Sufi, Gospel And Partition

Sonam Kalra has her hands full with The Sufi Gospel Project and the more recent, Partition: Stories of Separation.

- Vipasha Aloukik Pai

IN SONAM KALRA’S MUSIC, “ALLAH HU” and “Hallelujah” are interchangeable. As the creator of the hugely successful The Sufi Gospel Project, which merges the two genres of music, Kalra has defied norms to create a fresh space for herself as a musician. “Growing up there was always music in my house, thanks to my mother,” she says. “My first and perhaps the most special memory of listening to music is sitting on her lap, listening to Begum Akhtar.”

The New Delhi-based Kalra studied Hindustani classical music under Shubha Mudgal as a hobby, while she was working in advertising. She quit after four years in 2000 to study music full-time under vocalist Pandit Sarathi Chatterjee, only to lose her voice to “laryngitis, pharyngitis… every throat infection in the world.” She ended up using her time to work in television, freelance and study theatre, before veering back to music.

Kalra credits her theatre training, including her time with acclaimed theatre director Amal Allana, for her return to music; it taught her the value of honesty in the moment. “If my voice cracks when I’m singing out of truth, I’m not thrown by it, because it is the truth of my moment and what I’ve felt at the time. You can hear an opera singer or someone who is singing in perfect pitch, and not be moved, and yet you hear someone on the street with this crack in his voice, and you wonder, ‘Why did that rouse my heart?’”