35 years of Parikrama
What makes the band distinctive is not the longevity, it’s the template — write across languages, use various instruments, tour without ever signing to a label, and still be taken seriously as rock and roll
Clockwise from above, left: Organist & synthesiser player Subir Malik, drummer Srijan Mahajan, guitarist Saurabh Chaudhry, vocalist Nitin Malik, guitarist Abhishek Mittal and bassist Gaurav Balani.
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This isn’t a band just coasting on what it built in the 1990s. This is a band that is still building its legacy, still writing new material 35 years on, with a plan to put out 50 more originals over the next five years.
What makes Parikrama distinctive isn’t the longevity by itself — plenty of bands simply persist. Rather, it is the refusal to be legible as one thing. They started as a tribute act to the classic rock records that shaped them and yet, their very first show already contained an original composition.
Their arrangements pull in instruments most rock bands wouldn’t think to reach for — a bansuri line, a tabla sitting under a guitar riff — and none of it announces itself as a gimmick. It is simply how their songs come out. Most of their catalogue, too, was never really finished in a studio first. It got worked out on stage, in front of the crowds that would go on to sing it back at them. That’s an unusual way to build a body of work. It’s probably also why none of these songs sound frozen.
Underneath all of it sits a decision that I find more moving than any individual milestone: early on, the band agreed that music would never be anyone’s main income. Everyone around them assumed that would sink them. Instead, nearly everyone chasing the rock-star version of that dream fell away. But Parikrama — a band playing for the love of music, alongside day jobs and businesses — happened to outlast them.
That scrappiness produced a run of songs that still anchor who they are. ‘Till I’m No One Again’ and ‘Open Skies’ came out in 1995, picked from over a hundred demo tapes for the country’s first serious rock compilation. ‘Gonna Get It’ followed in 1996, then ‘Load Up’ in 1997. And in 2001 came ‘But It Rained’, later named among the country’s greatest rock tracks by Rolling Stone India.
That song is hard to separate from Sonam Sherpa, the band’s lead guitarist whose solo on it became the band’s most iconic moment. When Sherpa died in February 2020, Parikrama put the song back out that year with his solo left exactly as he’d played it without smoothening or changing anything. It feels nothing short of poetic that five years on, you can still hear him on it.
The scale that grew out of the past three decades is still hard to fully take in: thousands of shows worldwide, and a run of stages most bands can only dream of. Iron Maiden spotted them playing live in Bengaluru and ended up bringing them along for a UK tour, and the band has since shared stages with Megadeth, Porcupine Tree and Deep Purple — proof that a sound built out of second-hand equipment and blank cassette tapes could hold its own anywhere in the world.
In that sense, what kept fans coming back to Parikrama for three decades wasn’t marketing. In an era when the only real route to an audience was a record label and having a CD in a shop, Parikrama skipped the label route altogether and gave the music away instead. They pressed their own tracks onto blank discs and handed them out for free, treating the recording less like a product and more like an invitation to a show.
The logic was simple: let people hear enough to want more, then let the live set do the rest. Granted, it’s a slower, more trusting way to build an audience than any marketing plan. But come to think of it, that is also part of why fans of Parikrama don’t just know the songs — they also remember the actual nights they first heard them.
What Parikrama really built, more than any single song or show, is a template. Long before the Internet made independent music possible for anyone with a laptop, they proved that a band could write across languages, fold in a bansuri line without treating it as a gimmick, tour without ever signing to a label, and still be taken seriously as rock and roll.
In fact, musician Palash Sen’s moving Instagram tribute to Parikrama credited the band with inspiring him, his band Euphoria, and a generation of musicians who picked up an instrument partly because Parikrama made it look possible. More than the shows or milestones, that might be the truest measure of the band’s 35-year existence.
Parikrama didn’t just survive the changing shape of Indian music. They also kept the door open behind them, for whoever wanted to walk through it next.
— The writer is a freelancer
3 songs that define the band
Xerox (1991): The song nobody was supposed to notice. Parikrama’s very first show was meant to be a tribute set to the classic rock records that shaped them, but they slipped this original in anyway — a quiet signal, from night one, that they were never going to stay confined to covers.
Till I’m No One Again (1995): Picked from over a hundred demo tapes submitted for the country’s first serious rock compilation, this track put Parikrama on the map before most of India had a map for rock music to be on. It remains one of the clearest documents of the band’s early, unpolished sound. One that is recorded fast, built to
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be played live, and never really finished in a studio.
But It Rained (2001): Arguably the band’s signature song, and inseparable from Sonam Sherpa, the lead guitarist whose solo on it became the track’s most iconic moment. Later named among the country’s greatest rock songs by Rolling Stone India, it took on new weight after Sherpa’s death in 2020, when the band re-released
it with his solo left exactly as he had played it.
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