The Usha Uthup renaissance is upon us

Within the comma of a second, Usha Uthup has abandoned a sentence midway to dive headfirst into a song. “Maine tujhse mohabbat ki hai / ghulami nahin...” she pipes a verse from ‘Bindiya Chamkegi’, the classic Laxmikant-Pyarelal composition from the 1969 film Do Raaste, originally sung by Lata Mangeshkar. In a flash, her voice turns from saccharine to sazerac. “I’m gonna dance all night, baby,” she purrs like your regular 365 party girl. “I’m gonna sing all night.”

All the world’s a stage for Usha Uthup... even a Zoom call on a December afternoon between Kolkata, her adopted home, and Mumbai, the land where she was born and where I sit. Music and a flair for the dramatic have been hallmarks of the 77-year-old singer’s universe—throughout a storied career as club crooner, Bollywood playback singer, queen of pop, the OG cover-song superstar. Right now, though, she’s illustrating how she adapts her performances for new audiences because I’ve asked her if it really feels that nostalgia is driving a lot of our culture lately. “The past is everything for me, but I use it to make the present better,” she explains. 

But is it just plain nostalgia that can explain the Usha Uthup renaissance we’ve seen in 2024? Because what else to call it? There was that viral ‘Flowers’ moment in the spring, a Padma Bhushan in the summer, new original music in collaboration with artists like Rani Kohenur, Aakriti Kakkar, and Apache Indian in the fall, and headlining festivals like NH7 Weekender (which was cancelled at the last moment) and Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa this December. It’s safe to say that those of us not living in Kolkata hadn’t seen this much of Usha Uthup in a while—perhaps not since the release of Vikas Jha’s book, The Queen of Indian Pop: The Authorised Biography of Usha Uthup, at the Kala Ghoda Festival weeks before the pandemic hit.

Now, she has young people coming up to her on flights to hand her fan letters. They leave comments like “She ate and left no crumbs” on her YouTube and Instagram channels, and I don’t know what she really makes of that. “A couple came and said they’d love to hear me sing ‘Killing Me Softly’. And you know, it must be some 40-50 years ago that I first sang this song. The youngsters love ‘I Will Survive’, ‘Hotel California’, ‘Summer of ’69’—songs that I’ve been singing for donkey’s years now. Retro is where it’s at, believe me. Music is cyclic—like life itself, no?”

In 1969, a fresh-faced 22-year-old Usha Iyer, one of five daughters in a middle-class Tamil household from Mumbai, stepped into a nightclub called Nine Gems in Chennai. She had chosen to not dress for the job, turning up in a sari and a simple chandu pottu bindi (quite the signature style statement) rather than a jazz crooner’s standard black dress. She’d always known music to be in her bones, but in school, she had been directed away from the mic on account of her unusual voice (too husky for a woman, they said) and handed the tambourine instead. At Nine Gems, she sang jazz, blues, soul, pop songs that soundtracked the zeitgeist, having travelled around the world and into the Indian subcontinent via mediums like Radio Ceylon. She sang so well that the club owner asked her to stick around for a week.

More club gigs followed in Mumbai (Talk of the Town, Gazebo), Kolkata (Trincas) and Delhi (Oberoi hotel). Bumping into the who’s who of Bollywood and becoming friendly with RD Burman and Dev Anand, who gave Uthup her first break as a playback singer; she quickly found herself in the same orbit as the superstars of that era—Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi, Manna Dey, and Mukesh. 

But while theirs were songs of love and pathos, Uthup’s voice was built for fun and pleasure—the ‘bad girl’ songs set to a disco beat or occasionally a folk tune. She sang for RD Burman, Bappi Lahiri, Ilaiyaraja. She sang in 17 Indian languages. And she may have been the only woman in the film industry who sang for a male actor (Mithun Chakraborty in 1990’s Roti Ki Keemat). 

She was also that rare artist who was not content with the studio and returned to the stage frequently. “I think the creation is much, much bigger than the person who created it...because that thing, that creation, will live on forever and ever. People will be singing ghazals and bhajans and pop songs or jazz long after the people who created them have gone. For me, that is a very stabilising thought,” says the singer who has made Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’ her signature anthem. For over half a century, she’s captivated audiences from Kolkata to Goa to Nairobi—connecting with them by singing in their language. “I believe that music does not need to be put in any box.” 

Wrapped in a woollen shawl, Uthup sits in a corner of her Kolkata home, her silver hair cascading down her shoulders, her bindi stretching from between her glabella to her hairline. Behind her is a gold-framed portrait of her late husband, who passed away this July. Despite a presumably exhausting weekend—the cancellation of a festival in Pune, the news of Ustad Zakir Hussain’s death, flying around the country for shows—she’s ready for her show tonight. “I don’t know music. I’ve never learned music. I don’t know a note of sa re ga ma. But I know that my strength is stagecraft. That is, how to behave on stage, what I do with my audience, how I make people react to my songs. My whole goal has been to be able to make people smile with me.” 

In February, in a dimly lit corner of Trincas, Uthup sat against a red velvet-covered wall in her trademark kanjeevaram sari, bold bindi, and strings of jasmine in her hair. She stunned the millennial and Gen Z crowd with her cover of Miley Cyrus’s ‘Flowers’, delivered with a soulful vibrato that transcended age and genre. A clip of her performance trumped geographical borders and algorithmic bias and went viral. It wasn’t any different from what happened in 2013, when she performed a cover of Adele’s ‘Skyfall’ in the middle of an INK Talks speech. “It was my granddaughter Ayesha who brought Adele to my attention back then, and my daughter Anjali who gave me ‘Flowers,’” Uthup recalls. “She said I must sing it because it’s so empowering. But when I sing that last line—‘I can love me better’—I always add that I can’t do it without my audience. I need them. That’s what I’m all about: love.” 

Days after we speak, Uthup is set to fly to Goa to perform at the Serendipity Arts Festival closing ceremony, where she’ll join classical stalwarts Aruna Sairam and Shubha Mudgal on stage as part of Three Divas, a collaboration put together by tabla player and composer Bickram Ghosh. This will be their second outing—months of exchanging notes on set lists, duets, and dialogue over WhatsApp and email led to their blockbuster debut in Ludhiana earlier this year, where each demonstrated her distinct vocal prowess, with a banter segment straight out of the classic comedy Padosan (1968). “When you do something with complete, 100 per cent honesty, I think, how long can the audience resist?” she says. “And it’s always worked for me. When I give unashamedly, I receive.”

I don’t know music. I’ve never learned music. I don’t know a note of sa re ga ma. But I know that my strength is stagecraft. That is, how to behave on stage, what I do with my audience, how I make people react to my songs. My whole goal has been to be able to make people smile.

It delights her that the love of a new generation is coming her way. “A lot has changed over the years, but a lot of it is on a cosmetic level. Money power has changed, certainly: people are spending on artists, paying more to buy tickets, paying more to dress up for concerts. But also, technology has evolved to make sound better and live concerts more engaging. And I have the greatest appreciation for the event managers who give us toilets,” she laughs. “That’s the most important thing. I come from a time when you just had to control yourself or get sick or use some idiotic four bamboos tied with some hessian cloth and find a hole in the ground. But my audiences...people who are 90 have all heard me sing, and now their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are listening to me. So that’s still the same.”

Uthup knows none of this is a fluke. “You’ve got to stay relevant,” she emphasises. “And the only way to stay relevant is to speak the language of who you’re talking to and never let go of that. Never.” She does this by tuning in to emerging soundscapes and artists (“that Diljit Dosanjh is sensational,” she tells me), frequently improvising her material, forever reserving judgement and criticism, and listening to her grandson when he tells her not to embarrass him by saying things like “Ladies and gentlemen” on stage.

Reinvention is one thing; timelessness, though, is a whole other ballgame. “‘Ramba Ho’ and ‘Koi Yahan Naache Naache’ are both over 40 years old,” she says, a note of awe in her voice. “They say that in Allahabad and the Northern belt, no pooja function takes place without ‘Nakabandi’ [her 1989 song]. And everybody’s dancing to it on the roads. Is it because I made these songs big? No, it’s because the songs have that fantastic beat. But for anything to live, for anything to carry on, you have to give it time.”