From Ravi Shankar to Asha Bhosle: Who is India’s best-selling artist of all time?
In the hills of Rishikesh, 1968, the spiritual surroundings and cultural history of India altered the lives and sound of The Beatles, but the world’s biggest band were far from being the last group to take influence from the mind-expanding sounds of the South Asian nation.
Following their visit turned pilgrimage to Rishikesh, India’s transformative influence on the Fab Four was largely evident, with chants of “Jai Guru Deva” appearing in ‘Across the Universe’. The band created some of their most ambitious, expansive, and ultimately beloved efforts, imbued with touches of figures like Ravi Shankar, who exposed them to the far-out soundscape of Indian classical music and instruments. However, the musical exports of this colourful country certainly do not stop with George Harrison and his penchant for Hindu spiritualism and the sitar.
From the pioneering disco-jazz of Bombay’s very own Asha Puthli to the indie-folk mastery of Prateek Kuhad, the musical landscape of India is as vast and all-encompassing as you might expect for a nation with 1.5billion people living in it. Over the decades, that influence has spread far and wide across the globe, imbuing itself in everything from Yes’ prog-rock experimentation to the indie sounds of Cornershop or Kula Shaker.
Despite all that expansive influence, if you look at the biggest-selling records in the history of India itself, the chart is dominated by Western artists, Shawn Mendes’ ‘Señorita’ currently holding the record for the best-selling record in the history of India. On the other side of that coin, if you look down the list of the best-selling Indian artists, very few have made much of an impact outside their native land.
So, who is the best-selling Indian artist?
Topping the list of the best-selling Indian albums of all time is Mumbai-born actor, music director and vocalist Himesh Reshammiya, with his 2006 record Aap Kaa Surroor. Although the album remains virtually unknown outside of India and the Indian diaspora, its pop-centric sounds, along with the various remixes created by DJ Akbar Sami, were enough for the record to shift around 55million copies.
As well as topping the sales chart and forming the blueprint for the subsequent landscape of Indipop in its wake, Reshammiya’s album is also among the few best-selling albums in India that is not a soundtrack album or film score. India’s film industry far outweighs its music industry, with Bollywood movies representing the pinnacle of the nation’s cultural export, and virtually all of those films have had an accompanying soundtrack album.
Some of the best-selling soundtrack albums include 1995’s deathless Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, which also holds the seat for the longest-running film in Indian history, clocking 27 years at Maratha Mandir in Mumbai, and 1990’s Aashiqui. However, no discussion around Indian film music, or, indeed, Indian music in general, can be complete without a hearty dash of Asha Bhosle, one of India’s most prolific, culturally important artists, the inspiration behind Cornershop’s ‘Brimful of Asha’, and, so says the Guinness Book of Records, the most recorded artist in history.
Ultimately, if you were to collate all of Bhosle’s countless records, it is hard to imagine anybody besting her in terms of records sold. Certainly, in terms of presence, she is among India’s defining artists, setting the standard for filmi music and inspiring multiple generations of subsequent artists, spanning all sorts of genres.
However, if the music industry is solely a numbers game, no album in the past two decades has come close to challenging the crown of 2006’s Aap Kaa Surroor as the biggest-selling Indian album of all time, solidified in Reshammiya’s recent sold-out nostalgia tour, Cap Mania, across some of the country’s major cities.
