Musticism – a session to celebrating Fête de la Musique, 2026

“The soul does not search, analyse, experiment—it seeks, feels, experiences” – Shri Aurobindo Ghosh

“As soon as we go out of the encasings in which radical mechanism and radical finalism confine our thought, reality appears as a ceaseless upspringing of something new”― Henri Bergson

Alliance Française du Bengale, iLOGY praxis & friends celebrate Fête de la Musique, 2026 with a jam session that includes discussions about and performances of esoteric music practices. The evening covers a wide range of sonic landscapes, including Dhrupada, experimental, electronic, and the music in Ritwik Ghatak’s films.

In this session, titled “Musticism,” we celebrate the experience of music and how it paves the way for “alterity” and “creative evolution,” as Henri Bergson would suggest. For the mystic, music is both the path and the embodied knowledge itself.

• Date: June 23, 2026
• Time: 7:00 PM onwards
• Venue: Alliance Française du Bengale, Park Street, Kolkata
• Admission: Free and open to all

Participants: Pradip (Bulada), Sāyaņacandra, Rohitendra, Shorob, Varun, Bivas, Sudipto, U…..

About the participants

Pradip Chattopadhyay (Bulada)

One of the founding member of the iconic Bengali rock band Moheener Ghoraguli, Pradip has a unique musical practice of his own. His work is profoundly impacted by Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal compositional technique and John Cage’s cultivation of aleatoricism as a compositional process, alongside a spiritual quest guided by the Upanishads and sages like Sri Aurobindo. His experiential field is enriched by the music of the Bauls and the sound ecologies of Libya and Jharkhand, where he lived and worked as an engineer.

Sāyaņacandra

Sāyaņacandra is an embododied practitioner of Dhrupada and an independent researcher.

Varun D

Varun loves to bring an archive of sounds alive through the many synthesizers he builds. His central project, switchedonindia.com, experiments with memory, sound, and technology to create new, transcendental listening experiences.

Shorob Sinha

Shorob is a trained musician and guitarist versed in both Western classical guitar and the folk music of Bengal. His academic Master’s thesis focused on the music of Ritwik Ghatak. Shorob believes that sound played a central role in how Ghatak progressed his narratives; Ghatak’s sounds are sensual, evocative, and serve as an archive of landscape, society, the indigenous, and the politics of Bengal—acting also as a critique of society and its transition to urbanity.

Rohitendra Deb

A practitioner of visual arts and music, among other things, Rohitendra is a flutist who composes and leads his own band in Santiniketan. His surreal style of painting is deeply influenced and informed by his relationship with music and sound in general.

Bivas

A movement-based performer, theatre practitioner, and teacher, Bivas’s work has historically explored queer theatre and performance as a vehicle for liberation and identity formation. His current interest lies in the deep exploration of silence through movement and non-movement.

About iLOGY

iLOGY is a mystical, story-performance-based praxis intuited and practiced by Culture Monks. It looks at the continuum of memory and the way stories transmit the past into the future, thereby positioning the storyteller/performer as a living archive of an esoteric and non-mainstream past—both individual and collective. It tries to locate this contemporary performative self, which is a palimpsest of various influences but, like many things, is greatly influenced by a media environment that reduces the expressive and emotional body into a uniform site of production and consumerism, thereby robbing it of the sensory pleasures and nuances that surplus time should afford. Here, we rely on embodied practices from the past, including the Natyashastra and the music and sound practices from this side of the Indus, to try to find another way to listen, see, make, and perform stories.

MasterPeace COOLeaders Program

MasterPeace COOLeaders is a global program to build leadership among youth for change making through creative means. Music is very central to the COOLeaders program.