Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Amazing Grace

Asha Puthli’s achievements are even more remarkable when you consider that at a time when the West was only just beginning to discover Indian music through The Beatles and Ravi Shankar, here was an Indian girl, singing the blues like she’d been dyed in them.

For a girl from Bandra, Asha Puthli’s success in the international music scene of the Seventies was nothing short of extraordinary. From being described as a “genius” by legendary New York-based record producer John Hammond — the man credited with discovering musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan; to winning the prestigious Downbeat critics poll award for her vocals on Ornette Coleman’s path breaking 1973 album Science Fiction; to having the New York Times describe her album The Devil is Loose as an instant classic — Puthli’s international musical career had scaled exceptional heights. What’s more, her astonishing four-octave range was matched by her effortless segueing between genres as varied as the blues, pop, rock, soul, funk, disco, and techno.

Asha Puthli had once been the toast of New York’s avant garde; photographed by Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon, styled by Manolo Blahnik and immortalised by writer Ved Mehta in his book Portrait of India. (Illustration: Gajanan Nirphale)

Puthli’s achievements are even more remarkable when you consider that at a time when the West was only just beginning to discover Indian music through The Beatles and Ravi Shankar, here was an Indian girl, singing the blues like she’d been dyed in them. To be sure, there was a time when Puthli had been the toast of New York’s avant garde; photographed by Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon, styled by Manolo Blahnik and immortalised by writer Ved Mehta in his book Portrait of India.

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As the convent educated daughter of an upper middle-class family which featured stalwarts of the Indian Independence Movement such as cultural doyenne Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and poet Harindranath Chattopadhyay, brother of Sarojini Naidu, Puthli had studied Indian classical music as well as opera. But it was not only music that had consumed the teenager. A voracious reader, who devoured authors like Dostoevsky, Andre Gide and Kessler, Puthli had been attracted to all things cultural.

“I used to hang out at the Samovar which was such a hub for artists, writers, filmmakers and intellectuals,” she says, on a call from Florida where she lives for part of the year with her filmmaker son Jannu Goldschimdt. “Then there were institutions like the Alliance Francaise and Goethe Institute and personalities like Gerson da Cunha and Pearl and Alyque Padamsee. I looked up to them all.”

Like a sponge, Puthli says, she soaked up the heady mix of intellectual and cultural stimuli, the city an oyster for her insatiable appetite; but whereas it turned her into one of the frontline personalities of her generation, her name a constant fixture in youth magazine Junior Statesman, it also rendered her woefully unfit for a conventional life of domesticity and marriage.

Fortunately, her breakthrough came in the form of a year’s stint as an airhostess for BOAC and a subsequent scholarship to study dance with Martha Graham in New York. Soon, Puthli found herself winging her way to New York on a student visa, to seek her fortune in the Big Apple.

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It was no surprise that she hit the ground running, navigating her way with a combination of her characteristic, chutzpah, unique sense of style and generosity of spirit. “I think the fact that I had nothing made things easier, because it made me more creative,” she recalls. “For instance, instead of buying clothes, I invented my own look; I would turn an Indian mirror work pillowcase into a skirt, combine it with a traditional Saurashtra blouse and voila, it became a fabulous outfit for which I’d get complimented by strangers on New York’s streets.”

To understand the sensation the lithe, dark-haired Puthli with her large kohl-lined eyes, full sensuous mouth and provocative one-liners created is not hard. New York’s smartest set opened their hearts and homes to the exotic Indian rose with enthusiasm.

“As far back as I can recall, Asha Puthli was always a star,” says former NYT journalist Pranay Gupte, another Indian who’d breached the hallowed barriers of American media. “I saw her several times at Studio 54, in the company of people like Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s former partner, and Woody Allen and Zubin Mehta. Her songs frequently graced radio stations and she was a sought-after guest,” he says, adding, “But her fame never went to her head. When my son Jaidev was a little kid, enamoured of long limousines, one day Asha hired a spectacular limousine to ferry him around for the entire day! On another occasion, she threw a lavish, surprise birthday party for a schoolteacher friend. What’s more, she never expected anything from those on whom she lavished her largesse.”

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But though she’d become a darling of NYC’s smart set, Puthli eventually found her head knocking against the hard ceiling of the racism and cultural imperialism of the era. “Corporate America and record executives did not think I was marketable,” she says, adding, “According to them, blacks would not accept me and whites would not accept me. And Indians were not interested in buying western music.”

Fortunately, Europe had been more accepting. Here, she found the backing of record companies and appreciative audiences who turned her albums into chartbusters.

However, decades later the memory of rebuff from America, the mecca for jazz can rankle. When CBS was looking for an international star to put their formidable marketing muscle behind and the choice had been narrowed to Julio Iglesias and Puthli, Iglesias had been chosen because of the big Latin contingency in America, and millions of dollars were spent on promoting him, Puthli says, recounting how each time she’d see her rival’s face on a bus, it had felt like a kick in the stomach. This cognitive dissonance of being Indian and singing Western proved to be Puthli’s stumbling block. Though she continued to reap accolades from music critics and icons, serious money and international fame eluded her. “I cannot describe how I felt when overnight Donna Summers began looking, singing, dressing and dancing like me,” she says of the Disco Queen of the era, who went on to rake millions and attract a global following.

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But it is a tribute to Puthli’s upbringing and grace that she has made peace with pain. “If success equals happiness, I am truly blessed,” she says.

Today, in her mid-seventies, she says she is spending what she describes as the happiest days of her life, with her beloved son and their pet pooch, and later this year there is a plan to release a much-cherished album of classic jazz covers titled All My Life, as a tribute to her many mentors and collaborators. Meanwhile, thanks to the internet, her status as a cult icon keeps growing, with her original records becoming collector’s items on E-bay.

What’s more, her snakey, sensuous, futuristic music continues to win new fans through sampling in songs by iconic rappers like P. Diddy, The Notorious B.I.G., Dilated Peoples, Governor featuring 50 Cent, and Redman. And finally, there are plans for a book or a film documenting her life.

“I think age has mellowed me, has taught me a lot. And I am always open to life’s magical possibilities,” says Puthli, looking back with grace and gratitude at her extraordinary journey.