Shubha Mudgal

Shubha Mudgal's project Haman Hain Ishq and specifically the song and film Baagon Na Jaa was motivated by the growing and unnecessary communal tension in South Asia, which can be overcome by building understanding between religious groups.

In Baagon Na Jaa medieval spiritualist poet Kabir exhorts us to look within to find love and divinity. He says, "You don't need to seek out gardens to look for flowers — you can cultivate the flowers within." Baagon Na Jaa stands for the hope that can be built off individual relationships across barriers of religion.

The soundtrack was created by classically trained musician Shubha Mudgal. Shubha Mudgal has grown as a musician partially by taking a "blasphemous" step of straying into pop, and now she's got kids stopping her in the streets for autographs.

By her own description, her "music primarily is, of course, nonrepresentational, improvisation, classical music which has these important elements called rag and tal, which are by now internationally well known, but I also feel that I'm very much a person of today's contemporary sort of Indian woman, and so I'm also very, very willing to adapt to other musical urges and needs, and collaborate with people from all over the world." —Courtesy Calabash Music