est. 2020
Pieces of Writing
various pieces written by South Asian people, focusing on the different aspects of South Asian culture
Sinhalese Music in Sri Lanka
Anonymous
Music is a powerful force that influences societies and provides entertainment for many. There are several types of genres of music all around the world, each with different impacts on different cultures. Within music, there lies thousands of years of history, and ideals; it is important to understand how music has impacted civilizations. The small island of Sri Lanka is native to different groups of people. One indigenous group called the Vedda group, was one of the very first groups to settle in Sri Lanka, descended from tribes of Malaysia. They lived as hunters and gatherers and called themselves the “people of the forest.” Today the Vedda group is split into three separate regions. The largest group is known as the Anuradhapura District located in the north-central part of the island, next is the Coast Veddas located on the east coast of Sri Lanka, and the third group is the Bintenne Veddas. These three regions make up the Vedda Indigenous group. Sinhalese music has played a major role in shaping and defining the Vedda Indigenous group of Sri Lanka and is significant to their identity because of its central themes of daily life, religion, and ritualistic importance.
In order to understand the impact of Sinhalese music on the Vedda indigenous group, it is vital to have a well rounded understanding of the elements of Sinhalese music. Sinhalese music includes both folk and traditional music of the country. According to Jayantha Aravinda, “Majority varieties… under Sinhala folk songs are lullabies, reaping songs, wedding songs, miner’s songs, farmers songs, fisherman’s songs…etc” (Aravinda 2). There are Sinhalese songs that exist for all kinds of daily occasions and jobs. The main theme encompassing these different types of topics is daily life in Sri Lanka; the prominent themes themselves include agriculture and cultivation. Agriculture is a centralized idea in Sinhalese songs because the day-to-day life of a person residing in Sri Lanka often contains tasks linked to agriculture. There is an abundance of farmers on the island who maintain plots of land and grow crops and staple foods such as rice. The elements of Sinhalese songs that center around daily life allow people to feel more connected to the land and helps them to feel a sense of relatability to the lyrics...
The Witch Who Knocked
Ananya Dutta
Before the 1990s, Bangalore was a retirement community. The city limits were small and getting from one end to the other would set you back only twenty minutes. Missing the constant cries of street food vendors hawking their fares, which were usually present in most major Indian cities, Bangalore was a sleepy city. Women wore flowers in their hair to work and men spent their time drinking filter coffee and eating steamed idlis. People lived in sects, with different castes and communities living in their own separate areas. In the nineties, the Indian government liberalized their economy leading to a Silicon Valley-esque explosion of IT-related emmigration. This explosion also coincided with the rise of a creepy urban legend featuring a witch who would roam the city streets and call out to the men in the voices of their mothers, wives, and daughters, imploring them to let her in their homes. Once inside, the witch would kill the men and walk away. The only way to prevent this from happening was by writing Nale Ba on your front door -meaning come tomorrow. For a while, the wicked, murderous witch was all that Bangalorians could think about. She dominated the tabloids, magazines, and street art of the time. However, she is reminiscent of a much older trait of Indian culture —storytelling. The Nale Ba legend is an extension of a Bangalorian attempt to deal with the changes in environment brought on by the city’s rapid transformation into the tech hub of India.
The Nale Ba legend was used to rationalize a changing world. In the late eighties and early nineties, Bangalore began to see a huge influx of emmigration as technology companies began setting up shop. These companies created much-desired jobs and that led to a rush of people flooding the city and ultimately changing it. Gone were the city’s days of sleepy urban life. Bangalore began to come alive and grow in ways that were unimaginable to its earliest residents. As the city expanded, people of different castes, Muslims, and foreigners started to share spaces frequently. Around this same time, the city began to see a spike in crime...
Confidence Levels Amongst South Asian Bollywood Dancers on Social Media
Alisha Gupta
Perceived evils have become necessities in this time of crisis. We are living in a world void of physical interaction, forced to retreat to social media, which some would describe as the corrupting force for our newest generations. In parallel, STEM curriculum is now often rebranded as STEAM, with the inclusion of arts. Arts is not merely an educational essential; today, we regard art as an “irreplaceable unique creative product to help humanity (Bonin-Rodriguez & Vakharia 2020).” Artistic entrepreneurial resilience begets progessive movements, “social action to build economic and social structures that support...artists'' and the community as a whole - essentially a “culture ecosystem” (Bonin-Rodriguez & Vakharia 2020). While art has traditionally been an expression of self, Scott Blackshire in his Tobin Collection of Theater Arts at the McNay Art Museum analyzes a newfound shift towards a social consciousness from artists: Professor, author, and playwright Lisa B. Thompson is a supporter of artists’ unions. Her work reminds artists to question social and institutional values and be mindful of economic inequities. (Bonin-Rodriguez & Vakharia 2020)
There is then little doubt of the socioeconomic disparities exacerbated due to the pandemic. To corroborate personal findings, I surveyed 11 South Asian Bollywood Fusion dancers for 10 consecutive weeks during the COVID-19 lockdown in which studios were closed, meticulously recording their individual training sessions. Participant 1 noted the transformation of her bedroom into a “home studio” used to simulate the open-floored practice environment with which she is familiar. Contrary to Participant 2, whose “limited space” precluded any chance of recording a dance, Participant 1 was more confident in posting her sequence on social media (Gupta 2020). Five weeks later, Participant 2 managed to clean out space in her garage to train with her dance team over Zoom. Having transitioned from solitude to a larger dance environment, Participant 2 records a sudden shift in mentality, feeling increasingly encouraged and motivated. Minsberg, in her New York Times article, “The New Training Facilities: Backyard Gym, Hallway Track,” substantiates that economic imbalances allowed “athletes with existing home gyms or training facilities in their backyards” an easier transition during the pandemic whilst those without the means and space to convert into a workout studio faced chances of slower athletic progress (Minsberg 2020)...
Rape Culture & Treatment of Rape Victims in India
Ayesha Lal, TW: sensitive content
The image above shows a girl who would be around the age of nine, holding a white placard that says “AM I NEXT?” in capital letters. Her appearance is of Indian origin and the way she’s dressed shows that she is from a more traditional family, wearing handcrafted silver jewelry and ethnic clothes. The colors of the girl’s clothes juxtapose the colors of her surroundings. The dull dried up red, and dirty beige and white symbolize the world around her full of impurities while vibrant red and orange in her clothes suggest that she’s still full of warmth and embodies change, like a ray of sun on a dark gloomy day she provides hope that the world can still change. The background was intentionally blurred out to emphasize the girl and her dominant presence in the image which is substantiated through the middle positioning of her body against the background. The words “AM I NEXT?” taken out of context could reference child trafficking, sexual misconduct, child abuse, child marriage, child labor, or death due to poor health conditions. The image became popularized by a BBC article titled, “Why India’s rape crisis shows no signs of abating,” which discusses India’s rape crisis, seen through various heartbreaking incidents of sexual assault in 2018.
While the image is originally published by Sivaram on Thomas Reuters Foundation News with the caption, “a girl holds a placard during a protest against the rape of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, near Jammu, in Kochi, India April 15, 2018,” the image has been used in multiple other news sites such as BBC, CNN, and The Daily Beast on the overarching issues of rape, child rapists and death penalties for rape. These acclaimed news outlets are using this as a tactic to evoke pathos and empathy from their readers to make them more aware of the rape issue amongst children. As Harris suggests, “the other reader” can be anyone and no one is above the media. Even though the readers of these magazines have become desensitized to these issues because of how mundane they’ve become (Serein), no one is immune to their influence and the messages the articles are disseminating…