Bengaluru-based Carnatic artiste Deepti Navaratna will be the first woman from India to perform at the Parliament of the World's Religions on October 18.
Deepti, the current regional director of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, is a neuroscientist and a trained Carnatic singer. “I have always been a musician at heart. While growing up in Bengaluru, I sang my way through science labs and chanted my way through chemistry,” she tells Showtime.
At the Parliament of the World's Religions, an event to perpetuate the modern interfaith movement which started in 1893, Deepti will be performing aspects of her concert ‘The Dialogues with the Divine’, a curated musical experience that combines sacred music from various faiths.
She believes, East or West, Hindu or Muslim, the spirit of prayer is the same and that is what inspired the concept behind the concert. “I sing Carnatic music. It is what would be called sacred music in world circles. I often wondered how to repurpose my traditional music, as an agent of change in this new world. So, I hatched an idea to use the songs, poetry and text from various world religions as vehicles to bind people together, to educate people about the commonalities between faiths,” explains Deepti.
After thorough background research and meetings with scholars from various faiths, she performed the musical project at the Boston Jewish Music Festival in 2016, which was then followed by a Hindu-Christian congregation of music, ‘The Alchemy of Bhakti' at the First Church in Cambridge.
“It was a roaring success. Imagine these scenes where five Hindu children sing a Yiddish song in a Jewish temple accompanied by the South Indian drum and North Indian Sarod. A Jewish cantor and a Hindu singer are accompanied by a violinist from Libya and a drummer from Palestine as they sing in Sanskrit. This is how I want to promote my music as positive energy and transformative agent to the world,” she says.
At the event, Deepti will be accompanied by Shadrach Solomon on keys and Arun Siva on percussion and the concert will combine sacred music from seven major religions across Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism, Shinto and Christianity.
The eighth edition of the event will be conducted virtually this year and the concert will be live on YouTube (@Deepti Navaratna) at 6 pm.