NY to Mumbai: A math major makes a calculated move into jazz, theatre and cinema
MUMBAI: Ten years ago, Palomi Ghosh left New York for a sixmonth break in Mumbai. The Vadodara native had just acquired a degree in applied mathematics at North Carolina State University, with a job lined up in the R&D wing of a major business analytics software firm. But Ghosh wanted to have some fun before joining the rat race. As she had taken an elective theatre course at the university and loved it, she figured it might be worthwhile to explore the Mumbai theatre scene for a bit. When it was time to return to New York though, she realised that she had well and truly caught the acting bug. She never went back.
“Acting was never meant to be a profession,” said Ghosh, now a National-award-winning actor with a sideline in music. “I did a three-month acting course, just to test the waters. And then I stuck around because things kept happening, I kept getting offered interesting roles.”
In the decade since, Ghosh has built up a solid body of work. She’s starred in a string of critically acclaimed independent movies, including Bardroy Barretto’s ‘Nachom-ia Kumpasar’ (2014) and Rajat Kapoor’s ‘Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa’ (2023). She’s become a regular fixture on television, appearing in series like ‘Sense8’ and ‘Mission Over Mars’.
After spending the last year in New York as a cast member in Mira Nair’s ‘Monsoon Wedding’ musical, she is currently in rehearsals for an upcoming staging of the Rajiv Joseph play ‘Letters of Suresh’, directed by Feroze Abbas Khan. If that’s not enough, this week she performed her first major gig as a musician, executing classic Mumbai and Goan jazz songs from the 1960s set to the indiefusion musical stylings of guitarist-composer Adil Manuel at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Center (NMACC).
“It has all happened very organically, there was no real plan,” she said. “I just kept going one step at a time, it was always ‘let’s see what happens’.”
Ghosh made her screen debut with a small role in Claire Mccarthy’s Australian film ‘The Waiting City’, but her first big break was Bardroy Barretto’s ‘Nachom-ia Kumpasar’. The 2014 musical drama is inspired by the stormy relationship between Konkani jazz legends Chris Perry and Lorna Cordeiro. The film is a fictionalised account of their troubled affair, told through 20 or so of their songs from the 1960s and 1970s. Ghosh played Dona Pereira, a character modelled on Lorna, delivering a powerful performance that won her a National Film Award (the film also picked up two other National Award wins).
“I had 17 days to learn the language, the dialogue and the songs,” she laughed. “I was a schoolgirl, staying up late and mugging everything up.”
‘Nachom-ia Kumpasar’ never got a theatrical release, but Barretto continues to screen the film at sold-out community screenings across Goa (it’s also available for streaming on Goaflix).
The film—which played at festivals across the world—also brought Ghosh to the attention of other film-makers, though it took a while for the job offers to roll in.
While at the International Film Festival of India at Goa for a screening of the film, she caught the eye of Shubhashish Bhutiani, who cast her in his 2016 comedy drama ‘Mukti Bhawan’. Another ‘Nachom-ia Kumpasar’ screening—this time in New York—led to a chance encounter with Mira Nair, and she joined the cast of the ‘Monsoon Wedding’ musical, playing the 88-year-old grandmother of wedding planner PK Dubey.
“It’s so gratifying because the audience is right there, you can see their reaction,” she said of her stint with the off-broadway production. “The song that I was doing was about Partition. It was a love song, but with a lot of history embedded in it. And I could visibly see people being really affected by it.”
In recent years, film and TV roles have started piling up. There was the 2019 Netflix series ‘Typewriter’, where she plays a double role as a mother of two whose doppelganger haunts the family home. There have also been a couple of films helmed by Rajat Kapoor—2019’s ‘Kadakh’, followed by ‘Everybody Loves Sohrab Handa’, which earned rave reviews on its premiere at last year’s MAMI festival.
When she wasn’t acting, Ghosh—who sang in a band in university that covered Bollywood songs—scratched her musical itch, collaborating with Anurag Shanker to put out contemporary reinterpretations of Bollywood classics (check out their version of ‘Tu Mere Saath Saath’ from ‘Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman’). With ‘Churchgate Swing ‘66’—the show she and Adil Manuel just performed at NMACC—SHE’S now leaning further into her talent as a musical performer. “The show is basically music intermixed with stories of jazz in 1966 Bombay,” she said.
Ghosh is looking to take the show to more venues across the country, slowly expanding her repertoire of covers (“I want to perform all the greats”). She also wants to eventually release and perform her own songs, maybe even collaborate with her musical idol A.R. Rahman.
Film, TV, theatre and now music. That’s a lot of balls to juggle at once. Does she find it difficult to balance between all the different demands on her time and attention?
“Actually, I always think that one informs the other,” she said. “If you’re having fun doing music, then it also improves your other craft. It’s also a way to stay sane and not just keep doing one thing over and over. I’m a firm believer in doing many things.”