A melody that spans cultures

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She came, she saw — and after enjoying her conquest— flew home to Paris. Meet Anabelle Varma, the French songstress who has been the talk of the town for her Hindi language album Tumko Dekha.

But Anabelle’s Indian roots go a long way back, and her album is an amalgamation of the two things she has a consuming passion for: Music and languages. She explains how the concept for Tumko Dekha took hold. “At my brother-in-law’s wedding in 1995, I heard the song Ek Ladki Ko Dekha from 1942: A Love Story and fell in love with it. This album was an attempt to recapture the sense of adventure I felt in discovering that song,” Anabelle explains. But why an album in Hindi rather than her native French? “Since Tumko Dekha is dedicated to my husband’s family and this beautiful country, it had to be in Hindi,” she replies.
Anabelle’s own family had a big role to play in her embracing music. “My father played the saxophone and was very fond of jazz, so I grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, as also The Beatles, Elvis Presley and great French singers like Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel and Leo Ferre. My parents wanted me to have a proper musical education and they enrolled me in a conservatory when I was six. I learned the flute, then the piano,” says Anabelle, who is now happy with her identity as a composer, lyricist and singer.
Her exposure to the music industries in both France and India has taught her that “there is no difference in the way good musicians work. The only difference is in the exposure or treatment”. She has also realised that the French and Indian music cultures overlap remarkably, “Songs are a part of our lives. They are like a subconscious agenda, taking you back to your deepest memories — a sense of smell from childhood, your mother’s cooking, first love, first heartbreak…In France, we say ‘Everything in life starts and ends with a song’. I believe it is the same in India.”
Anabelle counts Rabbi Shergill, A.R. Rahman, Pritam and Shantanu Moitra among the musicians she would like to collaborate with, in the “building of a musical bridge”. She says, “I like the fact that music has no boundaries or frontiers. Music is universal, you can cry to Spanish or be uplifted by Zulu because of music’s ability to appeal to our deepest selves.”