Infusing music into Hindi literature

At the Tripathi household in Delhi, dinner table conversation is often an exchange of ballads, sonnets and couplets. Chinmayi Tripathi, a Delhi-based songwriter, says with her father being a Sanskrit scholar and mother a Hindi professor at Delhi University, she grew up devouring the works of Sumitranandan Pant, Makhanlal Chaturvedi, Dharmaveer Bharti and Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala'. "But, when I would interact with millennials, I realised they have no idea about these writers or their work. Worse, they weren't even interested in reading it," says 27-year-old Tripathi, a trained Hindustani singer and the lead singer of the Delhi-based fusion band Spice Route.

Chinmayi Tripathi

It was to revive interest in the great works of Hindi literature that she started the Music and Poetry Project. It is an album that provides tunes to some of the finest poems in the Hindi language culled from the corpus of works by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Nirala, Mahadevi Verma, Anamika, Shivmangal Singh Suman, Bhavaniprasad Mishra and Maithilisharan Gupt.

While the songs have been composed by Tripathi, independent artistes like Susmit Sen (formerly with Indian Ocean), Sharat Chandra Shrivastav (former member of Parikrama), Baiju Dharmajan (Kochi-based guitarist) and Deepak Ram (South African flautist and composer of Indian origin) have volunteered to lend their voice to the album. "I felt there was a need for revival of Hindi poetry and poetic songs. The music is contemporary, peppered with pacy beats and soulful numbers because we want it to resonate with the younger generation," says Tripathi, who started work on the project six months ago.

The album, which will be released by October this year, currently has 10 songs and will be an eclectic fusion of classical, folk and contemporary music. The poems range from the inspirational Jaag Tujhko Dur Jana by Mahadevi Verma to Pagal Nalla, based on a folk tale by Harivansh Rai Bachchan. "The criteria for choosing the songs were mainly the lyrics. For instance, Pattwar by Shiv Mangal Suman is so passionate and full of vigour that if you recite it to a corpse, he will come alive. It's meant for someone who is feeling defeated. The words spur you to do something with your life," she says. Tripathi says she didn't choose popular works such as Madhushala by Bachchan because it's already known. "I wanted to use the lesser-known works by these authors, which are as good or even better than the popular ones."

What she realised as she culled the poems, was the power of words. "Words are so powerful. This project, I feel, has the potential to grow into a movement through music creation, events, workhops and even a music festival."

Tripathi is currently crowdfunding the expenses on the Wishberry platform. "The problem is record labels rarely pay attention to anything other than Bollywood. And, a venture like this needs passionate participants," she says. The campaign has a target of R6,00,000 and has currently raised Rs 2,07,865. "Interestingly, like me, there are many who believe that there is great scope of bringing back good poetry in mainstream music and the fact that it is not there, hurts them. There are not too many people who are trying to make this happen, but I can't do it alone," says Tripathi.