Everytime I have met someone from the other side, I have found an underlying sense of kinship and love. We have met and looked at each other through the eyes of humanity and not through politics.
 
It has been almost 70 years since the Partition and for many reasons, I now want to explore what the partition meant, through my music. Many of the stories we have heard from our grandparents will be lost with the passing of the older generation and they need to be preserved, honoured and to serve as lessons for generations to come. I hope that in revisiting these stories through music, we are able to empathise, ponder and realize the way forward. Hopefully, a way of peace and co-existence based on a shared grief, a shared loss, a shared history and a shared love.
 
The words of the Punjabi poet, Daman have resounded in my mind from the first time I read them. In many ways, these lines have been my stimulus for putting this project together.

"Laali akhiyaan di dasdi hai
 roye assi vi, roye tussi vi"

(The redness in our eyes shows that you have cried and so have we)

Using the power of music, the voices of Manto, Ali Sardar Jafri, Daman, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Amrita Pritam, as well as personal accounts of ordinary people who lived through this terrible ordeal, my effort has been to weave together a retelling of this holocaust that tore our country apart, but to also look forward with hope and optimism.

The performance will be experiential, with music, poetry, design and interviews from people who lived through the Partition themselves.

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Collaboration - Gopika Chowfla, Deepak Ramola, Ahsan Ali, Manish Halder and Salima Raza.