Across borders: music, memory and the meeting of civilisations

Dear Saira Peter and Joanna Goodale,

Having attended your musical performances at Forman Christian College (a chartered university) this Fall, I am compelled to share my reflections with you. I am continually struck by how you blend the structure and expressiveness of Western classical genres - opera or piano - with the depth and lyricism of Eastern musical traditions. Your performances inspired me to consider the power of musical encounters across cultures and how the arts invite us into histories, traditions and experiences beyond our own.

When I think of a musical maestro, I can only think of Tansen. Mughal miniatures shape my sense of Tansen, just as Ragamala paintings shape my sense of music. For me, Tansen embodies artistic mastery, bridging history, myth and lived musical experience in our part of the world. Growing up in the 90s, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook defined music for us with the legendary albums Mustt Mustt and Night Song, fusing Eastern and Western musical traditions, leaving a lasting influence. Through visual art, I often wonder: how to translate a fleeting melody into colour, gesture or form? What might these paintings reveal about the dialogue between artistic traditions and the cultures that nurture them?

These questions led me to reflect on music as more than entertainment. At your performance, I witnessed FCC Community and the public gathering not only to listen, but to participate - clapping, singing along and exchanging stories afterwards. This sense of communal activity transformed the concert into a living dialogue, nourishing the soul and creating a shared experience that lingered well beyond the final note. Music, then, offers a field of inquiry through which we can explore cultural memory, identity and exchange.

From the traditions associated with Tansen to contemporary cross-cultural encounters, music's history reminds us that artistic traditions rarely develop in isolation. They travel, meet and acquire new meanings. When musical vocabularies intersect, it is not necessarily a loss of identity; it can be an opportunity to appreciate difference and discover new common ground.

Your performances brought this possibility into focus for me. The fusion was particularly powerful, weaving together the spiritual depth of Sufi poetry with the intricate structures of opera or classical music. This blend resonated deeply with the audience - students spoke about how the performance helped them see their own heritage in a new light, while others found unexpected commonality in the music's universal themes. You demonstrated how music can create dialogue across geographical and cultural boundaries, connecting audiences through shared listening even when their histories and experiences differ.

Beyond the concert hall, these encounters raise important research questions. How do musical traditions travel? What happens when a melody enters a different cultural context? How do musicians balance inherited traditions with experimentation? Such questions connect music to cultural history, ethnomusicology and the study of migration, identity and civilisational exchange.

Music also has a social purpose. It creates spaces where people can gather, listen and share an experience. In a world frequently divided by national, religious and political boundaries, this capacity for connection deserves recognition. Music may not resolve our differences, but it can encourage us to approach them with curiosity rather than suspicion.

My journey from Mughal miniatures and Ragamala paintings to live music has reminded me that the arts continually open doors into one another. Perhaps this is their enduring gift: they let us encounter the unfamiliar, reconsider what we thought we knew and recognise possibilities for connection. Music, then, is not simply something we hear. It is how we remember, investigate, communicate and build relationships.

In a world increasingly defined by divisions, perhaps real understanding begins with the willingness not just to listen, but to truly hear one another - a lesson your music so eloquently demonstrates.

Bano

Oct 2026