Soumik Datta’s Travellers puts war, identity and migration under the spotlight

His sarod, along with Sayee Rakshith on violin, Debjit Patitundi on tabla, and Sumesh Narayanan on mridangam and percussion, forms a thread that ties these stories together. Travellers is part of Datta’s seven-month-long India tour called ‘Melodies in Slow Motion’, which will see him travel the country to perform, collaborate and work with schools and children.

There are field recordings and immersive sound design that intertwine with the real voices of the world: the cries of refugees being deported, reporters broadcasting from Gaza, famous words by Oppenheimer: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’, echoes of the missiles cutting through, protests against US President Donald Trump, Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the wind, Arundhati Roy’s speech on “collective consciousness”. One also hears Charlie Chaplin’s words from The Great Dictator where he spoke of “kindness and gentleness”, Hum honge kamyaab (the Hindi version of the civil rights anthem We shall overcome) and Woodie Guthrie’s This land is your land.

The idea, says Datta, came while he was working with the Alzheimer’s Society in the UK and the UCL Division of Psychology to understand how music and memory are intrinsically linked. The result was Mone Rekho, which means ‘remember’ in Bengali. It was a piece about his experience of slowly starting to lose some memories of his guru Buddhadeb Dasgupta and “how the constant need to remember tradition, lineage and music is part of what can keep culture alive, and how easy it is for culture to be erased in a world of fast technology”.

Growing up in a Bengali home in London, music for Datta was through a chance discovery of his grandmother’s sarod, which twanged the moment a cricket ball hit it in the corner. “Sarod itself is a manifestation of Hindu and Muslim traditions. It’s a child of migration, ” says Datta about the instrument that came from the rabab.

While working on Mone Rekho, Datta was also interviewing migrants who had moved to the UK. This is when he began to understand this overlapping of migrant memory and how much of their own culture people forgot so as to assimilate. “Erasure is a part of assimilation,” says Datta, who was trying to figure this out around the time when border issues, channel crossings, and refugees trying to get in the UK was regularly happening in the country he now calls home.

“Rishi Sunak was the PM at that time. And him being the son of migrant parents and then being so anti-migration, I found that quite difficult to digest,” says Datta, whose final iteration came at a residency at G5A in Mumbai last year, where he and some other musicians devised what they call “ear cinema”, somewhere between a concert and an audio documentary format. “People are projecting their own visuals onto the concert,” says Datta, for whom the images of the suffering in Gaza formed the emotional core from which the music emerged. Which is why one also hears music from the region. “We stand in solidarity with that life-affirming music that faces the threat of being wiped out, along with physical structures,” says Datta, who adds that he is looking to see how these sounds can bridge the invisible borders.

The older Datta gets, the more he is aware of what his mother, an English professor in Mumbai, left behind because his father got a job in London. He would wonder what she carried along. The answer was music. “She built a community with music and theatre and it thrived. But in the early years, it must have been so cold, so far from home; I imagine scenes from The Namesake. And then, on the same table lie the experiences of people trying to get out of a war zone or stay in a country they think is home. It is not about which is worse, but it’s displacement in different degrees,” says Datta.