Against all odds | A concert that traces this singer’s adoptive journey—from India to Sweden, from finding her birth mother to losing her again
Vidya Liselotte Sundberg’s albums will find tangible expression at a unique concert in Pune and Mumbai from next month on.
When they say the best songs come from a deep sense of pain and loss they could well be talking of Vidya Liselotte Sundberg. Born in Pune and adopted at three months by Swedish parents, she grew up in Gavle, Sweden. Her journey to becoming a jazz singer was one phase of her life. The next began when she set out to find her biological mother, equipped with something she was given at the age of 10 to 15 – a letter left for her by her biological mother before she relinquished her at an orphanage here.
Her adoptive parents had divorced, enhancing her vulnerability, but with the support of her Swedish partner and her son Vidya began her quest. It took many visits to India, herculean efforts, time and patience but at the age of 39 she finally traced her biological mother, filling all the blanks she had grappled with in her life. It also perhaps fortified her for the losses that lay ahead—of losing two mothers, both her biological and adoptive one, in the space of four years. This was when she turned completely to her music for answers—and they came rushing in taking the form of lyrics and songs that only a broken heart can feel and create. Today these songs have been strung together to form the basis of both her second and third albums—Papillon and Adi Shakti and will find tangible expression at a unique concert that Vidya has planned in Pune and Mumbai next month on, where she will weave in her life story within each number on stage.
Vidya went to London and started working on her album AdiShakti, inspired by the Adi Shakti mantra.
“Life has taken me on a rollercoaster. After some very fulfilling years with my biological mother I lost her. I returned to Gavle, where I had grown up. Covid struck and I started to spend more time with my music. I then learnt that my Swedish mother had cancer and my focus shifted to her. She died in 2022, one week after my second album—Papillon—was released. The very next day after her death this poem came up inside me, that I think I had been carrying for many years. It was Rumi’s—‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there…’,” recalls Vidya, who then went to London and started working on her album AdiShakti, inspired by the Adi Shakti mantra. The album was released in May this year.
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“All my songs reflect who I am,” says Vidya, who honed her music, which she now calls “genre-free”, at the University of Gothenburg. Her first album, Peace Play, received a slew of positive reviews, while her second one, Papillon, was nominated for The Manifest Prize.
“Papillon was all about finding my biological mother and her death and then losing my adoptive mother too. AdiShakti is all about how life is so big and it’s all about living it and giving people comfort and hope and healing,” says Vidya, who is also doing a similar concert this month in Sweden, where she would be telling her story as she sings her songs on stage. “Five questions will prelude the performance that will be a mix thereafter of monologues and numbers,” she explains.
Vidya is also doing a similar concert this month in Sweden, where she would be telling her story as she sings her songs on stage.
But what she is really looking forward to is to bring this concept to India to connect with the people there who have been a part of her unusual journey. “Till now I would only come to look for my mother and then later to meet her. Now I want to connect with the people associated with her and me. My music will talk to them and so will I,” says the 46-year-old singer-pianist-composer who, depending on the support she gets, plans to increase the jigs during her December-January India tour. “I want people to take what they want from my life’s learning—be it adoption, loss, music, motherhood… but basically the message on how to cope.
Or as the lyrics of one of her numbers go…
Learning how to be alive
Loneliness
Is something I know how to express
But sometimes you need to do less
When you are shaken to the ground
There is nothing left to find
When the time has come to see
There is nothing left to be
There’s nothing out here that’s real
Love can be blind and it can heal
You have the power my friend
You really don’t have to pretend
No one can save me from life
I try to leave but I fly
Back again