enter the hibiscus ep. 13: on language
in the nilgiris and sri lanka
I host a radio show on East Village Radio called enter the hibiscus.
I thought to organize this episode by location. 1. Kotagiri, Nilgiris, 2. Bangalore, then 3. Sri Lanka. But I felt that the nation-state borders don’t actually make sense in connecting music to each other.
Within the Nilgiris I was relieved to only hear Tamil hits on the street and streamed on restaurant screens, directly synonymous to Jaffna. There was an obscene amount of French music in Colombo, largely for the ears of tourists. Bangalore exists in an old school RnB world. For my own sanity, I will break up my reflection of this episode by location.
Kotagiri, The Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu
This episode opens with a voice recording of a kai kadai (vegetable store) on the block of my friend Anokha’s house in Kotagiri, Nilgiris. The store plays the recording all day, repeating the prices of each vegetable over and over and over. It’s the soundtrack of the newly erected TASMAC next door, a government regulated shop to sell liquor, that invites only men and piss to the block. However, if you are next to an Elite TASMAC, the men act a bit more sensible. I learned in the Nilgiris that women cannot and probably should not buy alcohol, because then we cannot have children. And if we go to a “bar” we have to be escorted to the family section because it is either unsafe or unappealing to drink in the same room as men.
I was in the Nilgiris to co-develop a workshop on climate, gender, and health for Adivasi community leaders that you can read about here. I thought a lot about language, since the whole workshop was conducted in Tamil. I’m not fluent in Tamil so most of the technical flew over my head; I texted my dad every word I didn’t know (he doesn’t think in Tamil anymore). In discussion, the concept of “food sovereignty” is not translatable in Tamil. Access to food is not the same as control over food systems, or freedom from the labor that surrounds them. One participant said that vegetables are smaller now, and they don’t taste like they did in childhood. Even if fresh, nutritious vegetables are delivered to the door, someone still has to cook them. And that someone is almost always women.
I aspire to be fluent enough in Tamil so I can communicate my personality. That was my one regret of this workshop, that I couldn’t connect as myself on this “academic” level. My smile can, to some extent, but I wanted to say something more than a hug to those who shared stories of a friend who was killed by domestic violence and use my voice to affirm that I believe the men in their households should also cook meals. My personality in this workshop must have felt like toast with a little bit of jam. This episode is a reflection of that: an outsider picking and choosing what they can understand and sending it out through the radio waves for you to hear.
So, the voice recording of the kai kadai spirals into Bhairav, by Charanjit Singh, part of an iconic album that combines Hindustani ragas to disco beats but also providing a stressful start to the episode. The tracks following, I stole from Anokha while she was unpacking her suitcase.
Sri Lanka
My perception of Sri Lanka is informed by Tamil friends who are children of refugees, and being doxxed by one of those aforementioned children of refugees who is chronically online with a large following. Doxxer’s claim regarded an event we were planning on the island to bring artists together, specifically that visiting Sri Lanka is like visiting Israel and any participation of tourism on the island is supporting a genocidal government. At the time, we were planning an event in Hiriketiya that brought Sri Lankan artists together to showcase their work. Yes, it was in an area that is dominated economically and racially by white tourists. We rationalized that we were planning directly with artists on the island, listening to them that they had never been showcased in one place outside of the traditional white cube or been given a global platform. At this time, I decided as a Tamil Indian I needed to be was in solidarity with Eelam Tamils, however I did not know how to reconcile the difference in politics of Eelam Tamil diaspora versus Tamils on the island. My views shifted after visiting, and even then they continued to change depending on where I was.
In South India, it is common to hear neighboring languages, like in Kochi you can get by with Tamil, Malayalam and English; in Bangalore you can take a gamble with Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam, & English. However, in Sri Lanka, you had the best chance with Sinhalese and English, despite Tamil also being a national language (this makes sense given the government’s effort to erase the Tamil language using state policies such as the Sinhala Only Act and burning of Jaffna Library).
So the way we discovered if the people around us were Tamil, was based on the music they were playing. From Colombo to Weligama, our driver was playing “Tamil Love Hits” in the car. From Jaffna to Dambulla our driver was playing “Sid Sriram Tamil Hits,” and from Balangoda to Colombo our driver had his USB plugged in so everything was SongTitle.mp3.
From Colombo to Weligama [Tamil]
From Balangoda to Colombo [Sinhalese]
In Kotagiri or Jaffna, playing Tamil music seemed tied to language preservation. In Jaffna especially, after decades shaped by the war, language and culture will never be neutral until everyone is equal. Tamil music is innately a way of saying, we are still here.
Bangalore loves Enrique Iglesias while Colombo’s artsy coffee-shop-museums stream Saharan funk and Moroccan French rap. A gallery in Bombay curated an entire playlist of Hermanos Gutiérrez. These cities are not necessarily preoccupied with cultural preservation as they already have access to the global stage. What is being curated instead is to fit a cosmopolitan clay pot spun on the wheel by tourism and western fingers. I wonder, if this is still an over-generous catering to the Western ear. The act of smoothing a place into something consumable risks another form of erasure.
To play global music on enter the hibiscus is a privilege because I am able to play anything. It felt sacrilegious to witness so many non-local DJs take over the south coast of Sri Lanka. These DJs reproduce Ibiza-style parties that they promote exclusively to tourists and backpackers, mostly from Russia, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel. The sound is imported, not in conversation with the island but hovering in its own world of Purchasing Power Parity.
Common refrains we heard:
I came here for a holiday and loved it so much I stayed. I’ve been here for three years.
Bali and Vietnam are too crowded now, my friends told me to come here!
A specific example is Arugam Bay which has become a culturally insulated bubble of Israeli tourists (ex-IOF), who are “semi-settling” for months or years without integrating into society. While this does not entirely relate to this radio episode, I urge you to read this article by Prinita Thevarajah on the tensions between locals and tourists, gentrification, and how the Sri Lankan state prioritizes the protection of foreign tourists over local issues.
What is the “White Party” incident?
I got the chance to speak with a DJ in the south (who is Tamil and moved back to the island recently after their family fled at a young age to the UK) another mutual friend in Colombo about their perceptions. Both differently identified the dynamic between tourists and locals. My Sinhalese mutual friend in Colombo pointed to the hypocrisy of policing locals, how a Sri Lankan in a bikini is stopped and questioned by the police and there are checkpoints for local auto drivers. The DJ spoke about tourism as opportunity for locals to gain employment and exposure, as something that could be leveraged rather than resisted.
What sits between these two perspectives is not disagreement, but difference in positions. My time in India and Sri Lanka made me realize that as an American my default is to racialize everything to understand power. A Tamil man returning from the UK carries a different kind of mobility than someone who has never left the island. A Sinhalese local navigating Colombo carries a different relationship to the state. However, the Sinhalese local did not experience a genocide that forced them to leave, thus they could stay in their family home (despite potentially experiencing direct impacts of war).
Knowing he had been doxxed before and that his presence was already politicized, I found myself confused by the DJ. Even though he moved back to promote Tamil culture in places they are not welcome, his entire scene seems to be buffered with whiteness; a white manager and mostly white audiences. And yet, he spoke about bringing Tamil culture to the south as exposure is part of resistance. Maybe both things are true. Tourism can be a site of extraction and also a site of strategy. I had an interaction in Dambulla at a restaurant where the server realized I was Tamil and she said that she felt so much happiness in her heart to be able to speak to someone finally. I feel like I made her day and then broke her heart, since I could only communicate with her on a basic level. She said to me as I left, please come back.
inga akka irukku*.
I cannot answer the question on boycotting Sri Lanka because it seems that if we boycott it, it will continuously get looted by the west. And to refuse to come back, in spite of the Sinhalese or government will only hurt your own people back on the island. But who am I, to understand the impacts of a genocide? I hate to admit that it was the biggest question on my mind during the entire trip. How it is unfair I am allowed to visit while many cannot.
SajaS is a rapper in Jaffna; this track is about women’s power:
Favorite transitions from the episode:
25:00-27:00 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan into audio recording of a train
30:30-31:30 spiraling on classic Tamil film song and nadhaswaram into French RnB
34:00-34:50 looping of vocals over existing track
53:05-53:38 adding the beat from a trance song to a Sinhalese band
1:03:01 original track, and then a recording of a bird scatting over the same track!
1:57:00 slowing Priya Ragu down to an audio of the streets of Jaffna.
*you have an older sister here.