In July of 1982, Indira Gandhi, the former Prime Minister of India, made her first official visit to the United States in more than a decade. For her meeting with President Ronald Reagan, Gandhi wore a red and white silk sari, and a string of pearls, striking a look both effervescently cool and younger than her 65 years of age. Her visit was deemed a bonafide success, yet another pinnacle for the nation of India during a year in which director Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi nabbed eight Academy Awards. At that same awards ceremony, Bhanu Athaiya shared the Oscar for Best Costume Design, becoming the first Indian ever to win the coveted statue. In 1982, color television came to India, while the capital city of New Delhi hosted the 9th Asian Games, a transformative event that left its mark in the naming of neighborhoods and sports complexes alike. In 1982, it began to feel as though India—its people, its history, its culture—had finally appeared on the global stage.
Be reham duniya chodh kar hum [Let’s leave this unforgiving world] Khoo jaye jaake aasishi waadiyoo me [Let’s get lost in our own world] —from “Ayee Morshume Be-Reham Duniya”
The story of disco in India begins with Asha Puthli. In 1971, Puthli’s jazz vocal contributions to Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction LP gained international acclaim. She appeared in the 1972 Merchant-Ivory surreal film Savages , which was widely banned in India. Over the next decade, Puthli would release seven LPs of operatic disco and disco-adjacent soul, along with a slew of singles for CBS, gaining a sizeable following mostly in the European market. In New York City, she became a Studio 54 regular, captured in photographs by Andy Warhol. Her danceable pop tracks used Indian instrumentation to create a hybrid that became synonymous with Indian disco.
In 1982, Rupa’s Disco Jazz made its own entry into that sprawling genre. The record was then, and remains, an essential document of Indian pop history whose story is a convoluted, complex series of unfortunate events. It was fated to be owned by few and mostly unheard in the first several decades after its appearance on the Megaphone Company label as JNLX 1040, a simple “RUPA DISCO” riding its striking pink-and-silver label.
Unheard, that is, until YouTube’s inscrutable algorithm saw fit to propagate the album into user feeds circa 2016. A truly forgotten relic, Disco Jazz would soon turn up in DJ sets from Croatia to Brazil, from Ethiopia to the United Kingdom. As disco enjoyed a mini-revival in clubs, Rupa’s “Aaj Shanibar” served to showcase the depth of a selector’s crates. And Rupa Biswas’s reaction? “I am so happy [that] after all these years, people like my music.”
Moja Bhari Moja Bhari Moja [Fun, great fun, fun, great fun] Moja Bhari Moja Aah ha ki Moja [Fun, great fun, ah what fun] —from “Moja Bhari Moja”
She was born Sukla Biswas in Malda Town, Northern Bengal, to magistrate Rathindra Kumar Biswas and his wife Sabita, the parents of four other children. Quite a liberal family for the India of the 1950s, they maintained a focus on the arts. Sabita, in fact, was a renowned singer in their district. At 10, Sukla showed early promise as a singer, outshining her older sister during small concerts and performances. But Sukla held her dream of singing close. School and her studies took priority.
Then, as now, training in medicine, engineering, and law was seen as the one sure ticket off the Indian subcontinent. Creative pursuits were relegated to personal downtime. Families with the wherewithal to nurture creative talents that culminate in professional careers were uncommon in India, but when talent did emerge, it had the potential to blur class and create communal divides. It’s mostly men who are afforded creative opportunity. Women, however talented, are commonly shunted aside.
“In 1973, my father was transferred,” Biswas said via video call from Kolkata, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal. Known then as Calcutta, the city was rife with opportunities, and Sukla began to see a path she could carve in the entertainment industry. While studying diligently to make it into college, she also practiced singing. She’d perform “here and there on stages in Calcutta,” while getting her Bachelor’s of Science in Biology from Calcutta University, and she’d periodically audition to sing on All India Radio (AIR). Before television assumed its central role in middle-class life in India, AIR was all the rage. To this day, Indian families reminisce fondly about distant relatives who once sang for AIR.
In her coveted role as AIR’s junior artist, Sukla made her entire family proud by having her voice heard across the entire nation. “Every two months, I would sing,” she recalled. Sukla auditioned to become a senior artist for All India Radio, but didn’t pass. “I tried again and wasn’t let in,” she said. “A third time.... No, again.” Disheartened and ready to give up on her dreams, Sukla took a friend’s advice to give it another try—but this time under a different name. She chose to use her nickname: Rupa. Under the moniker Rupa Biswas, she finally passed the AIR audition.
Jaan nache chalo aaj jaan nache chalo aaj [Darling let’s go dancing x2] Jo dil hai gham saaz unka kare eelaaj [Those whose hearts are filled with sadness, let’s treat them] Chalo nache aaj chalo nache aaj [Let’s dance today x2] —from “Aaj Shanibar”
“One day, my family decided to visit my brother in Calgary,” Rupa recalled. “He was very proud of me. He mentioned that I sing to all of his friends. The first night of my visit, they asked me [to sing],” she continued. Two of her brother’s friends were so impressed that they asked Rupa to perform at the University of Calgary’s Boris Roubikane Hall. In the wintry autumn of 1981, at an event organized by the Pakistani and Indian student organization, Rupa sang geets and ghazals to an audience of about 1,000. She showcased her skills to a sold-out crowd, including a reporter from the Calgary Herald. Two others in the audience that night would go on to shape Rupa Biswas’s future: Aashish and Pranesh Khan.
“We were friends with her brother Tilak,” said Pranesh, who’d later play tablas on Disco Jazz. “We were teaching in Canada at the time.” After the Roubikane Hall performance, Aashish and Pranesh met Rupa personally. Frank Lockwood, a student of Pranesh’s, would go on to play drums on Disco Jazz . Alongside Lockwood came former bandmate Don Pope, whose guitar riffs would prove to be standouts on the resulting LP.
From Calgary, Rupa and her family flew to the UK, but not before she’d laid down vocals in a recording studio paid for by her brother Chandan. “It was £1000 at the time,” Rupa recalled. “I didn’t ask my eldest brother because he was a bit strict.” After spending nearly two weeks in the UK, Rupa and her family went back to India.
Meanwhile, the Khan brothers, Lockwood, and Pope were busy recording instrumentation for the album. Initially, Aashish made home recordings of the quartet with a two-mic setup. In the end, the entire project was recorded and mastered in a week’s time to 16-track at The Living Room Studios in Calgary, a one-room operation with minimal accouterments.
With four finished tracks in the can, Aashish brought the recordings to India, hoping to secure their release there. At the time, there were only two major distributors in play: His Master’s Voice and The Megaphone Company of India. HMV passed, citing Rupa’s unknown status. But Aashish leveraged his connection with the owner of the Megaphone Company of India, who, by chance, was his neighbor. Megaphone took on the project, but there would be no accompanying publicity.
Rupa knows exactly why. Disco Jazz was released in October of 1982 at the time of Bengal’s most religious holiday, Durga Puja, but it barely got a whisper of attention. “Because ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ by Nazia Hassan overshadowed everything,” she remembered. An all-time Bollywood disco classic, “Aap Jaisa Koi” had been featured in the 1980 Hindi action film Qurbani, that year’s biggest domestic box office smash. While the Bollywood marketing behemoth propped up Nazia Hassan’s debut and single, an unknown quantity like Rupa was destined to fall by the wayside.
Rupa’s relatives across India went out and bought her record, but she never saw any proceeds from album sales. Rupa went to the record store and purchased a cassette of her own debut. “I didn’t have the energy to sing and make an album after that,” she admitted. “I didn’t have the energy to start over.”
Disheartened, Rupa Biswas moved on. The Megaphone Company didn’t contact her. Aashish never brought up the album or its sales. Months became years. In 1984, she got married. She was now Rupa Sen. Though she fell deeply in love with her husband, Udayan Sen, and bore her only child, Debayan, in 1988, she deeply missed singing. She’d tend the house and travel with Udayan, who worked as a textile engineer. And she’d occasionally freelance as a journalist for Bengali newspapers.
Over the decades, Rupa’s only LP sold in dribs and drabs. In 2012, her recordings were used as the score to Miss Lovely, an art-house Bollywood film. Though Rupa didn’t dwell much on her musical past, she’d eventually perform in Indonesia, Singapore, and Bangladesh as Rupa Sen. After Udayan’s passing, Rupa retreated further, to live in the house she’d grown up in, the birthplace of so many memories.
In February of 2019, a relative of Rupa’s came over for dinner and the subject of Rupa’s music and Disco Jazz came up. Just a few seconds of internet research from Debayan revealed the record’s immense popularity, an unlicensed 2017 re-release on Germany’s Ovular label, and the million plus plays “Aaj Shanibar” had already amassed on YouTube.
In 2019, only a fading generation of Indians can attest to how rebellious disco was in its day. For many, it was an expression of sexual freedom, a chance for young men and women to sneak out of their homes to meet potential “dance partners” in clubs, defying the conformist expectations of India’s repressive society. Disco Jazz appeared as an embodiment of that culture, an artifact of a nation’s pop history stamped into wax. It never paved a yellow brick road to any kind of disco revival, but it thrives now amidst a liberated generation that need not sneak out simply to dance.
-Dhruva Balram, May 2019
