Track changes in Bastar: Check out medleys by tribal artists, Mumbai band Daira

The Mumbai art-rock band Daira has a new album out that is, quite literally, like nothing they have done before.

For one thing, it features folk artists from Bastar, singing in Gondi, Bhatri and Halbi, with the band’s vocalist Piyush Kapoor singing in Hindi alongside. For another, the album has received widespread attention in Chhattisgarh, with its lead single released on the website of the chief minister of that state, in August.

It all started, for the rock group, when they received an invitation to play in the Chhattisgarh district in 2022. Bastar is perhaps best known, to outsiders, as a key node of the Red Corridor, that hotbed of Maoist insurgency. To be the first independent rock band to play there would be an honour, but also, they thought, a significant risk.
“What we had heard, and all the news we’d read, had created a negative feeling in our minds,” says Kapoor, 34. “But when we got there, we saw something completely different. It’s a beautiful place, where people have preserved and sustained their unique culture. It ended up being one of our most memorable gigs.”
The day after the show, Daira — the term is Hindi for circumference or boundary; the band’s other members are guitarists Shivam Pant, 32, and Pratyayy Mishra, 29, bassist Aditya Ahir, 28, and drummer Aditya N Ranga, 22 — conducted a workshop with local Adivasi musicians, which ended in an impromptu jam session.
When the band heard their signature rock groove fit seamlessly into the folk songs being sung, Kapoor says, they decided to do more.
The result is the album Jaadoo Bastar (Magical Bastar), which takes five folk songs from the region and “respectfully re-imagines them” for a contemporary audience.
“It was magical working on this. We came up with the title track at that first jam,” says Kapoor. “[Folk musician] Lakheshwar Khudaram started singing a folk song and the music just started up as if on its own.”
The effort was supported by then district collector Rajat Bansal, who is passionate about indie music, and is an amateur guitarist. It was Bansal who first invited Daira to perform, at a local festival, in 2022.
When they said they would like to return, they were offered space at the Bastar Academy of Dance, Art and Literature (BADAL), where Khudaram was also head of the folk music department.
A tight budget meant that the band and the cast of local musicians — singers Khudaram, Ablesh Kumar and Vineeta Pandey, and instrumentalists Rahul Raikwar and Shrinath Mohariya — had only five days to finish the album.
“Because of how little time we had, we weren’t able to really explore very much of the music and styles. But working within those limitations made it more focused, less easy to get distracted,” Kapoor says.
There were other unique challenges at BADAL too. For one thing, there was often no electricity. For another, there was no controlled studio environment.
“We would sometimes have to stop because it was suddenly raining, or there was a lot of noise coming in from the road,” says Khudaram. “There were a lot of difficulties, but we didn’t lose heart. We knew the result of hard work is always sweet.”
Word play
Another challenge, quite simply, were the words.
Kapoor, who is the band’s lyricist too, tends towards the abstract and occasionally the absurd. “Teri aankho me main, suar ka baal ho jaata hun, mai gaajar sa laal ho jaata hun (Under your gaze, I turn into a pig’s bristle, I turn as red as a ripe carrot),” goes one of his lines.
This would not work with ancient folk songs that contained their own layers of history and cultural meaning. Realising this, Daira roped in the poet and lyricist Alok Ranjan Srivastava. He would listen to each folk song, explore its layers in discussions with Khudaram and the other musicians, then respond with lines of his own, in Hindi, almost in real time.
“Alok was a little worried, because obviously these are songs that are important to the people of Bastar,” says guitarist Pant. “So he spent a lot of time with Khudaramji, understanding the deeper meanings of the lyrics.”
Together, they found ways to tell stories that are pastoral and earthy, but ask larger questions. “The cow grazes in the corner / The buffalo near the pond / The cat walks the beam / To catch the mouse,” goes a line in Bhatri, in a song that is about the bucolic idyll of Bastar, and also the cycle of life and death.
The album, crucially, offer a different view of the troubled land. Some tracks are buoyant, joyful celebrations of life; others tell of everlasting love; and of Bastar’s natural beauty.
In August, to mark the release of a 54-minute documentary that captures their time there, the band returned to the state, to perform at the iconic, 13th-century, wood-pillared Danteshwari Temple, a shrine to the goddess after whom the town of Dantewada is named.
“We were a little apprehensive about how people would react to the way we had changed their songs. But it was an amazing experience,” says Pant. “There were about 5,000 people there and they were really responding to this new rock style.”
Daira now wants to take this approach with some of the other largely-ignored folk traditions in India. Khudaram, for his part, hopes this album will inspire others from both the folk and contemporary music traditions to collaborate.
“All over India, especially in Adivasi areas, there is good music that’s ignored because it doesn’t get a proper stage,” he says. “Daira offered us that stage, and in sharing their experience with us, also gave us the opportunity to innovate. We should be doing all we can to present the many other songs of Bastar — and other places — on the big stages, before they are lost forever.”