Park Street to Bombay at Nazrul Mancha, Kolkata | August 2, 2026
There are concerts we attend for the songs, and then there are concerts we remember because of the person who sang them. Park Street to Bombay at Nazrul Mancha on August 2, 2026, belonged entirely to the second kind. I had gone to watch Usha Uthup live in Kolkata, expecting familiar songs, memories of Park Street and perhaps a little nostalgia. What I came away with was something more intimate: the sensation of having spent an evening in the company of a woman who has lived several lives through music and who, after fifty-seven years of singing, can still walk into a hall and take possession of it simply by beginning to sing.
Concert at a Glance
Artist: Usha Uthup
Concert: Park Street to Bombay
Date: Sunday, August 2, 2026
Venue: Nazrul Mancha, Southern Avenue, Kolkata
Presented by: Bengal Web Solution
Music: Bollywood, Indian pop, jazz and retro favourites
The concert began at 6 p.m. and was presented as a celebration of Usha Uthup's extraordinary musical journey from the nights of Kolkata's Park Street to Bombay and Bollywood, with particular emphasis on her enduring bond with Kolkata.
The evening began with warmth. Debojyoti Mishra and his troupe paid tribute to Usha with a song composed and dedicated to her and her legacy. She was also felicitated during the evening by the organisers and by Siemens Healthineers. There was a ceremony, but it did not last long. Everyone knew what we had really come to see: Usha herself.
Usha Was Seated. Kolkata Was Not.
Usha was seated for much of the evening. At seventy-eight, she can no longer perform standing throughout a concert as she once did. But when she began to sing, the distinction between the woman sitting before us and the performer we remembered seemed to disappear. The voice arrived first: deep, unmistakable, slightly husky and impossible to confuse with anyone else's. The old vitality was still there in the phrasing, the timing, the confidence and the sheer pleasure she took in performing.
She sang, joked, told stories, teased people, remembered old acquaintances and moved between songs and anecdotes with such ease that the evening felt less like a formal concert and more like sitting with a fascinating woman who happened to have spent fifty-seven years collecting extraordinary stories. Before long, people were singing along, clapping, swaying and getting to their feet.
That is Usha Uthup.
At one point she joked that if she had not become a singer, she would certainly have become a comedian. Listening to her stories, one could believe it. Her timing is impeccable, her sense of mischief remains intact, and she has the rare ability to laugh at herself without diminishing the stature she has acquired over the decades.
From Usha Iyer to Usha Uthup
Explore Usha Uthup's Music
Listen to Usha Uthup's music on Amazon
Books:
1. The Queen of Indian Pop: The Authorised Biography of Usha Uthup
2. Ullas Ki Naav : Usha Uthup (Hindi Edition)
Bollywood Vinyl LP Record:
Because she is so completely woven into Kolkata's cultural memory, it is easy to imagine that Usha Uthup began her career here. She did not. Born Usha Iyer on November 8, 1947, in Bombay, she began her professional singing career in 1969 at the Nine Gems nightclub in Chennai. Her career eventually brought her to Kolkata, particularly to Trincas on Park Street, where her professional and personal lives took a decisive turn.
At the concert she brought one of her early Trincas memories back to life. She remembered arriving young, simple and somewhat naive from Tamil Nadu and telling the owners that she would not wear a frock. The word itself made the anecdote funny. She had come to sing, she said, and the owners simply told her not to worry: she only had to be herself.
She kept her Kanjeevaram sari, her large bindi and flowers in her hair, and later the Keds that became part of her instantly recognisable appearance. She sang English songs, jazz and rock and roll without trying to imitate Western performers or conform to the conventional image of a nightclub singer. The individuality that might have been considered unusual became her signature.
Her official biography records the extraordinary range of her career, including recordings and performances across numerous Indian and foreign languages. She would go on to become one of the most recognisable voices in Indian popular music, but the story began with a young woman who had already decided, in her own way, that she would not become somebody else simply to fit a stage.
Trincas and the Beginning of Everything
To understand Usha Uthup's Kolkata, one must understand Trincas on Park Street. In the city's great nightclub era, Trincas was one of the places where live music, social life and celebrity converged, and Usha became one of the performers who gave that history its particular sound.
But Trincas gave her something beyond a career. It brought Jani Chacko Uthup into her life.
He watched her perform, returned night after night, brought her flowers and little gifts and gradually won her over. Usha has spoken about their unusual love story with the same mixture of candour and humour with which she tells most of her life stories. The romance began around music, performance and a Park Street nightclub and eventually became marriage.
Jani died in Kolkata in July 2024 at the age of seventy-eight. But hearing Usha speak about those early years, what came through was not simply the sadness of a biographical fact. It was the vividness of remembered courtship: a young singer on a stage, a man in the audience who kept returning, flowers appearing, admiration turning into affection and Kolkata quietly becoming the setting of their life together.
That is why her connection with Kolkata feels different from an artist's ordinary professional association with a city. Bombay gave her the city of her birth. Chennai gave her an early professional opportunity. The wider world gave her fame. But Kolkata gave her Trincas, gave her Bengali music, gave her a husband and, as she said from the stage, gave her the love of her life.
The Famous People Who Listened to Her
Listening to Usha recall the Trincas years was also to hear a fragment of old Kolkata's social history. The people who came to hear her included actors, musicians, writers, politicians and other celebrated figures, among them Uttam Kumar and Satyajit Ray.
She remembered Uttam Kumar's fondness for Those Were the Days, My Friend. There was something wonderfully intimate about hearing her tell the story. Not Uttam Kumar the immortal star preserved inside old films, but Uttam Kumar the listener who sat in a Park Street nightclub and asked a singer to play his favourite song.
She also spoke about beautiful actresses who were close friends and, in her irrepressible tongue-in-cheek manner, joked that of course they could trust their husbands with her. Then came another Usha observation, delivered with a perfectly straight face: why, she wondered, do some people have such a fascination with “vital statistics”? The audience erupted.
One of the more intriguing recollections she shared was that Satyajit Ray had wanted to make a biopic about her life, but that it never happened. I would take this as Usha's own recollection from the stage rather than as an independently established historical fact. Still, the story is extraordinary: the celebrated filmmaker turning his attention to the young South Indian singer who took a Kanjeevaram sari into the nightclub world of Park Street and eventually became one of India's most distinctive popular voices.
The Voice That Was Once Called a “Bad Girl” Voice
Usha's voice did not fit neatly into the conventional mould of Hindi film playback singing. She recalled describing herself as the “bad girl” voice of playback singing while Lata Mangeshkar, Geeta Dutt and others were more often associated with beautiful heroines. She also laughed about being told that she possessed a “bedroom voice”.
There was no bitterness in the telling. If anything, she seemed amused by the categories that had once been imposed on her.
Her voice was different, and she made that difference memorable. Her appearance was different, and she made it unmistakably hers. Her repertoire crossed boundaries, and she crossed them with it. She never spent her career trying to sound like the singers who came before her. Within a few notes, audiences knew who they were hearing.
Her path from live performance to cinema included early work in Bombay Talkies and then the breakthrough associated with Hare Rama Hare Krishna in 1971. From there came decades of film music, pop recordings and live performances across changing musical fashions and generations of listeners.
Panchamda, Bappi Lahiri and Songs That Travelled Across Decades
Usha spoke with affection about the composers who had been part of her musical journey, among them R. D. Burman and Bappi Lahiri. Talking about them, she seemed to be opening old doors one after another, taking us back to the years when Hindi film music was changing rapidly, and musicians were experimenting with new sounds.
She remembered Panchamda with particular warmth. Among the Hindi numbers associated with her long career were songs from Hare Rama Hare Krishna, Shaan and other films that had carried her voice across generations.
Then came the Bengali connection: “Tumi Koto Je Dure”.
Hearing Usha sing that Bengali song in a Kolkata auditorium was one of the evening's loveliest moments. The song carried the memory of another musical era, but in her voice it was suddenly present again.
She also remembered Bappi Lahiri, whose music belonged to another phase of popular Hindi cinema and with whom Usha created some of her most exuberant numbers. Songs such as “Ramba Ho” from Armaan and “Bombay Se Aaya Mera Dost” immediately evoke that particular period of Hindi film music.
Pancham's sound was very different from Bappi's, but Usha's voice could move comfortably between them. She could be smoky and jazz-inflected one moment, exuberant and theatrical the next, and completely at home in a Bengali song. That versatility was not merely technical. It was part of her instinct as a performer.
What stayed with me was the ease with which she moved between these memories. There was no sense of delivering a catalogue of famous names. She was remembering people she had actually known and musical worlds in which she had actually lived.
A Different Kind of Bengali Connection
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Usha's relationship with Kolkata is that she did not remain the celebrated nightclub singer who happened to work here. She entered Bengali musical culture itself.
Usha has recorded and performed Rabindrasangeet and has spoken about learning the music from eminent musicians including Hemanta Mukherjee and Suchitra Mitra. That history matters because Rabindrasangeet is not simply another repertoire in Bengal; it carries a cultural intimacy of its own. Usha, whose career had been built through jazz, Western pop, Hindi film music and nightclub performance, found a place within it.
She also remembered her complicated relationship with the late Jatin Chakraborty, the RSP leader who had objected to her popular performances and described them as apasanskriti. The irony, she noted, was that although he disliked her nightclub songs, he appreciated her Rabindrasangeet.
She laughed while telling the story. Politics, culture, taste and tradition had all collided around the same woman who had never been particularly interested in staying inside one category.
Back to Nazrul Mancha
After all those stories, the history became present tense because the woman herself was sitting in front of us.
This was Usha Uthup at seventy-eight, looking back on a career that began in 1969 and then, when the music started, slipping almost effortlessly into the vitality of the performer we remembered. The programme moved through different chapters of her musical life: Western favourites, old hits, Bollywood numbers, Bengali songs and music associated with her Park Street years.
She spoke as much as she sang, and often the story between two songs was as entertaining as the song itself. She joked that she would have become a comedian if singing had not worked out. She remembered her youth. She talked about actresses, about “vital statistics”, about being the supposedly “bad girl” voice of playback singing. She teased people in the audience.
And the audience responded.
By this point, the reader has heard enough of her history to understand what is happening on that stage. The video allows the voice itself to take over.
When the Auditorium Began to Move
The pleasure was not simply recognition. It was hearing these songs in her inimitable style and watching her turn a large auditorium into something more intimate. She encouraged people to sing with her. They did. She encouraged movement. There was plenty of it.
Gradually, young and old alike were out of their seats, clapping, swaying and dancing.
Usha likes an audience that participates. She does not want people to sit silently and admire her from a safe distance. She wants them inside the music. At Nazrul Mancha, that relationship between performer and audience was unmistakable.
There was something deeply satisfying about seeing hundreds of tiny phone lights rise in the dark hall. The audience was no longer simply watching a celebrity from a distance. They had become part of the atmosphere. The room glittered with screens and torchlights while people danced and sang, and for a few minutes Nazrul Mancha seemed less like an auditorium and more like a roomful of people gathered around someone they had known for years.
A Tribute, a Few Familiar Faces and Usha Being Usha
The tribute at the beginning was followed by a succession of small human moments that gave the evening its personality.
Nandita Roy, the well-known director and screenwriter, was among those in the audience, there to watch Usha and show her admiration. Srikanta Acharya, accompanied by his wife, arrived rather late, and of course Usha noticed.
Why so late? she asked, teasing him that he had missed the chance to see her display her prowess as a singer.
It was exactly the kind of exchange that made the evening feel informal. A famous singer could still behave like a friend spotting another friend walking into the room late.
Perhaps that is what remains so disarming about Usha Uthup. The honours have become formidable. She received the Padma Shri in 2011 and the Padma Bhushan in 2024, the latter recognising her contribution to the arts and a career spanning more than five decades and multiple languages.
But she can still notice a late arrival, make a joke, remember an old friend or tell a self-deprecating story about the young woman who once worried about being made to wear a frock.
Kolkata Gave Her More Than a Career
As the evening progressed, one thing became increasingly clear: Park Street to Bombay was not merely a title describing geographical movement. It was an outline of a life.
Bombay was the city of her birth. Chennai gave her an early professional opportunity. Park Street gave her a stage and an audience. Trincas gave her a professional identity and brought Jani into her life. Kolkata gave her Bengali music, relationships, memories and the sense of belonging that comes from being claimed by a city you chose.
The organisers framed the concert around precisely this bond, describing Kolkata as the city Usha chose as her home and the city that proudly calls her its own. Sitting inside the hall and listening to her speak, that description felt less like publicity and more like something that had grown naturally out of the life she had built here.
She was not simply remembering a city where she had worked. She was remembering a city where she had lived, loved and made a life.
Fifty-Seven Years and Counting
There is something astonishing about the arithmetic of Usha Uthup's career. She began professionally in 1969. Fifty-seven years later, she was still on stage in Kolkata, singing to an audience that included people young enough to be her grandchildren and older listeners who had followed her since the Park Street days.
Her official Padma Bhushan citation records more than a hundred albums and performances across numerous languages. But statistics only take us so far.
The real measure of longevity was visible at Nazrul Mancha.
People still wanted to hear her. They still wanted to laugh with her. They still wanted to sing with her. And, when she asked them to, they still wanted to stand up.
Kolkata, Kolkata
There could really be only one way to finish such an evening.
“Kolkata, Kolkata.”
The song has become much more than another item in Usha Uthup's repertoire. It is her musical declaration of belonging. By the time she reached it, the audience was already emotionally hers, but the closing song gathered the evening into one place: the Park Street singer, the woman who chose Kolkata, the Bengali songs, the old memories, the years that had passed and the city that had remained.
People sang. People clapped. People danced. People held up their phones.
People did what Usha had asked them to do all evening: participate.
The concert was not ending with us politely applauding a veteran. It was ending with a city singing back.
Carry on, Usha Didi
While watching her that evening, I kept thinking about the young woman she once was: the young Usha Iyer who arrived on the nightclub circuit and apparently worried about being asked to wear a frock.
She kept the sari. She kept the bindi, the flowers, the individuality, the irreverence and the voice. From Nine Gems to Trincas, from Park Street to Bombay, from jazz and Western music to Bollywood and Rabindrasangeet, from being called a “bad girl” voice to receiving the country's major civilian honours in the arts, she has travelled a remarkable distance without having to become somebody else.
There are singers we remember because one song became part of our lives. There are singers who come to represent a particular decade. And then there are those rare performers who become part of the emotional landscape of a city.
Usha Uthup belongs to that last category.
She is not simply the singer who once performed at Trincas. She is part of the memory of Park Street. She is not simply a successful playback voice. She made an unconventional voice into an instantly recognisable identity. She did not merely learn Bengali songs; over the years, she became part of the city's musical memory.
At Nazrul Mancha on August 2, 2026, I watched the body show its years while the voice refused to surrender them. I watched a hallful of people become a chorus. I watched old memories become present again. And I watched a singer who has spent more than half a century entertaining us do what she has always known how to do: make an audience forget itself and join the music.
Usha was seated.
Kolkata was on its feet.
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Susmita Mukherjee is an Indian author based in Kolkata and a lifelong wanderer at heart. She writes about places, people, journeys, music and the small human moments that give a city its character. Alongside fiction and poetry, she writes travelogues and personal essays inspired by her encounters.
A trained classical vocalist, Susmita has always been drawn to the arts. Her fiction explores labour, resilience, displacement, family and the quiet complexities of human relationships, and has appeared in publications including Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Muse India, Fractured Lit, Sky Island Journal, Kitaab International, Setu, Fictive Dream and Flash Fiction Magazine. Her short story “Fuchka Geometry” won Second Place in the Inkspot Short Story Competition 2025–26.
Her debut poetry collection, When the Earth Sang of Us: A Meditation on Love, Life and Nature, is published by BookLeaf Publishing.
Come travel, read and wander with me.
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