“At one of our performances in Mumbai, there was an older woman sitting with her friends in the front row,” singer-songwriter Sourjyo Sinha, frontman of Dindūn — an indie band primarily based in Kolkata — recalls. “During our set, she spoke up and introduced one of her friends. ‘She is from Russia,’ the woman said. ‘She is a huge fan of Bollywood films and Mithun Chakraborty. Can you sing Jimmy Jimmy for us?’”

The band was dumbfounded, but not surprised. For many indie musicians in India, such demands from audiences, though rare, are not unprecedented. In the end, they declined the request, but the incident inspired one of their new songs, tentatively titled ‘Jimmy Jimmy Da’.

For almost a month between November and December 2025, I followed Dindūn around Kolkata as the band prepared for their annual Christmas Eve Special at Skinny Mo’s Jazz Club. I sat in on their brainstorming sessions at Sourjyo’s home studio in Jadavpur and on one of their full-band rehearsal sessions with music producer and multi-instrumentalist Subhagata Singha aka Rivu (@rivuperson), drummer Mehul Bhattacharya (@bengalidrummerboy), and singer-songwriter Proiti Seal Acharya (@_proiti_).

On 24 December 2025, I watched all that iterative work come together in two moving sets that featured familiar tracks from the band’s previous albums as well as selections from their upcoming record — offering the audience an early glimpse into Dindūn’s next chapter. In the weeks in between, I spoke to Sourjyo and Adrijaa about making music as independent artists, the economics of touring as an indie band, and the importance of community and informal support systems that sustain musicians even as the absence of robust institutional support continues to plague the indie music ecosystem.

The Synth-Folk Sound Of South Asia

The story of Dindūn is the story of resilience, of ingenuity, of making the best of less-than-ideal circumstances. In its current iteration, the band consists of four remarkable individuals: singer-songwriter Sourjyo Sinha; music producer, composer, and keyboardist Rohit Ganesh; vocalist Adrijaa Mridul Majumder; and visual designer Sourish Mustafi. They often work with and rely on a roster of close friends and collaborators, like Rivu, Mehul, music educator and multi-instrumentalist Sagnik Samaddar (aka Pilu), sound engineer Tapasi Bhattacharya, and photographer Adrija Samal (@vividserenity).

Today, Dindūn is one of the most interesting musical acts in India — characterized by their synth-folk sound drawing equally from the folk cadences of Silchar in Assam, pastoral Bengal, and Sylhet (in present-day Bangladesh), the emotional vocabulary of Indian film music — especially A.R. Rahman, — and the hushed intimacy of international indie auteurs like Sufjan Stevens, Tame Impala, and Devendra Banhart. Unlike these international auteurs, however, who use synth-folk as a space for innovation and experimentation, Dindūn uses the synth-folk framework to make regional languages and folk lyricism audible, though not necessarily easily legible, within the contemporary music scene. While most Indian indie acts of recent years lean more toward polished pop structures and anglophone accessibility, Dindūn stands almost defiantly apart with its commitment to Bengali, Assamese, and Sylheti lyrics. Their music grows out of personal history, inheritance, memory, and place, refusing to separate their craft from their lived experiences. 'Dindūn Vol. 3' — the band’s critically acclaimed 2024 album — is entirely in Sylheti, Sourjya Sinha’s mother tongue.

“Sylheti is often referred to as a dialect of Bangla, but it is not really,” Sourjyo says. “For a language to be recognised as its own, there needs to be literature written in it, songs sung in it. When I write and sing in Sylheti, I hope that it will one day contribute to recognising Sylheti as an independent language.”

A Different Kind Of Folk Revival

The last decade has witnessed a resurgence of Indian folk-inspired indie acts across the country, but much of it leans toward pastoral romanticism or exoticization. Dindūn’s approach is fundamentally different. Their folk sensibilities are connected to the realities of migration, ecological decline, intergenerational memory, and urban disorientation. Dindūn is part of a larger cultural movement in India where artists are increasingly reclaiming their subnational identities and challenging the notion that Hindi-speaking, North Indian aesthetics define the mainstream. Dindūn’s Sylheti songs like ‘Chandor Tolay Dekha Hoibo’ (We’ll Meet Underneath The Moon), for example, draw directly from Sourjyo’s personal experience of his father’s prolonged illness leading to his passing, and refuse to compromise with or flatten any of its emotional and linguistic complexity to become more accessible to audiences.

The Bedroom Years: 2018-2022

Dindūn began as a bedroom project in the mid-2010s, when Sourjyo moved from his hometown in Silchar, Assam, to Kolkata for studies and met Rohit. 

In those early years in the city, he felt like an outsider, Sourjyo says. “I knew the language, but I didn’t know how to sound like I belonged. Music allowed me to connect with people,” he told me when we spoke at his home studio — a small bedroom on the upper floor of a residential building which he has been slowly filling with musical instruments and recording gear. A self-taught musician, he had been writing and recording music and uploading his work to SoundCloud since he was a teenager, but in Kolkata, his music found an audience among his peers at Jadavpur University. In 2016, he performed publicly for the first time at a Sofar event organised by a friend. His first band, Whale in the Pond, was formed shortly afterwards, and their debut album ‘Marbles’ was released in 2017.

Sourjyo met Rohit through another member of Whale in the Pond, and the two connected over their love for making music. While Rohit, a mixing and mastering engineer, produces, mixes, and manages the technical aspects of making music, Sourjyo writes the songs and tunes, with each of them building off each other’s strengths.

The Breakthrough

Between Dindūn (2018), the band’s eponymous debut EP — named after a term of endearment Sourjyo invented for his grandmother, for its musical, bell-like sound — and Dindūn Vol. 2 (2022), their early music was marked by dreamy synth beds, organic instrumentation, and intimate DIY production. They were tender, almost whisper-soft collections, featuring songs like ‘Jekhane Alo Pore’ (Where the Light falls), ‘Megh Daakher’ (Cloud Calls) — both written by Proiti — and ‘Phul’ (Flowers), written by Sourjyo. These early tracks weave flute lines, ukulele plucks, and warm analog synths into meditative, folk-rooted pieces that feel like lullabies for modern times — like stepping into some hidden room of your mind, opening a window, and finding your favourite memories drenched in beams of warm, golden sunlight.

Widespread recognition came when the band won the prestigious Toto Music Award in 2023, alongside Bangalore-based musician Rudy Mukta, for Dindūn Vol. 2. The annual Toto Music Award honours highly talented singer-songwriters and bands across India, regardless of genre or language, from rock and folk to metal and jazz, and the 2023 win spotlighted Dindūn’s success in developing a distinctive folk-synth sound. With the Toto Music Award win, Dindūn finally broke out of its Kolkata bubble and into India’s growing indie music scene.

“It opened so many doors for us,” Sourjyo says.

The Tour

The Toto Music Award assured Sourjyo and Rohit of the legitimacy of their ‘bedroom project’. Dindūn Vol. 3, the band’s third EP released in August 2024, marked a decisive shift in their sound: unlike folk revivalists who romanticise the pastoral, Dindūn embraced urban themes, post-rock instrumentation, and industrial textures in songs like ‘Chorai’ (Sparrow), ‘Tungsten’, ‘Cotton Green’ (named after the railway station on the Harbour Line of the Mumbai Suburban Railway), and the haunting ‘Aao Gia’, a Sylheti farewell bidding literally meaning ‘come again’. The EP explored the evolving landscapes of Kolkata, Mumbai, and Silchar — finding beauty in both urban decay and natural imagery. Fresh off the Toto Music Award win, Dindūn decided to go on tour with their growing discography.

“We ideated and made demos between January and April, recorded and produced from May to July, crowdfunded from July to August, and released the album at the end of August,” Sourjyo recalled, explaining how fast things moved after the Toto Music Award win. They overshot their original crowdfunding goal of 60,000 rupees by two times, raising 1,20,000 rupees from 50 individual donors.

“We were also fortunate enough to have friends and collaborators across the country,” Sourjyo said. While Rohit is currently based in Mumbai, where he used to work as a Dolby Atmos Music Mixing Engineer for Saregama Pvt. Ltd., Sourish is based in Delhi NCR, where he works as an illustrator and visual artist, collaborating with bands and musicians like Dindūn and Nishchay Parekh (of Parekh & Singh). They functioned as bases for Dindūn during the tour, keeping costs low. “In the end, we made about 30,000 rupees from that tour,” Sourjyo said.

These figures reveal a crucial aspect of making music as independent artists in this country: the economic precariousness of this ecosystem. Margins are paper-thin, and musicians often have to pay for tours out of their own pocket. While awards like the Toto Music Award help individual artists and bands who win to stand out and lend them credibility, they do little to alleviate the near-total absence of structural support for artists and collectives across the country. Having been through the trenches, Sourjyo, Rohit, and Adrijaa are very clear-eyed about the gaps in this ecosystem and what needs to be done.

“We are now at a position where we can pay our collaborators an honorarium when we work with them,” Adrijaa told me. “It’s not fair compensation, but it’s a beginning.”

Although social media has enabled artists to find their audience and build loyal followings, most remain largely isolated and perform live in their hometowns. Many musicians also lack knowledge of opaque and complicated intellectual property laws, licensing rules, and regulations: in other words, the bureaucratic labyrinth of making music in India. Dindūn’s Toto win made them realise they wanted to invest in collaborative live performance rather than pursue mainstream recognition. In recent years, Dindūn has been instrumental in efforts to close these structural gaps through initiatives like Ponder Alt and Kolkata Ecosystem — run by Sourjyo and Adrijaa — that bring together artists, musicians, curators, and other stakeholders to discuss issues and find solutions to bolster the independent music scene. Beyond their music, they represent a growing cohort of independent creators who are circumventing traditional music industry structures that do not serve them. 

The Road Ahead

In the sprawling ecosystem of South Asian independent music, Dindūn represents something rare: artists who innovate without abandoning the familiar sounds and textures of home. Their music is a map of the places they have lived in, the histories they have inherited, and the futures they are learning to imagine. This is a contemporary synth-folk sound as a record of transition and transformation.

Dindūn’s insistence on writing and singing in Sylheti is an extension of this ethos; it's illegibility and untranslatability as artistic choice. It's taking a genre pioneered in North America and Europe and insisting it endeavours to preserve the Sylheti language and the region’s cultural specificity. This is only the beginning. In 2026, Dindūn is more experimental and ambitious than ever — they are currently working on their first full-length album, drawing inspiration from obscure ’70s Bollywood orchestration (a personal obsession of Sourjyo’s), retro rock, and more expansive forms of storytelling.

Follow @dindundindundin to keep up with the band.

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