Rhythms of India

Soumik Datta’s musical journey around India ends with a look at the popular music scene, discovering how Bollywood is changing, the impact of the internet and the rise of hip hop. He starts in Mumbai, the home of Bollywood, where legendary screenwriter Javed Akhtar describes the roots of popular songs in Bollywood’s storytelling tradition. Soumik also meets, and performs with, famous Bollywood playback singer Kavita Krishnamurthy, the voice behind one of Soumik’s favourite Bollywood films, Mr India.

Soumik Datta continues his musical travels around India in the southern state of Kerala, home to some of the oldest religious music in the country. He visits the Panchari Melam, a spectacular Hindu festival with extraordinary displays of massed drumming. And in Maharashtra, he discovers how the brass band tradition, with its origins in the military bands of the British Raj, is falling out of favour as the staple of Indian wedding processions.

Composer Soumik Datta travels around India exploring the country's rich and diverse culture and history through its music. Musician and composer Soumik Datta presents a musical travelogue around India. From a spectacular religious festival in Kerala to folk musicians in the deserts of Rajasthan, intimate performances on the banks of the Ganges to encounters with Delhi's hip hop superstars, Soumik takes us on an entertaining journey celebrating India’s remarkable musical diversity. Meeting and performing with folk, classical and pop musicians, he travels from the biggest cities to the most remote communities, exploring how music helps us understand India’s past and its rapidly changing present.

Free and nomadic, Naïssam Jalal plays with everyone and plays with all musical categories. From jazz to rap, from traditional music to contemporary crossbreeding, she performs with many talented musicians from all walks of life. After having created the duo Noun Ya with the oudist and guitarist Yann Pittard (with whom she recorded the album Aux resistances in 2009), then participated in the Jasmin project of double bass player Hubert Dupont in tribute to the "Jasmin Revolution" (superb album in 2013), it is quite logical that the flautist created in 2011 a set in his image, the aptly named Naïssam Jalal & Rhythms of Resistance.

Percussion Of India is a 1992 album by the Percussion Ensemble 'Laya Lavaniya'. This was released by Seven Seas via King Records in Japan.

This book focuses on the cohering elements across various texts and traditions of India. It engages with several significant works from the Sanskrit tradition and emphasizes the need to move beyond colonial and postcolonial engagements with the enduring cultural pasts of India. The chapters are grouped in three main parts: accented rhythms, dispersed mnemoscapes and inventive iterations.