This feminist band is what happens

when Desi culture and punk rock

collide
10/03/16 5:38pm

Awaaz Do.

Back in August, I squeezed myself into a crowded Brooklyn bar full of hip
brown kids and maybe a dozen white people to attend Function, an event
showcasing some of the dopest South Asian American acts on the scene
today including bae-in-chief Riz MC. As I worked my way to the more
breathable area towards the front, I realized the band playing was not only
fronted by a woman with some serious pipes, but they were playing punk
covers of iconic Bollywood songs.

Awaaz Do is a Desipeople of Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi descent

punk band out of Boston thats here to recontextualize classic
Indian songs in a cheeky but earnest tribute to the Hindi-language B-sides
of our collective childhood soundtrack.

The band is the brainchild of Tanya Palit, a singer-songwriter who performs

under the moniker Saraswati Jones, an homage to the Hindu goddess of
wisdom, education, music, and the arts. In 2013, Jones, noticing a dearth in
rock covers of classic Bollywood songs, endeavored to create a punk band
of all Desi women. I would always complain that there were no Desi women
in rock, Palit told me over the phone.

Despite an enthusiastic response, Palit was unable to find Desi women who
were also rock musicians, so she changed her course and decided to include
men and other women of color.

Along with Palit, Awaaz Do consists of lead guitarist Jagdeep Singh, guitarist
and dhol-player Sapan Modi, bassist Azhar Husain (he and Palit are married),
and drummer Leilani Roser. Theyre all of Indian descent, with the exception
of Roser, who is (in her words) half Filipino, half white guy. I chatted with
most of the band over the phone last week while they were at practice.

It was supposed to be one night only, Husain said.

There kept being a next show and there has never not been a next show,
Palit added.

In a way, Awaaz Dos music embodies the first generation South Asian
experience. Their sound is definitively rock, and they cite groups like Rage
Against the Machine and POC bands like Fishbone and Bad Brains as
inspiration. But if you listen deeper, there is a real push and pull of rock
subgenres interacting with the Hindustani music styles of their source
material. Its a dynamic group of people that one minute can play straight
up punk, one minute can play in the pocket funky groove, and the next
minute its like '70s style metal, Palit said. Sometimes its surf rock and
sometimes its Vedic chants.
The band dropped their debut EP Kite Fight in July, a five-song tour of their
eclectic sounds in the form of a heavy rock interpretation of a Hindu prayer,
Bollywood covers that range from a straight rock take on "Kuch Kuch Hota
Hai" to a fast-paced (with some groovy breakdowns) cover of "Roop Tera
Mastana," and their original upbeat punk song, Kite Fight.

It was one of those things where it was like too many cooksmake it
better, Roser said of their composition of Choli Ke Peeche a hit from the
1993 film Khalnayak, which has also been covered by The Kominas, a
Boston-based Pakistani-American punk band known for their subversive
songs that critique Islamophobia and Americas post-9/11 obsession with
terrorism.

Its like that article that kept getting regurgitated by everyone about flavor
complimenting in South Asian cooking. If you analyze the chemicals in the
odor compounds of the spices in an Indian dish, they are more diverse from
each other from neighboring spices in the dish than flavoring patterns in
dishes from Europe, Roser explained.

Were actually creating a new market or a new genre, Modi said. I grew up
listening to punk rock and also listening to Hindi music, and I never really
imagined those two would come together the way they have with Awaaz Do.

For an almost entirely Indian band fronted by a woman, occupying a space in

the largely white and largely sexist punk scene has the potential to be
fraught with complications. To me, even when we play a hard show, and its
late, and we all have to work in the morning, and youre tired, and youre like,
Why am I doing this again for $50 or whatever, having that one woman of
color come up to you after the show and be like, Oh my god, I just and Im
like, Oh my god I know,'" Palit said.

What Im learning this year is that [women think that] anger isnt okay to
feel, rage isnt okay to feel, and women are socialized to be super nice and
super chill, Palit said. I hope that some part of being free and liberated and
disembodied for a moment in the music can be powerful especially for
women and particularly for women of color.

Tamsyn Bindal.

I think theyre radical, Palit says of Awaaz Dos politics. Punk is, after all,
political. I hope theyre radical. and I hope theyre exploratory and trying to
talk about issues of race and talk about issues of post colonial identity and
liberation.

What moves us is music, and what moves me to take music a little more
seriously is how we live in a time where artists have an opportunity to help
pave the future, she continued. I think in many ways, from the Black Lives
Matter movement to whats happening in India with the Dalit Women Fight
and other organizations that are talking about caste injustice, I feel deeply
moved by that and music is the way that I speak to that personally.