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Culture & Living
With a range of romantic ballads to a melodic tribute to frontline workers, the 22-year-old Mumbai-based popstar and digital influencer has already set foot in the one billion-hits club
To talk to Dhvani Bhanushali is to talk about what it means to be a young star on the cusp of superstardom. A singer since the age of 17, it was only about three years ago when Bhanushali made her foray into singing for films, and subsequently went on to establish herself as a YouTuber.
The transformation of her pop persona into a digital star is noteworthy. She may call herself a novice, but Bhanushali comes backed by 3.6 million followers on Instagram, over four million fans on Facebook and 78,500 plus Twitter followers, who lap up not just her music but also play voyeur to carefully curated posts that feature (most recently) a vacation in Maldives, makeup videos, Reel videos showing off dance moves and more.
As much as there’s definitely finessing and grooming involved in the commercial music space in India, Bhanushali, who is the daughter of record label T-Series president Vinod Bhanushali, was first encouraged by playback singer and composer Himesh Reshammiya to pursue music professionally. But the 22-year-old singer is sure of one thing: “I don't want to be a made-up personality,” she says.
The authenticity seems to have worked. With over two million YouTube subscribers and a song like 2019’s “Vaaste” (which she recorded with singer-songwriter Nikhil D’Souza) accruing over a billion views, Bhanushali is certainly in the running for contemporary India’s biggest pop artist. In pop music, India’s billion-hits-club also includes Punjabi singer Mannat Noor as well as major label-backed star voices such as Jass Manak and Guru Randhawa. And much like Randhawa and Manak, Bhanushali thrives on her young listeners. Set against collegiate settings and a dramatised romantic plot, her dreamy videos and discography revolve around songs about heartaches and new love, which are not too far removed from what one would hear on film soundtracks.
Trained in Indian classical vocals (something she still practices) and also growing up on a hearty dose of global pop, Bhanushali name-checks everyone from Taylor Swift and Beyonce to Dua Lipa (whom she shared the lineup billing with at OnePlus Music Festival in Navi Mumbai last year) and Selena Gomez as artists she keenly follows. “I want to have the best of both worlds. I try to figure out the colours of my voice and try and blend it with my classical training,” adds the Mumbai-based musician, who like her the global roster of artists she names, has a penchant for choreography that she often displays in her videos.
It helps that Bhanushali is on a mammoth label like T-Series and has worked with a lineup of artists such as Randhawa (“Baby Girl”), Tanishk Bagchi (on “Leja Re” and a remake of 1999 song “Dilbar,” which put her name on BBC Asian Network’s Official Asian Music Chart and the Billboard YouTube chart in 2018), and most recently, duetting with Jubin Nautiyal for the Gujarati-Hindi love song, “Nayan”.
While acknowledging the privilege of releasing music via one of the biggest labels in the country, Bhanushali maintains that she still got here with talent and hard work: “Yes, my struggles are different, but not every opportunity comes knocking on my door. There are things that you need to chase. There are things that I want to do, but I'm not given a chance at. There are those days as well,” she says.
The pandemic notwithstanding, 2020 has been Bhanushali’s most prolific year in terms of releases outside of films–starting with the lush electronic pop tune “Na Ja Tu”, a rousing salute to frontline workers with “Jeetenge Hum” and a Punjabi wedding party-ready number called “Gallan Goriyan”. Once the pandemic restrictions eased up, she got back on track to collaborate with Randhawa for “Baby Girl” and earlier this month, dropped “Nayan”, which received half a million hits in merely 45 minutes of releasing. With her latest, she says it took a while to ride steady after a forced break from being on set or in the studio to make music and shoot videos. “I just missed it… that vibe of people sitting together and making music. I think I worked a little hard on it since it was coming after a very long time, given the lockdown,” she shares, “You sometimes kind of lose that edge. I had to work a little harder on getting it to the best point, getting it to the best I can do.”
Besides five “non-film” songs, Bhanushali also had three film projects this year—Jai Mummy Di, Saaho and Street Dancer 3D. In a year where most musicians turned to home studio setups to supply a steady dose of optimism through live sessions, her output is worth applauding. “I keep asking myself, ‘Okay, is this the right thing to do?’ I'm very cautious that way about my career,” she says.
The digital realm, on the other hand, is not so kind if you’re not always posting updates and churning out content. While Bhanushali did casually take on a few Instagram live sessions and even chatted with fans and answered questions on YouTube, she says she’s often conscious of when she needs to step away. “It's sometimes very overwhelming for me, emotionally, to handle so much. I'm a very reserved person like that. I can't handle a lot of emotions… of people coming my way.”
But she’s quick to confess that she does, in fact, love all the attention. Ask her about something she wasn’t prepared for with fame and Bhanushali says, “As pop stars, we want attention, but there are two sides of it. You know, when you get too much of it, it's kind of difficult to digest. Sometimes, you have to be on all the time. You can't have a dull moment, because the audience wants to see you perked up at all times. (But) I’m human and we’re all human. It irks me a little bit and I didn't think this would be a part of the package.”
Nevertheless, she intends on keeping things as real as they come, even as she’s constantly in the public eye. “I just want to be myself. If a moment is big, I would have captured it that way. If a moment is small, I will capture that way as well. I never really made things up just because I want to post on social media. Everything that happened in my life, or the kind of person I am, you'll see into my Instagram, it's not made up. It's just organically who I am in real life.”
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