Women Who Rock

Growling, rasping and purring, here is the vanguard of female indie music, rocking stage after stage with performances like none other

By Isha Singh Sawhney

TRAINED TO BE MILD: Saba Azad began as an artist trained in classical dance before she took to belting out the rasping soul tunes of Petri Dish

Growling, rasping and purring, here is the vanguard of female indie music, rocking stage after stage with performances like none other

As the rest of India shimmies to the chants of Munni, Sheila, Munni, Sheila, a few cheeky women are busy redefining the Indian idea of a female music star. And it’s not an idea designed to comfort the traditional. No, the old familiar is not what music means to Monica Dogra, Shefali Alvares, Jayshree Singh, Shridhar and others of this new wave of women performers.

Each, in her own way, is bringing the house down in ways that shake people up. On stage, their hair flies and colours pop, even as their ensembles go through a smorgasbord of styles ranging from rock-chic and hippie to vintage and Goth. Growling, rasping and purring, they form the Indian vanguard of female indie music, exploding in eclectic lyrics with sounds inspired by an edgy blend of alternative new-age and traditional music.

They sing about change and identity, sexuality and gender, motherhood and lovers, and they even write their own songs. They are India’s own Bjorks, Frou Frous and perhaps Madonnas.

Their search for an identity of their own has been a struggle in this celluloid-obsessed country, what with their indie niche under constant threat of being smoked out by all the sound and fumes from Bollywood. Not that they always insist on resisting cinema. Monica Dogra has had her own tryst with Bollywood, playing Shai, a New York returned financial analyst exploring the streets of Mumbai in Dhobi Ghat. She dressed conservatively for the role in monochromatic flowing pajamas and white shirts, the perfect girl-next-door. This is who she is to the world at large. But in her indie music avatar as Shaa’ir—the other half of the duo Shaa’ir and Func—with a trail of white mock tears down her face, silver bindis framing her eyebrows, cheeky sari blouses that end just below her boyish chest, low riding lehengas and combat boots, Monica is not really the girl you’d take home to mommy.

Yet, Shaa’ir the singer/songwriter/dramatist has stayed mostly in the shadowy recesses of the alternate, metamorphosing on stage from hippie-bohemian to all-out rocker with high boots, booty-shorts and a ruffle skirt, and then to the Mantis of her third album’s title, Mantis. “I have finally gone back to my roots,” says the US born artiste who visited India, fell in love and just stayed on.

Hindi cinema, however, hasn’t given up trying to co-opt performers like her—and Shefali Alvares, daughter of the jazz legend Joe Alvares. There are, thankfully, a band of directors these Indie performers are happy to work with. Shefali, who lent her voice to the jazz rock number Yeh Dil Hein Nakhre Wali for Madhur Bhandarkar’s Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji, and is now working on a Yash Raj film, says that this is really the best way to reach out to a larger fan base.

Growing up, Alvares would bang pots and pans in tune with Joe Alvares’ rock band. This, the late-night loudness of his 70s style parties, and the ever-buzzing crowd that used to hang around were all influences that helped shape her sensibility as a musician. With Louis Banks, Karl Peters and Loy Mendonca as gurus (and sometimes supporting session artists), Shefali learnt to exercise a powerful control over her vocals—even when backed by such heavyweights. And her refreshingly honest lyrics have evolved over time from mooning about lovers to more cosmic things like spirituality and ancient Egyptians and Mayans. “You move from writing just about the men in your life at 18 to seeing the world as much more at 26,” she says.

Jayshree Singh, frontwoman of the Kolkata band PinkNoise, saw her music evolve with age too. It grew edgier and more angular as she went along. While her let-it-all-hang-out-wrinkles-et-al ethos delivered music that rang true for its raw originality rather than airbrushed artifice, her lyrics matured in their own way.
Jayshree’s short cropped hair and unusual Bjork-like voice belie her age and nationality. But the minute she punctuates her song with Tamil nursery rhymes, there’s no doubting her music’s inherent Indianness. PinkNoise offers a new amalgam of underground jazz, electro and tribal groove, a mash-up that leaves you with a what’s-up curiosity.

The band first came together in the 1970s (as Skinny Alley), playing cover versions of other songs. It was a time when genre snobbery wasn’t de rigueur, and she, her husband Gyan Singh and best friend Amyt Datta never had audiences that would “only listen to jazz or rock” or heavy metal nuts who thought “pop sucks”.

PinkNoise, the band’s new avatar, was meant to be experimental, but trying to vibe with listeners has been a test of nerves. People have no patience for anything but their phones, bemoans Jayshree, let alone sharp deviations from the musical norm. This they discovered at a Blue Frog gig accidentally labelled ‘a Pink Floyd tribute’. Floyd-obsessed crowds turned up for the gig, got flummoxed by the band’s irreverent renditions of ‘Pink Fraud’ and ‘Punk Floyd’, and went home to blog angrily about ‘not just the worst thing to happen to music, but to humankind’. Which, by the way, is the band’s tagline.

Unsuspecting audiences are often left equally aghast by the ‘sexy urban grind’ music of Shridhar & Thyail (S&T). Their out-of-the-box music, says Shridhar, has neither format nor formality. Naturally, not everybody can handle it. Cheeky, quirky and random, the duo combine Thyail’s poetic sensibility with Shridhar’s ear for Western classical. “Each song is similar and different, and we don’t really think about rules.” A broken beat here, an unexpected growl there, an unpredictable twisted pop character from another song. The result? Twisted pop songs.

But is this really pop? “Well, it’s just easier to call the whole mixture, from dance hall and jazz funk to spoken word, opera and Indian classical, ‘pop’,” laughs Shridhar. And with the theatric appeal their shows have, they had stopped being ‘just music’ a long time ago. An S&T concert, she adds, is like a story—with mood shifts, drama and intensity. “Each performance is a new show. Everyone interprets it differently,” says Shridhar, recalling a memorable gig at Zenzi, Bandra, that had most of the audience walk out in disgust. The duo had decided to do an improvised act called ‘Art and Noise’. “We didn’t know what was happening till it happened,” says Shridhar, who found herself doing impromptu imitations of the feedback noise of an electric guitar. Not everyone could take it.

For high-octane performances, though, few can beat psychedelic-rock producer Ashutosh Pathak’s Petri Dish girls, who bring together a variety of vocals to complement his trip-hop compilations. Their musical acts range from the electro-punk rawness of Anoushka Manchanda, clad in torn fishnets and a neon ganji, to the rasping soul tunes of newbie Saba Azad in Goth make-up and a vintage dress, her performance underlaid with her beginnings as a trained classical dancer.

For this new wave of musicians, it’s not just about great originals, but occasionally about interpreting the greats as well. Jayshree, for example, speaks of playing them blindfolded as an ultimate high. Pop folk-rock artiste Batth shares the sentiment. She likes to strum her feminism to the sound of feminist icons like Mellissa Etheridge and Annie Defranco. At 22 now, Batth has come a long way from the violin playing, Punjabi folk music loving girl growing up in Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh. Now in Mumbai, getting audiences drunk on throaty pop-folk rock, Batth is collaborating with her girlfriend Alisha for the next act. The message, she says, is in her music.

The other performers would high-five that. And none of them seems the least conscious of the sexuality conveyed. Monica’s sex appeal, made edgier by her dramatic make-up and onstage theatrics, has already sent ripples down male audiences. Like Shaa’ir, her fight for feminism is about embracing her sexuality on her own terms.

Nor does their powerful sexual presence on stage ever veer towards the vulgar, offering yet another contrast with Bollywood item numbers. Their choice of get-up screams ‘intelligent, sexy, empowered’. Above all, self-chosen. And their multitudes of female fans are proof.

Monica’s outfits, for example, aren’t just mid-riff baring and dramatic. They are representative of her struggle for identity. Traditional sari blouses and combat boots and patchwork pants from old lehengas—they speak of her and her partner Randolf Correia’s need to keep the act evolving all the time. The dramatic white tears are symbolic of “deconstruction, of falling apart, of shedding and putting things on”, explains Monica, of Mantis. Imbibing the tenets of Natya Shastra, the album, a conglomeration of very Indian sounds, is about hybridity at its finest. About being “neither here nor there” and missing the “other side” no matter where you are. “But that’s just the condition of humankind.”