India’s lunar mission Chandrayaan will launch again in New Delhi. Not as a rocket hurtling toward the moon, but through the South Asian Symphony Orchestra’s New Delhi concert, Peace Notes. It is former Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Menon Rao’s balm for a world bleeding with a thousand cuts.
“We talk of society, diversity, plurality, of many kinds of people coexisting. In my mind, an orchestra is a model of what society should be,” said the former ambassador who built SASO from scratch in Bengaluru about six years ago to promote diplomacy through music.
As a founding member of the South Asian Symphony Trust, she reached out to composers and musicians—flautists, pianists, cellists—not just in India and the diaspora but also in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and other countries.
“We started off as a South Asian symphony orchestra. But today, I can say that we are an orchestra that includes many countries from the Global South. I hope that we will ultimately have people from Latin America and Africa,” she said.
Through SASO, Rao intertwines the warp and weft of music and diplomacy to overcome divides.
“It’s a small example, a little drop in the ocean, a whisper literally in the darkness,” said Rao.
In a freewheeling conversation with ThePrint, she talks about symphony and diplomacy and a polarised world torn by conflict standing on the precipice.
Edited excerpts
What is the underlying message of Peace Notes?
Peace Notes is a trademark that belongs to the orchestra. It is our name for our concerts because we play for peace and mutual understanding.
We always begin with the Sanskrit song Maitreem Bhajata, composed by the Shankaracharya of Kanchi in the mid-1960s, with music provided by Vasant Desai, who wrote for the Hindi film industry. It’s a song of invocation. The song itself means cultivating friendship among nations, giving up conflict and violence, and always approaching fellow human beings with a spirit of compassion, generosity, and self-control—from the Upanishads.
The message is also international because we are communicating with the rest of the world and bringing the rest of the world to us, literally. While we will be playing classical music from the West, we always include something from the region. For instance, in Chennai, two years ago, when finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman was the chief guest at our concert, we played the music of AR Rahman. It was specially orchestrated.
What role does music play within the framework of the South Asian identity?
If you look at the music from Afghanistan–Kandahar, it used to be called Gandhara literally. Go down to the southern tip of Sri Lanka, and you’ll find a village called Gandhara. It just tells you how identity is so integral to us.
As South Asians, we share history and mythologies. Human memory is imprinted in our DNA—whether through migrations, conquest, changing governments, or the colonial experience.
Everything has impacted us and left its imprint on us. And the music of the region is also a reflection of the traditional folk music of the people, which is beautiful.
In fact, for the first concert that SASO had in Mumbai in 2019, where [then] Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu was the chief guest, we commissioned a composition called Hum Safar, which means travelling together. We incorporated folk songs from India, Afghanistan, Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka into one composition.
There is a certain synchronisation there—the way it blends one into the other and creates this flow. It’s like a river of memory, a river of expression, and a river of hope.
Is there much hope in our world today? The Taliban in Afghanistan, Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Gaza. You’ve spoken about how we are at the precipice.
There’s a need for a lot of introspection and history will introspect about why things went the way they did. One has to look at the post-Cold War world and what happened. Of course, globalisation has helped people across the world. India is no exception. Investments have come in, jobs have been created, living standards have improved, the human development index has improved. So in a sense, there’s been a lot of positivity also in the last few decades.
But Russia, of course, had been vivisected. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The fallout of that has been tremendous for that country and society. And I think on the part of the West, yes, one can use the word hubris—the way that the post-disintegration situation was handled.
The expansion of NATO, for instance. [United States] President Bill Clinton had given assurance to [former Russian president] Boris Yeltsin and others that NATO would not expand eastward. That promise wasn’t kept. The road to the precipice, in many ways, was paved with these actions.
The way American power has been deployed, whether it was in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria. Iraq literally fell apart after the invasion, after Saddam Hussein was done away with. When Russia absorbed—one could use the word—Crimea in 2014, there were signs that all was not well between Russia and the West. And of course, the Israel-Gaza situation, nobody really saw it coming.
When countries disintegrate, there’s an outward movement of people because they don’t have a place to call home anymore. So there is a lot of agony and deprivation. It’s not just poverty. It’s societal deprivation.
And now, America is getting ready for Trump 2.0. When you spoke about people being angry and bitter, my mind immediately went to the polarisation in America.
It points to something in the American soul itself. It’s not just their society, it’s like the soul itself is kind of fractured. It’s turned on itself.
The India-US relationship is in a relatively stable and well-sustained place. It has grown despite changes in government or parties or presidencies in the United States. This relationship will continue to grow.
Mr Trump’s relationship with Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi was in a very good place during his first presidency. They enjoyed great chemistry. So, the stakes are very high in the relationship, and it makes sense for both governments to maintain those stakes.
On trade, yes, I don’t discount the fact that Mr Trump being so focused on tariffs and balanced trade and what he calls fair trade might also look at India. We have a favourable trade balance with the US, and that might become a cause for Mr Trump to seek some action on the trade front against India.
But the US-China relationship is very fraught today. The impression one is getting in the reportage that is coming out of the US is that Mr. Trump is surrounding himself with people who are quite hawkish on China.
What about India’s relationship with her neighbours? Has it worsened in the last decade?
We have to recognise that as far as Pakistan is concerned, there is a consensus among the people of India today that doing business with them has only brought us pain in the past. I’m not just talking about governments or commerce or business establishments. People have suffered, people have been victims of terrorism.
It’s not for want of initiatives taken by India. Even Mr Modi reached out first at the start of his first administration, and you know, you saw what happened–Pathankot and Balakot. It’s just as if history is repeating itself each time. So I think it’s, you know, in that sense, a break has happened.
With Bangladesh, there’s a lot of instability with the events surrounding the removal of Sheikh Hasina. There’s a caretaker government. Bangladesh is vital—it holds connectivity to our Northeast. So, we would like good relations with Bangladesh regardless of which government comes to power.
Our ties with Nepal are so close, so organic. There is so much that binds our people together. This is recognised by any government that comes to power in Nepal, regardless of surface tensions that rise from time to time. But ultimately, I think there is a certain self-correcting mechanism that always restores a degree of equilibrium in the relationship with what is.
And with Sri Lanka, again, similar concerns prevailed. We have ties of family, as I’ve always said. We need more communication, more connectivity and we stand willing. And with the Maldives also—despite the fact that the current administration came to power—there was a certain anti-India element in some of the actions that it took. But even there, I believe, equilibrium is being restored.
The fact, though, is that the rise of China—it has so much more power and influence to deploy today by virtue of its economic and military strength—has impacted the region, our own neighbourhood. And now, the question is whether China is practising a containment policy vis-à-vis India by pursuing certain policy approaches to our neighbours.
But the central reality is that the ties that bind us to our neighbours, and we leave Pakistan aside for the moment, are so strong. People are at the heart of these ties.
The South Asian Symphony Orchestra will be performing at India International Centre, Lodhi Road on 22 November and the Auditorium, Baha’i House of Worship (Lotus Temple) on 23 November.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)