Why Gangubai is gold

She challenged the thin-voiced norm set down for women singers

Nurses at the hospital where Gangubai Hanagal spent her last days used to call her ‘cutie pie’.

At 97, Gangubai was so full of good cheer and optimism that she would wave the nurses at Lifeline Hospital over to her bedside and teach them lines from a song she had learnt at school.

The nurses loved her spirit, and had become very fond of her. “About a year ago, she travelled to Goa and sang at a public event for about 20 minutes,” said Deepa Ganesh, a journalist researching Gangubai’s life for a biography, now in Hubli.

For the nurses' benefit, Gangubai hummed a Kannada song she had learnt when she was nine, but they probably didn't know that she had never sung any Kannada song on stage. Her daughter Krishna (who died in 2004) sang the compositions of the Kannada saint-poets, but she herself wouldn’t because she hadn’t learnt any from her Hindustani gurus. Gangubai only sang raga compositions in the north Indian dialects.

Many who hear Gangubai on the radio think she is a man. She used to employ her voice in the manner of an artist using a thick 6B pencil. Her strokes were bold, and etched out pictures that stood out starkly. A doctor had administered electric shocks for her tonsilitis, and turned her voice that way, but Gangubai wasn't the sort to stop singing just because she sounded masculine.

For many of us drawn to Hindustani music through the medium of film songs, anything that was sung by a woman and that didn’t sound thin was initially a surprise, then a delight, and finally a revelation about the politics of timbre. A delight because it rang true, and a revelation that women who cultivated a thinness of voice for its marketability were artistically shortchanging us!

Lata Mangeshkar’s voice from her golden years defines femininity for listeners of Indian popular music. In the south, we see her lineage in S Janaki, Chitra, Anuradha Sriram, B R Chaya and countless other singers. On the other hand, Gangubai is a high art practitioner of a daring style that Usha Uthup, Shubha Mudgal and Ila Arun attempt with varying degrees of success. Gangubai is the gold standard.