In lieu of the cliched “search for oneself” in the east through a spiritual journey inward, I travelled elsewhere and between the spaces of art forms, wherein migration replaced a place of worship and art became religion. Art in the most archaic sense of the term in which the performing, visual and written forms take equal and effervescent precedence. How did then my transit from Mumbai to New Jersey carry the code of what was to become an embodied multidisciplinary practice?

Growing up with the traditional Indian performing arts—Bharatanatyam, Hindustani, Carnatic and devotional forms of music alongside painting and drawing—infected me with a sweeping love for the arts. As a brown teenager and a fresh immigrant, my appearance did not sit right in the racially tense hallways of late nineties American high school. And so, I decided to focus my energies away from the stage, taking to painting, drawing and all the myriad mediums of visual art. By the time I reached college, I got tired of the over-emphasis on craft in the arts—was it just enough to make a pretty picture, or was it equally important what the picture said? The latter question drove me towards the humanities, and I gorged on everything from Philosophy to Psychology, History and Women’s & Gender Studies. This background is critical, as I watch, even today, hordes of graduates from music school deft at playing chords but in the dark when it comes to critical thinking. My tryst with cultural studies and post colonial theory is invaluable as that is what informs my art practice in a growingly globalised and collapsing world.

I began painting again during the pandemic, my first love that few people know of. My paintings featured as part of the 11th Berlin Biennale in a project that integrated film, music, performance and visual art. Speculative historical fiction and feminist theory merged in the work. The contemporary art world is one where the undeniable meaning of the renaissance (wo)man is supported in an otherwise stifling capitalistic world of specialisation. Having worked as a session musician, analogous to an assembly line, towards the fulfilment of another’s vision, it is indeed empowering and exhilarating to envision one’s own project. Here is where poetry became the glue between the various art forms in my practice—if effect and metaphor were the circulating blood and tissue, the visual and performing arts became the vital organs. The spoken and written word collided with painting and music. After all, to pull strands between art forms feels growingly contrived in a world taken by virtual and immersive experiences.

Having traversed the joys of a multi-disciplinary artistic approach, I will land us back to what I made my mark in when I moved back to Mumbai—voice. Voice as an improvisatory and compositional tool. This is something I include in my teaching practice, as the ability of the human voice to communicate an emotion or a narrative is vast. In my studies of Veenapani Chawla’s teaching methodology that fuses the Natyashastra with contemporary methods, the actor does not need to experience rasa (emotion) in order to communicate bhava (state of mind); the audience merely receives the rasa. This philosophy is freeing as it explains how performers can hit the stage repeatedly and successively without fatigue as technique enables the body to communicate the desired narrative without the accompanying emotional weight of it. And so, I can laugh and cry through a scene or a song without experiencing the burden of those emotions. This harks back to my operatic practice wherein the rigour and kindness with which I treat my body gets expressed to my audience—the body as instrument is prime philosophy. 

It is not a coincidence that the idiom “finding one’s voice” is simultaneously a metaphorical and literal reference to the creative process and the human voice. My concern with finding my artistic voice has led me to two albums thus far wherein genre-defying songwriting and collaboration with artistes from divergent traditions has come to define my signature approach. The Black Mamba explores love, time-space reflections on impermanence, consumerism and gender, traversing disparate genres such as jazz, soul, hip-hop, opera and Indian classical music, to forge a new genre that is worldbeat. I would urge young songwriters to look beyond themes of heartbreak and romantic love to larger themes. If your work is conceptually driven alongside being melodically, harmonically and rhythmically driven, then you have pushed the limits of artistic exploration, and there cannot be greater fulfilment than that. After all, what you have to say is just as important as how you say it.

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Suman Sridhar is a musician, composer, actor and visual artist from Mumbai / New Jersey. She has sung chart-topping Bollywood film songs and is recognised by Rolling Stone magazine for redefining indie music in India. She has presented her work at dOCUMENTA (13) (Germany), Berlin Biennale (Germany), Southbank Centre (U.K.), Coke Studio MTV India, NH7 Weekender (India), BBC World Service (U.K.). Her latest album The Black Mamba had a world preview at Tate Modern in London.