The Way Home

For India-born Danish conductor Maria Badstue, music is the one space where she truly belongs

- Pritha Vashishth

INDIA-born Danish conductor Maria Badstue sits on a chair, her bushy brows hovering over 'the duck tales of Danish descent' she recites to her daughter. She touches her nose often; and fall silent, slightly discomfited, whenever the conversation drifts towards the orphanage she was adopted from.

“What would a five-month-old know?” she asks. Her daughter—Nordic, Scandinavian—and she herself of Indian descent, both anchored to the brown skin she wears.

Badstue was in Mumbai for the sixth time to conduct the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) at the NCPA. The SOI Chamber Orchestra collaborated with musicians from The Royal Academy of Music and The Royal Danish Academy of Music under Badstue's baton. The programme featured Carl Nielsen's radiant Helios Overture, followed by one of Rachmaninoff’s most beloved works, performed by celebrated Danish concert pianist, Søren Rastogi.

“I wish I had come earlier,” says Badstue. She visited India for the first time in 2017. She had lived in Thisted, Denmark, for all the years before that. Badstue was only five months old when a Danish couple adopted her from an orphanage in Pandharpur, a pilgrimage town along the Chandrabhaga River in Maharashtra. The thought of meeting her birth parents had never occurred to her. The mirage of that hope never shimmered before her. In fact, it wasn’t until 2017 that she opened the briefcase that held the documents of her adoption.

“I was already home. I couldn’t be running behind a colour,” she says. “I was this person with brown skin in a class of whites, but I never felt I didn’t belong because everyone was welcoming. But...”

When she landed in India for the first time, she recalls, “I saw people like me. Is there a word I can pen down to describe how I felt?” For years, the only glimpse she had of India was in the mirror—her own face, her eyes.