Early this year, Dhruba Ghosh — Hindustani classical vocalist and, more importantly, sarangi maestro — sat down with two British musicians to give them a primer on Indian music, if such a thing was possible.
Darren Cunningham (who produces music under the moniker Actress) and Jack Barnett (part of genre-shifting group These New Puritans) were working to understand Indian music so that they could incorporate it into a performance piece called Different Trains 1947, which took place early this month at the fifth edition of the Magnetic Fields Festival in Rajasthan.
In the mix
Barnett likens Ghosh — who passed away after a heart attack in July this year — to “the grandfather I never had” over an email interview, talking about how much they observed in the hours they spent with him and tabla artist Yogesh Samsi. Barnett adds, “Dhruba gave us so much momentum, he was such an inspiration and a lovely man.”
Perhaps in Ghosh’s memory, Different Trains 1947’s second performance — the first was at the Barbican in London in October — had another dimension added on. Comprising three movements, the Indo-British audio-visual collaboration extended to include Mumbai-based producer Sanaya Ardeshir (Sandunes), drummer and percussionist extraordinaire Jivraj Singh, vocalist Priya Purushothaman and visual artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard.
At this point, if there weren’t already enough aspects in the mix, the artists were given starting points and the base — to tell an audio-visual story about the Partition of India in 1947, using American minimalist composer Steve Reich’s seminal piece ‘Different Trains’ (1988) as the main inspiration.
With these many elements, artists in different parts of the world, taking Different Trains 1947 to stage in all its 45-minute three-movement iteration was a challenge. Pollard told The Guardian ahead of their first performance, “This project feels a bit like tying our hands behind our backs. But that’s what we love — we have no control over the sound, the one thing that usually we have all the control over.”
Sanaya says over the phone from Mumbai, “It was not the easiest in terms of collaboration, because we were all in the same room for a limited amount of time.”
The globe-trotting, always-enterprising Sandunes was approached and commissioned in February to be part of the project that involved Liverpool-bred arts space organisation Metal, global gig hosts Boiler Room, New Delhi-based artist/ event agency The Wild City, Mumbai art agency What About Art? and U.K.’s Warp Records. It turns out, she was a perfect pick considering she had a local perspective on the Partition, her family’s history tied into one of the tumultuous times in history. She says, “It’s only when I got commissioned that I realised it’s a huge part of my country’s history. But my family is actually from Karachi, so it gave an impetus to explore that a little bit.”
She admits it was a “big ask” to be part of something this specific. But then she realised it met her wish to create music tied into something close to her heart. “It tied in with a lot of things I was doing — family lineage, ancestry — I wanted that to fit into my output as an artist.” She got a chance to talk to her grandmother about her family’s past. Jivraj Singh recorded and chopped up parts of an interview he recorded with Sanaya’s grandma, who narrated a story from 1945, when the artist’s grandfather moved from Karachi to Bombay. Sanaya says she’s lucky that her family’s Partition story is not one that matches the several millions who struggled and faced danger. “It wasn’t something that was excessively gory and violent. I know that there are so many of those.”
Strings and synths
Sanaya was recommended to use the tanpura as a starting point by the project’s music director Stephen Christian. While it seemed odd to her at first, she understood it tied in with Ghosh’s primers to Cunningham and Barnett. She also met Ghosh, who explained to her the history of the tanpura.
She says, “I was sceptical at first, because it felt a bit prescriptive, but everything else was pretty open. The magic in music production is that you can record a tanpura and make it sound like anything — I wasn’t hesitant to employ some techniques that were not sticking to the original source material.” With Singh adding his esoteric percussion, Sanaya’s final version includes voice samples of her grandmother, strings played through a synthesizer and a standard mallet, something that is typically Reich-ian.
Since she used the tanpura, it complemented Cunningham’s interest in sampling Indian instruments and crafting beats that bear his signature dark tone and rhythm. Barnett for his part took his recordings and mics as close as possible to steam engines, only narrowly preventing them from melting. He says, “I recorded the journey of a steam engine, one similar to those that were running in 1947, and that recording, unedited and untreated, forms the basis of my piece. I wrote all the rest of the music around it, around the sounds of the train.”
Inviting British musicians to work on a project that in essence revolves around colonial rule and power certainly raised questions about authenticity and aim. Barnett agrees that it’s “dangerous territory” in a sense, to take influence from another country’s music and not make it superficial.
Slow voices
He adds, “Indian classical music is perfect as it is; it doesn’t need me to come and add to it.” So his part of Different Trains 1947 — which also includes Singh playing percussion and drums — doesn’t include any Indian instruments or sounds.
“Instead I’ve taken some very specific ideas, small things like rhythms, ways that the music is organised, suggestions from Dhruba. Instead of using the sounds of Indian instruments, I’ve used the voices of people who experienced the events of 1947, talking about their experiences. Voices in Hindi and English. I’ve slowed them down and stretched them to create melodic and harmonic material. Hopefully this way I stay true to their stories, to their voices.”
The effort that’s gone into Different Trains 1947 comes from an honest place — Partition is a bit of history that can’t be completely represented through art — even if you have archival footage from the British Film Institute and some of the most forward-thinking minds in music. Sanaya says, “I think it would have been of benefit to cast a wider net, but it’s probably one of those topics that even if you had 50 people working on it, you can’t draw the whole picture. This just one instance in history impacted so many lives.”
The writer is a Bengaluru-based writer and critic who is into everything from metal to trip-hop, and tweets @anuragtagat.
