Musicians Amira Gill (25) from Delhi and Seattle-based Vasundhara Gupta (27) are voicing the verses that build a haunting narrative of Partition. Their composition, the eponymous rendition of legendary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s iconic poem ‘Subh-e-Azadi’, is the theme song of Child of Empire, an animated, VR (Virtual Reality) docu-drama. The film, produced by Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative, which reconnects Partition refugees with their childhood homes in VR, and Anzu Films, premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival 2022. Released on all music-streaming platforms on August 26, the tune explores Faiz’s poetry in a sonic landscape that traverses traditional ragas and layers of electronically modified sounds.
The film’s scriptwriter, Omi Zola, had approached Amira last year to work on its music score. She lapped up the opportunity and roped in Vasundhara, who she had first met at Berklee College of Music (Boston) in 2015. The duo has collaborated before for two experimental projects: a spoken-word ambient piece for the 2021 album called Manam and Delhi-based art gallery Nature Morte’s Artsounds in 2020. “We started working on the film’s score by mid-August last year. Usually, the score of the film is written once it’s locked, but because of time constraint, we wrote it while the film was still being made. The theme song was commissioned to us in October and we took three weeks to complete it,” says Vasundhara.
