Bhosle is known for singing daring and unconventional characters, and for her fluidity and ease across genres. Compared to her sister’s more chaste selections, Bhosle often voiced songs for actors portraying seductresses, sex workers, and cabaret dancers. She was a divorcée and a single mother for many years, and lyrics she had sung were often cited by journalists commenting on her personal life. (Bhosle’s penchant for portraying unorthodox women has earned her a title as a feminist hero of sorts, though her politics aren’t so neatly progressive. She maintained a close connection with the RSS, India’s umbrella Hindu Nationalist party.) She also learned different modes of singing in a concerted effort to distinguish herself from her sister. “I thought to myself, if I will continue to sing in a similar voice to [Lata], then I will never get work as long as [she] is in the business,” she said in an interview with India Today. “I started to watch English movies to learn Western songs… I also learnt how to sing [the Sufi mystical tradition of] qawwali, ghazal, the voice modulations needed in different forms of singing.”
“Dum Maro Dum” speaks to the conviction and flexibility that distinguished Bhosle as a vocalist. The song was originally a duet, in which Lata Mangeshkar would play a virtuous sober woman and Usha Uthup, a degenerate Westernized weed smoker. At the last minute, it was reconfigured as a solo for Bhosle (though Utup’s vocals remain in the high pitched group vocals singing “Hare Krishna, Hare Ram!”). Bhosle easily flits between temperaments by herself: She sings the chorus, which urges the listener to “take a hit,” in a deep, honeyed register that exudes both decadent nonchalance and striking poise, like a stranger across the bar who cooly maintains eye contact after you expect them to look away. In the verses, she switches to a thinner, higher range as she asks: “What has the world given us? What have we taken from the world?” These contrasting modes, with the addition of tinny, almost supernatural group vocals, give the song an irresistible changeability. Just as you feel beguiled into an intoxicated trance, you’re jolted to attention by Bhosle’s probing introspection and glittering vocal improvisations.
There was no greater collaborator for Bhosle than R.D. Burman, an experimental composer known to employ glass bottles, spoons, and sandpaper as instruments. Burman helped introduce rock, bossa nova, and jazz to Bollywood, along with the electric bass guitar (instead of the double bass) and the Minimoog synthesizer. On “Dum Maro Dum” he became one of the first composers to bring Western psychedelia, a genre itself inspired by Indian music, to the subcontinent. Burman and Bhosle were so creatively compatible that just in 1971, they also collaborated on “Piya Tu Ab To Aaja,” a song arguably as impactful as “Dum Maro Dum.”
Earlier Bollywood compositions often featured an intricate mix of orchestral strings, tangy sitar notes, and tonal, earthy tabla percussion. “Dum Maro Dum,” on the other hand, begins with a droning transichord melody played by none other than Charanjit Singh, who would go on to record the cult classic acid house album 10 Ragas to a Disco Beat a decade later. Compared to the lush, warm, and enveloping sounds of earlier Bollywood music, “Dum Maro Dum” is odd and imposing, murky and mysterious, made more so by a reverb-heavy, twisting guitar riff.
