Silk Road music: A Mumbai pianist’s quest for compositions that echo her in-between self

When I first encountered the languorous sensuality and lush harmonies of the British-Parsi composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, I was immediately transfixed. I was 23, a year into my Masters degree, and had been invited to perform his nocturne In the Hothouse for an edition of the Con Brio piano festival in Mumbai that highlighted the works of Indian composers in the Western Classical tradition.

Written in 1918, the piece is a fantastical tapestry of long trailing vines of melody, which, as the Scottish composer Erik Chisholm noted, “overlap and intermingle with one another like the vegetation of some fantastical tropical forest”. It was immediately reminiscent of the beguiling sonorities and rhythmic flexibility of composers like Debussy and Scriabin, who I would later come to find were as deeply influential on Sorabji as they have been on my own musical tastes.

My introduction to this piece in 2017 came at a somewhat fraught moment in my musical journey. Growing up in the Goan Catholic community in Mumbai, I was steeped in the western musical tradition, starting piano lessons at the age of 5 and voice soon after. Moving to the US at the age of 17 to study western classical music brought about an unexpected dissonance in...

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