Ace Kashmiri musician, Pragnya Wakhlu bagged two prestigious awards at the recently held 11th Dadasaheb Phalke International Film Festival.
Wakhlu’s music video ‘Kahwa Speaks’, directed by Srinagar-based Rumaan Hamdani and Xulkarnain Dev, was honoured with ‘Best Cinematography’ award.
The song uses a cup of Kashmiri tea as a metaphor for life and beautifully invites people to come together as a society, just as the myriad elements of tea come together to form a fragrant brew.
Wakhlu also bagged ‘Best Music for an Animated Video’ award for ‘Katyuchukh My Love’— a melody song on the love story of 16th century Kashmiri poetess Habba Khatoon and King Yusuf Shah Chak. The video was animated and directed by Daksh Jain and his team in Dehradun. Both the songs were part of Wakhlu’s Kashmiri-English album ‘Kahwa Speaks.’ Each song introduces people to the beauty of Kashmiri culture.
The Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival, India’s highest film fair, received over 600 nominations worldwide. The winners were declared by an international jury.
“It is a great honour to have our work recognised by the international jury, and to win two national awards,” says, Wakhlu, singer- lyricist.
Wakhlu is currently working on her forthcoming album ‘Lessons in Love’, which is set for release this year.
“To win with our self-produced videos against international production houses and big music labels with massive budgets shows that no dream is too big to achieve. Anything is possible if you have a strong vision, creative ideas and a great team. We are extremely proud to take a little bit of Kashmir to the rest of the world with our work,” adds Wakhlu.
Her latest works include her single from the album ‘Whale Song’ which features Australian guitarist Marcos Vilalta. It is a collaboration between three nations: India, the US and Australia.
Last year, Wakhlu hosted a show on DD Kashir called Bollywood Hits, where she sang Kashmiri songs accompanied with guitar and shared a narrative on different poets. The main concept was to draw parallels between different themes used by traditional Kashmiri poets.
Wakhlu was born in Srinagar and raised in Pune where she completed most of her education. “After completing my I.T. engineering from Cummins College of Engineering in Pune, I was campus placed in Infosys, Bangalore. Since my childhood I’ve always been fond of trying my hand at different things.
“I played hockey professionally and represented Maharashtra at the Nationals for many years, learnt classical singing, wrote poetry and played the guitar. I wanted to join Infosys because I knew that they had a hockey team and a band. It was a place where I could continue pursuing my interests alongside work. I was the only girl in our company’s all-male hockey team and once got awarded ‘man of the match’”.
She says, “We formed a band called ‘Zephyr’ and played a lot of gigs in Bangalore in the local circuit. My IT job took me to onsite in Seattle, USA. The city that inspired so many world-famous musicians also inspired me to start writing my own music.
“I performed my first show of original music to an entirely foreign audience at a women artist showcase in Seattle and received a standing ovation. That’s when I first felt that maybe my music has the potential to go somewhere.
“I had also started feeling that my IT job was not meaningful enough and that my life purpose lay elsewhere. I made the decision to quit my job in the U.S. and return India to work on making music that made a difference.
“I moved to Pune where I had to start a new career all over from scratch. I made a new band called Soul Strings and we performed in the Pune circuit, winning the MTV Rockathon and becoming finalists in an international competition Hard Rock Rising.
“I was also very interested in exploring how music can help people beyond just entertaining them. I worked with a dance therapist on experimenting how music and movement can benefit people in a positive way to feel more centred and at peace with themselves. That’s how the idea for my organisation Mousai was born.
“Since 2009 we’ve worked with over 400+ people across India, Hong Kong and the USA. We facilitate workshops where we teach people practices using the body and voice to release energy blocks, center the mind and feel happier and calmer. I recently got inducted as a national council member of the Women’s Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (WICCI) council for Holistic Wellness. We plan to make wellness more mainstream and easily accessible for all.”
‘Journey of Music’
“I released my debut album ‘Journey to the Sun ‘ in 2012 and it was nominated for the GIMA awards, the Indian equivalent of the Grammy’s for the Best Music Debut, Best Pop song and Best Album.
“My second album is a Kashmiri-fusion album ‘Kahwa Speaks’. The idea was to help the world see Kashmir through a positive lens and appreciate the rich culture of our state. We crowd-funded the money for the music videos to create a travelling audio-visual show with my band the Kahwa Speaks Ensemble. Since then I’ve taken the audio-visual show to different festivals in India such as the ‘Towards Peace’ festival in Pune and ‘The Kumaon Literature Festival’ in Uttarakhand.
“I’ve also performed the Kashmiri songs internationally in Hong-Kong where the audience received the music very well. In 2018, I was invited to perform at the Kashmir Overseas Association in Chicago, U.S.A for their annual camp. It was lovely playing to an entire audience of Kashmiris in the U.S.A and reconnecting the next generation to their roots.”
“I am currently working on my third Studio album ‘Lessons in Love’ which will release in June. I’ve released two singles from the album ‘Fallin’ and ‘Akele hi Sahi’ in 2020 and two more songs this year, ‘Whale Song’ and ‘Nice Guy’, as a prelude to the album.
“I started learning music as a child at the age of 6 years and trained in Hindustani classical singing. I think learning any form of classical music is really useful for a singer as it helps train the voice. My grandmother would visit us from Kashmir and play the sitar at home so it created a nice musical environment at home, growing up. She taught me how to play the sitar and a few raags.
“I started playing the guitar when I was 16. Initially I had a lot of stage fright when I performed on stage in college. It got better over the years. During my engineering days, we formed Pune’s first all-girl band and went on to participate and win a lot of inter-collegiate competitions.
“I went on to form bands in every city I lived or worked in including Bangalore, Seattle, Pune and Delhi. I played a lot of live shows where I played the guitar and sang. Since then my confidence on stage has improved and it feels like it’s my second home. I had the opportunity to learn Western Vocals from Sarah Jerrom at the Swarnabhoomi Academy of Music and Joanna Marie SKillet at another summer course.
“Learning specific vocal exercises to improve the voice really honed my singing skills. I continued my singing lessons in Delhi under the guidance of Ustad Aftab Ahmed Khan and I am currently continuing my vocal training under the guidance of Shivani Mirajkar from Dharwad.”
Divulging details about her recent collaborations, she says, “I recently collaborated with Australian jazz guitarist Marcos Villalta on two tracks ‘Whale Song’ and ‘Lessons in Love’ from my upcoming album ‘Lessons In Love’ where he features on the guitar. Whale Song is India’s first indie song & music video featuring whale calls, real humpback whales in Tonga collaborators from 3 different continents, USA (Karim Iliya – Videographer) India(Sonic Shori -Bass, Kunal Netrapal -Drums, Keshav Dhar -Mix and Master , Pragnya – Guitar,Vocals, Composition and Lyrics ,Bhanu Wadhawan- Videographer) and Australia (Marcos Villalta- Lead Guitar).”
She says the whale is a metaphor for feelings and emotions that lie under the surface of what people show us.
“I had reached out to Hawaii based national Geographic contributor and Whale photographer Karim Iliya (whose work I greatly admired) on Instagram asking if he would like to collaborate with me on a music video. Karim dives with whales, photographs them and also has an initiative called ‘Dancing with the Whales’ where he gets people to interact respectfully with whales in their natural habitat in Tonga. He agreed to collaborate with us on the video and generously sent us footage of the beautiful humpbacks he dives with which you’ll see in the video. When you actually interact with whales you realise that they’re pretty gentle giants even though they seem intimidating at first. If we approached our deepest fears (represented as the whale in the video) with the same courage, we would often see that maybe it’s not as hard or scary as we imagined them to be. Other collaborators on my music include Delhi-based Saxophonist Abhay Sharma ,pianist Rythem Bansal and drummer Naren Chettri who featured on Fallin’ and Shailendra Wakhlu who features on ‘Akele hi Sahi’ and another unreleased track on the album.”
Her work
She says it has been a long journey with a lot of ups and downs and learning to get to where she is now. “Life as an independent artist is not always as glamorous as it seems and it is often your passion for the arts and resilience that helps you sail through the rough times.
“I released my first album ‘Journey to the Sun’ in 2012 after I quit my IT Job in the U.S. and returned to India. I wrote a lot about causes I believed in, things I saw in nature that inspired me and my own feelings of self-doubt as I made a massive career switch in my life. ‘Journey to the Sun’ went on to be nominated for the Jack Daniels Rock awards and the GIMA awards that year.
“I released a music video ‘Rise’ which marked my music video debut on VH1 and MTV. As no one in my family or anyone I knew, had chosen a career as a musician, it was a lot of self-learning that happened along the way. There were very limited resources available for independent musicians at the time. Unlike a regular job where there is a clear career path, being a musician is all about creating your own milestones and journey.”
“After performing in the Pune Circuit for many years with my band ‘Soul Strings’, I moved to Delhi and started afresh in a new city. I wanted to write an album that helped me explore my roots. I was also observing a lot of negative news in the media about Kashmir leading to a negative portrayal of Kashmiris and I wanted to do something to help change the narrative.
“Kashmir has so much to offer culturally and I think it’s something every Kashmiri should be proud of. ‘Kahwa Speaks’ is a Kashmiri-English fusion album that introduces people to the Ladishah and Wanwun forms of singing, the translations of poetry by Habakhatoon and Lalded ,an insight into Tibetan culture(representing Ladakh) and the warmth and soul of the people in Kashmir that is an integral part of our culture. I wanted to make this a story-telling, audio-visual experience for people so we crowd-funded money for creating a visual piece to the album.
Kahwa Speaks went on to win the Radiocity Freedom Award for Best Folk Fusion album and VIMA (Malaysia) Awards for Best Genre-Bending song and Best Female Vocalist. Last year we released the animated music video for ‘Katyuchuk My love’ which narrates the love story of King Yousuf Shah Chak and Habakhatoon.
‘Projects in Pipeline’
She is currently working on completing a few songs for my next album ‘Lessons in Love’. She says that ‘Lessons in Love’ was written from a space of wanting to share her vulnerabilities with the world and also being comfortable with sharing them. “The songs are about experiences that I have been through in different phases of my life and what I have learnt about myself and life from them. I’ve released four singles last year and this year that will be part of the album
“The first single from the album is a jazz-inspired track called Fallin’ that I released with a music video that we shot in the lockdown. People from three countries sent in their videos on their definition of love. It’s interesting to see how the same word can have so many different meanings for people based on their individual experiences. Later in 2020, I released my first Hindi single ‘Akele hi Sahi’ that speaks about the acceptance of different ways that people might want to live their life and find their own formula for happiness. This year I released ‘Whale Song’ with a music video and another upbeat, funky song called ‘Nice Guy’, the music video of which I will be releasing later this month.
“I am currently working on a tune called ‘Song of Hope’ from the album. The idea of the song is to remind people that even the darkest days will turn to better ones and all of us will come out stronger as people. I hope that the song can bring a little relief to everyone that’s going through a difficult time right now.
“While I was recovering from Covid in Srinagar, I applied a bit of my sound healing knowledge to make a playlist of solfeggio frequencies (healing frequencies for the body) and other healing chants and music from across the world.
“Being in a positive, meditative frame of mind really helped my body recover better from the illness. I shared this music with a lot of other people as well that found it beneficial.
“After seeing the amount of anxiety, stress and grief our country is going through I felt a strong calling to create some healing music as my next project. As an artist it’s the least I can do to help provide people with some ease, relief and peace during this turbulent time,” she says.
Her organisation Mousai, she says, is launching a new series of 90 minute virtual sessions on topics such as “Sound and movement practices for well-being” “Changing our physiology for Mental breakthoughs” and “Communicating to Captivate” that I will be working on promoting to different organizations.
‘Cinematography is our true calling’
Xulkarnain Dev, who won the award for ‘Best Cinematography,’ grew up in Channapora, Srinagar and did his schooling from Tyndale Biscoe, Srinagar. “As a kid, I was passionate about football and photography. My initial interest in clicking pictures turned into a passion for cinematography when a team of film producers from Mumbai came to Kashmir to document the aftermath of the 2014 floods,” says Xulkarnain.
Soon after working with them, Xulkarnain, along with his friend Rumaan Hamdani, started their own venture, ‘Master Visuals’, where they make videos and documentaries. “I really admire the work of one of the most famous cinematographers from Mexico, Emmanuel Lubezki. He has inspired me a lot,” says Xulkarnain Dev.
Xulkarnain has been an Instagram user since 2011. He uses this platform to showcase his talent and believes that social media has the potential to bring a new dimension to photography and cinematography.
While talking about his remarkable achievement, he says, “It was down to years of hard work, dedication, and commitment which lead to our nomination for the Dadasaheb Phalke Awards.”
Emphasising the importance of proper platforms for photographers and cinematographers, Xulkarnain hopes to establish a school of photography and cinematography in Kashmir along with a production house.
Xulkarnain’s friend and co-cinematographer, Ruman Hamdani, born in Srinagar in 1991, says that he was passionate about filmmaking and photography since childhood.
“I come from a family that was very focused on academics and while I was a good student, my interests lied in the arts. I was attracted towards photography and films from an early age. I would watch movies all the time and look at wedding albums and old photos time and again. The concept of captu ring moments in frames was incredible for me.”
After completing his engineering from SRM University Ghaziabad, he came back to Kashmir to pursue filmmaking and photography.
About his role model in cinematography, he says Roger Deakins, a British cinematographer has always inspired him.
“Deakins and Steve McCurry have a lot of influence on my work. I’ve been drawn to cover the beauty of daily life in Kashmir. The interaction between the people and this majestic beauty that they are surrounded with.”
He says “a lot of my work is dedicated to archiving our dying culture. I photograph the people and architecture that carry the sense of Kashmiriyat as day by day we are losing it. It is extremely sad so my images are for me, a way to capture this time in our history, where modernization is killing our values and traditions.”
Boom of Social media
“I have to credit my success partly to social media. Nearly six years ago I realized the importance of platforms like Instagram and Youtube. They were not only helpful in sharing my work but in connecting with so many different artists and businesses,” he says.
Regarding the award, he says, “The lady behind the creation of this music video, Pragnya, had entered it in this year’s edition of Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival. Somehow the judges nominated us and it indeed was a good feeling. The festival is one of the best in this region.”
He says that the video was special in that it spoke about something that is such a significant part of our life, Kahwa. I don’t think there have been any other videos or songs about it in the current times.
“So it was quite fun getting together our friends and families and filming them drinking Kehwa. We also went to Fakeer Gujri and made Kehwa for some locals there. It was wonderful for me and my co-cinematographer Xulkarnain to capture the positivity of Kashmiri people throughout the shoot. The win for Best Cinematography was a real surprise and treat. In these tough times, it was good news coming out of the blue. We’re honoured to be receiving this award.”