Kaise Bani re Kaise bani | The Story of Chutney Music

In this episode of Unboxed, Amit Basole speaks with Sharmadip Basu and Kalyani K, professors of social science at Azim Premji University, about a sound that crossed oceans and came back home — Chutney Music. 

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The story begins in Malda, 1982, when a young Sharmadip first heard Kaise Bani Phulouri Bina Chutney Kaise Bani echoing through a half-built theatre. For years he thought of it as another catchy Bollywood tune. It wasn’t until decades later, in an Indo-Caribbean neighbourhood in New York, that he realised the song’s real lineage — one that stretched from Bhojpuri villages to Trinidad’s sugarcane fields.

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What unfolded in the Caribbean was not a simple fusion but a slow simmer — Bhojpuri folk songs carried by indentured labourers met the island’s soundscape of soca and calypso, genres already pulsing through Trinidad’s streets. After the abolition of slavery in 1835, peasants and artisans from Awadh and Bihar, fleeing an oppressive Zamindari system, signed girmits (“agreements”) and sailed to the Caribbean plantations. They carried their dholaks, their songs, and a stubborn sense of rhythm — and in this mixing bowl of migration, a new music was born.

Kalyani and Sharmadip trace how this sound evolved — playful, political, and profoundly hybrid. It was a music that refused purity, where Hindi could slip into Creole mid-verse, and where women like Rasika Dindial (Lazy Man) and Drupatee Ramgoonai (Roll Up de Tassa) brought new energy and agency to its stage. What began as folk remembrance turned into a declaration of belonging.

From forgotten refrains to Electric Piya and Gangs of Wasseypur, the journey of Kaise Bani reminds us that migration doesn’t just move people — it moves the beat. And somewhere between Bhojpuri and Creole, Bollywood and the Caribbean, the song still asks: Kaise Bani Re Kaise Bani?

Credits

Akshay Ramuhalli, Bruce Lee Mani, Gorveck Thokchom, Kishor Mandal, Kruthika Rao, Narayan Krishnaswamy, Prashant Vasudevan, Ram Sheshadri, Sananda Dasgupta, Seema Seth, Shraddha Gautam, Supriya Joshi, and Velu Shankar.

Special thanks to Sharmadip Basu and Kalyani K for being part of the episode.

Acknowledgements

Chutney Music Playlist

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