Saraswati Nandini Majumdar

This Foundation Project, implemented by IFA, investigates the Banarasi bandish as a rich site of lyrical, musical, and archival inquiry, unpacking its layered poetic and sonic textures through creative experimentation and critical reflection. Through writing, composition, collaboration, and performance, the project reimagines the bandish as both a living archive and a generative musical form. Saraswati Nandini Majumdar is the Coordinator for this project. 

Saraswati Nandini Majumdar is a poet, scholar, and Hindustani vocalist with years of training under maestros Rajan and Sajan Mishra. She holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English, and has taught and performed across India and internationally. Her interests span gender and feminism; the body; labour; mythology; ‘vernacular’ literary and performance genres, and popular culture. Given her love for experimental and collaborative work as well as her extensive training in the vocabulary of Hindustani music, she is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

Through intimate sessions with musicians in Banaras and elsewhere, the artist will investigate how the lyrics, anecdotes, philosophies, and contextual sounds that surround the bandish form an embodied textuality that informs both raga improvisation and the lived experience of music. Responding to a musicological landscape that often sidelines the bandish in favour of raga, her research brings attention to the compositional poetics of Hindustani music and the layered meanings within oral and sonic traditions.

The research combines formal and informal interviews, musical training, sound collection, writing, digital composition, and experimental collaboration with musicians to develop new interpretations of old compositions. Community-driven events like baithak workshops and public installations in Varanasi, Delhi, and Bangalore will serve both as dissemination channels and as research methods, fostering exchange among scholars, artists, and listeners.

The outcomes of this project will include experimental audio tracks based on the Banarasi bandish, baithak-style concerts that blend traditional and reimagined performances, and a bilingual website serving as a living archive of compositions, narratives and sonic responses. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA, along with the final reports, will include: the audio tracks, concert documentation, and the website.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme, bringing together research-based inquiry and artistic risk-taking. By drawing on the coordinator’s experience as a poet and a musician and treating the Banarasi bandish as a living, evolving archive shaped by memory, imagination, and everyday life, the project opens up new ways of understanding and sharing classical music, pushing beyond conventional modes of musical practice, inquiry, and documentation.

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

The Project is part-supported by BNP Paribas India.