How Three-Time Grammy Winner Ricky Kej Realised His Dream of Making Music About Mahatma Gandhi

GANDHI WAS ALWAYS RICKY KEJ’S HERO. His Grammy-winning albums Divine Tides and Winds of Samsara, have a song each dedicated to the Father of the Nation. “There was always a desire to create an album on Gandhi, but it didn’t happen for various reasons,” Kej tells me.

“The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” read the now-prescient prologue to the song Gandhi in Divine Tides. Winds of Samsara’s surreal track Mahatma brought together a polyphony of landscapes, sounds and ideas. “We’ve read about Gandhi since our school days. He would always make people question customs and encouraged critical thinking,” he says.

The dream has been realised now, with the new album, Gandhi - Mantras of Compassion—an ode to the leader’s ideals of peace, tolerance, non-violence and environmental consciousness. The story goes like this: In 2024, the composer embarked on an alliance with the Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Kailash Satyarthi—a four-city concert tour across India. Undertaken to raise funds for the Satyarthi Movement for Global Compassion, the tour gave Kej the chance to spend valuable time with the fellow Gandhian, both at the concert venues and the latter’s Bal Ashram. They shared meals, travel—and reverence for Gandhi—on the way. “I’ve been a huge admirer of Satyarthi’s work. This shared reverence sparked the idea for the album, a new-age musical tribute that would blend melodies loved by Gandhi and original compositions inspired by his ideals.”

The composer brought over 200 global artists for the 15-track album, including “fellow artists and my dear friends Tina Guo, a Chinese-American virtuoso cellist, and Masa Takumi, a Grammy Award-winning shamisen player from Japan,” says Kej, for whom the album was a fresh chance to realise the universal power of music as language, especially with war, civil strife and climate disasters posing fresh existential challenges to humanity.

“I collaborate with tribal musicians from India and the world. I cannot converse with them, but when I play a piece of music to them, they respond. Music is that one medium that can reach people when nothing else can. Timing becomes everything, when I feel strongly about something, I will make a song about that,” he says, signing off.

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