Shubha Mudgal explores verse to give voice to women’s desire

What does sexuality sound like in Indian music? The question lay at the heart of Women, Sexuality and Song, presented by Royal Opera House, Mumbai, in collaboration with AVID Learning. More than a conventional concert, Shubha Mudgal, joined by Aneesh Pradhan, Sudhir Nayak and Pratibha Singh Baghel, wove together music, poetry and storytelling, tracing how beauty, longing, desire, motherhood, shame and resilience have echoed through centuries of India’s literary and musical traditions.

Few musicians are as well-equipped to undertake such an exploration as Shubha. During a conversation after the concert, she said the challenge lay in balancing the historical context of these poems with a contemporary woman’s perspective.

“As an artiste, whatever I perform is inevitably shaped by my own thoughts, experiences and perspective as a woman. At the same time, these poems belong to a very different era, so they have to be understood in the context in which they were written. When I present them today, I interpret them through my own sensibility as a female artiste while remaining faithful to their historical context,” Shubha added.

The evening opened with a poem by Goswami Harirai, composed by Shubha in Raag Tilak Kamod and Rupak taal. The poem admired Krishna’s physical beauty through the eyes of a devotee, offering an unusual interpretation of bhakti. “We usually associate devotion with spirituality, prayer or bhajans, but this is an entire poem devoted to describing the beauty of the divine body. It represents a different shade of devotion that we wanted to explore. The poem was written by a male poet, while the musical composition and its interpretation are mine. So, in that sense, both the male and the female gaze exist within the performance. The poetry originates in one perspective, but every performance allows it to be experienced through another.”

The programme then moved into the classical nakh-shikh and saraapa traditions, literary forms that describe the human body from head to toe. Through an Urdu composition by 18th-century poet Nazir Akbarabadi, Shubha demonstrated how the female body became a subject of elaborate poetic imagination. The exploration continued with a verse by Badrinarayan Chaudhary’ ‘Premghan’, introducing the audience to the layered meanings of the word joban. While literally translating to youth, the word has also been used in poetry as a metaphor for the youthful breasts of young maidens, revealing how desire in classical verse often found expression through subtle metaphor rather than explicit imagery.

As the evening progressed, the focus shifted from how poets wrote about women to how women expressed themselves through song. North Indian folk traditions emerged as repositories of lived experience, preserving stories of patriarchy, social expectations, longing and resilience.

One folk composition, drawn from Awadhi Lok Geet, confronted the harsh realities of infertility through the story of a woman rejected not only by her family but also by a tigress, Mother Earth and even a temple because of the stigma attached to childlessness.

“I don’t think we can say, just like that, whether we have become more conservative or more progressive,” Shubha said. “Social change is never linear. It is often one step forward, two steps back, and yet the journey continues. The system is still largely patriarchal, and many of these practices are deeply rooted.”

As always at her articulate best, Shubha spoke about the taboo infertility carried and the social and emotional humiliation an infertile woman had to endure simply because she could not bear children. “Today, when I perform this song, audiences don’t laugh at it. Instead, they feel the pain of that woman. That, to me, is also a sign that society is changing, even if slowly.”

Shubha also revisited Praveen Rai’s work, the accomplished musician and poet from the court of Orchha’s king Indrajit, who was celebrated for her brilliance yet burdened with the derogatory label paatur. The evening later returned to Ratnavali, remembered largely as the wife of Goswami Tulsidas. By pairing verses from Tulsidas’s Janaki Trijata Samvaad with Ratnavali’s own dohas, the programme restored attention to a poet whose voice has long remained overshadowed.

The repertoire also featured poems that challenged patriarchal practices. Shubha recalled one composition in which a woman asks, “If I am the one who bears all the pain of childbirth, then why should the child be called only by his father’s son? Why shouldn’t he be our son?

“She goes to every member of the family, but no one is willing to consider her view. Finally, when her husband comes to know, he agrees that if childbirth has so much to do with the mother, then the child should not be called only my son, but our son. Sometimes, all we need is to raise our voice to the right person, for the right reason and even long-standing practices can begin to change.”

Among the evening’s most thought-provoking inclusions was 18th-century Rekhti poetry, centred on feminine desire and, at times, same-sex love. Historically marginalised because of its homoerotic themes, it gradually disappeared from mainstream performance traditions. “Today, when we are talking so much about inclusion in society, I feel Rekhti should also be included in the performance,” Shubha said, noting that the genre was largely written by male poets adopting feminine voices.

By the end of the evening, Women, Sexuality and Song had revealed itself to be far more than a musical recital. It was a thoughtful exploration of the many ways women have been admired, desired, judged, silenced and remembered across India’s literary and musical traditions. Through court poetry, folk songs and forgotten histories, Shubha demonstrated that conversations around women’s bodies, agency and sexuality are neither new nor borrowed from the present — they have existed for centuries, waiting to be rediscovered through music.

For Shubha, revisiting these voices is not merely an act of preserving tradition but of encouraging audiences to engage with it differently. “Even after all these years of being a performing artiste, after seeing so much in life and witnessing social change, I still live with the hope that art can bring about change. I believe it has the power to influence the way we think,” she said.

For her, the impact of art lies in these quiet transformations. “If, after this conversation and after watching the performance, someone goes back home and finds that their thinking has changed, even if only a little, or they leave with a sense of hope, then I feel I have done what I set out to do as an artiste.”