Music and food have long occupied intersecting spaces in our lives, from music in restaurants and live performances in dining spaces to the songs and meals that accompany satsangs, weddings and family gatherings—often becoming a language of community.
Bringing together this connection was ‘Songs On A Plate’, an intimate musical evening held at Project Otenga in Delhi’s Shaheedi Park last weekend. The gathering brought together musician Shruthi Veena Vishwanath and multi-instrumentalist Babui, who plays the dotara, sarod and rabab, for an evening of songs and poetry from the Sant and Bhakti traditions across India.
Vishwanath’s practice centres on South Asian music, particularly Sufi, Bhakti and Warkari traditions. The idea behind ‘Songs On A Plate’ emerged from the close relationship between music, food and community that she encountered while travelling across India. “Wherever I have travelled across India through different communities, there’s always that sense of ‘what is the khana after the satsang?’ If you go to a village in India, you will sit in somebody’s home, you will sing, and then you will have a meal,” she says.
She recalls a Kabir festival in Rajasthan, where local dal baati is cooked and served alongside music. “There’s a complete integration,” she says. The event was an attempt to bring some of that experience into the city—to “share space, music, and food”.
Where songs travelled
The evening began with a warm cup of roselle tea as the lights dimmed inside Project Otenga’s bamboo-lined interiors. The programme moved across songs in Bangla, Marathi, Kannada and Sadri Bhasha, a language that emerged among tea garden workers through an amalgamation of several languages.
As the sounds of the rabab and dotara and the scent of bamboo shoots filled the room, the first song was an old Bengali folk tune by an unknown poet, inviting listeners to sit, have chai and share singara. “Everyone understands chai, and here, tea becomes a metaphor for what we are searching for at a much more fundamental level,” Vishwanath tells TMS.
From Bengal, the songs travelled to 13th-century Maharashtra and the Warkari Bhakti tradition with ‘Kantha Mulla Baaji’, an abhang by farmer-poet Savata Mali. The song invokes onions, radishes and leafy vegetables as manifestations of the divine. For Vishwanath, the song also speaks to an increasingly urban disconnect from the land. “I had never seen a potato leaf till I went to a village 10 years ago and started immersing myself in different communities,” she says. “To celebrate the onion and the radish, knowing that they have been grown by a farmer somewhere, and to understand that connection in our being, becomes a holistic experience.”
The performance also moved to Karnataka and the 12th-century mystic Akka Mahadevi. One of her vachanas recounts a dream of rice, coconut and betel nut, alongside a Gorava boy—an Adivasi figure—whom she eventually recognises as her divine beloved, Chennamallikarjuna, “Lord, white as jasmine”.
A plate to share
Alongside the performance, a prasad of panchamrit was being prepared by chef and Project Otenga founder Kabyashree Borgohain, with the audience invited to add banana, rice flour, ghee, coconut and curd, turning the preparation into another part of the evening’s collective experience. “Participation takes you from just being a witness to the performance to actually being a part of the performance,” Vishwanath says.
The night concluded with a dinner by Borgohain, featuring a spread as humble as the songs, with everyday ingredients and flavours. It included ivy gourd and carrot with lentils; eggplant with mustard; bottle gourd and ridge gourd sabji; ridge gourd rind fry; ridge gourd peel batta; prawn salt; and charred chicken pitika, served alongside rice.
For Vishwanath, food also has no single meaning of home. Her comfort food changes with where she is—aloo or gobi paratha in Gurgaon, majjige huli in Pune or even a vada pav. “I find rootedness and belonging in a different sense in a different place,” she says.
For the musician, the idea of belonging is also inseparable from South Asia’s histories of migration and displacement. “Everyone who has ended up in a city is either a displaced person or a migrant in one way,” she says. The performance, she adds, is also an attempt to bring voices that remain at the margins of urban life into the same space. “We never share these stories at all because we live in our own silos. So the idea is to break those silos and kind of have an integrated experience.”
In these shifting sounds and flavours, ‘Songs On A Plate’ found another way of asking what it means to belong—not necessarily to one place, but to many, and to each other.