Razia Aziz

Creative writer, spoken word artist and musician Razia Aziz presents Chalé Gayé (They have departed/died), a multilingual soundscape, originally commissioned by part of the Witness Stand project at Brighton Festival 2022.

Chalé Gayé (They have departed/died), a soundscape by Razia Aziz

So many histories echo through this place, the most frequented site in Brighton. Chalé Gayé (They have departed/died) is a 40-minute soundscape in music, song and spoken word, which voices just one thread in the tapestry of stories this soil and these stones might tell. It is an intimate and enduring thread, binding Brighton - and Britain - to the men from pre-Independence India who fought for their imperial rulers in the First World War. Without them, Britain’s chances of victory would have been critically, perhaps fatally, weakened.

Blending English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Sindhi, Chalé Gayé (They have departed/died) takes the listener on a journey that follows the seventy-four fated Indian recruits from the villages of their birth to the fighting fields of Europe. Their bodies were committed to the fire at the Chattri memorial on Patcham Down, high above Brighton, or buried in Woking, Surrey. Following the roll of honour of the deceased at the centre of the soundscape, the music reaches for transcendence in a bid to reunite the men and ‘return them home’. The last word is given to the bereaved sweetheart of one of the soldiers, who tells of the agony of her loss.

The work as a whole is not just a tribute to the men of the Indian regiments who were treated for their wounds in the Pavilion complex – and especially those that died here. It is also an ode to spiritual unity, inspired by the distinctive culture of the northern Indian subcontinent, where a dazzling array of linguistic and religious traditions have for centuries lived in dynamic inter-relationship. ‘Divide and rule’ policies of the British Raj, and the consequent events and conflicts that lead to – and have followed from – Independence and Partition, have not silenced the impulse to a happier future coexistence: it still whispers in the veins of both land and people on all sides of the divides, especially through the medium of poetry, music and song.

Chalé Gayé (They have departed/died) does not represent a political ‘position’, but an ode to healing, mutual understanding, interdependence and fellowship among peoples and among nations with a shared, complex and entangled history.