The Ladies Sing the Blues

SHEFALI ALVARES LIVES on the top floor of an old, inconspicuous building behind the Bandra Gymkhana in Mumbai. On a late summer afternoon, I climbed up with Alvares’s band members to her flat and onward to the studio on the terrace, where, after they had set up equipment, the 28-year-old playback singer joined them to rehearse for a gig at the Hard Rock Café in Bangalore later that week.

Before the rehearsal, in the living room of her flat, I had spoken to Alvares, who sat goddess-like on a couch, an almost sheer white kurta sheathed over her curvaceous, Phuket-tanned frame. Her wide, kohl-lined eyes came alive as she talked about the three-day holiday she had just returned from. Her signature husky voice, made famous in the chorus of the recent disco rage “Subha Hone Na De”, was almost hoarse from singing her hit song about 20 times during a family wedding in Thailand. “It was ridiculous!” she said, tucking her legs under her. “And exhausting.”

“I never wanted to join Bollywood,” continued Alvares, the daughter of the legendary Indian jazz singer Joe Alvares. “Now I have GIMA and Radio Mirchi award shows and I don’t know what’s going on!” At the annual Global Indian Music Academy Awards held in Mumbai in October 2012, “Subha Hone Na De” was nominated in three categories.

Alvares was at the event, as were Shilpa Rao, Shruti Pathak, Nandini Srikar, Aditi Singh Sharma and Alyssa Mendonsa: a new crop of rising playback stars, each of whom possesses a powerful, distinctive voice. The girls gossiped, did each other’s makeup and ate aloo paranthas together—comradeship unusual for competitors in Bollywood. “The press conference went on for five hours. And we all held hands and sang each other’s songs. There is no jealousy,” said Aditi Singh Sharma.

The bonhomie may partly be due to the fact that these singers are all part of a growing league of artists who are changing the idea of female playback singing in Hindi cinema. Their exploration of unusual vocal ranges and timbres—low, raw, alto, husky—frequently inspired by their cultural backgrounds or work outside of cinema, responds sharply to the dominance of the soprano voices of sisters Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle that defined the past half century of Indian female playback singing. Inspired by a new mood sweeping through the industry, manifested most strongly in a set of daring film directors and music composers, the shift is part of a bigger recalibration of the place of women in Hindi cinema.

DESPITE HAVING DELIVERED the shaadi anthem of the last two years, all Alvares had ever wanted was to sing at jazz festivals around the world. From her childhood, she remembers loud rock ’n’ roll parties in the family’s Thane house where “crazy people with long hair would be smoking, drinking and jamming”. With The Sound of Music and a taping of the show Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever on repeat in her home, Alvares and her sister soaked up the sounds of Quincy Jones, the Jackson Five, Diana Ross and the Supremes, and Julie Andrews. Years later, her rendition of “A Few of My Favourite Things” would become a popular request in her set with her rock-funk band, The Distil Soul.

Alvares spent much of her childhood failing singing lessons. “School never put me in the choir. I never sang in the range they wanted.” She remembers being sent by her father on stage in the third grade to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and running away in tears. “I was too nervous and frightened to sing on stage. Father pushed us into it.” Yet, while her older sister (whom Alvares considered the better singer) left home to chase other dreams, it was she, just out of a rebellious teen phase of bouncing to psychedelic music, who settled into performing with her father.

“My father’s biggest advice to me was only to stop smoking,” Alvares told me, before breaking into a throaty laugh. By then, she had also started jamming—“messing around”, she calls it—with friends of hers, and deciding who would make up the band she plays with today, a rock-funk outfit that also experiments with genres like RnB and jazz.

Bollywood wasn’t a career choice for her then. “Because of my diction, my voice sounded very different. Singers didn’t sound like me when I was in my teens. It wasn’t what the market wanted,” Alvares said. Indeed when Alvares was a teenager, songs like the melodious “Kehna Hi Kya”, rendered in KS Chitra’s nasal, high-pitched voice, were what the market preferred.

The aspiring singer spent nine years, from the age of 12 to 20, training with Celia Lobo, a Western classical singer who taught her how to use her voice, which was ideal for smoky jazz or gritty rock. “She helped me discover the power of my tummy, how to use my breath and my diaphragm.”

One day in 2010, however, a call from composer Pritam Chakraborty’s office turned all her plans upside down. “They said they were looking for new voices and my name had come up,” said Alvares. Putting her misgivings about Hindi diction aside, she sang “Yeh Dil Hai Nakhrewala” for Madhur Bhandarkar’s Dil to Baccha Hai Ji, its texture so rough, the song almost sounds unfinished. Before she could digest its popularity, there were offers from every bigwig in the industry, from Amit Trivedi to Vishal-Shekhar.

A floor below Alvares lives another musical icon’s daughter, whose whispery “Khwaabon ke Parindey” from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara in 2011 touched a chord with young lovers the nation over.

The reticent Alyssa Mendonsa, 22, would rather people not know her as composer Loy Mendonsa’s daughter. Growing up in Andheri while her father was just starting in Bollywood as one part of the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy trio, she started singing very early, but just by herself.  “One day I told him I wanted to take part in a competition in school, and he just looked down at me and said, ‘You, what are you going to sing?!’” Her father almost fell off his chair, she added, when he heard the powerful voice coming from the tiny four-year-old.

Mendonsa’s taste in music was limited to Disney cartoons at that time, but before long she was taken by the sounds her father would wake her up to every morning, from Betty Carter to Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder. But that’s where his influence ended for the young Mendonsa. “I was in sixth or seventh grade when he started doing films, but my brother and I have never been involved in that part of his life. Never made a big deal of it,” she said.

It was only when the family moved to Bandra after she had finished school in 2008 that a painfully shy Mendonsa, who was having a hard time making new friends, began to spend a lot of time around her father’s studio, where the trio was working on the soundtracks of Kartik Calling Kartik and Housefull.

The composers needed a new voice for the former movie, which had Deepika Padukone in the lead role of an urban office-goer, and Mendonsa tried out. The producer loved her voice, and her deep and electrifying delivery of “Uff Teri Adaa” shot up the charts much before the release of the film, remaining there for a long time afterwards, along with Alvares’s party hit.

FOR MANY DECADES, the prevalent ideal of the female singing voice in Hindi cinema was that of Lata Mangeshkar, who entered the industry in the ’40s. Appropriately nicknamed the Nightingale of India, she also went on over the following decades to become synonymous with the voice of the virtuous Indian woman.

However, film critic Bhawana Somaaya, the author of Mother Maiden Mistress: Women in Hindi Cinema, 1950-2010 (a book she co-wrote with cultural commentator Supriya Madangarli) recalled that at the time of Mangeshkar’s entry, the world of female playback singing was a dynamic setup marked by a wide range of voices such as those of Noor Jahan, Shamshad Begum and Geeta Dutt.

She elaborated that Jahan had an extremely thin voice compared to Begum’s robust, bass sound. Dutt’s untrained voice, on the other hand, was considered unfettered, spontaneous and free to be moulded according to the song. From a poignant “Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam” to a mischievous “Jaane Kya Tune Kahi”, such a tonal range would not be heard in Hindi cinema after the definitive style of Mangeshkar and Bhonsle captured the nation’s attention.

As daughters of Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar, a noted Marathi theatre actor, musician and Hindustani classical vocalist, the sisters, along with their siblings Usha and Hridayanath Mangeshkar, were introduced to music very early on through their father’s plays. When he died of heart disease, Lata, 13, and Asha, nine, started singing and acting to support the family. Mentored by a close family friend and film producer Winayak Damodar Karnataki, they decided to move from Indore to Mumbai, where both would start with playback singing for Marathi films, Lata in ’42 and Asha in ’43, before moving on to Hindi cinema.

In the era before machines, softwares and synthesisers, the sisters would practise their songs for months before they recorded them in just one flow, often with 80-piece orchestras. The singers of that era would take on the skin of the corresponding actors. “When you hear songs from the ’50s up to the ’80s, you always felt like the actress was singing it,” comments Madangarli. “Before they went into the studio they knew the character and the actor. If a director said Nootan or Asha Parekh, they would imagine the face and sing like her.”

The sisters in particular were not only experts at reflecting the actors’ on-screen mannerisms, they would even convey through their intonations a flirtatious vibe sometimes missing from the screen. “Take a duet,” said Somaaya, “with [Mohammad] Rafi and Lata, or Kishore [Kumar] and Asha. There is a response to the attraction from the hero and you could feel it in the voice. These singers were emoting through the song, even while the heroine herself would be lowering her eyes, not looking at the hero.”

Over the phone from Mumbai, Somaaya talked about the sisters with palpable passion. “Lataji was a favourite with composers, because as she matured, she retained her sweetness, becoming more wholesome. Asha Bhosle, an extraordinary singer too and with the same classical training, had qualities that Lata lacked, which was sensuality and a magical flirtatiousness.”

Daniel Haldar and Trisha Pasricha, Harvard students and music bloggers who go by the pseudonym Mr and Mrs 55, describe Lata’s as “the voice of ethereal purity”.

“Lata’s soprano register suggests innocence and purity. This was enhanced by the traditionally feminine perceptions of heroines advanced by film directors of that time,” said Haldar over email. “The theory regarding Lata’s voice (yes, there is one) incorporates nationalistic discourse where “woman” was polarized between a motherly or a sexually dangerous being,” added Haldar, who is also a classical Western pianist.

So while Lata’s became the default voice of the Hindi film heroine, Asha’s stood in for that of her sexually dangerous antithesis: vamp, cabaret dancer or moll.  In an old interview with Tina Ambani in Harmony, Asha said, “Everyone was a hypocrite in those days; they liked those numbers but said they didn’t. When the lyrics were not in good taste, I would feel uncomfortable. But a song is a song. If I sing a tawaif [courtesan] number, it doesn’t mean I become one.”

Haldar and Pasricha also attribute the dichotomy to the sisters’ individual musical influences. “While Lata has cited traditional Indian artists like KL Saigal and Noor Jahan among her most formative inspirations, Asha was influenced by a variety of artists from non-Indian genres such as Western pop sensation Shirley Bassey and Egyptian diva Om Kalthoum.”

Significantly, however, despite the clear differences and seemingly demarcated territories, the sisters sang within the same tonal range and with a similarly childlike innocence. So while Lata did a vamp number like “Aa Janeja” from time to time (although with quiet seduction compared to her sibling’s more dramatic approach), Asha replaced Lata, in the wake of a notorious split between her and Rafi in 1961 over a royalty disagreement, as the gentle voice of the leading lady in love duets with him.

In the decades that they dominated the female playback industry, the sisters sang everything there was to sing. The following generations of singers like Alka Yagnik, Kavita Krishnamurthi and Mahalakshmi Iyer arrived in an industry monopolised by the sisters and reproduced without much resistance the same sweet, steep notes.

NANDINI SRIKAR AND REKHA BHARDWAJ remember entering an industry where moviemakers were afraid to try anything new. “Voices were defined by what the voice of the hero should be like and what the voice of the heroine should be like, which was inevitably very high pitched,” said Srikar, who came to Bollywood 15 years ago from a background shaped by classical Western and Indian music.

When Bhardwaj, a classically trained singer from the Delhi branch of the music school Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, married her music director husband Vishal Bhardwaj in ’91 and moved to Mumbai, the first question she would be asked at auditions by people used to working with Alka Yagnik and Anuradha Podwal was: “What is your top note?”

“I sing at B-flat! I felt I would never get work. I knew I didn’t have a high-pitched voice with all the brightness and naughtiness it brings,” reminisced Bhardwaj, who spent many years in the shadow of the more conventional singers.

The 43-year-old Srikar, too, went through a long phase of figuring out her place in the playback business. As we sat outside a studio, she talked about surviving the industry by becoming a music composer for ad jingles. “They weren’t ready for my voice. Opportunities weren’t few, they were non-existent! So I released my own album, which was obviously written for my voice, for the way I sing and think of music,” said the self-taught singer. She called her sound “a peculiar hotchpotch of musical influences”. “I could stylistically take a typically jazz phrase and construct it in a Hindustani way and vice versa.”

It was the composers Vishal and Shekhar, who had known Srikar for 30 years, who realised her time had come while they were composing the score for Shahrukh Khan’s science fiction venture Ra.One in 2010. “The reactions to “Bhare Naina” are what made me realise people are ready for a change, for a voice that is rural and rustic, that can perform, yet sounds different,” said Srikar, who sang the hauntingly beautiful song with the 200-strong Prague Philharmonic Choir. Her husky vocals were again employed by the duo in Dibakar Banerjee’s political drama Shanghai in “Duaa”, where Srikar ends with a powerful alaap, and the techno-based mujra number “Dil Mera Muft Ka” for writer-director Sriram Raghavan’s slick spy thriller Agent Vinod.

Bhardwaj’s own big break came when in 1999 a producer decided to keep her version of a song for Jahan Tum Ley Chalo, a film her husband was making the music for, that was originally meant for Lata Mangeshkar. But the offers began pouring in only after Omkara (2006).

Hearing Bhardwaj in the folksy “Namak Ishq Ka”, it is hard to imagine the number wasn’t written for her. “First he [Vishal Bhardwaj] just gave me a nice, slow, small couplet to sing for Omkara—‘Lakad Jal Ke”’. This wistful and brooding song about heartbreak was perfectly suited to her classical depth. A few days later, her husband sang “Namak Ishq Ka” to her for feedback and ended up asking her to try it out.

While the song might not have become as popular as the chartbusting “Beedi” by Sunidhi Chauhan from the same movie, it stood out in its own right. And after the catchy “Genda Phool”(Delhi 6, 2009), which made her a household name, “Raat Ke Dhai Baje” (Kaminey, 2009) and “Ranjha Ranjha” (Raavan, 2010), Bhardwaj finally got her due—not just respect within the industry, but also the adoration of crowds, who broke chairs at her performances in places like Jabalpur.

Another film to take chances with new voices around that period was Anurag Kashyap’s 2009 political drama Gulaal; apart from Bhardwaj, the Piyush Mishra-soundtrack also featured the poignant “Aisi Sazaa”, whose singer caught the industry’s attention. This was Jamshedpur-born, classically trained Shilpa Rao.

Ehsaan Noorani, who gave Rao her first break some time before Gulaal came out (Kashyap’s film took five years to release) with 2007’s Salaam-e-Ishq, told me, “She was amongst a crop of new singers who were from classical backgrounds, but were also listening to contemporary artists.”

Rao, who trained with her Hindustani classical singer father as a child, came to Mumbai in 1997 to meet the family friend and musician Hariharan, who sent her onward to train under Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan in Badayun in Uttar Pradesh. In 2002, she returned to Mumbai to begin college. After three years of jingles and a graduation in statistics and math from St Xavier’s College, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy offered her “Saiyyan Re” in Salaam-e-Ishq and then the mellow “Toh Se Naina” in Anwar (2007).

“People would hear my texture—say it’s great. But we don’t know how to use it!” said the soft-spoken Rao as we sat on the floor in her living room in Andheri West. The mid-afternoon sun streamed in from huge bay windows that went around the flat, whose centerpiece was a grand piano. Rao said she once asked Vishal Dadlani what genre her voice belonged to. “Why do you bother? Just sing what you’ve been singing,” was his advice.

Shruti Pathak, another classically trained singer who started in Bollywood around the same time as Rao, got her first film song in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion, with the resounding “Mar Jawan” even going on to win two playback nominations for 2008.

“It took me a long time to get to know people and to learn what Bollywood music was versus classical music,” said the Ahmedabad-born Pathak who, like Rao, benefited from this new acceptance for lower octaves and meatier tones.

While working on a theatre production together, composer Salim Merchant, of the duo Salim-Sulaiman, asked Pathak to try out a line from a song they were working on for an upcoming film. She sang on a low octave to avoid straining her voice before the performance, but Salim loved how the line sounded and offered her the song, “Mar Jawan”,  even going on to record it in the same scale.

The 30-year-old, who came to Mumbai with a Masters in psychology and a clean slate, said it took her a very long time to make it. But she is glad to have been around at a time when people were ready for a change. “Even the music directors don’t know what is happening. It has been an experience for all of us.”

This shift in movie playback singing towards unusual genres and voices would have been unimaginable without the experiments and ambitions of a growing breed of music composers. Prominent among them is Vishal Dadlani. Frontman of the hard rock band Pentagram, Dadlani burst into Bollywood with the musical score for Jhankar Beats in 2003, combining his electro-rock roots with Shekhar Ravjiani’s background in Indian classical music. Having composed music for more than 40 movies since, the Vishal-Shekar stamp has become a frequent feature of a Bollywood blockbuster. More significantly, the power duo has a reputation for using voices that are antithetical to mainstream Bollywood’s conceptions of female playback singing; over the years, the two have worked with a wide range of offbeat voices including those of Shefali Alvares, Shilpa Rao and Aditi Singh Sharma.

Over the phone from Mumbai, where he had stopped by in the middle of hopping through music festivals around the country, Dadlani told me that another reason it was feasible for today’s composers to experiment with a female voice is that it is not always expected to supplement the male voice anymore. In other words, the female vocalists of an older era had no option but to sing on a high octave because their male counterparts kept it characteristically low.  “When a man sings [in an old Bollywood song], generally if it’s a baritone voice, he sings low. Take a popular Kishore Kumar song “Hum Bewafa,’” he said. “[For such a song], women had to sing higher to match their male counterparts. They had to project more.” He demonstrated this by belting out the high and low scales of the song and asking me to sing the line back. Even my novice ears could pick up how my own pitch fluctuated to keep up with his, going low when he sang high and vice versa.

Dadlani believes that as music producers became more and more flexible with the scale and texture of male vocals, and singers like Kay Kay and himself arrived on the scene, who sang at a high pitch owing to backgrounds in rock ’n’ roll or Punjabi music, female playback singers found the space to explore the rawness of a folk song, the low tenor of a Sufi song or the rock interpretation of a love song.

A critical moment of this incremental movement was the entry of AR Rahman. Like RD Burman before him, a man ahead of his time, who imported influences like the ’70s’ flower power sounds, funk, black music and African beats, Rahman’s own Western-Indian mélange was nothing short of revolutionary.

“He believed the characters in a typical Bollywood song were in a very unnatural situation, and that no one sings songs in real life,” said film critic Somaaya. Rahman, she added, deliberately picked up raw voices since movie characters were almost never supposed to be trained singers. The second significant aspect of his method, in her view, was that he treated the singer as an instrument. For the man whom Time magazine called the world’s most prolific and popular composer, a singer was not a voice to be identified, but one of the many instruments that contributed to a song.

Now, with other composers who extensively use programming, like Pritam Chakraborty and Amit Trivedi, voices like Alvares’s in “Subha Hone Na De” or Mendonsa’s in “Uff Teri Adaa” are machine-tuned to make them sound more clubby; with a folk voice like Bhardwaj’s, the natural scale of her voice can be shifted to suit the undertone of a particular song.

On the flip side, old-school singers like Bhardwaj blame Rahman for making singers lazy with technological possibilities. “This has led to a compromise,” she said. “We sing one line. The machine will pick up the rest. And if we don’t sing in tune, there is enough software, to fix your voice later.”

According to singer and songwriter Ankur Tewari, though, the Grammy and Oscar winning director’s Carnatic-rooted approach to playback singing has challenged many musicians and raised the bar for everyone, even through the remix and the item song era.

Ehsaan Noorani said it was around the time Rahman introduced Vasundhara Das into the industry with the fervid “Shakalaka Baby” for the Tamil political thriller Mudhalvan (1999) that “compositional choices changed. Styles of music became different. We wanted to use different voices.” Four years later, when Noorani made Alka Yagnik and Kavita Krishnamurthy sing in unfamiliar styles in Dil Chahta Hai, the trend picked up momentum.

Farhan Akhtar’s 2001 directorial debut, a watershed in Hindi cinema with its refreshing theme and treatment, would have been incomplete without its hip soundtrack. “It was a whole new sound, with these three people’s will to take a risk and lucky enough to have the technology available to get that sound,” observed Mendonsa of the film, whose success she also attributes to correct timing.

And like Rahman’s work in Roja became a yardstick for composers two decades ago, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy set the trends afresh with Dil Chahta Hai’s wild assembly of genres, from rock, pop, hip hop and world music to techno and ambient beats, down to a didgeridoo for “Jaane Kyun Log Pyaar Karte Hai”.

ANOTHER DEVELOPMENT THAT HELPED to reshape the course for women singers took place in front of the camera. The appearance of directors who brought fully fleshed out female characters to the screen, according to Mandragali, gave composers “far more flexibility in choosing voices for them, especially now with a wide range of voices to choose from.” So, Rao sings a delicate “Yeh Pal” in No One Killed Jessica to evoke the hopes and anxieties of a solitary woman’s long fight against the system, while Singh Sharma joins her contemporaries Anushka Manchanda and Sonu Kakkar for the staccato chorus of “Aali Re, Sali Re”, a song from the same movie about the fondness another character, an investigative television reporter, has for swearing. Singh Sharma, who also sang the boisterous, rock-inspired “Dilli Dilli” for the film, which didn’t have a male protagonist, remembered people being surprised that a girl had delivered the vocals.

An India Today report from last March marked Fashion (2008) as the cornerstone for Bollywood actresses coming out of the shadow of their male counterparts. In the following years, we had Kareena Kapoor’s troubled title character in Heroine, Deepika Padukone’s wild girl in Cocktail, Vidaya Balan’s feisty starlet in Dirty Picture and determined wife in Kahaani, Priyanka Chopra’s autistic girl in Barfi and Kalki Koechlin’s moody activist in Shanghai, among many other instances where women were as important to a film’s narrative as the men, if not more.

Of course, all of these important roles did not necessarily mean more evolved characters, or even worthwhile films, but it has still been good for the new female playback singer if heroines visit clubs, do shots and still have internal dialogues with God from time to time, as does Katrina Kaif’s character in Jab Tak Hai Jaan. Singers like Rao, who brought to life songs written for characters of urban Indian women characters, such as “Anjaana Anjaani” and “Khuda Jaane”, are glad to finally be working in fewer unrealistic, over-the-top productions.

Notably, even in a film as mainstream as the Yash Chopra romance Jab Tak Hai Jaan from last year, Rahman, who was teaming up with the influential studio for the first time, incorporated the voices of Shilpa Rao (“Ishq Shava”) and Harshdeep Kaur (“Heer”) into a soundtrack that thrived on breaking rules—the coming together of Rahman and Punjabi poetry being just one of them.

Rahman’s initiation of Kaur into Bollywood goes back to the Sufi song “Ek Omkar” in Rang de Basanti (2006). The composer signed her on for the song not long after she had moved from Delhi to Mumbai, a time when she believed that, “Jo achchi singer hai, uski voice Lata Mangeshkar ke tarah honi chahiye.” (A good singer’s voice should be like Lata Mangeshkar’s.)

Having spent her childhood in Karol Bagh, where the family lived below her father’s factory of musical instruments, Kaur’s moment of awakening came when she heard a song by Shubha Mudgal on the radio and realised her raw voice also had its own personality. Although still most recognised for “Ek Omkar”, her execution of  Sufi-rock has been lapped up by many music directors since, from Pritam Chakraborty for Cocktail’s “Jugni” to Rahman again for Rockstar’s “Katiya Karoon”—both films with prominent female characters.

“As people making the movies change, so must the characters of the female protagonists,” said Dadlani of the slow disappearance of the norm where a heroine with a normal voice would break into a song on the highest scale. The most natural outcome of this is the near death of lip-synced songs. The focus is now on the choice of genres and voices at the disposal of music producers and composers, who find themselves empowered by the freedom of not having to worry about actors. “I haven’t made a Munni-Sheila. I wanted to make something alternate, an amalgamation of genres that encompassed world music,” said Amit Trivedi.

When he set out to make the experimental soundtrack of Dev.D, he had just one instruction from director Anurag Kashyap: make street-band music. By the time the first six songs were recorded, Kashyap loved them so much that he turned the script into a musical. With Rao, Pathak and Sharma in mind, Trivedi created tracks that explored each singer’s forte, resulting in songs like “Yeh Saali Zindagi” with Sharma’s rock-heavy vocals and “Dhol Yara Dhol” and “Ranjha” with Rao’s folk sound. He even made Pathak write her own song, which became the melodious “Payalia”.

THERE HASN’T BEEN A BETTER TIME to be a playback singer in India, especially since available creative outlets have expanded far beyond the movies. Not only do most playback singers come from or go towards bands, several now have opportunities previously unimaginable, like The Dewarists, Star World’s part-music documentary and part-travelogue programme, or Coke Studio @ MTV, a series that features live studio-recorded performances by two or more artists. Both the shows run on artist collaborations, and bring together singers from backgrounds as different as Bollywood and death metal.

L Chandrashekhar, Head of Programming for Coke Studio, said their brief was very clear: “We need to find producers and producers need to find songs, which should bring these two very clear things together. And all the five songs in an episode must be different.” So Pathak not only features in “Criminal” with Akon, but also performs regularly with the Karsh Kale Collective, along with Rao. The latter, who recently shot an episode of The Dewarists with rock bands Agnee and Parikrama, said, “With collaborations, shows and bands, singers now have platforms—where you can explore other facets of your singing character.”

Aditi Singh Sharma had spent years in Delhi performing with the now defunct band Crimson, where she did female renditions of songs by Nirvana, Metallica and Marilyn Manson, before she decided to come to Mumbai in 2006.

After asking her sister to design a CD cover, which was done in pink and black with the singer wearing her now signature elbow-length gloves, Sharma made around 100 copies of it, found an address book called Film India and began with A. “I would start from nine in the morning, go around in an auto and give my CD to everyone there was to give it to.”

It was finally at a gig at the suburban bar Zenzi with Level 9, a jazz-fusion band of which she was lead singer, that she met Trivedi. He called her to the studio, and gave her a song, which she sang with no hesitation or questions. “We had no idea at that time what the song was for—who, where, what characters, which actor. The Urdu words were so difficult. I had no idea what the lyrics even meant!” said Sharma. A few days later, Trivedi called her to say that the song “Yahi Meri Zindagi” was going in an Anurag Kashyap film called Dev.D.

Now, fresh from having delivered the title song of the Kareena Kapoor-starrer Heroine, Sharma, who once told Times of India that Bollywood was tough for singers from small towns or non-film backgrounds, is proud of having survived the industry, with close to 20 songs in the last two years. To integrate her new career with her usual pursuits, she recently set up with an old bandmate Groove Adda, a Bollywood-inspired cover band for “the masses”, and performs regular live shows with other playback musicians and singers.

“I didn’t envision I’d sing for Katrina in so-and-so movie. I just wanted to go and make everyone in Mumbai hear my voice,” said the singer, who now lives in a neat, sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a highrise in Goregaon West with roommates, who are aspiring actors. It’s a typical Mumbai dream. And hers came true.

Corrections:

1. A sentence in the original article erroneously stated that the song "Kehna Hi Kya" was sung by Kavita Krishnamurthy. It was sung by KS Chitra. The sentence has been corrected online.

2. In the original article, the singer Mahalakshmi Iyer was mistakenly referred to as Maheshwari Iyer. This has been corrected online.