Shantanu Moitra’s Himalayan songs

The year was 2016. The Hindi film, 3 Idiots, rocked the box office. While its songs scaled up the charts, the composer Shantanu Moitra decided to explore the peaks of the Himalayas. He wanted to get away from the hype of success and failure in Bollywood and the humdrum of city life. So along with his photographer-friend Dhritiman Mukherjee, he set out on a 100-day journey.

“I didn’t have any musical agenda. I went without a recorder. Sometimes you just need to travel without a purpose,” says Shantanu, ahead of his show on February 27, at NCPA (National Centre for the Performing Arts), Mumbai, which is inspired by this trip.

His first stop was Ladakh. For eight days, he just absorbed the stunning sights and sounds of the region. He would sit or walk around looking at people and chatting with them. “It taught me important life lessons. For instance, there was this Changpas woman whose livelihood was rearing sheep. One night, a snow leopard killed her flock of five sheep. The next morning, I saw her sitting with a child on her lap. I asked her what she would do now. She replied matter-of-factly, “Yeh toh unka ghar hai, hum toh unke mehman hain (this is the house of the snow leopard, we are only guests here).”

From Shantanu’s travelogue
| Photo Credit: Courtesy: Shantanu Moitra

Shantanu plans to narrate many such riveting stories at the show, as he feels the music of the mountains is an extension of life. He will perform with Ani Choying, a Buddhist nun from Nako Gompa in Nepal; Hindustani vocalist Kaushiki Chakraborty; and violinist Ambi Subramaniam. The songs, without lyrics, are based on the sounds of the landscape, and are conveyed through swars and chants.

From Ladakh, Shantanu journeyed to Lahaul-Spiti, Uttarakhand, Nepal, Tibet, and finally reached Arunachal Pradesh. “Only when you travel, you realise there is art all around. While camping at that high altitude (14,000 ft), I strangely found myself humming classical tunes. The topography seemed to reflect the highs and lows of the octaves. It felt like I was reconnecting with my Banaras roots (his family hails from the city), where our home constantly resonated with music.”

‘100 days in the Himalayas’ is about experiencing a land through its music. “To me, it has been an internal journey, at the end of which I began to look at myself and my music from a new perspective,” says the composer, who went on a Ganga trail last December, cycling for over two months from Gomukh to Ganganagar.