The question “Where are you from?” is a fraught one for people of color, loaded as it often is with insidious subtext on race, ethnicity, and nationalism. For Shubh Saran, it’s positively vexatious. The son of Indian diplomats, Saran had already lived in four countries on three continents by the time he was in high school. The full list of cities he’s called home reads like an airport departures board: Dhaka, Cairo, Geneva, New Delhi, Toronto, Boston, and New York City, where he’s been based since 2014. This nomadic existence has understandably left Saran feeling a “little lost, culturally.” So, with time on his hands during the pandemic, the guitarist and composer decided to dig deeper into lingering questions about identity and belonging in a globalized world.
Saran documents that investigation in intimate detail on his second album, Inglish, disentangling the mess of experiences and biases that inform his identity and creative process. He started down this road on the 2020 EP Becoming, which brought his pop-punk guitar roots into conversation with the jazz and R&B idiom he adopted while studying at Berklee. Inglish is a much grander project of musical integration, gathering Hindustani classical, Rajasthani folk, Middle Eastern folk, pop-punk, progressive rock, industrial, neo-soul, and jazz fusion into tense and occasionally fractious harmony.
The result is a lovingly assembled bricolage of Saran’s musical influences and personal history. Opener “Enculture” lurches from serpentine desert folk-tinged guitar to freeform piano, while Joshua Bailey and Angelo Spampinato’s twin drum attack marches in lockstep with distorted bass and synths, sounding for all the world like a slightly anemic Tool jam. “Intra” features even more dizzying shifts in styles and tempos. Drums, tabla, and folk percussion dance an intricate waltz, moving from a meditative stutter to bhangra frenzy in the blink of an eye. Saran’s guitar-playing channels Damnation-era Opeth via Arabic folk, while a brief sax-and-trombone interlude brings to mind the short-lived Mumbai experimental jazz band Groove Suppa (led by Madagascar-born saxophonist Tala Faral, another artist with wide-ranging musical roots).
Saran fuses these disparate sounds into a compelling composite, each element retaining its own identity within a largely cohesive whole. The compositional juggling act takes the normative idea of assimilation—of immersing oneself in the dominant culture, erasing difference—and turns it on its head. In its place, Inglish offers a more egalitarian vision—one which celebrates difference, abolishes cultural hierarchies, and leans into awkward, messy, confusing heterogeneity. If it sometimes feels like the whole thing might collapse under the weight of its contradictions, that only adds to the thrill.
The album’s clearest statement of intent—also hinted in the title, which references the uniquely Indian dialects of the English language that emerged from the collision of colonialism, globalization, and post-colonial nation-building—is Indo-futuristic lead single “postradition.” Notes from Rasika Shekhar’s bansuri (bamboo flute) drape themselves over arpeggiated modular synths like folds of gossamer fabric, while Saran’s sinuous guitar plays tag with chromatic swells of tenor and alto saxophone. In imagining a world beyond tradition, “postradition” argues for an expansive, inclusive concept of what it means to “be Indian,” pushing back against the politics of difference. The conflict between utopian dream and not-quite-dystopian reality reaches its zenith on “the Other,” where the drums stomp and swagger with undisguised menace and saxophones blare out a discordant challenge. Saran’s lead guitar picks a circuitous path through the chaos; having found a measure of peace, he turns his attention to its emotional and psychic toll.
In the post-rock grandeur of “There Across the Ocean,” Inglish is also tinged with a profound sense of loss—for the security of a homeland, for the comfort of deep, unconflicted roots. On “remember to come home soon,” the album’s emotional anchor, Saran drops the genre-bending tightrope act in favor of pared-back sincerity. Finger-plucked guitar and minor-key piano whisper to each other like exiles in a distant land, lost in bittersweet remembrance of a home to which they can’t return. What do we lose when we no longer belong to one place, when our roots are scattered across the globe? Beyond its Indian specifics, Inglish is a heartfelt exploration of the ups and downs of being part of the world’s fastest-growing floating tribe—part global citizen, part cultural refugee.
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