"Earlier, it was very difficult to dream of becoming an artist": Singer Jubin Nautiyal hails evolution of Indian music industry
Singer
Jubin Nautiyal
praised the current scenario of the Indian music industry, calling it more approachable and easier for upcoming artists to compose songs with the help of technology.
In an interview with ANI, Nautiyal hailed the evolution of the music industry in India while referencing the recent collaborations between Indian and international artists, including Ed Sheeran and
Arijit Singh
's new hit song 'Sapphire'.
The 'Raatan Lambiyaan' singer expressed his happiness at the consumption of Indian music in foreign countries and English music in India.
"Now, there is no national and international, it has all become one. And there's so much English music being consumed in India, and there's so much Indian music being consumed outside. So it's all the same now," said Jubin Nautiyal.
Jubin Nautiyal shot to fame with his song 'Ek Mulaqat' from the film 'Sonali Cable' in 2014.
The singer gradually built his diverse discography with the help of memorable hits like 'Kuch Din (Kaabil), 'Bawara Mann' (Jolly LLB 2), 'Akh Lad Jaave' (Loveyaatri) and others.
The singer called the present scenario of the Indian music industry a "great time" for the musicians, as now they can compose their music independently without the help of a music label.
"It's a great time for artists, all the upcoming artists.
It's a great time because now you can release your own music. You don't need an absolute music label to release your music. You can do your own thing as an independent artist," said Nautiyal.
Looking back at his struggling days, the singer said that earlier, the path to success for music artists was quite "difficult" as it required a lot of struggle to reach a breakthrough stage of their career.
He added that music composition has become easier and more approachable due to technological advancements.
"Earlier, it was very difficult to dream of becoming an artist. There was a lot of way to even reach a point where people will accept that, Okay, now you should start struggling in your journey to become an artist. But now you can dream and figure it out. Today, making music has become so easy because of technology, and singing has become so easy. Everything has become so much easier and more approachable. So I think it's just showing the power of music as how deeply everybody wants to connect to music and do a lot of crazy things in music," said Jubin Nautiyal.
Nautiyal has been in the music industry for over a decade. He believes that music has become more approachable and will blossom in the coming five years.
"In five years, I think we'll be, we'll multiply at least four to five times as an industry. It's amazing. Today, anybody can approach music. Earlier, you had to buy a cassette to even start, and a CD to even start. But now, just one click and you can listen to a song that was released in Africa 15-20 years back.
So that's the power we are at right now," said Jubin Nautiyal.
Jubin Nautiyal's recent song, 'Barbaad,' has created a buzz in the entertainment industry. It is the second song from the upcoming movie Saiyaara, directed by
Mohit Suri
and starring debutant Ahaan Panday in the lead role.
The movie is produced under the banner of Yash Raj Films. It is slated to release in theatres worldwide on July 18, 2025.
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The Hindu
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'Writing was never an ambition, only an accident': Sumana Roy on her favourite books and authors, and reading life
Published : Aug 17, 2025 10:17 IST - 13 MINS READ Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree (Aleph Book Company) and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford University Press), a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel and My Mother's Lover and Other Stories, works of fiction; and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant. Her poems, essays, and stories have been published in The Paris Review, Orion, Lit Hub, The Point, Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Minnesota Review, Emergence Magazine, The Common, The White Review, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies, American Book Review, among other places. She is now Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. Growing up in Siliguri at the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas, Sumana had access to fewer books and no bookstores except for some textbooks. She was formed, as she says, by the everyday—more by life than books and libraries. Drawn to reading through the kindness of others—books borrowed from teachers, books purchased by her father at his bank job—she also scavenged some magazines like Reader's Digest, National Geographic, and Sportsworld from the kabadiwala (scrap collector). More than reading and being immersed in the world of books, she was learning to listen to the way people spoke around her, and 'the way they spoke about their everyday lives, with humour, anger, joy, affection, and distance'. In her later reading life, she was especially drawn to poetry and essays, which remain central to her reading and writing. Writing, she emphasises, was an accident, a byproduct of circumstance rather than a sole ambition. 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The few books that my brother and I read over and over again came from Mrs Nora Bansal, our English teacher in the second grade, and Kamalesh Jethu, my father's friend, who, when he visited us from Calcutta, carried books in Bangla and music cassettes for us. Occasionally, during the library period in school, we were allowed to borrow a book. Mrs Bansal's children let us borrow the Famous Five and Nancy Drew from their collection. When the Rabindra Rachanabali became available to buy, my father, who worked at United Bank of India—the bank through which one had to buy them—bought the set for us. I began reading them after my ICSE—alone at home, with nothing to do, I first read the stories, which, at that time, I didn't like very much, then the poems and songs and essays. The Sarat Rachanabali had arrived before that, when I was in middle school. It was a very fat book, impossible for children to hold. My father read us the stories of Lalu on Sunday afternoons, after a lunch of rice and mutton curry. I remember another set of books—Tell Me Why, a series of sturdy hardbacks answering questions about the universe. My brother and I read one page over and over again: 'Why does the moon travel with us wherever we go?' That question has stayed with us, as I discovered recently when we were in Kashmir, and both of us looked at the full moon in the Pahalgam sky and then at each other. I was, like most hungry people in such a situation, an omnivore. I'd read everything that came to me. And much of this reading material was foraged from the kabadiwala—old copies of National Geographic, Reader's Digest, Sportsworld, anything affluent families had once read and then sold to him. Having nothing more than my neighbourhood and my town, fringed by the Himalayas, I was formed by the everyday in a way I would come to recognise only much later. I suppose I was formed more by life, its contingency, than I was by books and libraries. How have your reading tastes and preferences evolved over the years—from moving out of Siliguri after college and studying at the University of North Bengal to becoming a writer and academic? I'm sure I've discovered writers and provinces of thought and taste as I've become older. It might have to do with changes in place, friendships, and a recognition—and even coming to terms with—one's self as a thing beyond redemption. The poem and the essay continue to be my favourite homes, both as a reader and a writer. As a teacher—I'm not sure I want to be identified as an 'academic'; the word carries a weight which makes me feel like a fraud—I am now able to teach courses on aesthetic practice that I couldn't before, when I was teaching in Bengal's government colleges, where one has to teach a centralised syllabus. That has given me the freedom to experiment with thought systems through pedagogy. 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Tell us about the books and authors from your early years of reading and how they influenced you as an aspiring writer? I must clarify that I had absolutely no ambition to be a writer. Like most things in my life—studying literature, coming to love, growing gardens, teaching—writing too was an accident, a byproduct of the circumstances I found myself in, rather than a roaring ambition that had set me on a path. I read everything as literature—all my school textbooks, including, say, mathematics. I wish I could say—like my students often do—that I read a lot as a child. I didn't, and I'm therefore not a good example for writers who've discovered themselves through reading. Also, reading has taken on a moral life today—it's not just the simplistic arithmetic that feeds our understanding of what makes a 'good reader', the assumption that a 'voracious reader' must be, by some kind of alchemy brought about by the reading experience, transformed into an empathetic citizen. My writing has been influenced by the way people around me spoke, the lives they led, and, more importantly, the way they spoke about their everyday lives, with humour, anger, joy, affection, and distance. You write about the natural environment, plant life, and how we interact with our natural world. What draws you to these ideas? I write about the world I live in or want to live in. In this world, the human—a person such as myself—is not at the centre. I'm a minor figure there—it is populated by plants and animals, not as they are in a fantasy novel, but as I see them. When I watch a film, quite often, my eyes are taking in a tree without leaves or, as they did last night, a nasturtium plant outside a house that hasn't been watered for some time. I am drawn to what has come to be called the 'background'—in art, in manuscripts, in public policy, in the architecture of our houses and cities, in everything. This comes from a natural instinct, by which I mean this manner of experiencing the world, noticing walls, doormats, earthworms, flies, clouds, and the shape of the wind. In writing about them, I'm only following my instinct, my curiosity about them. In a world where everyone must be a 'follower', I am a follower of what you're, in shorthand, calling the natural world. As someone who also teaches literature and creative writing, what advice would you give to aspiring writers, especially from small towns and villages who may not have easy access to quality literature or literary mentors and may not be writing in English? I am uneasy about giving and taking advice, and so I can only share what I have tried to live by. It is this—that we should not be bullied by 'literary trends', by what the market wants us to produce. We should give ourselves the freedom to write what we want to, irrespective of the discouragement and neglect we might receive from publishers. Honesty to one's aesthetic, to write what one likes to read, to remain an artist instead of turning into content creators in the demand-and-supply routine—it might be hard to live by this, to survive as a writer in a culture where one is bullied by marketing teams telling you what to write and sales teams telling you that your books don't sell. But it'll be worth it—for yourself. Which books or writers, Indian or international, do you find yourself returning to? What draws you to their work? I re-read my favourite books and poems often. One book that I've been mesmerised by ever since I was four years old is Sahaj Path. I have a soft copy of the first edition on my phone, and I still look at it in wonder when I'm exhausted—the form of the book, of the page in particular, the distribution of word and image on it, and the rhythm of everyday provincial life caught in it by Rabindranath Tagore and Nandalal Basu. It's a primary school primer, and it would inaugurate a way of thinking about life—and art—in four-year-olds that has now been lost. Who are your comfort reads—books and authors that help at difficult moments? I like to laugh. In the last few years, I've found myself reading two writers who happen to have begun life as provincials. Rajshekhar Basu and Shibram Chakraborty still make me laugh a lot. Could you name a few books you've gifted recently? Two books that I've gifted a few times recently are The Five Senses by Michel Serres and Love's Work by Gillian Rose. I gave a copy of Nandalal Bose's Vision and Creation to my closest friend a few months ago. Have you discovered any lesser-known or overlooked authors or books later in life that you wish you had read earlier? What was unique about their writings? Like many, I did not grow up reading writers around me. In my case, it has been poets writing from northern Bengal. Growing up isolated from any sense of literary culture, pestered by an education system that turned Bangla into a 'second language', I read almost exclusively in the English language. I had no idea about the rich body of literature around me. Only a couple of hundred kilometres away was Amiya Bhushan Majumdar. But I wouldn't begin reading him until my early thirties. There's an elastic intelligence in the experiments he makes as a prose writer. I wish I'd discovered his work before, as I wish I had Manindra Gupta. How does one write such sensuous prose, like he does in Akshay Mulberry? What are you currently reading and enjoying? Are there any contemporary books—fiction, nonfiction, or poetry—you would recommend to others? I've been reading Saswati Sarkar's poetry in Bangla, The World According to David Hockney, and finishing Rob MacFarlane's Is A River Alive? Adil Jussawalla's Soliloquies (Thayil Editions), written when he was eighteen, has just been published. 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