Antara Nandy with AR RahmanFor the last two-and-a-half years, Antara Nandy, 22, has been visiting composer AR Rahman’s music studios in Chennai’s Kodambakkam – the nerve centre of the Tamil film industry – to record scratches for the Oscar winner.
Despite their derogatory implication — scratches are recordings that are scratched and replaced — they are significant in the film-music business. At any given time, about 10 or more scratches are recorded by as many singers before one of them is actually used in a film. “I didn’t mind it though. Singing scratches allows me to learn a lot – the process of recording, diction for so many languages, how to modulate one’s voice and match it with the actor on screen, etc. Besides, these are Rahman sir’s scratches, so I knew I could learn a lot,” says Pune-based Nandy, on a telephone call from Chennai, where she is back in Kodambakkam, to record more scratches.
What Nandy did not anticipate was that one of these scratches for Rahman would make it to Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan 1 (PS1), which released on September 30. The song, Alaikadal, reminiscent of Tamil film music from the ’50s, appears as Doobi Doobi in Hindi in PS1. Nandy’s gentle voice has an old-fashioned charm, but is a powerhouse at the same time. It soars comfortably amid the abundant crests and troughs in one of the finest pieces on the album.
Since its release, Alaikadal has become a talking point on social media. The brief from Mani Ratnam and Rahman was to sing it like “ripples of the ocean”. “The song was for Poonghzhali, the boatwoman who is in love with a prince, who is unattainable. So, it required joy and pain in the same breath through the song. Any song takes about two to two-and-a-half hours, I recorded this piece in 40 minutes. So, I was sure that this was a scratch and not an actual recording,” says Nandy, who was nervous after she was told of its selection and requested a re-recording. Rahman did not agree. “However, he asked me to record it in four other languages,” says Nandy, who is hoping that the song will be her introduction for other music directors.
Antara Nandy with Mani Ratnam Born to engineer parents in Assam’s Shivpur, Nandy’s access to music was limited to what she heard on the radio and television. Once, her aunt spotted a two-and-a-half-year-old Nandy carry a tune well and told her mother to enroll her in training. The Nandys took the decision to shift base to Kolkata two years later. At four, Nandy found herself under the tutelage of Ustad Rashid Khan, training for a classical career. She studied under him for about five years before enrolling in the children’s reality show – Saregamapa L’il Champs. “Guruji was unhappy that I was going to use my training to sing in reality shows, but I reached the finals,” says Nandy.
The appearance did open doors for her. At 12, Nandy was singing the title songs of Bengali reality shows. It was during one of these recordings that a Bengali composer told her not to pursue a career in music. “He said that my voice was not sweet enough and didn’t come close to Shreya Ghoshal’s. He told me, ‘I hope you are good at academics, because you may not make it as a musician,” says Nandy, who idolises Ghoshal. After that meeting, Nandy tried every unhealthy way to make her voice sound “sweeter”. “I was singing constantly in falsetto or in a hoarse voice, copying how other artistes sounded. I was not learning from a guru, just listening to different kinds of music but my voice was not working. Eventually, I lost it,” says Nandy, who could not sing for more than a year.
Antara Nandy Treatment, too, did not yield much help and Nandy slipped into depression. “Singing is all I know. It felt horrible when I could not even hum along the radio,” says Nandy, who stumbled upon voice training courses in Rahman’s music school, KM Conservatory, and enrolled herself as a last resort. “The teachers there spent hours with me, trying to get me to sing again. They made me do a bunch of vocal exercises, told me that I need not sound like somebody else to be accepted, that I needed to sound like me,” says Nandy.
When Nandy returned home in 2020, she spent an evening singing Lata Mangeshkar songs. “It was overwhelming to be able to sing again,” says Nandy.
By then, offers for her had run dry, so Nandy began to record ‘Balcony concerts’ on YouTube and Instagram with her younger sister, also a singer. “It was Bihu and we were missing Assam. So, both of us sang in a home video. That did well online and we found some confidence,” says Nandy. Soon, their rendition of the Marathi lavani, Reshmachya reghani, had Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray praise their performance on social media. “He said two Marathi girls were singing the piece. We weren’t. But the diction and pronunciation, which we’d worked on, was spot on,” says Nandy. Compliments poured in from others, too, ghazal singer Bhupinder Singh and composer duo Salim-Sulaiman, among others. “It turned out to be a great way to showcase our work and to engage with the audience directly,” says Nandy, who recently recorded a piece with Salim-Sulaiman. Despite Alaikadal’s currency in the market, Nandy is yet to get more offers. “I am continuing with the scratches for now,” she says.