Ellaji and Lakshmiji

When I arrived at Bryn Mawr College in the fall of 1992, the only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want to become a doctor like my Indian parents. Other than that guiding principle, I had no idea what I wanted to make of my life.

Unlike many of my classmates, I hadn’t brought along a boombox. I only had a tiny selection of music—my entire tape collection fit in a shoe box. A third of my cassettes were Western classical music, particularly violin concertos; I had studied violin intensively and was planning to play in the college orchestra.

Another third were bootlegs and mixtapes made by friends who took pity on me because my parents wouldn’t let me buy or listen to pop or rock music—their misguided attempt to protect me from the supposedly corrosive effects of American culture. All through junior high and high school, I surreptitiously popped these tapes into my Pepto Bismol-pink Walkman late at night, under the covers.

The final third of my tapes were of the Hindustani singer Lakshmi Shankar. Her soulful bhajans echoed African-American gospel hymns, emphasizing love and belief in the Divine, especially during times of adversity and oppression. They consoled me when I was visited by bouts of homesickness.

“Jo tum todo piya main nahi todu re,” she sings, saying: “Although, Dear Lord, you might break our bond of love, I will never break it.”

I grew up in a home steeped in Indian music and culture, but we were not overly religious. I wasn’t sure why Lakshmiji’s bhajans brought me such comfort. Even today, when I listen to her soulful voice, I feel the same stirrings in me that I felt when I watched her perform in the vastness of Lincoln Center as a five-year-old girl.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have Lakshmiji or her music in my life. My immigrant parents helped organize arts programs in New York City, and we frequently hosted Indian artists in our home. As a child, I was fascinated by these talented strangers who rehearsed in our basement and shared meals with us. But there was one I loved above all others: Lakshmiji. I cherished her visits.

Though she was an acclaimed artist, Lakshmiji fit right into our hybrid Bengali-Tamil family; she herself was a Tamilian woman married into one of the most esteemed artistic Bengali families, that of modern Indian dance pioneer Uday Shankar and sitar maestro Ravi Shankar. She seamlessly moved from helping my mother fry up puffy pooris, to discussing Indian current events with my father in Bengali, to chatting with me and my sister about our favorite TV shows in English, to sharing tea while conversing in Tamil with my Patti, my grandmother.

When it came time for her to perform, Lakshmiji cloistered herself in our guest room, and we could faintly hear her humming. Later, she emerged, silent and serene, and remained that way until she ascended the stage. As I grew older and my musical tastes evolved, her voice continued to stir something deep within me. It had a silken texture, spanned a three-octave range, and reverberated with so much emotion.

Even when I couldn’t understand most of the words in her songs, I felt I understood them on a deeper level. My parents had introduced me to Lakshmiji’s music as a way of connecting me to our culture, yet her voice became an indelible part of me that mysteriously spoke to all parts of my identity: first, as a South Asian American girl; and later, as a woman making her way through college and finding her path in life. Beyond her voice, her life as a US-based Indian musician inspired me. She was a bridge traversing South Asian and Western cultures, embodying how each one can be enriched by the other.

In college, I experienced a newfound freedom to explore and fall in love with other genres of music. I was riveted by my first ventures to rock concerts. I enjoyed trawling used tape and CD shops, up and down Philadelphia’s Main Line. On one of my trips to the store Plastic Fantastic, Ella Fitzgerald came on over the sound system. After just a few strains, I stopped rummaging in the rock section, migrated to classic jazz, and, lovestruck by Ellaji’s gorgeous voice, pulled out two of her tapes.

Her voice became an indelible part of me that mysteriously spoke to all parts of my identity.

Ellaji’s voice had some of the same qualities I loved most about Lakshmiji’s—the tremendous range, the musicality. Her voice could be somber and soulful one minute—as on songs like “April in Paris,” “Summertime,” and “How Long Has This Been Going On”—then turn nimble and bright the next, as in “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” “Oh, Lady Be Good,” and “Mack the Knife.”

If Lakshmiji’s voice was silk, then Ellaji’s was satin.

Though I went from playing tapes to CDs, and my tastes shifted from pop rock to grunge, I returned, time and again, to the music of Ellaji and Lakshmiji. Just a few years later, on the cusp of the millennium, these two women sang at my wedding.

At my mehndi ceremony in Bangalore, surrounded by a sea of Indian aunties I didn’t know, Lakshmiji’s round visage stood out. She began to sing a bhajan as beautiful and intricate as the vines being drawn onto my hands. Despite the jitters over my impending nuptials and being thousands of miles from home, the moment I was draped in the silken strands of Lakshmiji’s voice, I felt that familiar, stirring sense of comfort.

A few weeks later, at my wedding reception in New Jersey, my beloved and I danced to Ellaji and Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “Cheek to Cheek,” a song we fell in love to, singing it to each other over the phone during our long-distance relationship.

Heaven, I’m in heaven,

And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak,

And I seem to find the happiness I seek,

When we’re out together dancing, cheek to cheek.

As he dipped me down low and pulled me up, I watched the world turn topsy-turvy and right itself, enveloped in his arms and the satin softness of Ellaji’s voice.

*

In April 2010, on the heels of her Grammy nomination, I traveled from New York to Los Angeles to ask eighty-three-year-old Lakshmiji for permission to write her biography. She wasn’t touring much anymore, so I hadn’t seen her in a few years. I worried what she would think of my plan to write about her and agonized over how she would respond.

It had been twenty years since I graduated from college. I had spent most of that time working in social change but in my most recent job addressing racial injustice it dawned on me that it can manifest in quieter, more insidious ways, like erasure. It blots out one life at a time, invalidates some histories in favor of others, and ensures marginalized lives remain in the margins.

Although I believed deeply that Lakshmiji’s story must be told, I was unsure of how and where to begin. Knowing her personally seemed as much an incentive as a disincentive.

Upon seeing her, I was shocked by how gaunt Laskhmiji looked. She showed me her Grammy nomination, and the significance of it washed over me. It symbolized all Lakshmiji had done as an artist and cultural ambassador, helping to bring Indian music to the west. I had traveled across the country to ask if I could tell her life story and now was the moment to ask.

She said yes and I was overjoyed. But soon afterwards, I began worrying about not getting her story right and imperiling our relationship. I was battling a strong case of imposter syndrome in calling myself a writer and researcher. The gravity of having walked away from my career in social change to be a writer, to tell Lakshmiji’s story, weighed heavily on me.

Just months after I began working on the project in earnest, Lakshmiji passed away. I was grief-stricken. Even though I had watched her grow more and more frail over the past year, I had somehow believed she, like her music, would endure. Having lost my beloved muse, I wasn’t sure how to push forward.

At first, I carried on, propelled by my conviction that Lakshmiji would’ve wanted her story to be told. But delving deeper into her life as a person and an artist, I realized I needed Lakshmiji’s story to be told.

As I learned of the obstacles Lakshmiji faced, I grew to appreciate her artistry in a different way. I realized Lakshmiji’s struggles were probably shared by other women of color artists of her era. Being in love with Ellaji’s voice and music, I wondered what obstacles she had faced on her road to renown.

I discovered startling similarities between Ellaji and Lakshmiji’s artistic lives. By the time I came to her music, Ellaji was a legend, known as America’s “First Lady of Song,” the winner of fourteen Grammy Awards. But Ellaji, like Lakshmiji, had initially pinned her hopes on becoming a dancer. An orphan at age fifteen, she had been sent to an abusive reformatory school, where she was barred from singing in the choir because of her race.

At seventeen, Ellaji entered Harlem’s Apollo Theater Amateur Night contest intending to dance. But once she saw the strong dance acts, she tried her luck singing. She won and met bandleader Chick Webb. Soon, they were performing at Harlem’s famed Savoy Ballroom, and her career began to take off.

Meanwhile, young Lakshmiji was goaded into learning Bharat Natyam dance by her mother, even though dance was improper for South Indian Brahmin girls, according to cultural mores. At just thirteen, Lakshmiji journeyed from Madras to the foothills of the Himalayas to join a dance troupe led by dance innovator, Uday Shankar.

Lakshmiji’s passion for dance grew stronger, but then she was struck with pleurisy. Her doctor advised her to give up dancing. Devastated, Lakshmiji turned to being a playback singer for Bollywood movies, whose heroines lip-synched to her songs. A music producer told her she had the voice and talent to be a Hindustani, or North Indian classical, singer.

Doubtful at first, Lakshmiji soon fell in love with Hindustani music and began studying it intensively. Three years later, she relaunched her artistic career as a thirty-year-old mother of two.

While Ellaji achieved fame and acclaim, she also bore the burden of being a Black female artist during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. She built her reputation on legendary performances and hit records, even as she faced racism and segregated venues, travel, and accommodations. She persevered, breaking barriers, including being the first Black artist to headline New York City’s famed Copacabana Club. In my mind, that Ellaji transcended poverty and racism to become America’s First Lady of Song is less a testament to the American Dream, than to her own artistic brilliance and resilience.

Delving deeper into her life as a person and an artist, I realized I needed Lakshmiji’s story to be told.

Meanwhile, Lakshmiji was the most prominent Indian female musician in the cross-cultural movement that brought Indian music to the West in the late 1960s. Yet, despite her role as a cultural ambassador, she went largely uncelebrated in her own homeland of India. It was only decades later, in 2008, just five years before her death, that Lakshmiji received a Grammy nomination for her final album.

These women of song, whose music I love and whose lives I admire, faced inverse challenges—systemic racism and white gatekeepers hindered Ellaji, but could not hold back her success; while Lakshmiji was celebrated all over the world, but went largely unheralded in India due to patriarchy and cultural snobbery. Though their experiences as Black and brown women artists differed due to racial, cultural, and national contexts, I found solace and reassurance in Ellaji and Lakshmiji’s respective spirits of resilience.

Listening to Lakshmiji and Ellaji’s voices alternately navigating runs or meditating on a somber note has always been, for me, a sublime experience. Their vocal stylings provide the soundtrack to my most joyful moments and give me refuge during trying times. As I wrote Lakshmiji’s biography while struggling to find my own voice as a writer, their artistic lives were a beacon of inspiration.

Hitting one roadblock after another, including several agents and editors who didn’t think Lakshmi Shankar’s story merited a book, claiming there was no audience for it, I wondered what business I had trying to become a writer at age forty. But then, there, staring back at me from my evolving manuscript, stood the story of how Lakshmiji transformed herself from a dancer to a singer as a mother in her thirties, through commitment to her art and sheer resilience.

Meanwhile, when I felt like an outsider in writing workshops because I was the only person of color or because I lacked an MFA, I reminded myself how privileged I was to even have the opportunity. The story of the entrenched structural racism Ellaji faced, and the success she built despite it, reminded me how fortunate I was. I focused on what mattered: improving as a writer so I could tell these crucial stories.

Eventually, I published some of my work and signed a contract for my biography of Lakshmiji. At that point, I finally felt able to call myself a writer. But instead of feeling confident, I often felt dismayed by countless rejections and missed opportunities. I turned my gaze inward and began writing and publishing deeply personal essays, even as I doubted anyone would want to hear my ruminations on my own life.

When I received messages from friends and strangers about how my personal explorations resonated with them and reflected their own experiences, I was so moved. I remembered how much Lakshmiji valued her audience more than any critic or award. They were the ones who filled the auditoriums, clapped thunderously, and stayed after for the chance to speak to her. Heartened, I keep delving into myself on the page.

The obstacles Ellaji and Lakshmiji faced during their respective lives just for the chance to pursue their artistic passions far overshadow any artistic challenges I’ve faced or will likely face. If I had given up trying to tell Lakshmiji’s story just because of the value judgement of some agents and editors who didn’t believe her story needed to be told, how would I be honoring her struggle, or the struggle of other women of color artists?

Now, when I listen to Ellaji and Lakshmiji sing, I hear a sonic reflection of their resilience in the face of adversity. Whether they’re navigating vocal runs or meditating on somber notes, I discern a gritty undertone woven into their satin silk voices.

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