Pop Artist Purva Mantri Talks Folk-Pop and Multilingual Experiments

In between offering vocal support for rural and tribal development initiatives, supporting education and sanitation needs of villagers in Chinchpada, Palghar, singer Purva Mantri is lording over T.V. screens as well.

A part of music show Indian Pro Music League, Mantri may be growing famous for livewire performances of Bollywood hits, but she’s also been charting out her own path as a solo artist with songs like “Kala Sha Kala,” “Uljhi” and more. Through the course of the pandemic, the singer created “The Papa Song” for Father’s Day, as well as “Maa Tu Hai Na” for Mother’s Day, collaborating with her brother, producer Shravan Mantri.

Although the songs were released a year apart, Mantri maintains that she and her brother just wanted to pay tribute. “It was a personal gift but we also wanted to release it. My brother started writing the song [‘The Papa Song’] and we released it. I was overwhelmed with the response. There are a lot of songs on mothers but there aren’t that many popular songs about dads. Fathers often give us that tough love that takes us to heights. That’s what we considered,” she adds.

In an interview with Rolling Stone India, Mantri discusses why she loves to experiment in music, whether it’s bringing together folk and pop or throwing in even a few verses of multiple languages. Excerpts:

You were back in the studio after a while, right? What was that like?

Going back to the studio was like a dream come true again. The first time I stepped into a studio, I told my mother it was a dream come true. After one year or so of the lockdown and the pandemic scene, we as musicians were getting back to working with producers in the studio so you feel like the dream is back.

How do you view your success in releasing your own music?

Initially, I started releasing covers, as everyone in the industry was used to doing at the time. If you look at my covers, they’re very grand. It’s not just someone sitting with a guitar and me sitting alone. We shot in Dubai and we shot in Thailand. I thought along the way, ‘Why am I shooting this out there, why am I not shooting my own original song videos there?’ It had to be my independent music. In 2019, we started with our own YouTube channel, that’s where the first track was out – ‘Kala Sha Kala.’ It’s the reason people know me today.

Through creating independent music, we get to create our own face value apart from putting our voice out there. Beyond that, people also get to see not just how I sing but also the production value of our videos and things like that. The journey has been amazing so far.

You sing in multiple languages. Where does that come from?

I really love folk music – my music is often in the folk-pop space. It’s come from my family, my mother. I feel we should all sing in different languages because our country is full of music. We’ve got beautiful music, dance and art. We should keep experimenting. One of the biggest examples of this is Badshah. He did ‘Genda Phool’ and then there’s some Haryanvi folk elements in another of his songs. We can always make a song predominantly Hindi or English and add one or two lines in another language, that seems to do really well.

When I did ‘Uljhi,’ the song is Rajasthani but people love the hip-hop take on it. The next few songs are going to be like that, because I’m working on folk-pop songs after a bit of a break of the past year.

Yes, with language, it’s important to be experimental, so that you can keep the Gujarati audience happy, the Marwari audience happy, and keep all of India happy! [laughs]

What’s coming up next?

I’ve got a lot of songs from my Naani’s time and I’m working on them. She would teach me folk songs about different experiences every time I visited her during summer vacations. They’re songs about routine in rural India – folk songs are stories of people’s lives. I’m using a few lines of these and working on a mood board and create a pop side to it. It’s going to be crazy Punjabi and Rajasthani folk-pop songs. I can sing in eight to 10 languages, so it’s not a problem. I’m targeting a full festival season for the songs to release, like around Navratri.