We would always talk about how Sharda Sinha, the singer whose voice means home to us, used to chew paan while she sang so that her voice had that earthy touch to it. You could even smell home through her voice.
She passed away on November 5, the first day of Chhath Puja, a festival that’s worshipped across Bihar and is a homage to nature. She had been in the hospital. She had just released a new song for Chhath.
My mother is in mourning. So are my aunts in Bihar. They cried when they heard of her death and now tear up talking about her. My family is not the only one in mourning. Many families are feeling that loss personally. They feel that she passed away on an auspicious day and during the festival that her voice had become synonymous with. That’s not a coincidence. She had become one with the Chhath festival.
Like my mother, most of them would have never known her personally or would have met her. They only heard her songs on radio or tape recorder. Sinha was the woman who sang their songs and also the songs of their ancestors, and took them afar. Songs of love, marriage, festivals and childbirth.
She was born in the erstwhile Saharsa district of Mithilanchal region, which is home for me.
Having left home as a kid, the marker of home, for me, was not the physical space anymore. Home was now an idea in the head. The markers of that idea now were the language, the songs and the food of my childhood. Sinha’s songs were one such marker. Every time I have longed for home, I have found refuge in her songs. They anchored me, and somehow I felt that all wasn’t lost, and that was so comforting.
I was first introduced to her music through her audio cassettes at home in the 1980s. She stood out even on the cover of those cassettes. With her black hair, which back then she wore loose and a big round bindi, she imbibed both feminine and feminist personas. I remember listening to two of her audio cassettes in Maithili and Bhojpuri. My mother played them very often in my childhood. Hers was the only voice I had heard then and for the longest time in my mother tongue.
Once I left home to go to a boarding school in the 1990s, I left the songs of my home and the childhood behind. In my teens, I was growing up on Hindi film songs. Folk songs were not cool enough. So, one would only stumble upon a fragment of a song playing somewhere, sung by that voice from my home, in the cities that I lived in, but never in the intimate settings of home anymore.
Sometimes when one visited home, we would hear her voice from the loudspeakers from afar during Chhath or marriage ceremonies.
It was many years later, as an adult, that I would re-discover Sinha and fall in love with her all over again. This love was different. This now, that longing. In the last decade, I have possibly heard everything she had sung. I have watched all her interviews and seen all her videos many times over.
I wanted to know everything about her and her songs. I would play her songs on my phone and ask my mother to explain the words I could not understand.
There was never a gathering of friends in the last decade when I did not play at least one song of hers. I wanted everyone I loved to hear her at least once. I guess I was probably looking for myself in her songs. Her songs were the anchor that kept me connected to the roots and my land.
However, the urge to meet her never waned. Many times, I felt like flying to Patna just to chat with her in Maithili, even without knowing her. With her, it felt as if I had always known her. Later, I got in touch with her son Anshuman and spoke with him a few times. It was during one of these conversations, in 2017 or 2018, that I happened to speak with Sinha on the phone. I was then posted in Chandrapur, Maharashtra. We spoke for 10 minutes or so in Maithili and ended the conversation hoping to meet in person soon.
I am aware I won’t ever be able to meet Sinha in person.
But can a voice like hers ever die? I wish to celebrate her life by continuing to listen to her songs and taking her songs to those who have never heard her. May her songs be the anchor for many who feel lost, and may we all find our way back home led by that voice.
Ashutosh Salil is an IAS officer
