India by the Bay festival in Hong Kong is back with food, dance and the subcontinent’s queen of pop

When Indian pop queen Usha Uthup first performed in Hong Kong in 1978, she shocked the audience.

Uthup sang at The Eagle’s Nest, a supper club on the 25th floor of the Hong Kong Hilton Hotel, a fashionable hotel in the city’s central district that closed in 1995.

“I was performing with a Filipino band, and the audience—about 80 percent of them were foreigners—were absolutely shocked that an Indian girl could sing jazz songs in English,” Uthup says via Zoom from Delhi.

“They couldn’t imagine a girl in a sari doing this.”

But 76-year-old Uthup is full of surprises.

Since beginning her career in a nightclub in the eastern Indian city of Chennai in 1969, Uthup has recorded more than 100 albums in genres ranging from pop and jazz to R&B and classical music, from contralto to alto.