Shabana Azmi has taken several stabs at singing. Encouragement for her latest effort might see her work on a full-fledged album
Yogesh Pawar (DNA; April 25, 2017)

Shabana Azmi’s command over Rabindra Sangeet in the recently released Sonata caused the staunchest Bengali critics to call it the “only redeeming feature in a play masquerading as cinema”.

Azmi, who’s currently in London, shooting for an English TV series (not allowed to give details, she says, when pushed for details) in London, points out how she had very little training in singing. “I had two lessons in August and four in September in all. All the credit goes to my tutor Sharoni Sen, who was impossibly patient and encouraging. Without her, it couldn’t have worked at all.”

An adamant Aparna Sen, who directed Sonata insisted, “coaxed, cajoled and even bullied” Shabana into taking the risk. “And while we had recorded the song earlier, the day we shot the scene I was emboldened enough to sing it live on sets. That was Aparna’s plan all along!”

Before this, Shabana indulged a bit of Carnatic classical in Mahesh Dattani’s Morning Raga. And this was way back in 2003. That experience was decidedly tougher, she admits. She explains why. “Because it was Carnatic, a genre quite different from Hindustani with very rigorous, mathematical notations. To hold the swarams in a single shot was very, very challenging. However, unlike Sonata, where I’m actually singing, in MR I was only lip-syncing. I had to train to ensure the close-ups looked convincing.” The prep came handy when she hummed the same composition in a film anthology for a short film called Riceplate in 2007, where she played a staunchly Islamophobic and conservative Hindu grandmom.

But the actress’s first tryst with singing came far earlier. She has sung three songs for Muzaffar Ali’s Anjuman (1986), in which she also played the lead role opposite the late Farooque Shaikh. She remembers how reluctantly she sang under legendary composer Khayyam saab’s baton. “Muzaffar Ali had heard me sing in an IPTA play and suggested I sing my own songs in Anjuman because the character I played is a poet and sings in the ‘tarranum’ tradition of Lucknow. It needed to sound untutored. I was reluctant, but Khayyam saab was very supportive.” She adds, “It was terrifying. The first song was recorded a day after I got married. Instead of going off on a honeymoon, I was singing at Rajkamal Studios.”

She remembers how tabla maestro and composer Zakir Hussain used Anjuman to try and get her to sing in Ismail Merchant’s In Custody (Muhafiz) too. “But I pleaded to be excused and Kavita Krishnamurthy was roped in for the playback. In fact, in Mile Sur Mera Tumhara, many assume I sang my own lines, but it was Kavita Krishnamurthy. You know she’s herself admitted my singing sounds like hers. So I’m not surprised most people thought it was me.”

She credits her love for music and singing to her lyricist-poet father Kaifi Azmi. “Though Abba couldn’t hold a note, he’d make me sing to him quite a lot and was very keen I learn singing formally. But I never got down to it.

Actually, both my brother Baba and I have inherited sur from our mother Shaukat Kaifi. Her family has always been musically inclined.”

On being asked about plans for her own album she says, “Javed has been trying to convince me for a long time now. The response to Sonata’s singing has been so encouraging, maybe I’ll give it a shot!”