Singer-songwriter Vibha Saraf’s memories of her house in Kashmir are few and precious. “I remember the staircase, the telephone, the bridge...my house was next to a river,” she recalls her ancestral home in Fateh Kadal, Srinagar.
Now based in Mumbai, Vibha grew up in Delhi after the Kashmiri Pandit exodus of the 1990s. She is now making her presence felt in Bollywood; her latest is the song, ‘Kab Se Kab Tak’.
“I had recorded a five-minute rendition of a Kashmiri folk song with Dub Sharma. He kept it and it so happened that
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Vibha’s breakthrough in film music came in 2018, with ‘Dilbaro’, for
Artistes from the war-torn land have an additional responsibility of moving past the negative image of their home state. Vibha wants people to associate Kashmir with its rich history in music and oral storytelling. “It falls on our generation; how much we stick to our roots, how aggressive we are about where we come from. Look at the Punjabis.
They have always been aggressive about their identity, wearing it on their sleeves,” she says.
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Her own upbringing, though was in Delhi, remained Kashmiri, thanks to her grandparents. “My maternal side would speak and sing in Kashmiri. I read Kashmiri literature, poems by our poetesses like Lal Ded, and Habba Khatoon. So Kashmiri music has subconsciously always been in me,” she says.
Saying that it’s the rubab that reminds her most of Kashmir, she explains how memories of Kashmir and anecdotes from her grandparents are reflected in her songs. “We are all collectors of stories, after all.”