Rock On: How Antariksh took Hindi Rock from college circuits to global collaborations

There’s a moment in every creative journey where persistence stops looking like stubbornness and starts looking like conviction. Iltija, Antariksh’s new single released May 13, lands exactly there.

The track features Jack Gardiner, a globally acclaimed modern fusion guitarist known for his work across jazz, rock, and world music, and sits within the narrative arc of the band’s upcoming concept album, Rehguzar. It’s the quiet after the storm — a protagonist who has survived doubt and chaos, now turning inward. Varun Rajput and Gardiner’s collaboration brings an interesting tension to the track: Gardiner’s fluid, genre-crossing guitar work pressing against Rajput’s grounded Hindi songwriting, neither pulling the other off course. Rajput describes the song simply: “Surrendering to the process without losing belief in yourself.”

Antariksh has been building toward this kind of statement for over a decade. Founded in Delhi in 2012, the band came up through the college circuit, with members who left engineering careers to pursue music — showing up early on in formal office attire, almost as a nod to the world they were walking away from.

When Khoj arrived, it made a case that Hindi rock could carry real emotional and compositional weight — heavy guitars, Carnatic textures, Hindustani melody, and lyrics about the specific dread of your mid-twenties. Dheere Dheere didn’t feel like a rock song dressed in Hindi. It felt like rock music that could only have been written in Hindi.

Indian progressive rock had long existed in English, tucked away from mainstream attention. Antariksh didn’t translate the genre — they rebuilt it. Over 1,200 shows, coverage from the BBC and The Guardian, and a string of awards later, the conversation around Hindi rock has shifted in ways that would have seemed unlikely fifteen years ago.

Iltija is the next sentence in an argument Antariksh has been making for years. Rehguzar hasn’t arrived yet, but if this single is the opening move, the full record could be worth the wait.