Who we are

The Family

Two of us begin a song. Everyone else is the reason it is worth finishing.

Ashwin is not a band with a fixed lineup and a closed door. It is two writers and an open invitation.

The arrangement is simple. Syed Mehedi Hasan writes the music. Nafees Fahmi Ali writes the words. What exists at that point is a song on paper and nothing more. A singer, a player, a producer: they complete what the two of us began, and the finished record could not have existed without them.

Those people do not leave as a line in the credits. They become family, and the project exists partly to carry them further than it found them. We would rather help build one career than release one more single. If a song of ours is the reason someone's audience doubles, the song did its job twice.

Genres are not a consideration. The music goes where the lyric needs it to go. Samir Hafiz, who produced this record, has said much the same thing about his own listening: never look down on a genre, play everything. That is the house position.

The two horses

Where a song starts

The pair on the crest. Neither rears higher than the other. Where the two horses come from →

Syed Mehedi Hasan

Composer · co-founder

Writes the music for everything Ashwin releases. He has been composing on a guitar since long before there was a project to put it in, and a catalogue of instrumental pieces sits behind the songs: music written in Pavia, in Dhaka, and wherever else the work took him.

By profession he is a theoretical particle physicist. He took his Ph.D. at the University at Buffalo and now works on precision calculations for collider physics in Regensburg. The two halves of his life look unrelated and are not: both are the business of finding a small number of honest rules and letting them resonate.

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Nafees Fahmi Ali

Lyricist · co-founder

Writes the Bangla lyrics, and writes them to be sung rather than read. On about half the songs on সমর্পণ his words come first and the music is built to carry them; on the rest he writes into a melody that is already there. The words are his main part in Ashwin, but he composes from time to time as well.

By profession he is a doctor: a general practitioner in Wales with close to eighteen years in medicine, and a co-author of Two Weeks to PACES (World Scientific, 2021), a clinical examination text for physicians in training. The entities this project is named for were physicians too. We noticed that only afterwards.

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The voices and the hands

Where a song finishes

The artists who took সমর্পণ off the page.

Shanila Islam

Voice

সব আলো নিভে গেলে · অতৃপ্ত নয়ন

The voice of both released songs. A singer-songwriter who puts out her own music as Shanila, and a vocalist with Coke Studio since 2022.

She is the third generation of a musical family: granddaughter of Khan Ataur Rahman and Mahbuba Rahman, daughter of the singer Rumana Islam, niece of the singer Agun. She has been singing since she was four, and her father raised her on Hemanta Mukherjee and Kishore Kumar. She writes toward whatever is melodically richest, usually landing in pop or rock with blues, country and soul close by; her first original, Joto Jai Bolo, she wrote and composed herself.

She is an architect as well. She read architecture at BRAC University, practises with Basatikalpa in Dhaka, and is now in Melbourne reading for a Master of Architecture and Urban Design at Swinburne.

Absolutely loved singing this! So glad to be a part of this project. Shanila Islam, on অতৃপ্ত নয়ন

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Samir Hafiz

Producer & arranger · সমর্পণ

Guitar · Vocal

Produced and arranged the first album. He has played lead guitar in Warfaze since 2015 — the band formed in 1984 and was awarded the Ekushey Padak in 2026 — and has been with Powersurge since 2006, alongside Shrapnel Method, AvoidRafa and Severe Dementia.

He works the other side of the glass just as hard. He co-produced গিরগিটি (Girgiti), Warfaze's 2026 single and their first new studio track in fourteen years, and was its chief sound engineer: he recorded the drums, guitars and bass, then mixed and mastered the record.

Never look down on any genre of music, play everything. Samir Hafiz, The Daily Star, 2018

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An open door

Sing on the next one

There are more songs written than recorded, and they need voices and players we have not met yet. If you make music in Bangla or want to, we would like to hear from you. Come find us.

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