A Telling Impact

A moving tribute to the mesmerising storyteller, Ankit Chadha, who passed away in a tragic accident recently, showing us in his passing and through his fellow performer’s words, that some lights, and words, can never be extinguished.

- Bindhu Malini Narayanaswamy

We begin with silence and a breath and everything goes back into silence and a breath in the end.

This is how we start and end Khusrau ke Rang, the musical narrative written and designed by Ankit Chadha. The four of us – Ankit, Vedanth Bharadwaj, Ajay Tipanya and I – always get into a tight group hug and then we would say, ‘Let us perform this once again for ourselves’, knowing that is the only way we can reach out to the audience. And then we enter into that realm of deep meditation that we also call a performance.

Dastangoi (the art of storytelling) is mostly performed in Urdu, a language that I am not exactly familiar with. The first time I met Ankit was just before his performance of Kahani Dhai Aakhar Ki, a Dastangoi on poet-saint Kabir written by him. And I remember, I did not understand a word, or maybe I understood a maximum of two words, but I just sat riveted. Vedanth and I performed after him, and that evening we just casually said it would be nice to collaborate.

Maybe I was chuckling inside when I said that, knowing how ‘amazing’ my understanding of Urdu was. That was in 2013. One year later, Khusrau ke Rang was born. It was the first exploration for Ankit with music woven into the stories. Before we realised it, Vedanth and I, both Tamilians from Madras, were singing Qawwali and exploring excerpts from the Quran, while the Delhi boy spent many painful (and hilarious) hours of struggle to get this Tamil boy and girl to say their Kkkh, a hard Urdu sound to be uttered from the epiglottis. After performing this for four years now, I can safely say we are making some headway.