Rekha Bhardwaj’s soul song

The intoxicating petrichor that emanates when the first drops of rain fall on the parched earth after a scorching summer invokes a feeling of nostalgia. Rekha Bhardwaj’s rich baritone, be it in playback singing in Hindi cinema or her Sufiyana albums, is a voice fragrant and earthy.

As a woman artiste in the music industry, and that too with a not-so-typical voice, her songs — like ‘Sasural genda phool’ or ‘Kabira’, or even ‘Darling’ — resonate with audiences across all age groups. Her live performances are known for their high energy. She recently performed at the Sufi Heritage Festival held in New Delhi.

musical upbringing

Rekha’s early training happened under the tutelage of her elder sister, Usha, who had learnt music from Gandharva Mahavidyalaya in Delhi. Their father always nurtured a dream of becoming a musician and fulfilled it through his daughters’ prowess. After her sister’s wedding, a young Rekha went on to join the Mahavidyalaya in 1976. “I moved to Mumbai in 1991 after my marriage. Having always been a Delhi girl, I took to Bombay very organically and simply revelled in the streets and forged a connection with the people naturally. I must confess that as a young wife and a mother, while I was trying to do riyaaz as much as possible, I was not very regular. But I never gave up and continued to practice, attending concerts of prolific artistes like Zakir Hussain sahab, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Malini Rajurkar, Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, besides others,” she shares.

Cinema and beyond

As the wife of the prolific music composer and director Vishal Bhardwaj, her foray into the world of cinema and association with doyens like Gulzar led her to discover the music world in films and beyond, and opened hitherto unexplored avenues. Both she and her husband were inclined towards indie and Sufi-style music and began working on an album of Bulleh Shah’s kaafiyan, along with Gulzar. But the resultant album, ‘Ishqa Ishqa’, took more than a decade to release as there were very few takers for the genre.

Meanwhile, she continued to sing for Vishal’s films and gave us gems like ‘Namak ishq ka’ and ‘Chingari’. Her inclination towards spiritual singing in the form of qawwalis, dadras, khayals or thumris by stalwarts such as Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Abdul Karim Khan, Begum Akhtar, Girija Devi, Kumar Gandharva, among others, enabled her to dedicate her songs to the divine.

“Be it a Baul artiste or a bhajan singer, the ultimate goal is to surrender the self. It’s only when the artiste is ready does he or she get the chance to sing for the higher power. I once asked Kishori Amonkarji how to do riyaaz for 6-7 hours in a disciplined manner every day. She told me to add a rendering of ‘Om’, the sound of divine vibration, to my riyaaz. That elevated my practice to the level of ethereal invocation.”

Rekha held her first concert at the Bandra Fort in Mumbai in 2009 and that opened a plethora of opportunities. She won a National Award for ‘Badi dheere jali’ from ‘Ishqiya’, besides the Filmfare Award for the best Female Playback Singer for ‘Sasural genda phool’ (‘Delhi-6’) and ‘Darling’ (‘7 Khoon Maaf’).

During the pandemic, she enrolled with the Osho Foundation’s Sufi Commune programme, and, as she says, “This enabled me to let go of all my fears and insecurities and liberated my mind from the rat race. Since then, music has been a language that I use to spread love and joy around. It enables me to look at my audience as souls that can be healed with the purity of music.” Perhaps that is why her voice, just like petrichor, lingers long after the song has ended.

— The writer is a New Delhi-based contributor