Stories of music from Meghalaya

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New Yorker profiles. In 2009, a year before he left his home in Shillong to pursue a media degree in Pune, he discovered the New Yorker. In 2015, when he began a freelancing career in Mumbai, he came across Hura’s photobook, Life is Elsewhere (2015).

The former instilled the curiosity to explore the inner lives of people, and the latter the idea to use books as repositories for his photographs. Both come together in his new self-published work, The Songs of Our People, an anthology of 19 musicians and bands from Meghalaya, representing its contemporary soundscape. Music is woven into the cultural fabric of the state’s many communities—from the Khasis and the Garos to the Jaintias.

“I love what Khasi musician Raison Nongrum said: ‘We don’t know what a chord is, but you give us a guitar and we can play,’" Banerjee shares. The black-and-white portraits interspersed with landscape photography in colour are a close study of the artists and a peek into the places that shaped them. Most musicians in the book are in their 20s and 30s, and themes of belonging, loss and identity bind them.

“I am 32. There is a resonance with young artists and their stories because they are closer to my age," he explains. It spans several genres and communities.

Hip-hop and R&B, featuring names like Alphiush G. Marak, Daiaphi Lamare and Mejied Kyrpang, form the bulk of the anthology. This is followed by the blues band Quiet Storm from Jowai from the Jaintia Hills, famous as the winners of the nationwide Band Hunt Competition by Mahindra Blues Festival in 2020.