er voice slipped easily across borders. It is only in death that it seems to have been stopped by them.

When news of Asha Bhosle’s passing broke, television channels here were reportedly issued show-cause notices by the media regulator. It felt oddly small, especially when set against the rest of the world. Across international media - print, television and digital - the coverage flowed without hesitation. She was, quite simply, too great an artist to be contained within one country.

For many of us, her voice is woven into memory. Three generations have grown up listening to her, often without thinking of where she belonged, only of how she sounded. It is hard to believe that those issuing restrictions are not, in private, listeners themselves. But then there is always the weight of papi pait, the need to earn a living, to comply, to turn away from what one knows instinctively.

It also reveals something else: how narrow our listening has become. What do we really know of the music in Iran, or China, or Egypt, or Azerbaijan? Even where there are shared histories or proximity, the music does not travel easily. Taste, it turns out, is shaped less by geography and more by access, by what reaches us and what is allowed to.

The story of Afghanistan is a painful reminder. Since the 1990s, musicians there have lived in a kind of constant drift, moving between Peshawar and Kabul, crossing and re-crossing the Durand Line. Many eventually left for the West, tired of the uncertainty, and found a measure of stability there.

We have had our own uneasy relationship with music. In 1989, during Benazir Bhutto’s first government, Pakistan Television was picketed for airing pop music as part of national culture. There were arguments over what counted as ‘ours’: the tabla and sarangi on one side, the guitar and drums on the other. Music 89 was briefly taken off the air.

There is already enough division in the world. Artists rarely create it; more often, they soften it.

Those anxieties never quite went away. They simply changed shape. Today, they are often framed as a choice between maghrabiat and hanudiat, as if culture must always declare allegiance. In between there is a quieter, more confused space — people who listen to everything but feel the need to justify it.

Asha Bhosle belonged to none of these categories, which is perhaps why she unsettles them. She built her career in the shadow of great talent within her own family, carving out something entirely her own. She adapted as music changed, worked with new composers, experimented constantly and still carried something unmistakably rooted in her sound. It was not imitation; it was transformation.

In Pakistan, listeners never really needed to explain why they loved her. They simply did. Her songs played at weddings, on radios, in drawing rooms, in cars stuck in traffic. She was part of the everyday, not an exception to it.

Artists like her, those who might quietly bridge divides, are often the first to be pulled into them. Their work is measured not by what it does, but by where it comes from.

There was a moment, when the news broke, that could have been different: a moment to acknowledge what she meant, without hesitation or qualification; to allow admiration to exist without suspicion.

That moment feels missed.

There is already enough division in the world. Artists rarely create it; more often, they soften it. But they are still made to stand on one side or the other, even when their work has always lived somewhere in between.

The writer is a culture critic based in Lahore.