Tarun Balani turns inherited memories into an evocative album

Mint

2 days ago

How do you mourn a person you've never met? How do you process the bone-deep longing for an ancestral homeland you've never visited? New Delhi jazz drummer and composer Tarun Balani confronts these questions head-on in his new album Kadahin Milandaasin, an evocative and elegiac exploration of identity, displacement and the collective grief of a community in permanent exile.
The album is inspired by the musician's inherited memories of his grandfather Khialdas Suratram Balani, a writer, painter and photographer who migrated from his home in Naushahro Feroze in Sindh to the refugee colony in Lajpat Nagar in 1952, in the wake of India's Partition. Balani never met his grandfather, who passed away aged just 40 in 1970. Growing up, he didn't hear a lot of stories about him either—the grief was too raw.
Instead, Balani came to know his ancestor through the latter's paintings and photographs in the family home, and an old Yashika 635 box camera that he'd sneak out of his father's cupboard and play with as a young child. Those hours spent gazing into his grandfather's modernist paintings, or play-acting as a film-maker with his camera, would end up being a major influence on Balani's artistic worldview, and his self-conception as a 'sonic story-teller".
'I feel like this album has been brewing for years, because my first solo album [2012's Sacred World] also featured my grandfather's photography," says Balani, speaking over Zoom from his home in Lajpat Nagar, one of his grandfather's paintings occupying pride of place on the wall behind him. 'But back then I wasn't really thinking of my Sindhi heritage. With this record, the story of my grandfather's migration from Sindh to Delhi became a lens through which I could explore my Sindhi identity."
These questions of identity were first sparked by a conversation Balani had with his German record label, as he was struggling to find a booking agency for Europe. Balani has always been hard to pin down musically. He's a jazz-inspired musician from New Delhi, performing with a multicultural ensemble based in New York—trumpeter Adam O'Farrill has Puerto Rican roots, guitarist Olli Hirvonen hails from Finland, while pianist Sharik Hasan is originally from Bengaluru. His musical output ranges from contemporary jazz to improvisational synth-led electronica.
'Everybody would tell us that they love my music, but that they can't place me," he remembers. 'It was almost like they were having an identity crisis, and weren't able to understand me. But I'm actually very comfortable in my skin. So I just felt like it was time for me to make a bold statement about my identity, and my ancestral lineage."
Last February, Balani shared this idea for a new album with his father, who in turn gave him two black-and-white photographs—one of his grandfather and another of his grandparents. Those two images now appear on the front and back cover of Kadahin Milandaasin. Balani dove into his grandfather's archive, sifting through photographs, paintings, letters and manuscripts for inspiration. He also spoke to family members about how they—and other Sindhi families—experienced and dealt with the trauma of Partition, addressed most poignantly on album opener Lajpat Nagar Sometimes.
'In this day and age, I feel like it's necessary for us to reimagine or reinterpret this conversation of Partition so that it moves away from just being about loss and grief," he says. 'We need to understand how we can take this heritage forward."
In order to do that, he spoke to linguists and Sindhi historians, and explored the works of other Sindhi artists and writers such as Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Gobind Malhi, Popati Hiranandani and Shaikh Ayaz. Tiri Pawanda, a poem by Shaikh Ayaz that reflects on Partition, would actually inspire the album's title, and title track. The poem includes the line 'Tade milanda si ('we will meet then"), which Balani flips into Kadahin Milandaasin ('when will we meet?").
'The question is when will I meet my grandfather, but also when will I see the land they've left behind," says Balani. 'This became, at both a macro and micro level, a really beautiful question to chase, it kind of became the heart of the album."
Over the title track's pensive piano melody and Sindhi-folk inspired rhythms, Balani repeats the question like an incantation, the first time he's ever sung on record. He meant for the track to be a surprise for his father, who had always wanted to be a classical singer, but had to work to support the family instead.
'I never got the chance to share it with him because my dad sadly passed away on 2nd November last year," he says. 'But when I was in the ICU with him during his last days, I actually sang these lyrics to him. And that's when I felt like I had really experienced pain and loss. This personal loss became a gateway to my lineage and ancestry."
Though grief informs much of the Kadahin Milandaasin, it's far from funereal. Alongside the melancholy that suffuses songs like Sailaab (inspired by the devastating 2020 floods in Sindh) and Samadhi 2.11.24(the date of his father's passing), there's also pride in what he calls 'the quiet resilience" of being Sindhi.
'I found a lot of comfort in how we have still held on to our language, our traditions, the very basic yet beautiful daily rituals," he says. 'I think those are the beautiful things about being Sindhi that we've really held on to. Kadahin Milandaasinis a celebration of that."
With the album finally out in the world, Balanui is now thinking of putting together an audio-visual exhibit featuring his grandfather's archival work as well as stories of the Sindhi diaspora. He's also working on the next edition of Listening Room, an immersive sound installation that focuses on Balani's—and others'—experience of climate change. He's also preparing to take the album on tour. But for now, he just hopes that the album inspires listeners to embrace their identities, without fear or reservation.
'What I hope listeners take away from this record is that you don't have to be afraid to be yourself," he says. 'And if you're not seeing yourself represented in stories or art, then you just have to find a way to do it yourselves. If you feel like you're different, don't be afraid to follow that path."