“My restlessness has been my best friend.” For Sharon Prabhakar, those words perhaps sum up a remarkable journey that has taken her from running away from home as a teenager to becoming one of the early pioneers of Indian pop music, besides making her mark as a playback singer and theatre performer. In a candid conversation, Sharon opened up about the unconventional choices that shaped her career and revealed how she never really had a fixed plan. “I come from a very simple background. I was born with a very restless spirit. So I actually ran away from home,” she recalled. At just 17 or 18, she left school, wrote a letter to her teacher and came to Bombay, where the teacher helped her get a job at an advertising agency.
Her first salary was Rs 350, but the significance of that first cheque has stayed with her. “That cheque, I remember first getting it. It was a big thing for me,” Sharon said. The managing director of the agency was supportive, and music, which had always been somewhere in her life, slowly began to take centre stage. “I wanted to sing. My mother used to make me sing in school. But it was like one little corner in my confusion of life,” she said, admitting that she had no real career strategy at the time. Then came a phone call that would change everything. “Bobby said, ‘There’s a call for you.’ And it was Bappi Lahiri on the other end. I didn’t know who he was,” Sharon recalled. Bappi invited her to Mehboob Studio, a place she did not even know how to find. When she told her boss about the opportunity, his response was simple: “Run.”
Sharon sang for Bappi Lahiri and soon recorded more songs. The opportunity quickly turned into a breakthrough. “I sang that song, and a couple more, and later Bappi told me one of my songs won Song of the Year award. My life changed after that,” she said. Her association with Bappi Lahiri marked the beginning of her playback journey, but Sharon soon realised that success alone was not enough. She wanted to become a more accomplished singer and began training seriously. “I quickly realised, I said, ‘I’m not good enough. I am going to start training,’” she said. She found a classical guru and worked on her musical skills, while also learning Hindi after already entering the playback industry. “I said, ‘I can’t even speak in Hindi.’ So I had to learn everything after becoming famous,” she recalled. For Sharon, that experience became a lasting lesson: “If you’re going to do something, do it properly.”
As her reputation grew, Sharon began questioning the conventional path of a singer being primarily associated with films. Her independent streak pushed her towards creating and performing her own music. “Because I was very much a free spirit, I decided that I want to… why can’t I sing my own songs?” she said. She eventually formed her own group and began working towards independent music. “I then collected my group of people. I formed a band. Talent agencies — by then everybody was interested in me. My relationship with the record companies started,” Sharon recalled. Her move into independent pop came at a time when film music dominated the Indian landscape, making her decision to build an identity outside movies particularly significant. Her albums, including Feeling Good, Shararat and Shabash Sharon, helped establish her as a distinctive pop performer.
For Sharon, music was never just about what happened inside a recording studio. She wanted the performer to be part of the visual identity of the song as well. “I was very fashion conscious. So my jeans, my T-shirts, everybody would look at me in the studio. I said, ‘Forget it. I can’t see other people performing to my songs, I will feature in mine,’” she said. That attitude eventually led to her own shows and then theatre, expanding a career that had already crossed several boundaries. Sharon went on to become an acclaimed name in Mumbai’s English theatre scene, appearing in productions such as Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cabaret and Evita, directed by Alyque Padamsee. She also hosted the television show Kya Scene Hai and continued to perform on stages in India and abroad.
Despite the many turns her career has taken, Sharon remains connected to the discipline that started it all. Asked to share something people may not know about her, she revealed a few unexpected details with characteristic humour: “What people don’t know about me is I write with both hands. And yeah, pretty much when I go to sleep, I have to have seven pillows. Oh, and yeah, pretty much that. And I still do my riyaaz regularly.” From a teenager who arrived in Bombay without a career strategy to an artist who helped shape India’s early pop culture, Sharon Prabhakar’s journey has been anything but conventional. And perhaps the most revealing part of her story is that the restless spirit that set everything in motion is still very much alive.