Sebanti Chatterjee and Soumik Mukherjee

Sebanti Chatterjee is a Delhi-based scholar and storyteller with a specialisation in Anthropology of Sound. She has recently submitted her thesis titled Western Classical Music in Goa and Shillong: Exploring the Indigenous, at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Currently, she teaches Sociology at Sharda University. Soumik Mukherjee worked as a journalist and reporter for various online media outlets for over a decade, moving to other forms of storytelling, specifically working with documentary filmmakers. He has edited over a dozen films for educational, infotainment and web series for NGOs, corporations and production houses. He has been working on a documentary film on the ghost villages of Uttarakhand as an independent producer, which is slated for release this year.

This grant will enable Sebanti and Soumik to make a film on the lives of four vocal artists in Mizoram and Meghalaya, who are associated with making congregational music and other varieties of the choral tradition. These musicians come from families who strictly follow religious practices and protocols. While their forays into music began as devotion, they soon moved beyond the tenets of faith. The ‘vocal’ as a social object familiarised them with their own bodies as instruments in certain religious contexts, as well as an interface to articulate their existential dilemmas. The film will explore their journeys through life and the idiosyncratic relationships which they have with their practices. It will chronicle their articulations of ethnicities, gender, sexuality, citizenship, faith, friendship and their creative processes. Sebanti and Soumik will investigate how these musicians navigate their ways around the ritualistic and performative elements of faith and articulate aspects of social, political and identity through their practices.

According to Sebanti and Soumik, voice as a creative process becomes a relevant social object, which lends itself to tease out complexities of identity, creative journeys and vocational opportunities. They will explore ways in which different voices tell different stories. They will also analyse how a choral group animates distinct aspects of a social landscape. Sebanti and Soumik will employ an observational style of filmmaking that does not force an inorganic arc on its characters. Instead, they will make use of stylised performances of the musicians in order to explore their relationship with the craft as an act of labour. The film will be set against a backdrop of the four musicians’ relationship with their environment and the way their outlook is shaped by the framework of choral music. 

With music as the basic framework, Sebanti and Soumik will try to find vocabulary from within the context for the film. They will attempt to subvert the ostensibly non-political nature of this music and establish an empathetic relationship with the musicians without seeking to find or impose a sense of resolution to a complex terrain of socio-cultural setup. The outcome of this project will be a film. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will also be the film. The budget is commensurate with the proposal. 

This grant is made possible with support from Titan Company Limited.