When sridevi frolicked to Morni baaga maa bole aadhi raat ma in Yash Chopra’s Lamhe (1991), the voice—silvery, mischievous and teasing—was Lata Mangeshkar. But you can hear another woman in that Shiv-Hari classic: a deep, grainy voice (Ila Arun) singing of thwarted desire and longing, a voice that came from the golden dunes of Rajasthan. It’s not a voice heard often in Bollywood. The paradigm of a woman’s voice for Indian cinema has been Lata—high-pitched, melodious and almost transcendental.

But you can hear the strains of change—newcomer Shilpa Rao’s rich timbre that broods over love in Tose naina laage from the film Anwar; Rekha Bhardwaj’s husky voice that tells you about the tug of lust and desire in Namak ishq ka (Omkara) and Anoushka’s unbounded energy in Golmaal’s title track. From a time when you could hear only hear snatches of an Usha Uthup or a Reshma (Lambi judaai in Hero) in the chorus of the Mangeshkars, Alka Yagniks and Kavita Krishnamurthys, the voice of the Indian woman in Bollywood appears to have undergone a subtle shift. “There was a notion that only high-pitched female vocals add brightness to a song. That myth is being broken. Now there is more scope for warmer female voices. There were singers in the past, like Ila or Uthup, who also had deeper voices, but the songs for them were very few compared with today,” says Bhardwaj, who is also the wife of fimmaker and music director Vishal Bhardwaj (Omkara, Maqbool).

The change perhaps began a few years ago when Sunidhi Chauhan stormed the music scene. Since then, the trickle of huskier, textured voices has grown—from Vasundhara Das (Aks, Nayak, Lagaan) and Alisha Chinai to Soumya Rao (Zara zara in Rehna Hai Tere Dil Mein) and Shubha Mudgal (Raincoat, Hazaar Khwahishein Aisi) and Bhardwaj. Mudgal’s brassy voice in Rituparna Sengupta’s Raincoat is a character in itself—its almost masculine texture speaking of the rumble of thunder and the bitter sadness of foiled love.

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