JOIN USStill a trailblazer
She’s a firm believer in time and the ‘force above’. Anuradha Paudwal recalls being told at a nascent stage of her film career that she could not hope to make it big in the female playback singing world because of the hold the big two names in Hindi films had over the listeners and the industry. “It’s all about time,” she emphasises. “When my time was right, and he decided that I would make my place, nothing could stop me! I made my position when Lata Mangeshkarji and Asha Bhosleji were very much around and busy.”
And Anuradha remains a trailblazer in the industry. After she became very successful, other young singers — Alka Yagnik, Kavita Krishnamurthy Subramaniam and Sadhana Sargam — began to make marks too. The so-called ‘monopoly’ in that field was broken, not by any composer or singer but, as Anuradha rightly stresses, by time deciding their advents.
Lost & found
For those who came in late, Anuradha is a trained singer, who before embarking on her career, mysteriously lost her voice for a while after an illness, and recovered it months later. She married Marathi composer Arun Paudwal, who then assisted Hindi film composers such as S D Burman. Her break came with the short song ‘Nadiya Kinare’ for Jaya Bachchan in Abhimaan (1973), but the few lines, recorded without any orchestra, were sung under the supervision of Arun, not the film’s composer S D Burman, and did not feature in the film’s soundtrack.
After this, she recorded a song for Jaidev, but the film was stalled. Since she also began training in playback singing under Kalyan-Anand, they gave her a break in the hit ‘Ek Bata Do’ (with Kanchan) in Subhash Ghai’s Kalicharan (1976). But despite a good number of assignments and many popular songs under various composers, she only broke through with Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s title-track in Hero (1983) — ‘Tu Mera Janu Hai — followed by their Coolie, Nagina, Karma, Tezaab, Ram Lakhan and others.
However, it took the next generation of composers and the backing of T-Series chief Gulshan Kumar to make Anuradha a household name with multiple films led chronologically by Dil and Aashiqui (both in 1990) and a deluge of devotional and non-film albums.
After his demise and changes in trends, Anuradha has stopped singing in films and concentrates on shows and select devotional albums. She has just recorded ‘Auspicious Mantras Of Mahalakshmi’ for Times Music. “The game has changed,” she says with a placid smile. “Today, it’s all digital. And it’s all business.”
She goes on to reveal her role in Gulshan Kumar’s evolution, for initially T-Series, as a music label, was entirely into covers. “There was a reason for this. Gulshanji wanted his raw material — the blank cassettes he was manufacturing — to sell more, so he decided to fill a section of them with music. I was singing many of these songs. So, I suggested that he fill them up with original content. And that’s how he made his small beginning with film music in 1984,” she reveals.
There was no looking back after this for Gulshan Kumar. “Gulshanji started acquiring film music and later even took to producing films himself. But there was a hitch with his non-film devotional music — television channels were airing only film songs. And so were born the music videos of devotional music,” Anuradha states.
Sense of contentment
Today, the songstress has “done so much” in her 45-year career that she can afford to be quite laid-back. This is her answer to my query about why she doesn’t have a YouTube channel of her own today. “I still get called for programmes, mostly out of Mumbai, and like most composers and singers today, good money lies only in shows. Having sung in Marathi, my mother tongue, Oriya, Bengali, Assamese and a few other languages, and with my children Aditya and Kavita being into music and coming up in their own ways, I do not see the need to go out of the way for work. My recordings for films have stopped,” she states. She does not even recollect the last Hindi film for which she has sung, but it must be over a decade, she analyses.
She candidly adds that she did recently go through a demoralised phase as she could not see a single album of hers in music shops. “I was used to seeing my albums and films and posters everywhere,” she smiles. “Then I went to YouTube and so many of my songs opened up.”
While she prefers not to divulge her opinion about today’s songs, diplomatically stating that everyone has to move with the times, one trend she seriously does not understand is the multi-composer one. “A guest composer for one specific kind of song is understandable, but now three, four music directors come in. Look, a film has a theme, and its underlying moods and emotions have to be understood by a composer in all their shades,” she says.
She goes on to make a deep statement. “Why is a music director called so? It is because he is also a director. In one story, different people are bound to have different perceptions of it. So, how can different music makers come in? Will you have different directors for comedy, romance and action and so on in a single film?” she asks.