TO THE BEAT OF A SUFI DRUM
Kanishk Seth is using electronic sounds to ensure that Sufi poetry leaves his audiences in a trance
When Kanishk Seth was just 13, trying to wrap his head around high school science, his father told him he ought to start learning sound engineering. Now 24, Seth, a Mumbai-based producer, singer, guitarist and composer, says he was initially stumped by his father’s unusual instruction, and that it was only later when he understood why he and his mother, Sufi and ghazal artist Kavita Seth, had nudged him towards music.
Seth admits that only after losing his father at 16 did he start taking music seriously. Having taught himself the technology and software that music production entails, he collaborated with his mother on her 2014 album, Trance with Khusrow. Kavita Seth’s evocative renditions of Khusrow’s verses were at the forefront of the Sony Music record, but its sonic direction showed a versatility that would surprise listeners even today. Seth says it took about four years to make the album, and though it might sound “amateurish” in parts, he does feel proud of it. “I have been growing as a composer and producer since.”
Since 2017, Seth has been performing his brand of ‘Sufi indie electronic’ at music, art and literary festivals across the country. His repertoire already boasts of hits like ‘Man Qunto Maula’, but then there are the more feelgood tunes like ‘Aane Ko Hai Khaab’ too. There’s also ‘Dil Jogia’, a song he made with his mother, which featured in Pinky Memsaab (2018), a Pakistani film. Seth says that since crowds jeer him when he says aloud the word ‘Pakistani’, he now takes his mother’s advice: “Say it was for an international film.”
This February, Seth will perform at Jodhpur’s World Sacred Spirit Festival. For the first time, he and his mother are both part of the same line-up. “On stage, I don’t care much if people are watching me or not. People have called my performances soulful. I cannot describe them myself, but I do groove to my music.” ■
twist well spun on the legends and subaltern histories that keep emanating from that mythical battlefield of Plassey, of the summer of 1757, can possibly rival the Mahabharat at its most epic and macabre; it can also inspire a Marquez to pen another Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Sudeep Chakravarti’s new book is built on a fabulously conceived plot to the Plassey end-game, likely to inspire the fancy of philosophers and philanderers, alike.
The Battle of Plassey’s philanderer, or central protagonist in most eyes, is a man whose curtailed adolescence in the riyasat of Murshidabad enters the plot with nearly half the tale spent. Siraj appears as the Nawab of Bengal closer to the 156th page, commandeering that fatal siege on Calcutta, in June 1756. Following the mysterious tragedy of the Black Hole, the city becomes Alinagar. About a hundred pages—or a year—later, Robert Clive is seen with
Ghaseti Begum, conspiring in a Banglican tongue, a scripturally Anglicised attempt at Bengali imagined by a 19th century nationalist Bengali poet. As in Chakravarti’s account, Siraj would be the most favourite stepchild (read boxing bag) in colonialist and some nationalist retellings.
Decaying from internal revolts in Awadh, Mysore and Bengal in the early 18th century, the idea of the Mughal Empire was besieged by growing factions of Marathas, Rajputs and even the Borgis (or dacoits) of Bengal. With some ambivalence, Chakravarti navigates through a daunting dramatis personae of his own reinvention. Besides those mentioned, it frogmarches Akbar, Jahangir, Aurangzeb, Farrukhsiyar, Murshid Quli Khan, Alivardi Khan, Mir Madan Khan, Jagat Seth, Omichund, Nabakrishna Deb, Warren Hastings, Khwaja Petrus Arratoon, Khwaja Wajid, Marquis de BussyCastelnau, Mir Jafar, Mir Qasim and sundry others pining for what is not, before, after and in between. Historians, namely Robert Orme, George
Malleson, Saiyid Amin Ahmad, Christopher Bayly, Percival Spear, Irfan Habib, besides several doyens, also mark their territories.
As Chakravarti cautions in the beginning, this is a grand theatre— or a delightful schizophrenia—of proper nouns and their spellings. Just as the conspirators of 18th century Bengal are seen cohabiting with each other in that absurd era of contained conflicts, chaos and camouflage, Qasimbazar, Cossimbuzar, Cossimbazar and Kasimbazar or Moorshedabad, Murshidabad and Muxadabad—to name just a couple—all inhabit the book uncomplainingly.
The most awaited moment, the battle itself, is written with circumspection. It was one where Siraj’s army of about 60,000 soldiers, 300 cannons and 300 elephants fought one-twentieth of its strength in Clive’s 3,000 men. The militia of the last Nawab of Bengal deserted, surrendered or defected. Siraj’s last wish of offering namaz was stabbed short, and Mir Jafar headed Clive’s first government. Going by today’s fiscal standards, a sum in excess of £30 million was transferred to the Company’s army, besides an annual revenue of over £300 million. Clive took to Britain a jagir of £3.5 million and family seats in the Parliament. Nearly all conspirators, including Clive, met dreadful deaths within a span of 20 years, revealing what Chakravarti reiterates as the
‘sting of karma’.
This is a book that librarians must list and buyers read for what it is worth, if not also for the battle itself that it recounts. Publishers and readers must patiently cradle the deeper talents and prescience of the likes of Chakravarti to build better societies, especially in these times.