Ramba who who who? Narendra Kusnur on the Usha Uthup phenomenon

Bengali TV serial producer Gautam Banerjee, now 75, was in the audience that day. Most people stopped dancing when Usha began, but in 15 minutes the mood changed again, he recalls. Usha Uthup, then Usha Iyer and not yet 22, was to become one of India’s most popular live singers.

Trincas headlined many popular performers at the time, including The Savages, and The Lone Trojan consisting of Biddu. But Uthup slowly gained a distinct following and identity. “She sang in the evenings when it was not possible for college students like me to enter Trincas. We would catch her show after the Saturday and Sunday jam sessions, and we would hide in the toilet until she began,” says Sudipta Maitra, 73, a retired corporate executive.

Over the next few months, people began looking forward to new renditions of songs such as Fever (later covered by Boney M and Madonna) and Jose Feliciano’s Rain. “The best thing was that she kept changing her song list,” says Banerjee.

Jazz maestro Louiz Banks recalls playing with Pam Crain at Blue Fox in the 1970s, when Usha was at Trincas. “Park Street was like the West End of London or Broadway in New York,” he says. “Restaurants and clubs buzzed with bands and cabaret acts. Usha was a big draw. With a smooth contralto voice, here was this Indian lady wearing a sari, with a big bindi and a tambourine. It was unique.”

From greeting cards and stitching dresses to live gigs and ad jingles: Read an exclusive excerpt from the Usha Uthup biography

Now 74, Uthup remembers those days vividly. Before Trincas, she had been singing at nightclubs and venues such as Nine Gems in Chennai and Talk of the Town in Mumbai. “Having grown up in a Tamil family in Bombay, my dad a police officer, I never imagined I would be performing in Calcutta, which to me always seemed like a foreign city. When the Trincas owners (Ellis Joshua and Om Prakash Puri) wrote to me, I remember replying that I did not know how to wear a frock,” she says.

The singer’s life is recounted in detail in a new biography, The Queen of Indian Pop, originally written in Hindi by Vikas Kumar Jha and translated into English by his daughter Srishti Jha. The book covers her childhood, early career, Hindi film songs (Ramba Ho Ho Ho; Hari Om Hari; Auva Auva Koi Yahan Nache perhaps being her most popular), her multi-lingual jingles (for Pepsodent, Nescafe, Thums Up, Vicks), and collaborations with musicians ranging from RD Burman and Vanraj Bhatia to Bappi Lahiri.

The book talks of her marriages to Ramu Iyer and later Jani Chacko Uthup; her two children, Anjali Uthup and Sunny Uthup.

Uthup says she has always looked at music as a means of communication. “When I started singing, I never had any plan to think of it as a career. Things just happened. I enjoyed relating with the audience, and realised that many people love particular melodies or phrases in songs which makes them nostalgic. It strikes a connect. So very early on, I decided that I would sing what the people want, what touches their hearts the most,” she says.

Music retail veteran Babi Mitra adds that Uthup can enchant any crowd. He recalls watching her at a tyre dealers’ conference in Bangalore. “It took her only a few seconds to feel the pulse of the audience and then go with the flow.”

This writer attended a few of her shows at Mumbai’s Jazz by the Bay (earlier Talk of the Town) in the late 1990s, and the energy she elicited from crowds was remarkable. She would begin with jazz standards, then slip in an English pop hit, perhaps segue into Que Sera, Sera.

If the audience was up to it, Banks recalls, she would add Ramba Ho Ho Ho and Hari Om Hari. “Usha was doing mash-ups before that term was invented,” he says.

As she began performing in different cities, she began singing in different languages (Bengali, Assamese, Kannada, Marathi and more). “On the one hand, I’ve always believed in music being one language. But on the other I also feel each language has its own musicality, its own intricacies,” Uthup says. “So I began practising them, and realised that language can be a great way to connect.”

Musically, her playlist is still changing. Uthup will sing Lata Mangeshkar’s Bindiya Chamkegi from 1969, but also Adele’s Skyfall and her own official Bengali version of the hit Srivalli from the 2021 Telugu film Pushpa: The Rise.

The bindi has stayed, so have the Kanjivaram saris. She still belts it out, as she did at an event to mark the Bengali New Year in Kolkata last week. “The kind of adrenaline that’s produced after a successful show,” she says, “is much more than all the single malts can give.”