For decades, small towns across Meghalaya have sustained a music culture that is as rooted in church choirs and community halls as it is in rock concerts and underground gigs. Generations of musicians have built spaces where folk traditions, jazz, punk, and rap coexist, creating a scene that is distinctive yet constantly evolving.
Photographer Anurag Banerjee captured this world in The Songs of Our People: Vol 1. The book featured nineteen musicians, spanning genres from heavy metal to indigenous Garo and Khasi music, and presented their stories as part of a larger cultural archive. It was conceived as evidence; proof of a scene that has always existed and continues to thrive, while its design echoed this permanence, with letterforms pressed into the pages like an inscription.
The newly released Vol 2 focuses on the origins of the scene. Anurag highlights the artists and mentors whose creativity, teaching, and commitment helped build the spaces and subcultures that shaped the musicians in Vol 1. This volume is about legacy and the groundwork laid by those who came before.
Among them is Cinda, founder and lead singer of Tura’s first all-girls rock band, The Haystack Ladies. Their name is a declaration of energy — “because when we come together, we are inflammable.” There is also Dauni, once the punk bassist for Shillong’s Pip Of The Fourth Mother, a band that once opened for Hoobastank. Today he is a choir director and teacher in Jowai, shaping the next generation of voices. And there is Pauline Warjri, a jazz musician and teacher whose return to music after illness became a turning point in her life, and who has devoted decades to guiding students in the belief that music is also a form of understanding.
The book’s design reflects this shift in focus. While the structure of Vol 1 has been retained, the outlined lettering that suggested artists on the margins has been replaced with shadowed type, a subtle gesture toward the idea of legacy. The two covers, perfectly aligned in proportion and spacing, now exist in dialogue: one marking presence, the other tracing origins.
Across both volumes, Anurag's portraits remain sublime acknowledging musicians not through gentler moments, but by situating them within their own environments. The images weave a pictorial narrative of the spaces, objects, and moods that surround music-making in Meghalaya. By capturing artists in the rooms they inhabit and among the details of their daily lives, the photographs suggest how music emerges from the texture of lived experience.The books construct a visual world where music is inseparable from identity, culture, and everyday life. Alongside Anurag’s written accounts, these portraits immerse the reader in the spirit of the scene, allowing the cultural atmosphere of Meghalaya’s music to come through.
Follow Anurag here for updates on the book release.
If you enjoyed reading this here's more from Homegrown:
Mothers & Goddesses: Photobook 'MATAJI' Is A Visual Meditation On The Divine Feminine
‘Snoops On A Train’ Captures the Unintentional Intimacy Of Mumbai Public Transit
Aashna Singh And Farheen Fatima’s New Photobook Examines The Hidden Cost Of Housework