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Music in a Village Named 1PB
Music, Memory and Forgotten Landscapes
Speakers
130 minutes | Saraiki, Hindi with English subtitles | 2024 | India
Across the Thar desert, in villages known only by coordinates—places like 1 PB—the sound of devotional music drifts through a landscape both harsh and luminous. Here live the Mirs, custodians of a syncretic tradition shaped by Sufi and Bhakti poetry, yet recorded in government documents simply as “Damami,” a Muslim Backward Caste. Their dignity as musicians has long gone unacknowledged; many now work as daily-wage labourers, even as their songs hold centuries of spiritual wandering and desert memory.
The film grew from filmmaker Surabhi Sharma’s first encounter with the Mirs in 2009, guided by historian Rahul Ghai, who has worked in the region for three decades. Sitting in the cool shadows of a mud hut in Pugal, listening to Bassu Khan and Abdul Jabbar play music of extraordinary depth, she was led into a world where saints walked among scrubland and wild grass. What began as an attempt to archive a rich musical inheritance gained urgency as syncretic legacies face erasure and minorities confront growing precarity.
Music in a Village Named 1 PB honours these musicians and the vastness evoked in their songs: the beauty, the harshness, and the eternal wait for rain-laden clouds.
Following the screening, Surabhi Sharma and R V Ramani will join an in-person conversation moderated by Pallavi MD, with Amala Popuri and Diksha Sharma joining virtually. The session will conclude with an audience Q&A.
In collaboration with:
Speakers
Surabhi Sharma
Surabhi has been an independent filmmaker since 2000, creating feature-length documentaries, short films, and video installations that explore cities in transition through the lenses of labour, music, and migration. Her work reflects a long-standing engagement with the shifting textures of urban life. She is Associate Professor of Practice in the Film and New Media program at New York University Abu Dhabi, where she also serves as Associate Dean for the Arts and Creative Practices.
R V Ramani
- V. Ramani studied Physics at Mumbai University before beginning his career as a photojournalist. A 1985 FTII graduate with a specialization in Motion Picture Photography, he moved to Chennai to work as a cinematographer on numerous films. Alongside this, he has continued to create an influential body of independent work, experimenting with diverse cinematic forms and pushing the boundaries of nonfiction and personal visual expression.
Amala Popuri
Amala Popuri works across fiction and non-fiction cinema as a sound recordist, mixer, and designer. She has collaborated with Dibakar Banerjee, Prashant Nair, and several leading arthouse filmmakers, and contributed to A Man Who Knew Infinity. She received the IRAA Award for Kadakh (2019) and Best Sound Design at IEFFK for Body (2025), which she also produced. Amala has mentored emerging filmmakers at FTII, Srishti School of Design, and Maisha Lab.
Diksha Sharma
Diksha Sharma, a Film Editing graduate from SRFTI Kolkata, has edited documentaries, fiction series, short films, and video installations, and has directed commercial work. She is Artistic Director at DRI, where she leads key programmes—including DocedgeKolkata, the Letsdoc Fellowship, and Documentor—that nurture and strengthen the documentary ecosystem across India and Asia.
Pallavi MD
Pallavi MD is a singer, composer, actor, editor, sound designer, and filmmaker with over twenty-five years of performing Kannada poetry (bhavageethe) in India and abroad. A recipient of the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for Bhav Sangeet, she composed music for the Broadway play The Vanishing Elephant (2024) and designed music for Banjara Virasat. Her LP Song for Broken Ships was nominated for the German Record Critics’ Award, and her single Simchezo won Best Composition from Beyond Music. She also performs with her band Kayaka.
