A Musician Draws On His Sindhi Heritage

Tarun Balani's album 'Kadahin Milandaasin' is an elegiac exploration of identity and displacement

- Bhanuj Kappal

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-based 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 (in present-day Pakistan) to the refugee colony in Lajpat Nagar in 1952, in the wake of Partition. Balani never met his grandfather, who died 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 Yashica 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 filmmaker with his camera, would end up being a major influence on Balani's artistic worldview, and his self-conception as a "sonic storyteller".

"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. "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."