Veecheet Vigya Dhakal

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will trace the interplay between imagination and realities surrounding the river Teesta and the Teesta highway through expressions of music. Veecheet Vigya Dhakal is the Coordinator for this project. 

Veecheet Dhakal is a musician and filmmaker who shuttles between Bangalore and Kalimpong. He is the lead singer and violinist of the Nepali folk-rock band Gauley Bhai. Through music, Gauley Bhai foregrounds questions of migration, displacement, and identity. Veecheet also runs his own production house Firiri Films for independent and commercial video projects as an independent filmmaker. Given his experience as a musician, Veecheet is best suited to be the Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA. 

Given that the state suppresses most public dissent, the songs and stories become lived alternative histories of people and the place they inhabit. They capture the landscape under the assault of “development” and embrace the region’s larger sociopolitical and psychological atmosphere. Through research into these forms, Veecheet will try to understand how the landscape around Teesta has changed, how people live and cope with the rapid transformations and how music and storytelling practices have evolved, reflecting these shifts.

The project will facilitate spaces for activity, exchanges, and conversations to make the research process interactive and participatory. Music production workshops with young people working as rafters, stone quarries and construction workers along the Teesta highway will form a vital component of the project. Curated walks will be a part of the research methodology for exploring places in the landscape that hold strong memories for people across generations. Foregrounding space as a primary actor, the places and their histories will be used as prompts for conversations around past, present and future. 

Finally, through audiovisual documentation, the project aims to capture the changing moods of Teesta across seasons, capturing the rhythm of life and work in the region through short videos of rafters, contractors and workers. Interviews with people will be conducted to form a dynamic archive which will reveal how people perceive and represent the landscape they live within. 

Senior rafters and river guides Shanti Rai and Santabir Tamang, who live and work in Teesta, will collaborate with Veecheet on the project. Joe Panicker, drummer with Gauley Bhai and music producer, will facilitate the music workshops, while Angarika G will be involved in the project as a researcher and facilitator. Overall, the project intends to draw an amorphous portrait of the Teesta highway line by foregrounding music and rhythm to understand and engage with infrastructural changes and transformations. 

The outcomes of this project will be songs produced through collaboration with local musicians, performances in community spaces, and video diaries capturing the rhythm of life and work along the highway. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be music recordings, stories from walks, visual diaries, and audiovisual documentation of the process. 

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme in the manner in which it attempts to express alternative lived histories of marginalised people whose voices are constantly oppressed by the state, through songs and music. 

IFA will ensure the timely implementation of this project and that funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the project’s progress at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is complete and deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation report to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with support from BNP Paribas India.