A Roundtable Discussion on Desi Music Culture

As a continent, Asia has the largest population – around 4.4 billion to Africa’s 1.2 billion, the Americas’ one billion and Europe’s 0.7 billion. And yet generally, Asian culture, beyond food and religion, hasn’t really left its mark on Western consciousness, despite massively popular music and film industries in most of the larger Asian nations.

Bollywood, K-pop and J-pop have comparable revenues to Western markets – Japan is the world’s second largest music market, and China the second largest for film, with both trailing the US – and yet most Western audiences are unaware of superstars like SRK, Ayumi Hamasaki and Feng Xiaogang. In the US, Asian people comprise around 5.6% of the population, and yet as music makers, Asian people in America are all but invisible. As a mixed-race British Asian and a musician, I wanted to explore why Desis – a term often used by people of South Asian descent to describe themselves – are often working on the sidelines in the music industry, if they’re present at all.

If music is an ideal form of expression, and if all minorities live in a country framed by the desires and structures of a white majority, why wouldn’t Asian American kids take to music to protest, to celebrate, to react, to be visible? To what extent do South Asians align themselves with other minorities, specifically with black artists? Do South Asians in Western music industries rely too much on a template of success based around black entrepreneurship and artistry? Or do some Asians prefer to align with white music cultures, often in response to cultural pressures from within their own familes?

Many of the answers to these questions can be found in the discussion below, excerpted from a recent episode of my recurring show on RBMA Radio that featured four women: Nitasha Tamar Sharma, author of Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness; DJ Rekha, a London-born producer, curator, DJ and activist credited with bringing bhangra music to the US; Anupa Mistry, journalist and writer currently at The FADER; and Falu Bakrania, author of Bhangra and Asian Underground: South Asian Music and the Politics of Belonging in Britain. Thanks to them all for the insights and encouragements – and for highlighting the strengths, and occasional weaknesses, of our burgeoning artistic community.

Kindness

Nitasha, could you briefly contextualize South Asian immigration to the US?

Nitasha Sharma

To ask a professor about a brief history of South Asian Americans is almost an impossible task. Generally, the standard way of thinking about it is through three or four different waves. The idea is that the first South Asian men came mostly from the North India, Pakistan area – from Punjab, actually. They came as laborers as part of the first wave in the early 1900s. They faced a lot of anti-miscegenation laws. They were ultimately deemed illegals, aliens ineligible for citizenship. Later, the primary wave that people talk about, that many of us might be seen as children of, is the second wave, the post-1965 wave. That’s really the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened up immigration quotas, but mostly to people who were professionally trained and who spoke English.

Falu Bakrania

The largest migration to the US of South Asians was as a result of the 1965 Act, so it was really post that time period that you saw the burgeoning of a community here. It was primarily a middle class community that traveled here, or at least came with skills that could then translate into a middle class existence here in the US.

I think a lot of scholars talked about a minority myth, right? The idea that Asians were being portrayed in the media as a sort of model minority to pit different folks of color against each other. Asians often bought into that rhetoric and wanted to fashion themselves as such.

Nitasha Sharma

This was really the group of Asians, including South Asians, who come to define what mainstream people think of Asian Americans, and specifically of South Asians, as the model minority. South Asians in the 1990 census basically earned the highest income of all groups, surpassing even whites. People thought of this as a cultural reason that we’re the new Jews, or Indians or Hindus are the new Jews. It really has to do with immigration policy. You can go to India to see the class diversity to challenge that.

Then there was the 1980s, 1990s dot-com boom, which lead to tech-y people, but also the H1B visa folks, who were a lot of men who worked in Silicon Valley that lived in these bachelor societies who were overworked and underpaid. Vivek Bald has really shown that there was actually a much earlier wave in the 1800s, where he looks at South Asians and Bengali men who came to the US on the East Coast. We have a huge legacy of South Asians in the US that’s not really known very well, and is all sort of crystallized through this one stereotype of the South Asian doctor or engineer and their children being a second generation who goes to elite schools. They want to be doctors and lawyers. If they’re not so successful they might be other professionals, who generally don’t pursue art or activism, and who certainly do not pursue African American or black cultural forms.

Kindness

Nitasha, the subjects of your book and your research is this specific cultural space that we do define as a black American culture. As a South Asian, often you’re going to be the descendant of a South Asian immigrant to the US. I can see how it would take a certain amount of being rooted here before you would be approaching a musical genre like hip-hop. What did you find were the ways into hip-hop for Desi kids?

Nitasha Sharma

My book, really, is an ethnography. I wrote an ethnography of 24 South Asian American hip-hop artists... I was really interested in the 1990s and early 2000s and looking at South Asian youth, including Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Indians – not just Indians – who really dedicated their lives to producing hip-hop, who also dedicated their lives to living in black communities and often with black people, and who shared politics with African Americans.

I don’t quite fit the generational mold, but youth of my generation were a lot of these artists who were born in the ’70s and ’80s and grew up in cities like Richmond, California; Berkeley, California. Some grew up in Chicago and New York. They grew up, in some cases, alongside African American and Latino peers in black neighborhoods, and so their in wasn’t that far-fetched. It’s just that in our focus on suburban middle class South Asians we miss the diversity of the South Asian American experience.

A lot of South Asian artists that I talk to who are producers and engineers were raised in a more typical Desi experience. They grew up in white suburbs like San Francisco and Fremont and they felt a lot of ostracization and racism in their white schools and in their white communities. But their parents, our Desi parents, didn’t really know how to talk to us, or chose not to talk to us, about race or racism.

Their in was also generational. Hip-hop was really booming in the 1990s and 2000s and it really spoke to them, because it articulated for them the kinds of racism that they were facing. Again, I saw these two parallels. The timing was right for South Asian youth born in the ’70s and ’80s, just when hip-hop was born. For a lot of these youth, they came from the cities where this was created, and they created alongside black and Latino peers. On the other hand, for a lot of white youth the technical and other aspects appealed to them, but it gave them this vocabulary for understanding racism in American.

Kindness

Would it be more likely, say, for a Desi kid to gravitate towards the production side than the emcee side?

Nitasha Sharma

Absolutely. I saw a pattern there, too. This is speaking of youth who I was interviewing in the 1990s and 2000s, and some of them are still hip-hop artists and producers 20 years later – Chee Malabar has about six albums to his name, Sammy Chand continues to be a hip-hop producer who’s produced, I think, 20 albums. Generally, I think people who grew up in suburban white areas where you heard hip-hop through Yo! MTV Raps, heard it on the radio and television as opposed to experiencing it in person, are the folks who had the access and the material means to pursue production. It’s also because they didn’t have the everyday practice of just rhyming in garages or in bedrooms with friends.

On the other hand, those youth who grew up in more working class areas with single parents, or in places like Richmond, California, parts of San Francisco, a lot of these folks were more working class, were raised by their moms. They grew up more with peers and with hip-hop. Chee Malabar says he learned English by rapping. They grew up as young people who were rhyming, and so they became emcees. It’s not just that they had something to say. I think a lot of people have things to say. But I think the practice of developing those skills and doing freestyle rhymes and all of that, of being b-boys and b-girls, really depends on where you are from, or if you pursued it much later in college.

Kindness

I need to state I have a generosity for everyone’s personal journey into hip-hop, or any musical art form. I think if you’ve had a extremely suburban experience, it can also be naturally difficult to find an entry point into being an emcee or going toe-to-toe with another rapper. It’s not going to be natural for you, in a way, than perhaps if your experience is more of a working class experience, regardless of racial background. You might have been exposed to more rap battles or the traditions of rhyming and writing rhymes, I guess.

My next question would be, in your discussions with that generation of emcees and producers and musicians, to what extent was the identification with the black American culture empowering, what were the positives of that identification, and what were the potential tensions of South Asians identifying with the black culture here?

Nitasha Sharma

I think that for some youth who grew up with black peers or who identified in white suburban schools with the other students of color – which were just a handful, right? – for them it was very empowering, because first of all the music spoke to them, it moved them. In some cases it’s true, of course, that it’s also braggadocio and the racialized masculinity that might have appealed to some of the South Asian boys-turning-men, who were looking for some sort of racialized masculinity that was not really the way South Asians had been typified stereotypically. I think the music really moved them. I think that it really gave people a solid sense that, “I’m not crazy. I’m not the only one experiencing this. This is not because I am devalued and South Asians are devalued as brown people in the US with multiple stereotypes. It’s that this nation is structured economically and along a racist, exclusionary basis.”

What these folks did, especially later in college – they’re all college-educated – a lot of them took ethnic studies classes and South Asian history classes in the US. What they realized was at first they were really taken by the black power rhetoric of Public Enemy and the masculinity offered by Ice Cube and folks like that. Later, they realized they had to turn black power into brown pride. That’s when they really developed as artists and got to tell their own narratives of transnational phone calls, multilingual debates, parental expectations. I think in a lot of ways they made it their own. These are the positives, that they found an art form that really spoke to them as American people of color who are racialized, and it allowed them to express themselves in a way that they loved.

Like you said, there’s a lot of tensions that come with it. Parents were almost universally against their children’s choices to pursue music, which was seen as devalued. Like, “We left India,” or Sri Lanka, “and this is what you’re going to do with yourself?” Specifically, of course, black music, [it was] like, “Why this rap crap? What is this?” With all of its attendant anti-black, racist sentiments, that this was all about violence and misogyny and drugs, which most of the artists actually don’t rap about.

I think a lot of community questions about their authenticity, which they got in black and hip-hop circles, was like, “Why is a South Asian rapping? What do you have to rap about?” Also, from South Asian youth audiences. Sometimes they’d be asked to perform at colleges for Desi or South Asian student alliances. Desi kids would show up and be like, “I don’t want to see brown people rapping. I want to see black people rapping.” I’d say the biggest struggle has just been politically motivated artists, who are not pop artists, who are not black and who are not white, how do you make your art and have people listen to you, and how do you make a living from it? It’s been really difficult for them.

Kindness

Anupa, could you talk about writing on black music culture, or being generally at FADER hyper-aware of current trends in music and that sort of content creation in a black American culture? Is there a complexity to that as a non-black person, as a non-black woman of color?

Anupa Mistry

I’m glad that I have my job at an age where I’m old enough – and I don’t want to suggest that age infers wisdom – but old enough and experienced enough to handle or understand the responsibility that comes along with it. That’s one thing. I have to think about something like that every day, whether it’s in something that I’m writing myself or in the kind of stories that I’m choosing to cover or the freelancers that I want to work with. The good thing, and the reason that I think I’m successful in my role right now, is I’ve always kind of moved through the industry, at least in the Toronto or the Canadian media industry, functioning in this way.

I think that’s part of the reason why I probably had some difficulties, which is that I have always valued and believed in talking to the people – going right to the people who the story is about, and not making assumptions about your knowledge base of something, and I don’t know where that comes from. I don’t know if it comes from how I grew up or who my friend circles are or because I read a lot or because I read the internet a lot or because I’m just smart enough to know. I should give myself that credit, too.

Also, it’s trial and error. Maybe sometimes you fuck up or you see someone else fuck up and you make note of that, but I have always wanted to talk to people who are doing interesting things, and what I define as interesting has always been different from maybe what your standard music journalist has looked like. I think that I started out at a time when I had to fight for those stories a lot and I would see them then being picked up by white dudes. I always wondered why that was, and I think that means that now that I’m in this position I’m like, “OK, I am now this gatekeeper, so I have to be responsible in terms of how I assign stories, how I treat the stories that I’m assigning.” Because I also don’t like the idea of commissioning a story from a younger, unexperienced writer and throwing them to the wolves a little bit. You know what I mean? I think that happens so much in this new landscape where identity politics is so predominant. It figures so predominantly in pop culture writing.

Kindness

Rekha, you’re British originally.

DJ Rekha

I’m poco [post colonial] diasporic. British-born, Brooklyn-based, la-dee-dah.

Kindness

Specific to the US scene, why does the South Asian musical landscape look the way it does here at this moment in time? What are the historical reasons for the way visibility is the way it is?

DJ Rekha

Why does it look the way it does? It’s a question of how does it look to whom, which is a bigger question.

Kindness

I mean in terms of its relative visibility.

DJ Rekha

Are you suggesting it’s very visible or invisible?

Kindness

I’m saying it’s somewhere in between depending on what you know and where you’re looking for it. Compare it to visibility in the UK, for example.

DJ Rekha

It’s hard not to compare the two communities. Let’s just put it that way. Every word to describe everything is problematic, so we’ll just say “scenes.” A culture does not happen in a vacuum. The context in which music producers arose in the UK are very different than the ones here. In the United States, the pull factors for immigration are very different. The communities that immigrated here are very different.

I think a lot of what happened in the United States starts from the desire to preserve cultural tradition within the community. In the UK there’s a concentrated community of Punjabi people that have a direct lineage to that music and culture, folk music.

Growing up here there is a lot of emphasis within certain communities, especially within South Indians, on certain kinds of cultural traditions. In terms of music making, that sort of knowledge base wasn’t here. But what we needed here, I would say in the early ’90s, was a desire to go out dancing, and dance to something South Asian, or be in a room full of brown people. That gave rise to remix culture, which was taking Bollywood songs and remixing them with Latin house beats or dancehall beats or whatever, and that built this underground mix CD, mixtape scene, which was so powerful globally I think it shot back to Bollywood. They just started making their music better.

On the flip side, in that same situation, in New York City particularly and other metropolitan areas, we saw a group of people coming of age and desiring their own spaces. Some of those spaces began to percolate in college campuses. Eventually it bled into clubs that were rent-a-club. Holiday weekend, white people with money go to the Hamptons, these clubs are empty. Let’s give it out to groups that can’t get into these clubs on other days. Then there you go. You’ve got a space, some of the music is South Asian, some of it is not. It’s sort of a hybrid. That’s kind of how that scene emerged.

Kindness

I want to acknowledge that, number one, we’re talking about music created in the diaspora, because we’re acknowledging that there’s incredible music being made in India of diverse production styles, genres and cultures, and secondly, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the different class compositions in these countries. It’s just that not having access to that working class intensity, the particular alienation and lack of assimilation you’re talking about, that creates music in a different way perhaps.

DJ Rekha

In both scenarios, immigrants have to find their way to survive. One way of survival is on the one hand assimilating, and the other hand, hyper cultural practice, in a way that’s excessive in some way or superficial. The United States just issued a Diwali stamp. Some of the undertones about that are kind of dangerous to me... Diwali is the Hindu New Year. It happens sometime in the fall. It’s astrologically based. The United States issued a Diwali stamp, like a Christmas stamp. We’re representing Indian culture through a religious lens, so it includes but also excludes people... It’s not representative completely.

Just to get back into the context and the culture stuff, the conditions are very different. I think the music emerged here in some ways out of a Desi party scene which was very different than the UK. There were day-timers and things like that, but in the UK you had a more monolithic or linguistically connected group of people, Punjabi speakers, direct connection to Punjabi music. Here it was more diverse, it was more mixed. The larger uniting factor here was Bollywood rather than bhangra music. Those are the two things that are different.

Kindness

Falu, as someone born in India, then living in the US, what attracted you to writing about the diaspora and music in the UK, specifically?

Falu Bakrania

I had come of age or was growing up at a time where the children of the mass migration of the 1960s here just started to emerge in the US, and I was also growing up in an area where I was pretty alienated by my environment, which was predominantly white – Orange County. As it was the South Asians were, for the most part, scattered throughout the US. There were certainly areas of concentration, but nothing like you had in the UK. Again, this is just the second generation coming of age, and I heard this music via my cousins, who are actually living in a part of LA that was a little bit more densely populated in terms of having a South Asian popular culture and street with a bunch of shops. They had access to this music that was coming from Britain. I heard a track and it just spoke to me.

It was “Star Megamix” from Bally Sagoo’s album Wham Bam Bhangra Remixes, that was released in 1990 in Birmingham, England. It was a really early track. It was really clever. It was remixing South Asian music with other kinds of Western popular music and sampling different kinds of lyrics and speeches from MLK, so there was an obvious political tone to this track, even though it wasn’t didactic, per se. It was really nothing like anything I’d heard before. It just sparked my imagination and stayed with me. In the course of graduate school, as I was thinking about a project, I really wanted to go to England and start finding out more about the music scene that this reflected.

Kindness

Let’s talk about your moment spent in the British Asian scene. Could you explain exactly what time period that was and your own personal experience, for people who won’t have a chance to read the book?

Falu Bakrania

It was in the summer of 1996 that I first went to the UK to begin work on this project. That summer was unique because it was the first time that bhangra found a space for itself in central London. A couple of DJs got together and opened a club night called Bombay Jungle. It turned out to be enormously successful and there was lines out the door, the media were all over it, and it was the first time that bhangra kind of got that exposure and that coverage in the public, mainstream space. It was fascinating for me to see that, and I went to the clubs and started to notice really interesting ways that the music was actually connecting to hip-hop music. Just noticing things about the racial formations, class formations, gender dynamics in the club spaces.

When I went back in 1997 to start the project, which was going to focus just on bhangra, that was when the Asian underground scene emerged and erupted full force into, again, the British public media. It was just a really unique opportunity for me to be able to be there at a time when both scenes were now in the public spotlight, gaining a lot of attention. There was a lot of celebration of both forms of music and people were talking about how it was the voice of the British Asian community. I thought what was really interesting was these scenes were actually very different and within them, they had certain kinds of dynamics. That’s sort of what launched my project, this idea of thinking about what were the more nuanced, more complicated, messier ways to think about what was happening in these spaces instead of just glossing them over as a kind of unified resistance to British racism – which was very much there in different ways, but I think was not the beginning and end of a story, so to speak.

Kindness

I know it’s specific to this moment in time, but talk about the roles that class and gender and sexuality and the free expression of any of those roles plays in these music scenes. I know that’s a huge discussion.

Falu Bakrania

That sounds like a whole book, but I can think about certain things to pinpoint.

First off, the bhangra scene was predominantly working class, if one were to make a generalization. I know it’s never that simple, but the majority of the scene was that way, and with the Asian underground, it was majority middle class in terms of who was attending and all of that. What started happening was the Asian underground was getting a lot more entry into some of the style magazines and the artists were winning top British awards. They were making it into the mainstream in a way that bhangra had dreamed of doing for a very long time and still hadn’t been able to quite do.

You started to get these conversations or conflicts between artists and fans about the music between both those scenes, which I sort of look at and talk about as, in some ways, a coded class conflict. They’re ostensibly talking about musical styles, and they were, but there was working class folks kind of critiquing middle class folks for just wanting to, excuse me, be favored by the white media and, at the same time, bhangra was in a kind of ambivalent position itself, because it had wanted to be actually mainstream. I kind of tease out some of the discussions that were taking place and how we can see this as an example of how class still continued to play a role. It wasn’t erased by the emergence of these scenes.

The other main category I look at is gender. Here again, if we were to just take a step back and think about the books that have been written about popular music and popular music scenes, they often typically focus on the predominantly male artists. There’s been a slew of important books, but I thought about what it would mean to center women, or the category of gender, in this analysis.

With this scene, most of the artists were men, and where you found women was primarily as clubgoers, so half of the book I look at the artists. But the other half I look at the experiences of the women clubgoers and show that to cast the club space as a kind of space of racial liberation is a problematic thing to do, given the fact that these women were dealing with very different kinds of what I call “burdens of representation.” You have these scenes that are ostensibly about promoting or celebrating a British Asian identity, and yet what was happening to both working class and middle class women in each of these scenes was that they were still being asked to carry the burden of tradition.

Kindness

In a way that the men weren’t.

Falu Bakrania

Exactly. That made for a very different kind of experience for, let’s say, the working class women at the bhangra clubs. Them even being in those space inherently casts them as these bad girls that were sort of falling out of the norms of morality and modesty and all of that stuff that goes along with being “traditional.”

That space had a whole other set of meanings for these women. I guess my idea with this book was to multiply the stories and multiply our understanding of what’s going on. They had to deal with the misogyny, the sexual assault of various kinds and things that happened in some of these spaces. At the same time, they were wanting to go assert some sort of autonomy for themselves, enjoy themselves. It was just sort of an inherently contradictory and difficult space for them to inhabit in terms of the bhangra clubs.

Kindness

Nitasha, in your research in the US - and I know that things are changing - what was preventing South Asian women from entering hip-hop in the same way that the South Asian men were?

Nitasha Sharma

It’s really interesting, because with regard to nightlife, nightclub life, DJ life, hip-hop, in one way it’s actually easier in a heteronormative sense for Desi women to enter hip-hop vis-á-vis relationships with black men in the hip-hop scene – to be fans, to go to clubs, to date men. To be an artist, you can look at DJ Rekha, you can look at Deejay Bella, [but] it’s very hard to be a woman DJ. It’s a highly male-dominated situation.

In hip-hop traditionally, including with black women, there’s been either this cute anomaly or this butchy novelty, right? There’s this twin dichotomy of either you’re a lesbian or you’re hot and available and sexy. I think that it’s very difficult for women to navigate the sexual politics, but the racial politics might allow Desi women more of an in socially or sexually. Whereas for South Asian men, they’re often being evaluated as men in a male field, and they’re just seen as racially inauthentic. I think that the entry point is different. It’s not impossible. A lot of the South Asian women that I talk to, they did more production. They were not emcees. They were sort of screwed around by promoters. They wouldn’t get paid. They would be sexually harassed. Black women and black men at clubs would not like what they were playing and would throw drinks on their equipment. I don’t know that that’s specific to Desi women, but it seems very tough.

Kindness

Falu, from a very generalized perspective, to my mind, the music scenes within South Asian communities in the UK are maybe slightly more politicized than the South Asian music scene here in the US. Is there any fairness to that?

Falu Bakrania

You’re talking about Desi music scenes in both places, right?

Kindness

Yeah. I think anyone of a South Asian heritage making music, not just saying bhangra or Asian underground, but anyone. I feel like in the UK – like M.I.A, who’s very overtly political regardless of whether what she’s saying is right or wrong – it’s very political.

Falu Bakrania

You’re talking about a long history of resistance coming in part out of racial discrimination, economic inequality, and you just don’t have the same history here [in the US]. You certainly have those histories here, but it hasn’t been on the same level to the same degree for that length of time. I think that speaks to it. I also think that if you’ve got a predominantly middle class model minority wanting community – again, I don’t want to gloss over the incredible political formations that are here, and the diversity – in that context, folks going into music is not necessarily encouraged. There’s that whole stereotype of wanting your kids to be a lawyer or doctor or engineer, which I know holds true for folks in the UK as well. I think you also just have a longer established public culture there of South Asians being involved in music, in theater, in film, in comedy.

That all lends itself more to the idea of South Asians entering into those kinds of fields and being political with those forms.

Kindness

Anupa, the conversation that we’ve had on this show is about identity in music, but what’s it look like in music journalism, for example? Are there many other writers with South Asian roots that you’re aware of that you speak to? Is there a community?

Anupa Mistry

I wouldn’t say there’s a community. There are people who I’m aware of and I think we seek each other out, which is great. Like my friend Puja Patel, who is now at Rolling Stone. I’m trying to think of who else. Like, is that the only one? Is it just me and her? There are definitely younger writers who are coming up, which is great.

I do think there’s a history. When I was in college I would stream BBC Radio and I listened to Asian Network a lot. Those are the people that I was looking to as journalists who were chronicling music culture, and I guess it was specifically Asian focused, but to me it was still super cool. One of my other idols growing up was this woman Monika Deol. She hosted this dance music show that aired on MuchMusic, which was like our MTV, and the show was called Electric Circus. The concept was basically like Friday night before the club. It was all of the club hits, and they showed people dancing inside the TV studios and stuff like that.

Kindness

It was like Soul Train, but with dance music?

Anupa Mistry

Pretty much, but it was ’90s, so if you look it up the fashion is really great.

Kindness

Is this Canadian as well?

Anupa Mistry

Yeah, it was Canadian. It was one of the flagship shows and you could audition to be a dancer on the show. I was too young, but I would watch it religiously and Monika, who is a South Asian woman – she’s from Vancouver – was one of the hosts. I always say that I know what people mean when they say there’s not enough of us and there’s not a certain level of visibility, but we have always been there, and I wonder if there’s a young person right now who’s like, “There’s South Asian people in music journalism?” I’m like, “I’m here.” Just because I’m not putting myself on blast in a certain way, but I’m here and I’m doing work.

Kindness

Let’s maybe move into another line of questioning, which is this sort of idea that all non-white communities are just the same. It resulted in a potential erasure of South Asian people because it’s just like, “Oh, you’re not white. OK, well, you must write with the black music writers.” That’s where you are. Same with broadcasting maybe, same with TV and internet, press as well. Where is the Saint Heron for South Asians? Where is the self-created platform for people with a similar cultural heritage?

Anupa Mistry

Well, we’d need our own Solange. I also don’t want to say that this stuff doesn’t exist. There are young brown kids doing this stuff. There’s this site I follow on Twitter called The Aerogram, and they do a really good job at aggregating – whether they create their own original content or they aggregate it – Desi stuff from around the web, and I actually think their curation is pretty good. It’s a mix of fun stuff, but serious journalism, too.

I do think there are dangers of a site that feels definitive or a site that claims to be a definitive chronicle of the South Asian experience. Actually, a really good website was a blog called Sepia Mutiny. I think it kind of still exists, but it was more politics and culture focused – really good, serious critical blogging about what was going on for South Asian Americans. It was really rooted in the US, but I’ve never encountered anything like that before.

Kindness

Rekha, having looked at things from a historical perspective, looking at it from an optimistic view, what would you like to see happen? What would you like to see the Desi community foster for itself? Where would you like to see musical creation go?

DJ Rekha

I’d just like to see more of it... We have some really quality musicians. We have some people that have had tremendous success, Red Baraat, Folou and Vijay Iyer – they are all very different genre-wise. Just more, and also support within the community as well. It’s kind of like you get supported the minute you make it big outside, and then you come back. Norah Jones wasn’t Indian until she won the Grammy. We started to claim her.

Kindness

I was on the Wikipedia page for people of Indian descent. I was like, “You know, Nicki Minaj is a quarter Indian, but we’ll claim her.”

DJ Rekha

Yeah, definitely. Engelbert Humperdinck was born in India. Random! Colonialism is neat. Nicki Minaj, her Trinidadian background draws on colonialism, on the population of South Asians that migrated to Trinidad. She’s from Queens. There’s a rich community in Queens and a Caribbean community that also doesn’t get acknowledged here in the same way.

Kindness

Anupa, do you see the potential for there being greater representation of South Asian kids in the music journalism that you’re writing with them being the producers and performers? Do you see that increasing over time? I know that those artists have always been there, but can you think of any ways in which the community would shift into a place where there are more DJs, more emcees, more SoundCloud producers? People that are starting at a grassroots level and working up to being the next Drake or the next Bieber or whoever?

Anupa Mistry

You don’t think that we’re seeing that now? There’s so many now, right?

Kindness

It’s true. But how many Gen F profiles have there been of people at that entry level compared to other white, black, Hispanic peers? I just don’t think there’s as many people, even though there’s a fairly sizable population... Asian kids have access to laptops.

Anupa Mistry

This is where I put on my asshole hat, as someone who actually really does care about this and has always cared about this and was a noted fan of Tony Kanal before Gwen Stefani. You know what I mean? This has always mattered to me. I haven’t seen anything that has impressed me that much, either. That also plays into this, and that’s not necessarily because I’m saying that people shouldn’t keep making stuff and keep trying or whatever.

Kindness

It’s a different argument, but I do remember reading someone talking about, let’s say brown mediocrity, in a sense. They were talking about black mediocrity and they were saying, “Well, now we have true equality in society, when black and brown people can be mediocre and still get on in the world,” but within those white, independent, especially alternative scenes, sometimes it just takes picking up a guitar and being very good-looking to get you into the potential space to have a feature written on you. Listen to me hating over here. But it is true.

Anupa Mistry

Although you have had a FADER cover.

Kindness

Yeah, and? I went through the Wikipedia just before you got here and I was like, Zayn Malik, me. I’m half Indian, FYI. Nicki Minaj – quarter Indian – M.I.A. and Bat for Lashes and that was it. That’s all the South Asian representation.

Anupa Mistry

I’m not going to say it’s great, but it’s not bad.

Kindness

One optimism I do have is that within the underground, there’s a very vibrant global culture with interconnections everywhere. It would be nice to foster the same kind of intensity within a more generalized South Asian music community. Even if, as we say, there’s a disparity in genre sound. Just mutual support.

DJ Rekha

It’s a double-edged sword. Do you want to do a South Asian music festival? What does that mean? Do these people have anything in common? There’s some cultural background. Does the music sound the same? If you do that, programmatically, is there enough talent strong enough to support that idea?

Kindness

I think we could look to comparative concepts like Afropunk, for example, and say that you can have a musically diverse lineup that focuses around a cultural identity and that it’s not a problematic thing. It’s entirely positive in my opinion.

DJ Rekha

No, it’s positive. I think Red Baraat actually pulled it off great last summer. They did a Celebrate Brooklyn! thing and they had a slew of performers. We’re just a complex background, complex community, and I think it’s about finding the talent. It’s like, there are a lot of performers, but are they really solid, or just some part-time stuff? Sorry. You just try to keep it all peace and love and I’m trying to keep it real.

Kindness

No, I want as much realness as possible. I feel like that’s the only way that we can push ourselves, is to be pushed with love.

Anupa, just to bring this particular conversation to a close... When I touched on the Saint Heron thing, in terms of the producer and performance space that we’re talking about, an emerging artist that might be featured in FADER rather than in Rolling Stone or NME or whatever, I think on some level we’re talking about weird or more alternative people within a larger community. What could happen there within that very small group to nurture that smaller, weirder part?How do we make each other stronger in that sense? That’s when it gets really desperate. That’s when you start feeling kind of lonely. It’s because you do see other peers, but you don’t see peers who want to make music in the same way, who want to think about politics in the same way.

Anupa Mistry

It’s so hard, because I think so many weirdos – and I would include myself in that – often migrate to white spaces first, because maybe those are places where we feel like we can truly express ourselves, and then eventually you get disillusioned. I think kids today are so lucky now because they can find each other online, but again, it’s never been that hard to find each other. I have a weird ragtag group of friends back in Toronto that I’ve been friends with for so long now, and when we think about it we’re like, “We met each other on the internet, through weird message boards, because of our music taste.” Then we were like, “Hey, you’re brown.” We’d go to shows together and stuff like that.

I don’t know what could be done. I really don’t know. I don’t even want to offer solutions because I don't work in that space, because I’m not a musician or I’m not an artist. I think that I see certain people doing well because they know how to aggressively market themselves, and they aggressively market themselves to their community and they’re unashamed of doing that. I think that some of us need to do that better and put a little bit more faith in our community.

I think there’s actually a lot of fear in the weirdo contingent because – again, I’ll speak for myself and for my friends – I know that people have been called whitewashed by other brown people or all of this kind of stuff, or maybe they’ve experienced shade-ism from other brown people, whatever the case may be. I think that it’s great that weirdos have found a way to express themselves and are healed and confident in their South Asian, their Desi, their brown identity or whatever, however they want to identify. But I think maybe the last step of that healing is to be like, “It’s okay. We can be amongst our people still.” I really do feel that a lot, and maybe that’s the most immediate solution I think I can offer.