‘We’re literally the same people’: The artistes of Indie Fest find common ground in Dhaka

Amidst the lively buzz of a Thursday evening press conference at the Crowne Plaza, held just before their highly anticipated Friday gig, Asfar Hussain—frontman of the Lahore-based rock outfit Bayaan—shared a simple but striking revelation: he had only recently discovered that music icon Runa Laila was Bangali.

It was a fleeting admission, yet it carried a quiet, profound weight. Here was a Pakistani artist who had grown up absorbing her melodies—and the broader musical legacy she helped shape—entirely unaware of the geographical lines drawn around her identity. Ultimately, that seamless blending of art and origin captured the very essence of the night.

The gathering served as a prelude to Friday's 'Indie Fest: First Chapter', bringing together four distinct acts for a rare collective dialogue. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder were Pakistani vocalist Abdul Hannan, Lahore-based alternative rock band Bayaan, Kolkata's celebrated indie duo Taalpatar Shepai, and Bangladesh's homegrown talent, Level Five.

What began with standard promotional pleasantries quickly gave way to a deeply genuine exchange. As the conversation flowed, it painted a vivid portrait of four musical acts who share far more than just a festival stage—bound together by a common, borderless language.

Bayaan, who have previously performed in Bangladesh, said they felt no real foreignness here. 

"We're literally the same people — it's just the language that is different," Hussain said. "We don't feel like we're in a different country. Probably the same country, just a different region." 

Level Five vocalist Aedid Rashid, could attest to that from the other side — his formative years on the guitar, was largely built on Jal songs.

The Pakistani band's shadow loomed large over the conversation. Bayaan were themselves shaped by that same Jal-era explosion of pop rock in Pakistan — the early 2000s moment when, as Hussain put it, "everyone picked up a guitar." Rashid listed Coldplay and Bruno Mars among his inspirations but named Jal as something closer to a foundation. "Jal is like our teachers," he said.

That cross-border musical inheritance ran deeper than just bands. Hussain's own voice is the product of 14 years of classical training — Tagore, Nazrul, sargam, the full apparatus of subcontinental classical music — before a friend handed him a stack of rock and R&B discographies and asked him to front a band. He resisted at first. "I'm a classical singer," he told his friend. "I can't sing whatever you're giving me." 

He eventually came around, though he is careful not to frame what followed as abandoning one tradition for another. "I wouldn't call it breaking the voice," he said. "You just add things to your arsenal." Rashid agreed: "You don't forget what you learned. You just get rusty."

At one point, Rashid, suddenly deciding that the formal interview arrangement was not quite enough, lifted the correspondent's press ID from the table and appointed himself journalist for a stretch — turning to Taalpatar Shepai and Hannan with questions of his own. 

The conversation that followed had little to do with music. It wandered through the foods of their respective countries, the rickshaws of Kolkata, the somewhat more improbable subject of Teslas in Dhaka. 

It was, in its own way, the most revealing part of the evening — four artistes from three countries finding that their curiosity about each other extended well beyond what any of them play.

That tension — between classical roots and contemporary form, between what music was and what it has become — surfaced repeatedly in the formal conversation. 

When the discussion turned to Alamgir and Runa Laila, figures claimed by Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan in roughly equal measure, it crystallised into something the evening had been building towards. These were not icons of any one country. 

They were products of a cultural continuum that the subcontinent's political geography has spent decades trying, and largely failing, to interrupt.

It is a sentiment that Indie Fest: First Chapter is, at least in aspiration, built around. The concert has been a long time coming — a planned show last December featuring Jal and other international acts was cancelled due to visa complications, one in a series of setbacks that had kept international artistes off of Dhaka stages for much of the past year.