Where no desi band had played
He plays the Diwali festivals and the Indian food festivals too. What Shivam Shankar counts as the milestone is the small Belgian rooms that had never booked a band like his.
Shivam Shankar
Belgium ¡ 3 min read
Invitations from unlikely places
Shivam Shankar's gigs turn up in places you would not predict. Sounds Jazz Club. KFK. Small local rooms, festival stages, bars â and the invitations keep arriving from quarters nobody went looking for: neighbourhood festivals, local collectives, groups who caught the band somewhere and wanted them next. Very little of it has been planned. Most of it has been asked for.
There has been a gig a month since he landed in Belgium, and the map has kept widening â Amsterdam, Luxembourg, France. He fronts Dariya: he sings, he plays guitar, and there are three of them. They do not work the covers circuit. Shivam writes his own songs, and then they go and find rooms for them.
It's been a rollercoaster ride since I arrived in Belgium.
Jamshedpur, and the dustier trail
He was born and raised in Jamshedpur, in the eastern belt of India, and trained there in Indian classical music â the discipline of it, the years of it. What kept pulling at him was the rougher thing next door: folk, older and less tidy, with dust on it.
Two cultures sat around that training, and he still carries both. Bengali, and a rustic Bihari one. Both satirical. Both fond of the joke that turns out to be the point.
Born and raised in eastern belt of India, Jamshedpur, schooled in the discipline of Indian classical music, but always chasing the wilder, dustier trail of folk.
Fourteen years of getting people into a circle
Long before Belgium, the work was already the same: gather people, and let the music be the reason they are in a room together. Fourteen years of it now, in one country and then another.
Dariya was born here. The instinct behind it was formed a long way east of here, and it travelled intact. Across Europe, that instinct has taken a specific shape: driving community folk music through the continent, and watching it land with people from every walk of life â not just the diaspora rooms, but strangers with no connection to India at all, pulled in and finding something like joy in it.
For fourteen years now, I've been building community around music, pulling strangers into circles of sound and calling it home.
Where no desi band had played
There is a ready-made audience available to him, and he plays for it gladly â the Indian Food Festival, the Diwali festival, a diaspora that turns up and knows exactly what it is hearing. He is close to that community and says so.
But ask him for the milestone and he does not name any of that. He names the other rooms: small, local, Belgian, the kind of place that had simply never had a band like his on the bill. Getting booked there is not the same as being invited home. It is harder, and he is prouder of it.
We are performing in places which are very local, where no Indian bands, no desi bands, have performed.
A song that outran the stage
Not everything he has made stayed on a stage. He also wrote the Hindi-language Game of Thrones song that went hugely viral â the kind of reach a live gig can never quite match, carrying his music to people who will likely never see Dariya perform in person.
Light that only makes sense next to dark
Ask what the songs are actually about and the answer is not a genre. It is duality â opposites that need each other, the one that only means anything because the other is standing next to it. Old eastern philosophies, and the dilemmas inside them, still turning over while he writes.
Three people, their own songs, and a list of stages that keeps getting longer. He calls Dariya a fantastic three-piece and says he is proud to be associated with it, which is a modest way of describing a band you front.
Old eastern philosophies and their beautiful dilemmas live in my head rent free, and they bleed straight into every note I write.
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