On a warm June evening in Hyderabad, a small group of college students lingered outside an auditorium, phones in hand, refreshing a booking page one last time in the hope of a miracle. They had heard about a choir that sang Queen and The Beatles alongside Mozart, Nigerian folk songs and show tunes. They didn’t want to miss their performance.
Inside, one of the choir’s founders, Shakila Dausi, noticed their disappointed faces and decided to let them in. “They came over afterwards, just awed with our music and stage presence,” recalls Dausi, co-founder of The Hyderabad Voices. “It was their first time at a choir concert. It brought such a sense of satisfaction for us.”
For Dausi, the encounter was proof that an art form long associated with church halls and devotional music could find a wider audience. She founded The Hyderabad Voices in 2024 as a women-led group, after watching Hyderabad’s secular choirs disappear one after another. “The last secular choir packed up over a decade ago, and I felt its need,” she says.
She reached out to choir conductor Ashrita D’Souza. “It took a year or more to come to fruition, but here we are,” says Dausi. For D’Souza, the project fulfilled a long-standing ambition. “The idea behind it was to bring people of all cultures and religions under one roof to start an all-inclusive secular choir,” she says. “Currently we are the only secular choir in the city.”
In Hyderabad, as in much of India, the word choir still evokes church services and devotional music. The Hyderabad Voices, however, moves across genres, from pop anthems and Broadway scores to Western classical works, rock standards and world music, performed in soprano, alto, tenor and bass harmonies.
The choir began with what Dausi jokingly calls “a straggling number of 17”. Today, it has around 45 singers and accompanists, aged 16 to 75. IT professionals rehearse alongside teachers, students, retirees and working musicians, united, as Dausi puts it, “by a passion for music.” D’Souza also conducts choirs for children aged five to 16.
As the choir has grown, so have the challenges. Unlike many choirs, The Hyderabad Voices performs entirely from memory. Every performance requires sectional rehearsals, discipline and commitment, narrowing the pool to those willing to invest the time. “We also have people from different backgrounds and cultures, and sometimes we do face subtle frictions among them,” says D’Souza. “But when it comes to singing, we put our differences aside.”
For Dausi, the journey is measured less by the number of performances than by what the choir has come to represent. “There is great joy and satisfaction when I look at our journey,” she says, “especially as this is not just the only secular choir, but it is the only women-led choir in the city.”
D’Souza is more measured, acknowledging both the resistance and progress of the choir’s first two years. “Our journey so far has been challenging, but encouraging,” she says. “While people still consider choral music to be religious, breaking that wall through our music, we have definitely reached great heights in such a short span of time.”
