Sona Mohapatra, a singer & rebel

Saibal Chatterjee

The provocative and the profound flow ceaselessly in and out of each other in Shut Up Sona, a lively documentary that explores the creative credo of songstress Sona Mohapatra. There is nary a dull moment in the film. The combative singer speaks her mind as only she can, holding forth on the industry’s ingrained gender skew, on the misogyny rampant on social media, on religious bigotry, and on the music she makes. 

Directed by cinematographer-filmmaker Deepti Gupta — “she has been a friend for a decade and a half,” says Mohapatra — the 86-minute film premiered at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival last year before travelling to festivals in Rotterdam and Goteburg in early 2020. It was also due to participate in Hot Docs Toronto and the Sheffield Doc/Fest, but has been stopped in its tracks by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Shut Up Sona is a pulsating musical documentary on which Mohapatra’s feisty personality imprints itself. Gupta follows the fiercely feminist entertainer as she travels across the country, frequently for concerts where she presents her music and her worldview with equal gusto. 

Shut Up Sona also tracks the many battles that Mohapatra fights as a woman, a performer, and a gender parity activist. “All of it is rolled into one,” she says. “I have always been inspired by artistes from around the world and across the ages who have gone beyond the scope of just entertainment. Having a voice and a personality has helped me stand out.” 

Plain talk comes easy to Mohapatra. In the film, we see her calling out IIT Mumbai’s Mood Indigo Festival for giving no space to female performers. In an angry missive sent to the organisers, she calls the event “a training ground for the worst kind of boys’ club”. She also takes on an obscure Sufi outfit that accuses her injecting “obscenity” into an Amir Khusro rendition. Neither does Mohapatra shy away from pointing to the prejudices that female crooners face in the industry even from self-styled paragons of fairness and equality. 

Mohapatra is herself the producer of Shut Up Sona. She initiated the film because she felt she “was at a point in her career and her life where she needed to do more than just be a singer”. She says: “I have multiple interests. I love to travel, I love history, I love connecting with my audience in different ways.”

Dynamically structured, crisply edited and gloriously unapologetic, Shut Up Sona captures Mohapatra as a person and an artiste, embellishing the vivid portrait with her concert performances and her ruminations on music. “I have always believed that it is important for artistes to convey something more through their music than just nature poetry. It has to reflect what you believe in,” she says.   

The initial idea, the singer reveals, was for the film to be a journey undertaken by her and the director. It was music composer Ram Sampath, her life partner and professional collaborator, who suggested an alternative approach. 

Says Mohapatra: “Deepti and I talked about our abiding interest in roots music, in Mirabai, Kabir and Amir Khusro, as we travelled. Ram told me that I should consider bringing my life into the film. Your life, he said, has so much conflict, you are an artiste who constantly engages with issues and fights and yet enjoys herself.”

Mohapatra rues the fact that India does not even have a music industry. “It is only a subset of the film industry. We should be worried that music does not have an existence of its own, it only helps promote films.” But none of the music in Shut Up Sona, she points out, is film music.

“I carry more than 3,000 songs within me,” says Mohapatra. It is a culture so rich. There isn’t just folk;there’s also classical music, qawwalis, ghazals, nazms. Every state of India has at least five dialects, each with music of its own. This country is so crazily diverse that you can’t have only flavour that feeds us.” 

Some of that depth and range of India’s varied musical heritage is reflected in Shut Up Sona, where it not only serves the purpose of defining who Mohapatra is, but also transports the audience into a zone where its timeless resonance becomes palpable. 

Unusually for a small independent documentary, as many as 17 cities feature in the film. The shoot yielded 300 hours of film. Veteran film editor and filmmaker Arjun Gourisaria gave Shut Up Sona its momentum.

“He,” says Mohapatra, “would say, how do I edit a woman who talks without taking a breath for three hours.” All the toil that has gone into the film and the money that’s been spent on — financially, it drained the hell out of me, says Mohapatra — has paid off and yielded an exceptionally engaging documentary.

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