"Speaking Back To History In Real-Time": Tarun Balani On How The India-Pakistan Conflict Weighed On His Album Release

When the Hindus from the Sindh region left their homes in the aftermath of the blood-soaked partition of India and Pakistan, growing concerned about their place in the effectively non-secular new nation they suddenly found themselves in, they weren’t just displaced from their homes but also from any geographic cultural anchor. Unlike Punjabis or Bengalis, who could relocate within their respective linguistic territories, Sindhi Hindus had no state or province of their own waiting—they were refugees absorbed into linguistically unfamiliar parts of India. The Sindhi language itself wouldn’t be officially recognised by India until 2 decades later in 1967.

Still, escaped from the shadows of violence that scarred both nations, they forged small pockets of survival—communities where culture endured through oral tradition and storytelling. One such pocket grew in the multi-cultural refugee colony of New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, where writer, painter and photographer K.S. Balani set up his studio.

About a quarter-century later, K.S. Balani’s grandson, the musician Tarun Balani found himself in the same studio, grasping at the echoes of life his grandfather had built to discover the Sindhi phrases, melodies, poems, oral histories and, more importantly, childhood memories and shared grief within his heritage.

As Tarun releases the music inspired by his research, in the form of the 7-track album ‘ڪڏهن ملنداسين Kadahin Milandaasin’ (Sindhi for “when will we meet?”), he finds the nations of India and Pakistan violently in conflict yet again – and yet again, it is the people in close proximity to the two nations’ commonalities that suffer the most.

“The timing of the album’s release, coinciding with renewed tensions between India and Pakistan, brought a kind of weight and urgency to the music I hadn’t anticipated,” Tarun tells me. “‘Kadahin Milandaasin’ was always meant to be a bridge—a way to trace shared memory across a divided geography. But in this context, it felt like the songs were speaking back to history in real time. The research—especially speaking to elders and piecing together scattered stories—suddenly felt less like archival work and more like active remembrance.”

With the album, Tarun finds and shares the artefacts and documentations from the time his grandfather’s generation would gather at community meals, telling stories of older glory and the growing pains of building new lives over dishes recreated from the time and place they had left behind. Tarun recreates glimpses from it for the music video for his title track, on which he surprisingly appears as a singer as well, repeating the titular refrain – a turn on the line “Tade Milanda Si (we will meet then)” by poet Shaikh Ayaz from his partition-inspired poem ‘Tiri Pawanda’.

“The current news cycle made those historical events feel very present,” Tarun continues, referring to the constant claims, some accurate and some less so, of missiles thwarted, drone attacks carried out, militant bases destroyed and collateral damages that had us again hooked to news outlets during India-Pakistan’s military action on each other in May and the hypernationalist and raging commentary that often surrounded it. At the sidelines of these military conflicts, a mob decided to vandalise Hyderabad’s prominent Karachi Bakery, a business set up in 1953 by a Sindhi Hindu family that migrated during the partition, stupidly interpreting the inclusion of “Karachi” in the name as allegiance. “I used to think of this music as a search for belonging, but what surfaced was the realisation that diasporic identity is not a fixed place—it’s an ongoing negotiation, shaped as much by displacement as by resilience.”

However, the album is only as political as the personal story of Balani’s familial roots. It is not a work protesting, rousing or even explicitly documenting, but rather reflecting and introspecting with a very personal lens. Unmarried from the concept notes, the music becomes a lot more abstract. The Sindhi aspects don’t jump up beyond the aforementioned refrain on the title track and its slightly exotic melody. What remains prominent is the emotion of longing on the melodies of ‘Lajpat Nagar Sometimes’, an ode to the neighbourhood Balani and his forefathers made a home in, or the foreboding sense of tragedy of the textures that emerge out of the reflective sparseness that permeates drum brushes, hushed trumpet notes and piano tinkles on ‘ٻوڏ Sailaab’.

Tarun Balani hosting a listening session for 'Kadahin Milandaasin' at Oddbird Theatre, New Delhi

Indeed, even for me, whose first qualm alongside respect for Tarun’s discography has been how important or arbitrary the concepts and contexts around his releases have been in the actual experience of the music, ‘ڪڏهن ملنداسين Kadahin Milandaasin’ is the most successful in actually echoing the stories that went behind its creation. Within Tarun’s work, there is an unprecedented level of emotional intensity, which I identify as anguish, on the harmonic stabs that build from and dissipate into reminiscing arpeggios on ‘Samadhi 02.11.2024’. The track is a version of an earlier release that Tarun reworks to commemorate the passing of his father.

The handpicked rhythmic motifs that build ‘The Laburnum Blooms’, a track inspired by the trees of Delhi, do carry the wistfulness suited for thoughts travelling through memories, real and imagined – like the one of Tarun wondering if his grandfather, whom he never got to meet, too used to admire the gulmohar tree outside his studio window, the same which Tarun does now.

“I went into the process thinking I was simply tracing ancestry, but I ended up immersing myself in a cultural archive that feels both distant and intimately familiar,” remembers Tarun about his journey researching for the album, and in doing so, stumbling upon the two contrasting words that describe the emotional state the album puts you in: distant and intimate. “This music became a pathway to carry memory, grief, and stories of migration, but also a celebration of the resilience of our community. In doing so, I found a deeper connection not just to Sindhi culture, but to myself.”

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Words: Amaan Khan