Zarin Sharma entered Bombay film studios as a teenage sarod player at a time when, as she later recalled, women sarodists were rare and few women worked in the film line. Her story is not a measurable account of a glass ceiling disappearing; it is a documented set of steps into a male-dominated studio world, and the surprise and anonymity she encountered there.
From harmonium lessons to the sarod
Sharma, also reported as Zarine Sharma and born Zarine Daruwalla, was born in 1946. According to Rudradeep Bhattacharjee’s 2014 Scroll tribute, her police-officer father encouraged her to study Indian classical music. She began learning harmonium at four.
At the 1952 Swami Haridas Sangeet Sammelan, she heard Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan perform a jugalbandi. The performance drew her to the sarod. Scroll names Haripada Ghosh as her sarod teacher and lists vocalists S.C.R. Bhat, Laxmanprasad Jaipurwale and S.N. Ratanjankar, as well as violinist V.G. Jog, among her influences.
How Sharma entered film studios
Scroll places Sharma’s first film-studio encounter in the late 1950s: she played title music for Maasoom, released in 1960. Her more sustained film-industry association followed in 1964. The tribute says sarodist Imrat Khan recommended her to composer Roshan for a sitar-sarod passage in Chitralekha. After the first recording, Roshan asked her back to work on the background score at Mehboob Studios in Mumbai.
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- Instrument- Sarod
- Color- Brown
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- Dimensions: Length 44 Inch, Width 11 Inch, Height 8 Inch
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These are specific credits, not a complete filmography. Scroll also points to the Kinara (1977) track “Naam Goom Jayega” as featuring Sharma; the available account does not establish a full list of her screen credits.
What “that Parsi girl” reveals about the studio setting
In the Scroll tribute, Sharma recalled waiting with her father while the orchestra recorded, then playing when called. The musicians’ surprise at seeing a woman with a sarod became a defining memory of her entry into the studios. She described their response in her own words:
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“When I began to play, all the musicians who were standing around were very surprised. Because I was a lady, no? And lady players of sarod were very, very rare. And also there were very few ladies in the film line, so they all were astonished. It seemed to me as if they’d never seen a sarod before. And people came to know about me because here I was – I was just this 18-year-old Parsi girl playing in films. But mostly they didn’t know my name. I was ‘that Parsi girl’.”
This recollection is quoted by Rudradeep Bhattacharjee in the Scroll tribute published on 22 December 2014. The article does not say when or where Sharma’s original recollection was recorded. Her words capture both the visibility of being an unusual presence and the way colleagues could recognize her by identity rather than by name.
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For a documentary view of the subject, Scroll’s audio page reports that Sharma’s student Ulhas Bapat discussed her life with vocalist Shubha Mudgal. It offers another account of her legacy through a student’s perspective.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Award and later recognition
The Sangeet Natak Akademi’s award and death report describes Sharma as an eminent Hindustani sarod instrumentalist and records that she received the Akademi Award in 1988. It also gives her date of death as 20 December 2014. Scroll’s tribute independently reports the same death date.
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The Akademi record confirms formal recognition, while the detailed studio episodes and early-career narrative come from Scroll’s retrospective profile. Taken together, they show a classical musician carrying her training into film work—and the gendered assumptions she had to navigate upon arriving there.
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