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[ESSAY] “Sa Re Ga Māyā: The Speculative Life of Breath in Anaar Desai-Stephens’s Voicing Aspiration” by Tyran Grillo
Anaar Desai-Stephens. Voicing Aspiration: Bollywood Songs and Dreamwork in Contemporary India. Wesleyan University Press, 2026. 260 pgs.
At midnight in Mumbai, a young woman named Tanvi sings into a mirror. The accompaniment exists in her head, tuned to the possibility of another life. As the melody rises, her reflection seems to move a little ahead of her.
Anaar Desai-Stephens opens Voicing Aspiration with this nocturnal rehearsal, inviting us to listen for what is taking shape in a space that appears, from outside, to contain only a singer and her image. Tanvi has travelled across the country to pursue a musical career, supported by parents who have borrowed against her mother’s jewellery. Her rendition of “Chahun Main Ya Naa,” from Aashiqui 2, carries that investment into an uncertain future. Somewhere between the reflected mouth and the singing one, a second anatomy assembles itself in the image of a career for which there are no guarantees.
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Aspiration holds a small physiological secret within its promises of ascent. For Desai-Stephens, this doubleness of the word, which also names an intake of breath, opens onto a contemporary India in which economic transformation enters the body through aesthetic practice. Her principal research, conducted in 2013 and 2014 and extended through subsequent visits, moves between Bollywood singing lessons and reality music television.
“Dreamwork” names the labour of cultivating a desired self and giving an imagined future material consequence. Even apparent idleness belongs to it. Listening again to a recording can be part of the work, as can waiting for someone important to answer a message. As Desai-Stephens puts it, “subaltern individuals have learned to be speculators in and of themselves.” The economic wager precedes employment: singers and their families absorb the costs of preparation before an industry decides whether to employ them. Within the national imaginary she calls “Aspirational India,” dissatisfaction acquires the prestige of progress. Belonging can depend on commitment to the next version of oneself, yet the author also hears attachments forming beyond the professional destinies on offer.
Playback gives that uncertainty a familiar sound. A singer’s recorded voice animates an actor’s onscreen body, passing from face to face across successive films while retaining an identity more durable than any character it accompanies. The arrangement unsettles the assumption that a voice reveals a single person(a) hidden inside it. A beloved song arrives crowded with earlier encounters, intimate from having been heard in circumstances its makers could never anticipate. Within this history, Lata Mangeshkar’s (1929-2022) enormous authority as one of the defining voices from the 1950s through the 1990s sustains a gendered ideal of purity that seems to place her voice beyond bodily labour. The throat works strenuously while the listener receives an almost incorporeal presence. For aspiring women, respectability can depend on being heard without seeming excessively present in the sound they make. A microphone enlarges a woman’s reach while social convention carefully subtracts her body from its source.
Lata Mangeshkar
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Into this world comes the instruction to sound like oneself. Music directors urge singers to establish a distinctive sound, making personal recognisability a condition of employability. Teachers and television judges, meanwhile, measure performances against cherished originals, detecting tiny departures from familiar ornaments.
Bhoomi Trivedi
Bhoomi Trivedi encounters this contradiction when her rendition of a Mangeshkar song draws criticism for its lower pitch, even as Salim Merchant champions the difference as a professional advantage. Trivedi’s subsequent success as a playback singer with a low, husky voice exposes the competing standards at work: fidelity to a beloved recording can penalise precisely the difference a music director will employ. By taking imitation seriously, Desai-Stephens hears the historical relationships it renews between listeners. I also hear in her account a challenge to the possessive grammar of finding oneself. A voice may become most intimately ours through an attentive surrender to sounds that already belong to other lives.
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Ravinder Ravi
On television, even the life behind a voice can be edited. Ravinder Ravi, a Dalit house painter, attracts substantial audience support during the first season of Indian Idol. His popularity troubles producers when it threatens to carry him to victory. The show welcomes the pathos of his circumstances, then treats his unease before the cameras as evidence that he does not belong at its summit, recutting his narrative to make him less appealing.
Desai-Stephens places this episode beside the ascent of the eventual winner, Abhijeet Sawant, who also comes from a Dalit background. His Mumbai upbringing and ease of presentation better suit the programme’s desired image. Caste alone cannot explain the contrast; judgements about talent also translate regional location and familiarity with urban public life into apparently personal capacities. The promise of transformation depends on an already cultivated ability to appear transformable. A contestant’s life can furnish the show with its most persuasive claim to openness, then undergo revision when that openness produces an inconvenient result.
Abhijeet Sawant
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The Institute for Performing Arts, the Mumbai school where Desai-Stephens enrols in singing classes, advertises itself as a gateway to Bollywood. It charges almost one hundred thousand rupees for four months of group instruction, substantially more than other available forms of musical training.
Behind the gates of a corporate complex, training a singer takes its place among other speculative investments. Students buy proximity to an industry whose entrance remains elusive. Celebrity visits and a demo recording give that proximity tangible form. Teachers warn how hard it is to establish a career, invoking years of dedicated practice against the compressed timetable their employer sells. The classroom occupies a peculiar temporal fold, offering acceleration while teaching the dimensions of delay. The school earns from preparation for a career whose realisation it does not have to secure.
For the women who identify themselves as housewives, the classroom also opens an interval in the day. Someone expects them to sing, and for a while, their attention has a destination beyond the needs of relatives. Preeti describes renewed confidence and hope, though obligations still make evening performances difficult even where a husband has supported the expense of classes. Such pleasure, however, should not be taken as compensation for those restrictions. Her projected career gives the present an opening in which another identity can be rehearsed, even if never attained.
Nishika is another who gives that opening a voice in her recording of “Julmi Re Julmi,” an item number from Rajjo. Such sensually charged song sequences demand vocal acting, bringing the body into sound through flirtatious inflections and shifts of address. She sings with such assurance that she bursts into laughter at her own persuasiveness, astonished by the woman she has just heard. Her husband later objects to the selection and wants the recording replaced, although his precise reasons remain unresolved in Desai-Stephens’s account.
In the passage from studio to household, a praised performance becomes something a wife must then withdraw. The musical competence she is paying to acquire confers an expressive authority that her domestic position does not secure. Thus, a voice becomes intimate contraband, carrying an unsanctioned version of its owner through spaces where her physical presence appears entirely proper. Her laughter lingers after the take, as though she, too, has heard a door open (although one has to wonder what that door opens onto).
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Elsewhere in the classroom, the language of expressive freedom permits a more invasive demand. Instructor Laxman Sir’s insistence that students cultivate feeling extends into questions about their romantic lives, treating personal experience as raw material for convincing performance. His increasingly inappropriate conduct prompts complaints. The administration responds by presenting this behaviour as part of the industry students must learn to manage. The invitation to shed inhibition leaves those who have paid for access to find their own protection.
Even the gentler counsel to honour one’s natural voice can block a path it seems to clear. Shanta struggles to reach the notes required in class, where a shared tonic already privileges some voices over others. Eventually, she develops a higher, more nasal sound through a different mode of production. As Desai-Stephens observes, “one’s ‘natural’ voice emerged in relation to the genres one wanted to sing and the kinds of vocal production prioritized in that genre.” Training helps produce the evidence that subsequently passes for nature. Elsewhere, regional identity serves to predict vocal character, giving communal stereotypes the authority of musical knowledge. The invitation to discover oneself can end with an expert announcing that the search is over. An imagined horizon folds inward until it fits the outline of a socially recognisable body.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
After singing a song associated with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Irffan, a young Muslim student, encounters an especially formidable barrier. Whereas Desai-Stephens hears potential in his performance, Laxman Sir tells him that further auditions will lead nowhere and that he must recognise his limits. Behind the language of suitability, she hears judgements about who may attempt social transformation and who should accept the place from which he has come. Versatility brings more privileged singers a cosmopolitan distinction. Others are told to remain faithful to an origin assigned to them. The voice stands accused of trespassing across its own possibilities, and the person carrying it must answer for the disturbance.
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The critic’s ear must also examine the confidence with which it recognises a social location. Desai-Stephens acknowledges that she never visited her classmates’ homes or met their families. She did not even know everyone’s surname. Her friendships flourished where people were attempting to become someone else, sometimes withholding the backgrounds that gave the effort its meaning. This candour limits what the study can establish about the students’ class positions, even as classroom observation supplies strong evidence of how teachers attach social limits to particular voices. A teacher can identify a technical difficulty without possessing definitive knowledge of the person manifesting it. The question is how a judgement about a performance hardens into one about someone’s right to change. Dreamwork offers criticism a discipline of its own. Listening to an attempted departure may require us to relinquish the wish to place its author conclusively, allowing parts of a life to remain beyond our hearing.
All the while, Mumbai dreams upwards. Desai-Stephens describes redevelopment organised around air rights, through which the space above a building becomes a profitable anticipation of structures yet to materialise. New towers rise beside unfinished shells, while residents of deteriorating homes wait for promised reconstruction. The city develops a second skyline inside the first, an invisible elevation composed of transactions in what has yet to exist. Returning to Pooja, still pursuing musical work amid the demands of her joint family, the book shows how prior investment deepens the obligation to continue. Money already spent on training becomes a reason to persist when opportunities fail to arrive. An expense in the past lays claim to her future.
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The epilogue follows singers into a digital economy where platforms offer further routes to an audience while converting musical attention into valuable data. Desai-Stephens keeps the limits of her fieldwork in view, preserving the texture of a moment when televised competition and newly aspirational music schools organised powerful expectations of access. Her account also follows digital expansion into surveillance and Hindu majoritarian politics, where the promise of connection is shadowed by new forms of constraint. Beneath the work of remaining visible lies a quieter question about who makes that work possible. I keep returning to the book’s opening acknowledgement of care work. Before a dream can acquire a schedule, someone must make time available for it. One woman’s purchased afternoon may rest on another’s uncounted labour. Even the solitary rehearsal depends on support that the myth of the self-made singer has difficulty hearing.
Reparative attention asks criticism to remain with these lives after diagnosing their entanglement with capitalism. Drawing on Ernst Bloch and José Esteban Muñoz, Desai-Stephens considers what aesthetic activity makes possible beyond its commercial functions. She argues that “to think with dreams, not against them, is to inquire into how people feel beyond the material conditions of their lives.” The most productive tension in this approach lies between a changed sense of self and the practical freedoms that may remain unavailable. Feeling different need not mean being permitted to live differently. Such possibilities place a responsibility on those who would celebrate them. Calling an experience transformative must leave room for the participant to demand the paid work or practical freedom she originally sought. Otherwise, criticism risks awarding symbolic compensation from a fund to which it has contributed nothing, as aspiration becomes a basis for judging those who solicit it.
Near the book’s close, “Iktara,” from Wake Up Sid, offers a meditation on following paths that cannot yet be seen. The single string invoked by its title suggests how one might maintain an orientation without a map. I find myself back with Tanvi, who recounts singing at a friend’s birthday party after her course and moving a listener to tears. At the beginning, she sang to a surface that could return only her image. Now someone else is listening, and the song comes back altered by a feeling she could not have made alone. Nothing in this tenderness guarantees a livelihood or settles the family’s investment. Something has nevertheless left the private circuit in which she must continually certify her own promise. For the duration of a song, the future is no longer hers to carry alone but instead passes into another person’s keeping. Neither singer nor listener can tell what it will become.
How to cite: Grillo, Tyran. “Sa Re Ga Māyā: The Speculative Life of Breath in Anaar Desai-Stephens’s Voicing Aspiration.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 3 Nov. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/11/03/aspiration.
Tyran Grillo holds a PhD in Japanese Literature from Cornell University and is an avid reader, translator, music critic, and photographer. His latest book, Fuzzy Traumas: Animals and Errors in Contemporary Japanese Literature (2024, Cornell East Asia Series), explores complex interspecies relationships through a posthumanist lens. Although he has left academia to pursue a full-time career as a professional editor, he remains deeply engaged with his fields of interest through lived experience and creative practice. [All contributions by Tyran Grillo.]