Song celebrating womanhood has big names lending their voices, goes viral

Yeh Hai Stree’, a song composed by playback singer Sowmya Raoh and music producer Jim Sathya, has gone viral. It has received more than one lakh views on YouTube and more than 9.6 lakh views on Facebook currently.

Composed for the occasion of Women’s Day, the song, which was released by TVF’s Girliyapa, has been sung by Shankar Mahadevan, Shreya Ghoshal, Shaan, Mahalaxmi Iyer, Vishal Dadlani, Aditya Narayan, Neha Kakkar, and Sowmya Raoh.

Sowmya had thought of the song a while ago. “In February, I thought of putting together the song for Women’s Day. It includes a ‘shloka’ from ‘Manusmriti’, and goes on to talk about the women of today who set their own rules,” she says.

She adds, “Women are often tagged as daughter, wife or mother, but men do not have such tags. The song tries to explain that such tags are unnecessary, and celebrates women as they are.”

The lyrics of the song are written by Sowmya’s friend, Vickie Bhattacharya. “She has written some material for me earlier so we gel well. She wrote the ‘mukhda’ (first part) of the song in English and it worked so well that we didn’t want to change it.”

Sowmya wanted to work on an ensemble song and approached popular musicians and singers with much hope. “I was elated when everyone I called, instantly agreed. The song has reached out to many listeners because of them.”

‘Yeh Hai Stree’ took more than a month to be completed and has a simple video. “We were short of time and had a deadline to meet, so we decided to shoot while the artistes were singing,” she says. “All the artistes insisted on me singing too, which resulted in me joining the team,” she adds.

Sowmya is thrilled that ‘Yeh Hai Stree’ has received so much attention. “I was hoping it would, as the names associated are loved by different generations’; be it Neha Kakkar and Aditya Narayan or Shankar Mahadevan and Vishal Dadlani. We were lucky to get varied voices together for such an amalgamation.”

Ashwin Srinivasan played the flute and Joshua Satya played the acoustic
and electric guitars for the song. It was recorded, mixed and mastered by Praveen Muralidhar of Sound Impressions.