Issue 3: The Editors Speak
The editors of Mahogany Journal, Jaryl George Solomon and Prasanthi Ram, share their thoughts about the third issue, Soundscapes.
We’re Just Dancing the Night Away
The mellow and steady drumming of a tabla sits at the back of synth waves that slowly wash out of the speakers like dark water thirstily reaching for the shore at night. All around me, flushed faces of teenagers ready to grab the reins on their newfound journey in junior college perk up. Everyone is completely drained from a night of campfire songs and games but the palpitations from the drumbeats ripple through our bodies, magnetically pulling us into huddles around the gargantuan school hall that is humid with the weight of lingering sweat. Soon, the beats crescendo and are briefly drowned out by screams from all of the students present. This is our moment, we have been practising the steps tirelessly throughout the week of orientation programme. As soon as Vasundhara Das’ voice seeps in, every single body simultaneously side-hops while pumping our thumbs up in the air. The humidity that has been stubbornly clinging on to the air hurriedly dissipates with the rush of flailing arms and manic kicks. We are all smiling and moving in unison - side-shuffling and dipping till our Dri-FIT tees can no longer handle our fervour. I turn and catch a glimpse of the face belonging to my Geography rep. She is bursting with youthful zeal along with the other girls from Crescent. The sweat-drenched arm of my best friend from secondary school grazes my own and things feel right and infinite as we are deliriously echoing the titular phrase from the song: “It’s the time to disco!”
Unbeknownst to me, what happened to be an innocent mass dance song morphed into an emotional imprint, forever locking the people I loved in that moment to how I felt about the world, a world that was yet to fully unfold to a bright-eyed 18-year-old boy who is now forever sunbleached and faded away. However morose it sounds, that was how my (often frazzled) mind filtered the theme for Issue 3 - Soundscapes. The term conjures snippets of my being traversing multiple emotional terrains, each tagged with its own soundtrack. Though I barely understood many of the songs that would play in the background on weekend afternoons while I was cramped on a weathered sofa in the living room, I remember making my own associations to the soundtracks of Bollywood and Kollywood cinema that my mother would religiously unwind to after lunch was served. Anjali Anjali reminded me of all the times my baby sister and I would fight over our shared green Gameboy on the balcony floor. I loved how she would verbalise all the sound effects that blasted from the gaming console in her toddler babble and how I would maniacally pinch her cherubic cheeks only to send her running away from me. More importantly, I fondly remember feeding my sister her first Cornetto and invading her Barbie dollhouse with my Blue Ranger action figure. Of course, my life was nowhere near the celluloid one of the film’s but the upbeat chorale of children in that song will forever remind me of two children who were a lot closer then than now.
Similarly, other South Asian songs I barely understood linguistically still managed to anchor themselves within my life. My mornings were always brightened by my father’s blasting of Made in India whenever it came on Channel V. The house would reverberate with Alisha Chinai’s voice while I frantically put on my socks before dashing out of the house to catch the school bus at 6:15am. Skipping the beats several years ahead, K.J. Yesudas’ Amma Endrazhaikatha would play in my head on repeat as I helped my mother dress the mouth of her gaping wound from her mastectomy. Not long after, M.I.A’s Matangi Mixtape for Kenzo was on a constant Youtube loop as I found myself constantly alone rushing papers in a school library a million miles away from my mother’s sambar and rasam. Despite my abysmal knowledge of the languages that these songs were artfully crafted in, these soundscapes managed to keep me sane and imprinted on me the histories that make my brown body mine. Whatever has been said about the transcendental power of music rings 100% true!
Unsurprisingly, the +65 South Asian is dissected and celebrated in a corresponding way through the mesh of songs and rich personal histories embodied by the poets selected for this issue. Each poet treats the parallels between their chosen song(s) and histories as an avenue for the reader to be confronted with the complexities and realities of being a +65 South Asian in the present. In Laili Abdeen’s piece, the image of Mastani melds with the persona as she too goes in search of the ever elusive love. In contrast, Sarah Farheenshah Begum explores the connecting thread that unites lovers across eras framed by her chosen soundscape. The theme of love once again emerges but as an unwavering flame that pains the persona in Subash Kumar’s prose poem. A literal soundtrack forms the backdrop for Kiran Kaur Dhaliwal’s piece where we follow her persona’s revelations on a ride back home. Finally, Pooja Nansi rounds up the poetry selection for this issue with her ode to Prabhu Deva and his irresistible yet irreproducible swag.
I am so incredibly proud and grateful to have worked with each and every poet in fleshing out this issue. Each of them has taught me that I am not alone in vibing to the soundscapes that have made up my own +65 South Asian experience, despite my struggles to understand the language. Music is truly universal and uniting in its essence. I hope the culmination of this issue (through the hard work of the contributors and editors alike) presents you with an opportunity to rekindle with the soundtracks of our youth and rediscover the beauty behind these South Asian beats. After all, the night is still young and there is no better time to disco than now.
Dancing the night away on two left feet,
Jaryl George Solomon
In a World of Mamis and Enjaamis
If you had told my younger self that a famous American talk show host would one day plug a song by a Singaporean Indian rapper, I would have laughed in your face. But in July 2021, that was precisely what happened. Yung Raja’s addictive bilingual track Mami got a shout-out on Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show. This was monumental, even if Fallon did not seem so thrilled by the repetitive chorus (which I personally deem unfair given the astounding number of American songs that rely on such choruses).
You see, Yung Raja emerges from a generation of Tamil kids who grew up on Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan. My generation. The now nostalgic nineties. Kids of an A R Rahman diet who danced to Mukkala Mukkabla as if they were Prabhu Deva or imagined love to be as pure as Shalini and Maddy’s smitten smiles in Pachai Nirame. To us, the worlds of American music and Tamil/Indian music were always separate. I was the child who loved Oops I Did It Again and Kaatre En Vaasal in the same year, two songs that could not be more different from each other. When Aishwarya Rai, who began her career in the 1997 Tamil film Iruvar, crossed over into Hollywood in 2004 with her first English-language film Bride and Prejudice, it was an exception, not a merger of two worlds. When Akon sang Chammak Challo in 2011, it was an anomaly within an otherwise predictable soundscape. But with Mami, and arguably the rest of Yung Raja’s discography in relation to a larger narrative of diasporic music, these worlds melt into a layered, heterogenous soundscape. If one can get past the smokescreen of repetition, one will realise that Mami is not just Spanish slang for an attractive woman or an English homophone but also means “auntie” in Tamil. On his track, Raja raps about an attractive woman, a mami “in a saari not a skirt” who is a “freak for sure” for wanting “that thaali”. As the repetition ascends into almost a mantra, the Tamil woman of his bilingual imagination takes centerstage where she both is desirable and desires without any inhibition.
Earlier in the same month that Mami was released, Enjoy Enjaami (Enjoy My Lord) blew up on YouTube, taking over the top trending page alongside best-selling Korean pop artists, and became a viral sensation within and beyond the Indian diaspora. Released by maajja, A R Rahman’s new music platform for independent musicians, Enjoy Enjaami was the lyrical brainchild of Dalit activist-rapper Arivu. He performs the track alongside Sri Lankan Tamil playback singer Dhee. Merging tropical beats with rap and oppari, a Tamil folk style of lamentation that is usually sung at funerals, the song is a powerful ode to and an elegy for the generations of agricultural workers who have “planted five trees” and “nourished a beautiful garden” but whose “throats remain parched”. They are unappreciated, undercompensated, and without any ownership over the lands they toiled over. The cinematic music video, which opens with a thrilling parai sequence (a drum traditionally associated with funerals), marries aesthetic and authenticity by featuring Arivu’s grandmother Valliamma, whose story inspired Enjoy Enjaami, as well as real-life rural workers from his hometown in Tiruvannamalai. Each time I listen to the song, I am moved to tears. What’s the matter, my sugarcane? What’s the matter, my darling grandson? The buildup of the music and the aural textures of the lamentation always speak to this raw, primal and non-verbal part of me; it is impossible to fully articulate just how powerful it is. Many YouTube reactors, even those outside of the South Asian diaspora, have expressed a similar reaction; under such videos are often comments from Tamils attributing their reactions to the innate power of oppari, that music can evoke deep emotion in us even across language barriers.. If one were to take into consideration the historical contexts of both Dalit Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils, the impact of the song only swells into majestic proportions. In my humble opinion, the sublime and poetic blend of the aural, lyrical and visual in Enjoy Enjaami is worth a legion of essays. (That and the constant erasure of Arivu, which is absolutely deplorable–shame on you Rolling Stones India.)
Now that I have waxed lyrical about the two 2021 tracks that have made me incredibly excited and proud to be part of the Tamil and South Asian diasporas, let me return to the point of this editor’s note. That is, music has the propensity to hold space for our diasporic complexities. Music holds the immense power to transcend the arbitrary yet defining boundaries we are born into. In a world where Yung Raja raps interchangeably between English and Tamil, Jason Derulo makes jalebis on Tiktok to promote his feature on Canadian-Indian Tesher’s viral Jalebi Baby (a feature Derulo himself sought out) and DJ Snake participates on a remix of Enjoy Enjaami, music has the unparalleled power to speak us into existence–no, propel us into confident exuberance.
That is why we narrowed in on the soundscapes of the +65 South Asian for our third issue. What are the South Asian songs that have spoken you into existence then and now? Who are the South Asian musicians who enable you to embrace all your cultural complexity? Are there songs that delineate time for you into befores and afters? Which songs hold past versions of you that are ready to be resurrected at the sound of the first chord? Which songs make you hopeful for the future?
I for one have so many answers to give you. The iconic Kaadhalan soundtrack that defined my early years even before I began learning the curves and edges of the Tamil alphabet. Simple sa re ga ma’s at my childhood Carnatic singing classes that still sound superior to the Western music scale. The earlier mentioned Pachai Nirame that made me realise the poetry inherent in the Tamil language–where else would I read a gorgeous comparison between the colour red and a baby’s foot that has not yet touched the earth? Honey by South Asian sapphic goddess Raveena who sings like a languorous Sunday afternoon dream. All these songs remind me that being South Asian means to be abundant, to overflow and demolish the boxes we are pigeonholed into. There is so much to us; how can anyone possibly tell us otherwise?
Our fiction and prose writers had their own answers as well. Ranjini Ganapathy reimagines the sixties Tamil classic Unnai Ondru Ketpen for a contemporary tale about a widow on her deathbed. Gayathrii Nathan brings us into a speculative future where late loved ones can be resurrected through a process known as the Revival and are eased into the disorienting process with a song they liked in their last life–in this case, it is S P Balasubrahmanyam’s soothing Nilaave Vaa. Last but not least, Mrigaa Sethi, through a spellbinding patchwork of Bollywood bangers such as I Am A Disco Dancer and Dum Maro Dum, examines queerness in the heart of Magic Carpet, a well-loved Bollywood nightclub in Singapore that has incidentally been suspended since the pandemic.
We hope that through reading this issue and listening to the accompanying playlist, you too resurrect your own +65 South Asian soundscape. And if you are not one of us, we are confident that you will discover a new artist or song through our eight wonderful contributors. After all, our soundscapes are gloriously abundant.
Mami signing off,
Prasanthi