Text Maarit Piippo

A stage with a thatched roof and close-grained wooden engravings has been created in the entrance hall of the Tennis Palace Art Museum in Helsinki in mid winter. Three Finnish men in their kurta clothes are playing their instruments with an Indian lady dressed in a colourful sari sitting amongst them. After the instrumental parts she starts her hazily beautiful song with grace-notes.

This is the concert of the Finnish-Indian band Shankara held in connection with the India Express exhibition in the Helsinki City Art Museum. The musical piece is an Urdu song about the heart´s night called  Dayar dil ki rat me.

Shankara´s repertoire consists of refined raagas, which belong to Hindustan music as well as lighter ghazals of the Muslim tradition which are mostly sentimental love songs.

The singer is Peali Mitra, born in Calcutta, who has been living and working in Helsinki for over two years. Mitra is a versatile singer who has studied Indian classical music for more than twenty years. After moving to Finland because of her husband´s work she has managed to go on with her studies in social psychology and develop her musical skills even further.

– I´m happy to be able to live in Finland because I´ve found new audiences for my music. I haven´t had to convince people of the elegance of Indian music since the audience has been well-versed in it.

Unexpected collaboration

After she had moved to Finland from the United States, her previous home country, Peali Mitra had her harmonium sent back to India, because she thought that she couldn´t use the instrument in the northern borders of Europe.

That´s why the collaboration offered by the musicians of the Shankara band was an unexpected opportunity for Mitra. Surprisingly, a number of experts on Indian music were found in the cold North with whom she could perform similar music in which she had been trained for all her life.

Mitra had her first singing teacher at the age of five when her parents discovered her musical talent. Mitra got a Master´s degree in Indian classical singing when she was 15 and when she turned 22, she made a contract with All India Radio where she concentrated on performing Bengali folk music.

Mitra tells about her deep love for her family. Her parents´ support has been of great importance to her singing career. Despite the fact that none of her family but herself are professional musicians, they all like singing at home.

– Calcutta (currently called Kolkata) is the cultural capital of India. Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel prize winning author, who composed a great number of his poems, also comes from the city, relates Mitra, who is proud of her roots.

Among the Indians, Calcuttans are considered particularly open with a great sense of humour. Sociableness which runs in the family has been necessary in Finland. When Mitra heard about Finns´ reserved character in advance, she decided to create her own tactics to break the shyness. Mitra, who is talkative by nature, used to talk to everybody in such an unprejudiced way that finally the most taciturn people started to talk to her.

– Maybe I find it easy to get to know people because I love people and interaction.

An inimitable Indian sound

In Finland Peali Mitra´s singing career began in the Kassandra choir whose principle is to combine people representing different cultures through music. Veera Voima, the choir leader, has noticed that music creates a direct channel to emotions and various experiences can intensively be communicated through songs of different cultures.

In addition to Shankara, Mitra has been heard to perform Bollywood hits as a visiting star of Shava, the Finnish-Indian bhangra band. Within the framework of Taru, a cultural project on minority artists, Mitra has been collaborating with flamenco guitarist Ramón Maromieri. An international band Amura has rearranged Finnish children´s songs. Such songs as Vaarilla on saari and Rati riti ralla have been heard in Finnish by Mitra in the band´s concert.

Judged by their sound, Mitra´s own compositions belong to semi-classical Indian vocal music. She finds the lyrics very important because she really wants to feel inside herself what she is singing about. Her pieces, the majority of which have been composed in Bengali, tell about the various sides of love.

– It´s very hard to imitate genuine Indian sound. Ornamenting Indian vocal art correctly with its grace-notes and glidings requires orientation which takes years, which Peali has, Kiureli Sammallahti, defines. He is the key figure of the bands Shankara and Shava.

Presently, Peali Mitra is involved in such a lot of musical projects that when her husband´s working period in Finland finishes in a year, it gives her plenty of concern. Feeling melancholic, she confesses that they are likely to return either to India or another new country because of her husband´s work.

A thesis on female activists

Peali Mitra´s own thesis deals with women´s activation. She interviews socially active women both in Finland and India. What increases the topic´s interest is the great difference between the two countries. In terms of social influencing, Mitra doesn´t even try to put Finnish and Indian women on the same line since the situation in the countries is so different.

While she maintains the flame of Indian culture in her new home land, she admires the freedom and independence of Finnish women.

Mitra admits that her attitude towards Finnish society is a lot more positive than that of many other immigrants. Although her husband admires Finland´s modern, teachnically operating and classless society, however, he hasn´t adapted to the country as well as she has.

– Art removes boundaries between people, Mitra states.

·Music is a universal phenomenon which is not committed to the language or nationality. Thanks to this, I have managed to make such a direct contact with people of various backgrounds.