Last month, after years of exile, the music catalogue of Viva, India’s original girl group, returned to streaming. Both albums from the 2000s band are streaming now, courtesy of KaanPhod Music. To nobody’s surprise, the songs immediately began to get good streaming numbers, more than two decades after they were first released.
To mark the occasion, the four original members of the band – Anushka Manchanda, Neha Bhasin, Mahua Kamat, and Pratichee Mohapatra – sat down with Hindustan Times to talk about their journey and the changing landscape of Indian music.
‘Where is the music’
The band members say they were not surprised by the response to their music arriving on streaming. Mahua Kamat says, “This started because our listeners, our fans who loved us over the years, asked, ‘Where is the music?’ This is their childhood, just like it was ours. We grew up with it. That was the catalyst for us to seek this.”
Viva was formed in 2002 after five girls won the inaugural season of Channel V’s Popstars. Their first album, released the same year, topped the charts with many tracks becoming part of pop culture. Viva is regarded as India’s first popular mainstream girl group. But even as they became famous, the girls were unaware of their fame, even when 50000 fans turned up at their first concert in Delhi. Neha Bhasin recalls, “It was unreal when we were first on stage together. There was so much chaos because everyone was trying to figure it out. People were breaking barricades, we were getting mobbed. At that time, we didn’t realise this is happening because we were famous. It took many years to realise we were famous.”
Their fame did spread far and wide. Mahua Kamat recalls being accosted at Hong Kong airport by a fan, while Anushka Manchanda found a fanboy among the servers at a New York restaurant. Viva was a movement. Neha recalls, “I think you cannot engineer or manufacture this. A movement becomes organic when it is. In our case, people came together to create good music, do great things. And that became popular.”
‘Talent shows are more planned now’
Viva’s triumph and their time on television on Popstars can be called the birth of reality TV in India. Along with Sa Re Ga Ma and Roadies, it was one of the first reality talent shows in the country. But it was devoid of the drama that exists in the genre today. Popstars ran for only two seasons and was over before the reality show boom truly began. Neha says that if it existed today, it would be ‘more scripted’. Pratichee Mohapatra agrees and adds, “It would be more scripted, like she said. There would be more efforts to evoke some extreme reactions. It would be more clickbait. Even the people who are trying to be part of a show, they come very prepared. Even what they say or do stuff to get those eyeballs. Everything feels very planned now.”
Viva’s rise came towards the end of the glory years of pop music in India. From the 1990s to mid 2000s, Indian pop music – or Indipop as it was called – was at its peak. It gave independent artists and chartbusters by the dozen. But Mahua says the girls were unaware of the hierarchical supremacy Bollywood music enjoyed at the time. “We won a contest and we knew we could sing. We were just following what they mapped out for us. We didn’t feel like we were breaking into a Bollywood-led industry,” she says.
The ‘death’ of indipop
Viva’s albums were released in 2002 and 2003. By then, remixed had begun to take over in the independent music scene, and pop was fizzling out. Anushka Manchanda credits this to Bollywood ‘borrowing’ the pop sound. “They pulled the sound from the indipop and devoured it. They took singers like Shaan and Alisha Chinai from pop into films. Everyone was eventually singing in films,” she says. Pratichee recalls how mainstream films began to utilise music videos – disconnected from the plot – to promote themselves. It was pop music, but integrated into Bollywood. “It killed the indipop industry,” she says.
Their rebirth on streaming has given the band and their sound a new lease of life, and the women are hopeful that their music will continue to be discovered by younger listeners. “All I hope is that they realise there were cool things being done in the early 00s, and we were part of it,” sums up Mahua.