From VIVA to W.i.S.H: What two decades of girl groups say about women in pop

If you look closely at the history of the Indian music industry, you will find that the "girl group" has often been a rare, shimmering anomaly in a landscape dominated by solo playback singers and male-fronted rock bands.

The 2002 debut of the girl group band VIVA — comprising Neha Bhasin, Anushka Manchanda, Pratichee Mohapatra, Mahua Kamat, and Seema Ramchandani, was supposed to be the start of a revolution, a moment where five young women broke the playback mould.

However, it took nearly two decades of industry silence and a total rewiring of the musical ecosystem before W.i.S.H. arrived as a phenomenal powerhouse of a band capable of competing on a global stage.

The 2002 blueprint

The success of VIVA was, by any objective metric, a staggering commercial triumph that the modern industry still looks back on with a mic of awe and nostalgia, largely because their debut album moved over 500,000 copies. 

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They famously broke attendance records when over 50,000 people converged for their first ever live performance, proving to a sceptical industry that Indian audiences were thrilled to yell for a female collective that existed entirely outside of a film's narrative. To the public, they were the "fiesty five", a symbol of urban independence who sang about changing their destinies. Behind the scenes though, they were navigating a corporate environment.

Years after the group’s dissolution in 2005, members like Neha Bhasin and Anushka Manchanda began to pull back the curtain on the industry’s darker side, describing contracts that were as much about physical surveillance as they were about musical output.

The culture at the time largely prioritised a very narrow, demure version of femininity and so the members of VIVA were subjected to a gruelling regime where gaining even a single kilogram could result in a 5,000-rupee fine from the management.

The rebellion of the Indipop era

Their music fundamentally challenged the high-pitched, almost saccharine vocal aesthetic that had dominated Indian female singing for decades before their arrival. Prior to 2002, the female voice in mainstream India was almost entirely defined by the playback tradition — a style that was sweet, ethereal, and often secondary to the male lead’s narrative. VIVA, however, brought a raw, rock-edged grit that allowed for lower registers and vocal textures that felt authentically human.

Their breakout anthem, Hum Naye Geet Sunaye, was a literal manifesto for a generation of young women who wanted music that reflected their own messy, ambitious lives.

This extended to their second album, Viva! - Reloaded, where they experimented with moodier, more somber tracks like Jaago Zara and even touched on social issues like dowry and patriarchy, proving that a girl group could be a vessel for serious social commentary.

Despite this artistic growth, the media remained obsessed with the catfight narrative, especially following Seema Ramchandani’s departure to join the Art of Living Foundation, which served as a convenient industry tactic to undermine their collective power. It was the classic play: when a group of women functions as a unit, the easiest way for a male-dominated industry to control them is to suggest they are incapable of getting along.

W.I.S.H. and the rise of the "I-Pop" idol

After VIVA faded away, a twenty-year drought followed where the girl group became a relic of the past, until Ri (Riya Duggal), Sim (Simran Duggal), Zo (Zoe Siddharth), and Suchi (Suchita Shirke) reclaimed the mantle for a new generation.

Unlike the VIVA members who were thrown together in a matter of weeks by a television jury, W.i.S.H. spent two years in an intensive "trainee" system under composer Mikey McCleary, perfecting a blend of athletic choreography and vocal harmony that is clearly influenced by the global K-pop model.

They are the face of "I-Pop", a brand of Indian pop music that is designed to be as palatable in London or Seoul as it is in Mumbai, reflecting the globalised ambitions of the modern Indian woman.

The primary difference in 2026 is that the members of W.i.S.H. are the visual directors and social media strategists of their own brands, exercising a level of creative control that was virtually non-existent twenty years ago. 

Ri and Sim were already established as the indie duo Simetri, and Zo had proven herself on the reality show The Stage, meaning they walked into their Sony Music contract with a level of professional seasoning that the teenagers of VIVA were never allowed to cultivate.

Their debut track, Lazeez, famously originated from a casual studio conversation about being hungry, illustrating a shift toward a personality-driven, relatable form of songwriting that feels far more organic than the manufactured scripts of the early 2000s.

The power of sisterhood

While W.i.S.H. has even ended up performing the official anthem Whatever It Takes for the 2024 ICC Women’s T20 World Cup, they face their own problems. In the Viva era, the gatekeepers were a small group of label heads and TV producers; today, the gatekeeper is an anonymous algorithm that demands a constant, 24/7 stream of relatable content to keep a group from falling out of the public consciousness. 

This has turned the modern pop star into a multi-tasking octopus who must balance recording sessions with editing reels and managing a parasocial relationship with millions of followers who feel entitled to comment on every aspect of their appearance.

To fight this, W.i.S.H. has turned "sisterhood" into their primary survival strategy, using their platform to show the unpolished, collaborative side of their creative journey as a direct rebuttal to the divisive stereotypes of the past. By standing as a unit, they have created a shield against the hyper-sexualization and ageism that still plagues the music business, proving that while the technology has changed, the necessity for women to protect each other’s agency remains constant.

Feminism as a girl group motto

As we look at the trajectory from VIVA’s pop-rock growls to W.i.S.H.’s sleek, global disco-pop, it is clear that the girl group is more than just a musical format; it is a powerful mirror for the evolving status of women in Indian society.

VIVA provided the spark and weathered the initial storms of systemic sexism, taking the hits so that a generation of girls could grow up seeing female stardom as a viable, self-directed career trajectory. W.i.S.H. is now walking through the doors that Viva kicked open, redesigning the industry to be more inclusive, digital, and global than it ever was before.

The stage in 2026 looks vastly different from the one in 2002, the CRT televisions have been replaced by smartphone screens and the CD stores by streaming platforms, but the act of women standing together and owning their own narrative is still the strongest statement.