Hong Kong’s India by the Bay festival back with food, dance, subcontinent’s queen of pop
Usha Uthup will sing and speak, and there are yoga classes, writers’ talk and more at Hong Kong event celebrating one of the oldest cultures
When India’s queen of pop Usha Uthup first performed in Hong Kong in 1978, she left the audience in shock.
Uthup was singing at The Eagle’s Nest, a supper club on the 25th floor of the Hong Kong Hilton – a fancy hotel in the city’s Central neighbourhood that closed in 1995.
“I performed with a Filipino band and the audience – it was about 80 per cent foreigners – were shocked out of their mind that an Indian girl could sing jazz songs in English,” says Uthup via Zoom from Delhi.
“They couldn’t have imagined a girl in a sari doing that.”
But Uthup, 76, is full of surprises.
Since starting her career at a nightclub in the eastern Indian city of Chennai in 1969, Uthup has recorded more than 100 albums in genres from pop and jazz to R&B and classical, in voices ranging from contralto to alto.
