The face of fado
Sonia Shirsat, India’s lone internationally acclaimed fadista, aims to revive fado and widen its appeal to non-Portuguese speakers, writes Amrita Singh
Music transcends language, they say. Thus does someone with no knowledge of Telugu thrill to M S Subbulakshmi singing an Annamacharya kriti. Just as a non-Francophone person may be moved to tears by Edith Piaf declaring she “has no regrets”. And you don’t need to be Portuguese to know that Amalia Rodrigues is singing about love and loss and longing.
Rodrigues was, of course, singing fado, Portugal’s best loved and best-known musical genre. Unexpectedly, there is a powerful voice in our own country singing those same songs of love and loss— in Portuguese. Sonia Shirsat is the country’s one and only internationally acclaimed professional fadista.
In between snatches of song, Shirsat offers brief but evocative descriptions in English to bring audiences closer to the scenes she sings of: “I have a love that I cannot declare, so I will kiss the cobblestone streets of Lisbon on which my lover has tread”. Or, “Oh pretty girl Lisbon, do not run after the French men for we Portuguese love you even more.”
The songs are intense, about love lost, unrequited or tragic. In the end, though, Shirsat’s goal is to produce a strong emotional connection between the singer, the instrumentalists (Portuguese guitar and Spanish guitar) and the audience, leaving everyone feeling inspired (or deeply moved) by the experience.
While it is hard to establish definitively when fado was created, the first written references to it as a musical practice in Portugal date back from the third decade of the 19th century. “At that time, fado was performed by prostitutes, prisoners, sailors — all of them people with a strange ‘fado’, a Portuguese word that means ‘destiny’, especially a destiny of suffering,” says Susana Sardo, professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Aveiro. In fact, she adds, the expression “women of fado” in colloquial Portuguese was synonymous with women of “bad destiny” who could be found in the taverns and bars of Lisbon suburbs.
Some also trace fado’s origin to a young prostitute called Maria Severa who lived in Lisbon in the early 19th century. The story goes that Severa fell in love with the Count of Vimioso, an aristocratic bullfighter, with whom she had no future as their class differences were irreconcilable. Driven to an inevitable destiny of loneliness and pain, Severa sought refuge in singing to convey her heartbreak. Her music, carrying the emotions of anguish and loneliness, became a genre in itself after her death in 1846 at the age of 26 from tuberculosis. The house where she lived still exists in Lisbon and has been converted into a fado museum and a venue for performances.
Fado, as it is practised today, has grown beyond the themes of forbidden or tragic love to feature joyfulness and celebration as well. Its current form was crystallised during the first half of the 20th century after its appeal grew and it found acceptance among the upper classes of Portuguese society. “Today, all themes are possible but, at the core of fado, there’s always a very emotional poetry with a very biographical profile of imagined characters,” says Sardo.
Shirsat’s entry into the world of fado was no less dramatic. While she was familiar with the genre — her mother is a Portuguesespeaking Goan Roman Catholic — Shirsat drifted to other forms of Indian music while pursuing a law degree in Goa. In 2003, a Portuguese guitarist, Antonio Chainho, was in Goa offering guitar training. “At the end of the workshop, they wanted to organise a concert but didn’t have anyone to sing a fado piece. I was already a known singer in Goa by then, so they contacted me, and there began my tryst with fado,” she says.
Soon, she made her first trip to Portugal to train with specialists and imbibe the traditions and experience of the fado bars of Lisbon and Coimbra (the two distinctive fado styles, though the latter is almost exclusively a male preserve). At the end of the two-month trip, when she went to bid farewell to one of her trainers in Lisbon, she received her best compliment: “What do you mean you are leaving — don’t you live here?” Shirsat says the trainer was so impressed with her fluency in Portuguese that he couldn’t believe she wasn’t a native.
In 2008, Shirsat held her first solo fado concert in Lisbon, and since then there has been no looking back. Having performed across the world, she has become the most recognisable face of fado in Goa.
Goa’s connection with fado is an old one, but its appeal was always limited. “Fado was an insular phenomenon in Goa, performed by a few people, mainly those connected with the Portuguese and living in the cities of Panjim and Margão,” says Sardo.
During Portuguese rule in Goa, fado was broadcast by Emissora de Goa and many people in the state still count their old fado LPs as prized possessions. But since fado was never an established tradition in the state, it became a dying art form soon after Portuguese rule ended in 1961.
One of Shirsat’s goals is to revive Fado and widen its appeal to non- Portuguese speakers through concerts, training audiences and drawing a younger demographic of singers. With help from private organisations such as the Taj Group and other cultural foundations, Shirsat holds classes for people to learn the history of fado and train to become a fadista. (And no, knowledge of Portuguese is not a requirement to be a student.) The training sessions are divided into five classes of two hours each and, at the end of the session, those who display an aptitude for singing fado are promoted to the next round to train; others become part of the fado community who are invited to be the audience at performance.
“This way, we create an audience that is capable of appreciating the music and engaging with the fadista during performances,” says Shirsat.
The engagement with audience is central to a fado performance. “Fado is not exclusively words or lyrics. It is a performance of sung words in a dialogue with the guitar, which needs to be felt beyond its language,” says Sardo. “Participating in a fado performance, always in silence, produces a strong emotional connection between the fadista, the instrumentalists and the audience, and this is quite important for the aesthetic interlocution.”
Shirsat has infused a bit of Indianness into the music, too, for local audiences with a new form of fado called “fado raga”, where instead of guitar, the songs are set to the beat of tabla and keyboard. “We have many different fados, and all of them are very valid forms of fado. No one has the authority to control it,” says Sardo.
‘FADO IS NOT EXCLUSIVELY WORDS OR LYRICS. IT IS A PERFORMANCE OF SUNG WORDS IN A DIALOGUE WITH THE GUITAR, WHICH NEEDS TO BE FELT BEYOND ITS LANGUAGE’