Tabla player on a mission to revive Afghani music

Tabla virtuoso Samir Chatterjee firmly believes that music can transform lives. He witnessed it first-hand while reviving the music tradition in Afghanistan, ravaged by 40 years of war.

“A minister of higher education told me that a live TV show I performed in Afghanistan towards 2008-end was the first since the Taliban left (in 2001). He said he was waiting for this moment. He got emotional and called me ‘the godfather of Afghani music’. I don’t know if I deserved to hear that,” the Kolkata-born, New York-based artiste says.

Samir was also the first non-Afghan musician to perform after the Taliban rule ceased. During that show, held at a radio station in Kabul and attended by local musicians, some elderly men sobbed. That was the time when Afghanis were “demonised as terrorists”, so for “an Indian to come all the way from America was an assurance that they were not forgotten,” he looks back.

Samir has taught music to over 300 street and orphaned children in the beleaguered nation; some have gone on to perform at leading venues like the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and Carnegie Hall in New York. All this started with a collaboration with Dr Ahmad Naser Sarmast, an Afghan-
Australian ethnomusicologist and the founder of Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) in Kabul.

“I was the initiator of the curriculum and I wanted to base it on the music tradition of Afghanistan. That brought me in close interaction with the locals,” Samir recalls. Afghani music has aspects of folk but also popular music rooted in the Hindustani classical tradition of north India, he learnt. So the students learnt tabla, sitar, bansuri, dilruba, and sarod, “which is the closest to their rabab (a lute-like instrument)”.

Samir first visited Afghanistan in June 2008 and kept returning till about seven years ago. “Religion and music are two foundational pillars of any society, especially in South Asia. When the Soviet came, they shook the religious pillar of the Afghan society. Then when the Taliban came (in the mid-1990s), they took away their music. So when we started reviving the music, it gave people some hope and assurance in life.”

The return of Taliban since 2021 has brought back the “apprehensions and anxiety” of losing Afghani music again. Revival efforts are still on albeit outside. ANIM has shifted to Lisbon in Portugal. Then, Samir is starting a course on Afghan music in New York with singer Ahmad Fanoos who had to flee his home in Afghanistan following a threat by the Talibans to stop playing music. A few of Samir’s Afghan students are pursuing education in the US.

“The people of Afghanistan have been through a lot. They will find a way forward,” Samir says and signs off with a story: Before the Talibans came raiding, local artistes hid the old music records behind a fake wall, and later retrieved and dispatched them to the US for digitisation.