Ronita Torcato profiles multi talented singer Lalitya Munshaw. Somewhere in the USA (or Europe), there’s got to be a mirror image of the versatile singer Lalitya Munshaw. Consider this: She was raised in a household that had three temples where satsangs were a daily feature. Now, replace bhajans with gospel music, temples with chapels and satsangs with congregations, i.e. assemblies of God lovers…Getit? As the opening of this para goes here above, somewhere in the USA…
She has the habit of humming between snatches of conversation, which has me pondering whether this trait had gotten her parents to enrol her, at age seven, for music lessons. Definitely, the realisation must have dawned that here was a talent that merited nurturing. When first noticed by the doting grandmother in whose company she’d attended satsangs, “We Munshaws are all related to each other. My branch of the family didn’t have any professional musicians, but we all loved and appreciated music, especially my father, a businessman dealing in textiles” in a city that had earned the sobriquet ‘Manchester of the East’. But Ahmedabad’s fortunes had waxed and waned until it was no longer the epicentre of textiles, and the Munshaws had explored business alternatives.
Lalitya on her part pursued education and annexed double post-graduate degrees in English Literature and Hindustani Music. During the school and college vacations, she says she travelled abroad, “always backpacking” taking in the sights, making friends and soaking in the arts and culture. Standing out among the memorabilia in her spacious Andheri office is a row of figurines of music makers which she’d bought in Bali. Travelling solo, she confesses, has been both exciting and worrisome.
There were oddball situations such as the time she was almost mugged in Italy but these encounters were offset by the pleasantest of experiences, as when she gate crashed an open-air concert at an Indian Embassy in Scandinavia, took to the stage herself and was invited to spend a few days in the Ambassador’s stately residence!
Lalitya’s father had helped her relocate to Bombay aka Mumbai where he took the time and trouble “to introduce me to the music industry, and meeting people like Kalyanji Anandji.”
There was no looking back then. Devotional music, understandably, is pre-eminent but Lalitya has developed her very own style of singing filmi geet, love songs, children’s ditties, ghazals and above all, her fave rave, fusion. Fusion, she believes, is the way to steer young people to an appreciation of classic forms. Besides, “no other genre gives me the kind of creative freedom that fusion does”.
She reels off an impressive list of names like Shivamani, Louis Banks, Ranjit Barot with whom she has had the privilege of recording fusion, also Anup Jalota and Suresh Wadkar (bhajans), Hariharan, Ghulam Ali and Pankaj Udhas (ghazals), Ustad Sultan Ali Khan, Ronu Majumdar, Neeladri Kumar, Abhijeet and Prem Joshua, the German multi-instrumentalist and a pioneer of World Fusion Music. She has also sung a song or three for Bollywood, which had even attempted to lure her to the wide screen given her good looks and a sweet speaking and singing voice. “But I wasn’t interested at all then. My heart and soul were in music.”
Over the years, Lalitya has sung at innumerable concerts in India and abroad and won many awards. Would she consider making a foray into Bollywood now? She smiles an enigmatic “perhaps” and shows me her catalogue of albums, most of which have been released by VVIPs who run the gamut from Rishi Kapoor and Hema Malini to Shaan to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi who commended her for “preserving and reviving our cultural heritage.” Her album of Navratri music launched in CD and Mp3 format was a smash hit, selling in lakhs.
Figuring among the most memorable of milestones is May 29, 2011 (which also happens to be her birthday) when Shree Shree Ravi Shankar blessed her by launching her album “Guru Om”. The same year NaMo launched her album of Lullabies titled ‘Halarda’ in Gujarati and ‘Lori’ in Hindi. The album was inspired by the fact that multi-tasking mothers today have precious little time to sing to their children. “Lullabies” in her considered opinion, “are the best way to calm fussy babies and lull them to sleep. There is no substitute for such quiet, peaceful and nurturing moments.”
Certainly, few things can beat the smell of mint tea which Lalitya’s major domo has been brewing as she tells me she has been trying to preserve and popularise music through her company Red Ribbon Entertainment. It is housed in a three storey building built on the site of an old bungalow inAndheri .Red Ribbon produces, distributes and marketing various genres of music in multiple languages. The building also houses two state of the art recording studios ‘Re n Raga.
Lalitya also runs a charitable trust called ‘Antarang’ which aims to promote education in rural Gujarat and health programs (specifically, cancer treatment, kidney patients and the blind) for the economically backward. Part of the proceeds from the sale of albums goes into Antarang which also organises cultural programmes like an annual music contest for talented youngsters. A Catholic saint, Augustine of Hippo once said of church music “Qui cantat, bis orat” (“A person who sings prays twice”) He would have approved of Lalitya Munshaw.
