TIMEZONES – Imagining Worlds and Making Meaning with four Artists from Delhi by Suvani Suri and Abhishek Mathur

Imagining Worlds and Making Meaning With Four Artists From Delhi

Podcast

Episode 3 of the TIMEZONES podcast series, co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe-Institut. In this episode, four contemporary artists with a connection to the city of Delhi reflect upon their diverse and evolving practices.

Heeding to the COVID-19 pandemic, they share observations and open spaces of thought where new meanings and speculative realities are constantly being formed, un-formed and re-formed. The composition interweaves these conversations into fragments of found sound, musical renditions, and sonic textures, contemplating the ever-shifting edges of truth, experience, the real, and the fictional.

A podcast by Suvani Suri and Abhishek Mathur

Co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe-Institut

Featuring: Mochu, Pallavi Paul, Gagan Singh, Suhail Yusuf Khan

Conceptualisation, Interviews: Abhishek Mathur, Suvani Suri
Arrangement, Editing, Sound Design: Abhishek Mathur, Suvani Suri
Additional Mixing: Gaurav Chintamani, Quarter Note Studios
Additional Samples, Recordings: Suhail, Mochu, Pallavi
Jingle Voiceover: Nana Akosua Hanson
Mastering: Adi Flück, Centraldubs
Artwork: Šejma Fere

→ Full transcript of episode 3

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→ Listen to further TIMEZONES episodes

Mochu works with video and text arranged as installations, lectures and publications. Techno-scientific fictions feature prominently in his practice, often overlapping with instances or figures drawn from art history and philosophy. Recent projects have explored mad geologies, psychedelic subcultures and Indian Modernist painting. Exhibitions include 9^th Asia-Pacific Triennial, Sharjah Biennial 13, 4^th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Transmediale BWPWAP.

Suhail Yusuf Khan is a sarangi player, vocalist, composer, and a PhD candidate in the department of music at Wesleyan University. He brings together expertise from a performance career that has already extended over twenty-years, creative ability, and academic research to find new modes of expression in Hindustani music, contemporary rock fusion, pop, folk, jazz, and experimental music. His ethnographic scholarship draws on personal experience as an eighth-generation musician belonging to a lineage of Hindustani musicians. He has been featured on more than fifteen albums and is currently signed to Domino records, U.K.

Pallavi Paul works with video, performance, and installation. Her practice speaks to poetic exploration of cultural histories, questioning the limits of speculation and facticity and evidence. Paul is also engaged in thinking about ideas of the archive, tensions between document and documentary and the implication of trace within these openings. She has received her PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Paul’s work has been exhibited in venues including Tate Modern, London (2013); AV Festival, New Castle (2018, 2016), Beirut Art Centre, Lebanon (2018), Savvy Contemporary (2019), Contour Biennale, Mechelen (2017), New Alphabet School, HKW (2020). She currently lives and works in New Delhi.

Gagan Singh is a Delhi-based visual artist, whose experiments with drawing have involved engaging with illustration, cartoons, storytelling, memory mapping, site specific installations, wall art and artist books. Gagan brings an element of flaneury to his work, both in the literal sense of walking through the city, but also via the mental act of constructing visual narratives in landscapes drawn from memory and observation.

Additional Playlists

Explore a playlist that takes off from the artist conversations in TIMEZONES Delhi podcast by Norient and the Goethe-Institut.

Curated by Suvani Suri and Abhishek Mathur

A compilation of sounds, music and provocations by the four artists featured in the podcast but also extended to many contemporary and critical voices from the milieu. The collection includes film, research material and references sourced from the artists, dialogues/conversations/features that they have been a part of along with a range of music – experimental/electro-acoustic compositions, Hindustani classical/folk-fusion-jazz, Sufi music, rap, songs of resistance, and more.

The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different countries, cities, and contexts today? The artists’ thoughts on their moods, their social, political, and intellectual realities and their philosophies (of life) have been worked up into experimental audio collages.

The podcasts run the gamut of formats and content, from straight journalism to experimental and documentary approaches, ethnography and fiction, sound art, and improvisation. The TIMEZONES series endeavours to create new artistic forms of storytelling, listening and exchange across the boundaries of geography, time zones, genres, and practices.

The TIMEZONES podcast series is co-initiated and co-produced by Norient and the Goethe-Institut.

Biography

Abhishek Mathur is a musician and sound designer based in New Delhi, India. He is a guitar player and founding member of Advaita, one of India’s most acclaimed bands. Abhishek has been composing, arranging, and producing music for media such as films, TV, theater, art installations, and podcasts for the past two decades. He is also the facilitator and course designer of a short term program in music production at the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communications, New Delhi. Follow him on Instagram and Facebook.

Biography

Suvani Suri is an artist and researcher based in New Delhi. She works with sound, text, and intermedia assemblages and has been exploring various modes of transmission such as podcasts, auditory texts, sonic environments, objects, installations, fictions, experimental workshops, and live interventions. Her research interests lie in the relational and speculative capacities of listening, voice, aural/oral histories, and the spectral dispositions of sound that can activate critical imaginations. Actively engaged in thinking through the techno-politics that listening is embedded in, her practice is informed by the processes of production, mediation, perception, and distribution of sound. Alongside, she composes sound for video and performance works and teaches at several universities and educational spaces where her pedagogical interests conflate with a sustained inquiry into the digital and sonic sensorium. Follow her on her website, Instagram, or SoundCloud.

Links

Audio Pervert: «The Indian Side of Sampling» (Norient)

Rana Ghose: «India’s Experimental Underground Vol. 1» (Norient)

Thomas Burkhalter, Suvani Suri, and Abhishek Mathur: «Aesthetics Matter: New Ways of Storytelling» (An audio talk on TIMEZONES)

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The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what living and working in culture and the arts involvse in different contexts today? Season 1 with a focus on Nairobi, Belgrade/Sabac/Zurich, Delhi, the Bay Area, and Rio de Janeiro.

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TIMEZONES – Season 2

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The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different countries, cities, and contexts today? Season 2 focuses on Beirut, Montréal, Dhaka, Mt Makiling, and Gaza.

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TIMEZONES – Season 3

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The TIMEZONES podcast series plunges into the world of artists and their practices, asking: what does living and working in culture and the arts involve in different contexts today? Season 3 travels from Budapest to Colombo, Buenos Aires, and Ukraine.

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Published on December 03, 2020

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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5 Videos Clips From India: Asserting Equality

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by Suvani Suri,

Shiraz Iqbal

India has been in the throes of a political, social, and civic crisis driven by the nationalist ideology of a communal majority. As mass mobilizations and resistance movements of unprecedented scales and intensities proliferate throughout the country today, what undeniably lies at the heart of the ongoing crisis of democracy is the discriminatory reality of a caste society.

Against this caste order, the Dalit subject is not merely a sociological identity that suffers this brutality, but a revolutionary one as declared by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the insurrectionary constitutionalist.1 Rejecting the violent thinking of a hindu (non)society of unequals – a society that attempts to lock inherited grades of difference into (caste) destiny – Dalit identifies the collective and unconditional thinking of a society of equals2 for constituting a new «common».3

In an interview with The Wire, Yashica Dutt, author of Coming Out as Dalit, observes a shift from «mainstream discourse or pop-culture validating ‹upper› caste images» when she was growing up, to recent times which have been witness to a steady spate of emancipatory and powerful assertions by «Dalit directors, actors, musicians, and academics who are claiming their rightful place in the country’s history and culture». The list that follows is an attempt to turn towards and listen to such a multitude of recent unequivocal assertions in the field of music that declare a radical equality and commit their unwavering voices to the struggle for truth and justice. It is through listening to these scintillating resonances, egalitarian utterances, rhythms, and registers of sound, that we may be able to traverse the impasse of history and the contemporary moment.

Music: The Casteless Collective
Video: Pa. Ranjith, Neelam Productions
Track: Magizhchi (India, 2019)

The Casteless Collective is a 19 member band of hip-hop, rap, rock, folk musicians and «Gaana» singers (a form of ritual music associated with mourning) that was started by filmmaker Pa Ranjith and producer Tenma in 2017. The ensemble takes its name from the lexicon of 19^th century anti-caste activist and writer Iyothee Thass. Their songs, composed and performed in Tamil, are incisive in their take on contemporary politics, caste, and class discrimination and minority rights.

Other than performing as an ensemble, the members are also producing their own albums and tracks. Isaivani, the only woman in the group at the moment, was recently featured in the «BBC’s 100 women 2020» list for her contributions to the age-old field of «Gaana music», a largely male-dominated space.

«Magizhchi», their debut music video, is Tamil for ineffable joy. The song moves through a vibrant dramatization interwoven into street performances and summons the revolutionary power of love and fraternity to exit the atrocities of a hindu caste society.

Music: Arivu & ofRo
Video: Ken Royson
Track: Kallamouni (India, 2019)

This song, a layered political satire, features Tamil rapper Arivu, who has been writing for The Casteless Collective. Together with producer Rohith «OfRo» they released the album Therakural in 2019. Kalamouni (sly silent fellow) zeroes in on the hypocrisy of the selective outrage or deliberate silence in the face of injustice and discrimination in the hashtag era. Choreographed against a vast landscape with stark red hues, it holds up a mirror to the complicity of us, the listeners, in structures of oppression that benefit from the liberal posturing.

Music: Ginni Mahi, Amar
Video: Yash Mahi
Track: Fan Baba Sahib Di (India, 2016)

A young Punjabi singer, Ginni Mahi (or Gurkanwal Bharti) made waves when only 17, with her phenomenal interweaving of Punjabi folk instrumentation and familiar tunes with no-holds-barred rap in her song «Danger Chamar», an expression of Dalit pride and a searing rejoinder to oppressive structures that thrive on invisibilising caste identity in order to keep perpetuating systemic violence. «I don’t want to talk of caste, I want to break it», she declared.

Her single «Fan Baba Sahib Di» (a fan of Baba Sahib Ambedkar), is an exuberant paean to the radical thinker of equality, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, whose emancipatory politics shaped the anti-caste movement. More recently, she proclaims her commitment to imagining a new world order led by the force of Ambedkarite thought in another ballad «Raaj Baba Sahib Da» (2018). The picturization of this single features the activated and political spaces of gathering and collectivity in Punjab, also alluding to the tradition of «Shabads» and religious hymns around which communities assemble.

Music: Sambhaji Bhagat, Sachin Mali, Sheetal Sathe
Video: Sambhaji Bhagat, Anusaya Arts
Track: Dear Democracy (India, 2017)

The Ambedkarite movement is closely affiliated with resistance music, in the form of the centuries-old tradition of «Shahiris» (Shahir as in poet, a largely Maharashtrian movement in its origin and influence), which transformed into Ambedkarite Jalsas (or public gatherings organized around performances), and was also disseminated via analog recorded media and later over digital mediums and internet-based platforms.

Within the contemporary practice of «Shahiri», the revolutionary music of Lokshahir Sambhaji Bhagat occupies a central place. A Dalit activist, composer, and playwright, he has been rendering the harsh complexities of caste and its implicit structural violence into powerful compositions and public performances.

The song «Dear Democracy» is directed by Sambhaji and hosted on the YouTube channel, «The War Beat», started by him. Written and recited by Sachin Mali and featuring Sheetal Sathe, it calls attention to the failures of democracy in upholding equality and minority struggles.

Music: FeniFina
Video: Jaden Lall
Track: Rukna Nahi (India, 2020)

The debut music video of Mumbai/ Toronto-based FeniFina aka Josefina D’souza, «Rukna Nahi» affirms the exigency to keep traversing the present, in an intent and resolute way. A multilingual composer, she employs a tenacious and experimental visual aesthetic as she dexterously moves between rapping in Hindi to Marathi, urging the listener to «not step, not bend, keep moving...while staying firm».

Another hard-hitting freeverse «Na Hai Insaaf, Na Hai Sukoon» (No Justice, No Peace) was released on Instagram as an urgent response to the appalling lack of justice and state apathy towards the mounting cases of caste violence in the country.

1. (Non) society is a term coined by Prof. Choudhury to mark a paradox: «Hindu society is in actuality a (non)society, in which caste names mark and mask as immemorially given forms of conviviality, kinship and law» (Choudhury 2018, 95).
2. «When the birth of the term ‹dali›’ in language is studied it refers to a rigour which involves the double task of occupying the exact place of the untouchable in social hierarchy and separating from that place/identity in the light of a thought of future egalitarian society … in thinking of equality, the unequal becomes a new subject which with a certain force and delicacy we call dalit. But the dalit doesn’t think merely for herself; she thinks equality equally for everybody» (Choudhury 2018, 61).
3. Prof. Choudhury attends to the invocation of the word ‹common› in Ambedkar’s text «Annihilation of Caste» (1936): «In that sense, the question of the ‹common›, unlike the imperative and reflex of habit, is a question asked for the first time: it is like asking for the first time, what is true society? It is to make language say that society comes into existence with the sentences (un)uttered in 1936» (Choudhury 2018, 78).

List of References

Alam, Mahtab, and Yashica Dutt. 2019. «Interview | ‹But You Don’t Look like a Dalit›: Yashica Dutt on ‹Coming Out as Dalit›». The Wire. March 24. Accessed December 20, 2020. (https://thewire.in/caste/coming-out-as-dalit-yashica-dutt).

BBC. 2020. «BBC 100 Women – Who is on the List this year?». BBC News. November 23. Accessed Novemver 28. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-55042935).

Choudhury, Soumyabrata. 2018. Ambedkar and Other Immortals. New Delhi: Navayana.

Dutt, Yashica. 2019. Coming Out as Dalit. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company.

2020. «Na Hai Insaaf, Na Hai Sukoon». Instagram. October 2. Accessed December 20. Instagram video. (https://www.instagram.com/p/CF13Hqmgmzc/).

Gaikwad, Rahi. 2016. «An Equal Music». The Hindu. August 20. Accessed November 15, 2020. (https://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/An-equal-music/article14580390.ece).

Biography

Shiraz Iqbal is a designer and researcher currently living and working out of Ernakulam and Bangalore, India. Follow him on Wordpress

Published on June 24, 2021

Last updated on August 18, 2021

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