The Silk Road: My quest for compositions that echo my in-between self

Published in Scroll on June 17, 2023

When I first encountered the languorous sensuality and lush harmonies of the British-Parsi composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, I was immediately transfixed. I was 23, a year into my Masters degree, and had been invited to perform his nocturne In the Hothouse for an edition of the Con Brio piano festival in Mumbai that highlighted the works of Indian composers in the Western Classical tradition.

Written in 1918, the piece is a fantastical tapestry of long trailing vines of melody, which, as the Scottish composer Erik Chisholm noted, “overlap and intermingle with one another like the vegetation of some fantastical tropical forest”. It was immediately reminiscent of the beguiling sonorities and rhythmic flexibility of composers like Debussy and Scriabin, who I would later come to find were as deeply influential on Sorabji as they have been on my own musical tastes.

My introduction to this piece in 2017 came at a somewhat fraught moment in my musical journey. Growing up in the Goan Catholic community in Mumbai, I was steeped in the western musical tradition, starting piano lessons at the age of 5 and voice soon after. Moving to the US at the age of 17 to study western classical music brought about an unexpected dissonance in my self-conception. No longer surrounded by others like me, and unmoored from most of the Indian cultural markers that had previously permeated my life in Mumbai, I began to wonder what made me truly “Indian” beyond my passport. The music to which I had devoted my life certainly didn’t.

Chelsea de Souza plays Sorabji: In the Hothouse

To someone who has traveled between India and the US at least once a year for nearly half her life, as I have, the world can often feel both incredibly within reach and far too large. It gets harder and harder to commit to a singular definition of self. I am Indian, but also one who has not lived there in over a decade. I sometimes wonder if the international skies might be my real home: those hours spent between origin and destination when I am tethered to neither. I fidget in my cramped seat and try to imprint in my memory the feeling of being awoken by a parent bearing a plate of cut fruit (the ultimate South Asian expression of love) or the salty taste of the sea breeze along Bandra’s promenades.

For those of us who are displaced from our roots, this kind of nostalgia is both an understanding of our shared cultural origins as well as an acknowledgement of the impossibility of attaining a complete sense of self. For first-generation immigrants like Sorabji, this nostalgia is often for an invented past – an era not as it actually was but as it might have been.

Born Leon Dudley Sorabji to an English mother and a Parsi father in 1892 England, his musical origins are entirely of that time and place. He took piano lessons as a boy, and soon developed into a serious pianist of the virtuoso pianist-composer tradition.

The harassment he experienced as a gay man of mixed ancestry growing up in England eventually spurred the development of a non-English identity that embraced the very origins for which he was persecuted. In 1913, he officially changed his name to Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji with a navjote ceremony, and from then on completely disavowed any vestiges of Britishness: “I am BY NO MANNER OF MEANS NOR IN ANY WAY ENGLISH… my racial, ancestral and cultural roots are in civilisations with more millennia behind them than Anglo-Saxondom has centuries’’.

This newly-claimed Indo-Persian identity was not without complications. In 1932, he wrote of “our own people, the Parsis, who thank God are not ‘Indians’”. But by all accounts, he remained immensely proud of everything that being a Parsi stood for, especially their storied artistic traditions.

A major source of personal and musical inspiration were his readings of Persian literature, especially for his nocturnes such as In the Hothouse, which he described as evoking “tropical heat”. The most lavishly ornate and sensuous of his music, these single-movement works are frequently perceived as “Oriental”. Composer and musicologist Alistair Hinton describes them as “representing the essential Persian Sorabji”, a statement that presumes a connection between the composer and his father’s Zoroastrian ancestors before they left Persia in the 8th century.

Of course, it was the default of much 20th-century scholarship to understand composers like Sorabji as being “authentically” or essentially Oriental and expressing an innate Eastern musicality, rather than as complicated multicultural individuals with self-constructed, and often entirely invented, identities.

Sorabji plays Sorabji: a live radio broadcast of the composer on his own Steinway piano.

My overwhelming first impression of In the Hothouse was not that of a reproduction of any style of Indian music, but simply an extension of French composter Claude Debussy’s innovations in harmony and form. Yet its free, improvisational feel combined with Sorabji’s self-professed Indo-Persian heritage prompted critics of the time to label it as innately “Oriental”, only superficially a part of the Western musical tradition. An entry in an important 1930 music encyclopedia demonstrates as much:

  “In order to reveal the Oriental mind through a musical medium, a musically gifted Oriental would be needed, one who had mastered the western musical language well enough to express his conceptions with freedom, yet free from the conventions by which Western minds are unconsciously bound. This is the phenomenon presented by the personality of Sorabji…”  

Yet Sorabji had a complicated relationship with Indian classical music. He viewed the Hindustani improvisation style of “endless repetition” (a gross oversimplification that could only come from someone with limited knowledge of the centuries-old practice) to be its downfall, one that would prevent the art from achieving the stature of European art. Fascinated with the exotic, mystical Orient of Western imagination that he encountered through the writings of Orientalist precursors such as Gustave Flaubert, he chose what he perceived as the most striking elements of Indo-Persian culture and raga performances. He viewed them through the lens of his own Western musical aesthetic to create a hybrid form that tells us more about his own emerging sense of cultural identification than it does about any innate Oriental musicality.

If Sorabji’s process of self-identification with his Indian heritage was reactionary, the result of his feeling alienated from British society, I have found an altogether different note in the charming Reena Esmail’s conception of a shared tradition of Indian and Western classical music. Born in 1982 to parents from Goa and Gujarat and based in Los Angeles, California, she describes her music as “trying to bridge the two universes of Indian and Western music, in a reflective, personal way”.

With degrees in composition from the Juilliard School and Yale School of Music, as well as a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India, she represents the modern Indian diaspora – first- and second-generation immigrants that seek a more complete sense of self through keen engagement with the art forms and cultural traditions of an ancestral home in which they may have never lived.

Reena Esmail discusses familial influences and bringing Indian folk songs and Western classical music together in her compositions.

Esmail’s own diasporic nostalgia finds its best expression in the musical material that she draws from her own family. In Jhula Jhule, for violin and piano, she uses two folk melodies: the first, a song called Ankhon Vina Andharon Re that her Goan grandfather made a recording of long before she was born; the second, a lullaby called Jhula Jhule that her Gujarati grandmother would sing to her as a baby.

When Esmail writes of her grandfather, a man who she never met but with whom she had much in common, one senses a yearning for connection across time and space – no wonder, then, that the piece is imbued with such an aching desire in its haunting violin melodies that build to a delirious climax before fading back into the ethereal piano arpeggiations. Performing this work is an experience unlike most – the violinist and pianist dancing around each other, both in their own worlds of raga-inspired melody, finding connection in the moments when one phrase melts into the next.

Suzana Bartal and Vijay Gupta perform Reena Esmail's Jhula Jhule.

In my search to curate a solo piano programme that would trace a “Silk Road’’ of musical trade between East and West, I was drawn to Esmail’s Rang de Basant (Give it the Color of Spring), a piano work of sinewy chromaticism colored with the dark, bold tones of the Hindustani Raag Basant, and the tension between the shudh and tivra madhyam notes that evokes a very different aesthetic than the Western conception of spring. The dense opening chords give way to an excerpt from a short bandish in Raag Basant, stylised for the sonic possibilities of the piano – a low bass note that resounds every few measures as a drone, and a melody layered above that winds sinuously around the pitches of the raag.

In the face of a long history of Western music appropriating Indian elements in a way that renders them no longer Indian at all, Esmail’s desire to create something that both Western and Hindustani connoisseurs might find resonance within is refreshing, and much-needed.

Chelsea de Souza plays Esmail: Rang de Basant.

In her essay Ballad for Goa, about the jazz guitarist Amancio D’Silva, scholar Nicole-Ann Lobo writes: “To be Goan is to be at once tied to a particular place and to bear claim to a heritage that is universal, worldly, and fundamentally cosmopolitan”. As I write this essay, sitting in my bedroom in Bandra with the welcome sound of the first rains outside my window, I am struck by how my performance of music such as Sorabji’s and Esmail’s is my own way of integrating the parts of myself that are cleaved across geographies and artistic traditions.

Articulating a cultural space for myself, a Catholic Goan from Mumbai, within the world of Western Classical music, requires that I constantly reconstruct my art to be relevant across geographical and cultural boundaries. In their works I can find opposing but equally poignant expressions of the dual ties of my Indian roots and my Western musicality.