Making “Global” Music: Performing as Tamils

Dissertation

Submitted to the University of Calicut

In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Philosophy in

English Language and Literature

By

Dhananjay Rajendran

CUAUPEG004

Department of English

University of Calicut

August 2023

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 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the dissertation titled “Making “Global” Music: Performing as Tamils”

is a record of bonafide research that I conducted under the guidance and supervision of Dr. K.

M. Sherrif, Professor, Department of English, University of Calicut and submitted to the

University of Calicut in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of

Philosophy in English Language and Literature. No part of this dissertation has been submitted

before for the award of any other degree, diploma, title or recognition.

15 August 2023 Dhananjay Rajendran

Calicut University M.Phil Scholar 2021-2022

Department of English

University of Calicut

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 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the dissertation titled “Making “Global” Music: Performing as Tamils”

is a record of bona fide research carried out by Dhananjay Rajendran under my guidance and

supervision and submitted to the University of Calicut in partial fulfilment of the requirements

for the Degree of Master of Philosophy in English Language and Literature. No part of this

dissertation has been submitted before for the award of any other degree, diploma, title or

recognition.

Dr. K. M. Sherrif

Supervisor

Professor

Department of English

University of Calicut

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Even in this form, completing this dissertation feels miraculous.

Thanks to the artistes and scholars whose work I have used.

Thanks to my guide, Prof. Sherrif, for setting a good example, for being understanding and

extremely resourceful.

Thanks to the faculty, other staff, and students of the Department for a memorable time.

Thanks to my family for standing by me.

Thanks to Anand for many of the ways I have become better in the last few years, for being my

first reader, and for being an inspiration himself. And for turns this project has taken.

Thanks to Sreedhar and Sarath for homes away from home, and to Pranjal, Sreehari, Mahesh and

Vijay for homes in their hearts.

Thanks to Ashikha for the company, and for sharing time, interests and friends with me, thanks to

Adheena for the walks, and Anamika for commiseration and gallows humour.

Thanks to my classmates of HS12 and other friends who helped me grow.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT 1

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1 7

CHAPTER 2 18

CHAPTER 3 35

CONCLUSION 47

WORKS CITED 50

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 ABSTRACT

Changes in music production, listening and performance practices in the internet era have

constituted music as an increasingly important site of global cultural flows. This project takes the

formation of the music publishing and distribution platform Maajja in 2021 as an occasion to

explore articulations of Tamilness in the works of a few artists featured on its launch video as sites

of “encounter” with a global music industry where a “different present and future replete with

unanticipated participation and opportunity” (Dattatreyan 209, 3) may be produced.

INTRODUCTION

Sri Lankan - Tamil scholar Athithan Jayapalan notes that Tamilness is “perceived as an ‘ethnic

kin(ship)’” based on “language, myths, literature, and ancient historical connectedness”, shared by

communities with different “‘homelands’, statehoods, political identities and modern histories” (7).

It produces, simultaneously, a sense of belonging and one of permanent diasporicity. During the

twentieth century, the series of World Tamil Conferences organised by the International Association

for Tamil Research (IATR) with institutional support from governments of host countries, emerged

as an important platform not only for highlighting the multidisciplinary scholarship centred around

Tamil, but also as a means of redefining Tamilness. After an inaugural edition in Kuala Lumpur in

1966, the newly elected Dravida Munnetra Kazhakam leadership of Tamil Nadu hosted the second

one two years later in Chennai. Coming right after the DMK had risen to power on the strength of

the widespread agitations against making Hindi the sole official language of India, and later against

the compulsory study of Hindi through the three-language formula, the event evolved into a parallel

celebration of “popular cultural pride and a careful staging of the DMK as the representative of the

Tamil people” (Pandian; Raman 161).

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Karthick Ram Manoharan observes that representatives of Dravidian thought emphasised on the

“linguistic and cultural unity” of Tamils (S. E. Pillai, quoted in Manoharan 53) and professed to

destroy Brahminism to build an egalitarian society, by “only seeking to curtail the identity based

rights and power holdings of Brahmins” (R. Sriramachandran, quoted in Manoharan 56). Over the

years they have not remained vigilant to the insidious replication of Brahminical structures among

the “intermediate castes” (57). As arguably the most influential ideological strand in twentieth

century Tamil politics and culture, what Manoharan notes as the continuing dominance within Tamil

cinema of heroes “fighting for lower castes against caste oppression” rather than those “fighting as

lower castes against caste oppression”, and the masking of casteism by other markers of villainy

such as criminality or corruption, are symptomatic of this problem within Dravidian conceptions of

Tamilness (52).

In 2010, the M. Karunanidhi-led state government invited the IATR to conduct the ninth World

Tamil Conference in Tamil Nadu. In the immediate aftermath of the conclusion of the Sri Lankan

civil war and with an upcoming state legislative assembly election in 2011, the moment was

politically significant. Prof. Noboru Karashima, then the President of the IATR, declined, citing

concerns about academic rigour and the ability of such large-scale conferences “covering all aspects

of Tamil studies” to respond to new trends in scholarship. He all but declared the obsolescence of

the Dravidian movement, arguing that its “historical role” in mobilising a non-Brahmin Tamil

cultural movement and that of the IATR in aligning with them, had already been fulfilled (“IATR

and the World Classical Tamil Conference”). While Karashima’s pitch to preserve the IATR as a

“non-political and non-profit making” academic body by holding the conference in the United

Kingdom or North America copped criticism for its political naïveté in overlooking the problem of

accessibility for most Tamil scholars (“Requiem for the IATR”; Kulandaiswamy and Mahadevan,
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“IATR fails to avail itself of a great opportunity”) , this exchange also illustrates the political and

cultural importance of ideas of Tamilness.

Manoharan observes that the inability of the Dravidianist political elites to intervene effectively

towards the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009 has led Tamil nationalist voices to adapt a more

aggressive stance and attempt to “appropriate the political symbols of the LTTE while being totally

ignorant of the radical emancipatory politics of the Tigers” (56). Similarly he criticises political

entities that mask the interest of particular caste groups under “vague Tamil nationalistic

ideas” (57). In the context of the movies Kabali (2016) and Kaala (2018), set within the diasporic

Tamil populations of Malaysia and Mumbai respectively, Manoharan details how the director Pa.

Ranjith “negotiates and reimagines the identities of ‘Dalit’ and ‘Tamil’, through a paradigm of

social justice that engages with Tamil nationalism, Dravidianism, and anti-caste thought” (52).

Shana L. Redmond notes that music is a “meaning-making endeavour, one that is strategically

employed to develop identification between people who otherwise may be culturally, ideologically,

or spatially separate or distinct from one another” (1-2). In particular, she uses the term “anthems”

to discuss songs that “make the listening audience and political public merge”, helping to create and

sustain “world-altering collective visions” (2). Scholars like Kate Lacey have elsewhere argued how

advances in the “recording, manipulation and transmission of sound … ‘re-sounded’ the modern

public sphere that had been ‘de-auralised’ in the age of print”, so that listening, which has

historically been regarded as performed by a receptive, “passified audience”, can be understood as a

form of active, critical practice (viii, 12). Prefacing her examination of “efforts by the African

descended (sic) to compose an alternative politics and repertoire of belonging” in the context of

various political struggles, Redmond argues that the music was never “ancillary, background noise”

to these events (8). Rather, participants, both as performers and through the activity of listening,
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“actively (engage) in a quest for alternatives to their political present and were assisted in imagining

and enacting that change by … the anthems” (8).

Following a brief survey of works on the relation of music to political power, John E. Richardson

notes that while there has been greater attention to positive aspects of the ability of music to “bring

people to form more effective political communities”, music is equally adept at “articulating

exclusivist (or bigoted) cultural identities” (Mark H. Pedelty and Kristen Weglarz, Simon McKerrell

quoted in Richardson 190). For instance, Pranathi Diwakar’s examination of the Gaana and

Carnatic music scenes in Chennai uses Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” — an

understanding of music as an activity “embedded in social life and relations” that “produces group

difference, encodes symbolic boundaries and confers cultural power or stigma” (21-22) — to

discuss how music becomes a site where caste inequality is reproduced through “socialisation,

spatialisation, politicisation, and the related processes of digitalisation, migration, and

globalisation”, as well as a site where such operations of inequality are resisted (205). This project

takes the formation of the music publishing and distribution platform Maajja in 2021 as an occasion

to explore articulations of Tamilness in the works of a few artists featured on its launch video as

sites of “encounter” with a global music industry where a “different present and future replete with

unanticipated participation and opportunity” (Dattatreyan 209, 3) may be produced.

For the artists we discuss, performances of “Tamilness” are key to their attempts to reimagine

“global” music. I take Maajja’s launch as an occasion that brings artists and audiences connected by

“Tamilness” from several music scenes together through multiple technologically mediated modes

of performance including live shows, audio and video streaming. It becomes a site of what Ethiraj

Gabriel Dattatreyan, following William Mazzarella, calls “encounter — the moment where media is

produced, consumed, interpreted, and cited — (which) opens up the possibility of seeing the subject
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in relation to media circulations anew, in tension between the past and the future, between structure

and agency” (209). Starting from Althusser’s notion of a subject who is “at once a product of

structure and an agentic force”, Dattatreyan draws on Stuart Hall’s argument, made in the

“postcolonial Atlantic world context of the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s”, for a “more

complex account of mass mediation that involves reception, contestation and reformulation” (209).

Retaining Dattatreyan’s emphasis on “agentic” reformulation of subjectivity, I attempt to pay

attention to rearticulations of Tamilness in works by A. R. Rahman and M.I.A., as well as in two

works released by Maajja. I have limited my primary texts to recorded material published as music

videos or live performance videos by dedicated music channels on YouTube. I hope to make use of

its double function as a performance space as well as an albeit incomplete archive of “live”

performances. This project attempts to take Tamilness as a site of discursive and material practices

in the works under consideration.

In Maajja’s launch video, A. R. Rahman announces the Yaall festival — a televised/video-streamed

“global music festival” to be held in Chennai — as their maiden initiative. The choice of Chennai

as the (virtual) location for an internet-era music performance, publishing and distribution space, is

significant. Access to innovations in media technologies which made Chennai the centre of the four

major South Indian regional language recorded music and film industries for much of the twentieth

century, as well as the emergence and growth of several Tamil music scenes and practices, owe

directly to the city’s position as a node of political, cultural and economic power within colonial and

postcolonial regimes. However, as Jasmine Hornabrook points out, the Tamil transnational music

scene does not so much exhibit a “linear “diaspora” and “homeland” relationship” as one reflective

of “the highly-dispersed and complex trajectories of Tamil migration” (1).

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The histories of twentieth century Sri Lanka, and Jaffna in particular as a seat of Tamil cultural,

educational and political influence, provide important points of reference for many of these artistes.

The fourth edition of the World Tamil Conference was held there in 1974 in the wake of mounting

discontent against militant majoritarianism and breakdown of democratic polity in Sri Lanka. Even

the decision to conduct the conference in Jaffna was in defiance of the government’s wish to hold it

in Colombo. The events of January 10, when the Sri Lankan police disrupted a large public

gathering organised as part of the conference and opened fire, leading to eleven deaths and several

persons injured, then became a rallying point for early Tamil separatist movements. Subsequent

events like the torching of Jaffna’s public library during the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1981 re-emerge

as cultural memory in tracks such as “Savage” by Shan Vincent de Paul.

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 CHAPTER 1

Leurdjik, Neuwenhuis and Poel note that the music industry “began as an industry of publishers

who contracted composers and lyricists to produce songs that could be performed at concerts,

vaudevilles, opera houses and music halls and whose sheet music could be edited and sold to

private persons to be played at home” (133). In the early decades of the twentieth century, the

invention of the phonograph opened up the possibility of recorded music. Once the modern

gramophone and record discs made music a mass producible commodity, this industry has remained

a system where music publishers, recording companies and artists seek to grow their market by

attempting to swell the numbers of the listening public.

Dave Laing adopts a “minimalist” definition of the music industry, where music recording, music

publishing and live performance constitute the most important sub-sectors that contribute directly to

the production and dissemination of “music compositions, recordings and performances” (15).

These activities generate revenue through a system of copyrights, licenses and royalties. While

record companies work with performing artists to bring out a “master recording” of a particular

song which may then be replicated or licensed for other use, publishing companies liaise with other

components of the music industry including recording companies on behalf of songwriters or

composers. Several other practices such as the “manufacture and dissemination of musical

instruments and associated technologies, and the training and education of musicians and music

industry personnel” indirectly contribute to the broader music economy. The music industry is also

a huge driver of revenues in allied industries such as broadcasting (15).

Peter Manuel illustrates how recording industries in different regions of the world developed on

different trajectories, depending on a variety of factors such as “ideologies and composition of

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linguistic and ethnic groups, the nature of the technology employed, along with the particular forms

of media ownership and control” (28). However, as Laing observes, in general the music industry

exhibits a centralised structure where a handful of transnational companies undergo further

consolidation by merging or buying up smaller players due to the considerable competitive

advantages offered by scale (24). This tendency is most pronounced in the recording industry,

which is dominated by three major record labels — Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and

Warner Music Group — along with their numerous subsidiary companies. In recent years the music

publishing and live performance industries too have seen trends towards consolidation.

In the twentieth century, technologies of representation, from musical notation and song lyrics to

audio and video recordings of musical performances, have made it possible to constitute units of

music as autonomous cultural artefacts removed from ritual contexts and systems of patronage.

Like Jonathan Culler notes in the context of literary systems (3), the predominance of interpretation

as critical activity has also been a feature of both popular and academic engagement with recorded

commercial music. This approach is evident even in the way musical genres are constituted with

room for some degree of overlap and disagreement by “experts” on the basis of common lyrical or

musical themes, use of similar time signatures, instrumentation, or geographical and historical

proximity among a group of artists. Culler argues that critical projects should rather investigate the

“conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse” and theorise its “historical

relation to other forms of discourse through which the world is organised and human activities are

given meaning” (6). The Frankfurt School’s mid-century reading of an all-pervasive culture

industry in late capitalist societies can be read as such an attempt, which continues to provide useful

insights into the recording industry’s efforts to maintain control over cultural production and its role

in social reproduction.

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The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), established in 1933 and counting

over 8000 recording labels as members, lays claim to being the “voice of the recording industry”

and collates data globally and from among discrete markets on the condition of the industry (“What

We Do”). While its annual Global Music Report is prohibitively expensive — the upcoming GMR

2023 may be purchased for £3000 by academics, non-profits and industry insiders as against

£16500 for everyone else — the IFPI provides a much shorter summary in their free-to-download

State of the Industry reports. According to the IFPI’s State of the Industry Report 2022, the USA,

Japan, the UK, Germany and France, in that order, are the five largest music markets in the world

(10). Such sources also provide information about the popularity of particular artists or their works,

or trends governing the pattern and modes of consumption of music.

After peaking at a total revenue of USD 24.1 billion in 1999, the global music industry encountered

a prolonged decline as consumers found informal ways to share and access music without paying

for it. Initially, the music industry attempted to resist by litigating and getting early file sharing

platforms such as Napster shut down. By 2021, the music industry completed its recovery by

registering USD 25.9 billion as revenue. But while the revenue stream in 1999 was made up almost

completely of physical record sales, the industry is now characterised by increasing control over

multiple platforms and revenue models. For instance in 2021, synchronisation licenses which allow

music publishers and record labels to monetise the use of their songs along with other visual media

like advertisements and movies, accounted for 2.1% (USD 0.5 billion) of global recorded music

revenues (11).

According to the State of the Industry Report 2022, the global music industry is currently

dominated by “mature” regional markets in a handful of countries, and focusing on local genres of

“high-potential growth markets” to drive global demand (30). Their report also notes that while
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subscription based streaming services now constitute the dominant revenue stream and continue to

grow, ad-supported streaming on platforms like YouTube and Facebook are extremely popular

among the “wallet-poor but attention-rich” population in regions like India (37). In 2021, the Indian

Music Industry (IMI) — India’s recorded music trade body — launched its own weekly

international Top 20 chart.

A group of eighteen “case studies” featured on the State of the Industry Report 2022 emphasises a

close relationship between the artist and their record label. They construct the star as a unique talent

destined for worldwide fame, and their label as the agent who discovers the artist, develops their

raw talent, and launches them into their rightful position at the apex of the industry with the ability

to reach an ever increasing public of fans. To sample a quote by Nicole Bilzerian, Executive Vice

President of Geffen Records, from the write-up on Olivia Rodrego, “It all stems from her ideas and

who she is. We just try to sculpt her and amplify all that on her behalf” (47). Or as Konrad von

Lohneysen, the Managing Director of German independent record label Embassy of Music says

about the artist Monolink, “Even at that early stage, we believed in those songs and knew that he

had potential to reach a worldwide audience” (45).

The icon, one of the three types of signs identified by American philosopher C. S. Peirce, is

characterised by its physical resemblance to its referent. As opposed to a symbol, whose meaning is

culturally learnt, or an indexical sign, which points to or shows evidence for the existence of its

referent, an icon offers a more immediate relation between the sign and its referent. Stardom has

been an integral feature of mediatised popular culture, functioning as “trademarks which generate

sales for the … culture industries” (Longhurst, quoted in Till 70), but as Rupert Till notes, only

some stars attain the status of icons. Beyond fame, iconicity combines a technique of holding back

information, familiar from religious traditions, of allowing the popular icon to be “filled or
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inhabited by the viewer, by the consumer, or fan”, with twenty-first century multimedia techniques

to create a “three dimensional multimedia creation, based on the character of the performer, but

weaving myth and fantasy into a hyperreal legend” (70-1). Icons are often expected to embody, and

become physical representations of their work. A common expression of this tendency is for the

work to be identified almost completely with its star performer, so that superstar artists from Frank

Sinatra and Elvis Presley to Britney Spears are identified profoundly with their work even though

they do not have songwriting credits on most of their songs.

For instance, Britney Spears’ 2004 single, Toxic, was produced by the Swedish duo Bloodshy and

Avant (Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg) who also co-wrote the song with Cathy Dennis

and Henrik Jonback. Spears recorded the song after it was turned down by the Australian pop star

Kylie Minogue. However, everything — from the singing to the smallest detail of the music video

— came together to project a carefully realised image of Britney Spears, and create a special

relationship to the audience. In the words of the video’s director Joseph Kahn:

She has this weird awareness of her appeal. She totally understands that she’s naughty and

nice, that she’s the girl next door gone bad who’s constantly titillating you. She’s not like

most artists who flaunt their pure sexuality. She toys with you and leaves you conflicted.

(Kaufman)

The photos and profiles of artists in the IFPI’s report attempt to produce them as icons — feted both

for their powers of representation or relatability, and for their “insuperable separation” from their

audience (Horkheimer and Adorno 57). According to Adorno and Horkheimer, stardom, with its

emphasis on the “element of blindness” or “chance” that sustains “the myth of success”, becomes

an ideological instrument. It supports cultural production by subjecting its consumers to the logic of

driving demand within an increasingly efficient schematising machine (42, 50). Integration into
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commodity culture is made universal by producing the illusion of individuality, through the

“predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself —

which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated together with the idea” (44). They warn of an

underlying process of standardisation, by which the “mechanised labour process” that governs work

is reproduced in the name of entertainment. It is designed to produce “impulses” by operating along

“well-worn grooves of association”, and the consuming subject is trained to “alertly (consume) even

in a state of distraction” (45-6, 52).

Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the culture industry is not a response to technical necessity;

rather, technological development too is determined by the same “rationality of domination” that

drives the culture industry (42). They attempt to explain the “step from telephone to radio” as a

development that subjects consumers to “(organisation) from above” (42). Their observation that

ostensible critiques of late capitalist culture are easily co-opted by the culture industry persists in

the words of the author David Foster Wallace who writes of American televisual culture that it has

“become able to capture and neutralise any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive

unease and cynicism that television requires of (its audience) in order to be commercially and

psychologically viable at doses of several hours per day” (100).

Social media, according to Adam J. Mills, are “internet and web-based technological platforms

designed to encourage social interaction … and … enable the transformation of broadcast

monologues (one to many) into social dialogues (many to many)” (162). Within this milieu, he

notes that the notion of “viral” marketing separates itself from prototypical forms of multivalent

communication such as word-of-mouth through 1) the “rapid and successive spreading … (which)

is both self-propelled and exponential,” and 2) the object of viral communication is a shareable

“thing” that can be spread across multiple platforms — such as a “picture, video, sound byte or
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website”. Technological interventions of social media companies to harvest their users’ attention by

tailoring algorithms that encourage maximum use or by efforts to achieve platform convergence, or

the development of mobile social media platforms are all targeted to cash in on viral

communication. Although new technology makes song recordings much more accessible than

before, and several avenues on the internet including Digital Service Providers such as Spotify or

iTunes allow artists to publish their own recordings, record labels and traditional music publishers

continue to play a huge role due to their ability to provide much better reach, promotion, artist

development facilities, as well as financial support to artists, songwriters and composers.

Over the last couple of decades, the internet has given rise to a “new media universe” with immense

possibilities for “user-created media content” (Manovich 319). Lev Manovich notes that Tim

O’Reilly coined the term “Web 2.0” to characterise multivalent online communication (320), where

several “users can create, share and communicate information, adding value to the mass of content

available” (Mills 163). He observes that communication among users and user-generated content

evolve several new communication forms like “posts, comments, reviews, ratings, …

links” (Manovich 320). Similar to the operation of a disciplinary machinery, the internet

universalises access to cultural products. At the same time, it also enables what Ethiraj Gabriel

Dattatreyan calls “digitally enabled transnational connection, distinctive consumption and creative

self-production” (ix).

This can be read alongside Jon McKenzie’s “speculative forecast”, that “performance will be to the

twentieth and twenty first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth, that is, an

onto-historical formation of power and knowledge” (18). He observes that the “modern subject” is a

unified, stable entity produced through a particular relation between knowledge and power, where

the “asserted objectivity, rationality and universality of knowledge … purportedly allows it to

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demystify and master subjective, irrational and particular forces of power” (15). On the other hand,

the “performative, postmodern subject” is “fragmented rather than unified, decentred rather than

centred, virtual as well as actual … unstable rather than fixed, simulated rather than real” as a result

of a realignment of the “relation between power and knowledge” as, quoting Francois Lyotard, “two

sides of the same question” (15-18). McKenzie notes that the expansion of “performance concepts

into formalised systems of discourses and practices” is part of a broader epistemological turn where

knowledge is no longer legitimated by what Lyotard called “grand narratives” but by “optimising

the system’s performance” (14).

As a study of popular music in its interaction with globalising and localising processes, this project

is inevitably influenced by work on cultural globalisation. Peter Achterberg et al trace three broad

directions taken by such discussions: 1) the proposition that dominant cultures such as those of the

United States would overwhelm other “peripheral” cultures and give rise to a homogeneous global

culture, 2) the glocalisation thesis which proposes that global cultural forms would be appropriated

to give rise to “authentic expressions of local, national or regional cultures”, and 3) the idea that

through cultural exchange the differences between “core” and “periphery” would erode and lead to

a coexistence of diverse cultural forms (591-2). Daniel Hammett, in his study of globalising

influences in the hip-hop scene of Cape Town, South Africa, similarly traces an evolution from

“homogenising theses” to “transformationalist” approaches, which see globalising processes as

“hybrid and contested, with uneven, incomplete, and contradictory local outcomes” (418). The

transnational (as well as transtemporal) character of Tamilness allows us to move away from

framing an emergent global Tamil independent music scene as a localisation of a global music

culture. Antonio T. Tiongson discusses how the initial consensus that hip-hop was an “African

American expressive form” gave way to “complex genealogies and trajectories that exceed the

bounds of blackness” as it evolved into a “global expressive form” (2). Similarly, Pennycook and
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Mitchell argue against the assumption of a “unidirectional spread” of hip-hop, and that

“convergence and multiple origins are equally possible” (quoted in Westinen 34). This project

invites us to further complicate the familiar dichotomy between global and local music cultures.

Richard A. Peterson and Andy Bennett note that “music scenes” are “contexts in which clusters of

producers, musicians and fans collectively share their musical tastes and collectively distinguish

themselves from others” (1). This is an essential counterpoint to the perception of music as the

product of a global culture industry. They distinguish between local, translocal and virtual scenes on

the basis of the scene-making processes out of which they evolve (6-8). They note how studies of

local scenes have moved on from investigating a “relationship between (local) music and the

cultural history of the locale” to discussions of how “emergent scenes use music appropriated from

global flows and networks to construct particular narratives of the local” (7). Scene-making

processes in a local scene are usually embedded within the social life of the local community.

Translocal scenes are made of “similar local scenes in distant places” that maintain a high degree of

interaction through the exchange of “recordings, bands, fans and fanzines” (8). Specially

“designated occasions” like music festivals or rap cyphers and establishments such as clubs which

provide performance spaces which allow participants to “enact the ways of life idealised within a

scene”, play an important role in translocal scene-building (10). In contrast, virtual scenes are

created through “net-mediated person-to-person interaction between fans”, on online fora usually

maintained by fans who also evolve norms of interaction for the group (11).

Peterson and Bennett observe that although “subculture” is a similar concept, the term implies a set

of standards different from those of the “commonly shared culture” that govern all the actions of its

participants rather than the relatively fluid identities that participation in a scene can support (3).

Thus, even while remaining alert to affinities with certain hip-hop practices and drawing influences
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from them, artists collaborating within a Tamil independent music scene need not privilege a

subcultural aspect such as belonging to the “global hip-hop nation” over other musical influences.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan points out the creative possibilities of self-fashioning opened up by hip-

hop practices to the young men of Delhi’s underground hip-hop scene who were simultaneously

being “cast in the media and in their everyday lives as Delhi’s Others, potentially destructive

outsiders on the peripheries of vital change in the city” (ix). He deploys “the globally familiar” as a

frame that tracks the “feeling of connectedness” arising across places and times that are mediated

by sharing in “media-enabled participation and practice and the affective economy and structure of

aspiration this feeling produces” (3). With that in mind, I attempt to trace how performances of

Tamilness in the texts I have chosen “facilitate connections across place and time” and allow these

artists to envision “a different present and future, replete with unanticipated participation and

opportunity” (Dattatreyan 3).

According to Simon McKerrell and Lyndon C.S.Way, approaching music as a multimodal system

makes it possible to the retain the sensitivity to linguistic choice that characterises Critical

Discourse Analysis, but also to examine the “interacting meaning potential of semiotic resources

such as rhythm, instrumentation, pitch, tonality and melody, and their interrelationship with lyrics,

written text, image, colour and other modes of communication” (53-4). At the same time, it

recognises that as a much more context dependent and affective medium of communication than

language, musical units may not carry the same meaning on different occasions. Within Catherine

M. Appert’s study of Senegalese hip-hop for instance, she notes that music is “a coherent

configuration of aural signs that can be lifted from its original context …, allowing a

transformational process in which the music retains meaning from traditional performance contexts

while acquiring new meaning, form, and function as it is recontextualised" (233).

!16
As texts move through “continuities and changes” in discourse, it is less useful to treat meaning as

inherent in them than to pay attention to an economy of “textual borrowing” which produces

meaning through the removal of elements of a text from a specific context, and their insertion into a

new context (Appert 198-9). This approach focuses on practices of decontextualisation and

recontextualisation, as well as technologies which facilitate intertextuality, such as sampling,

remixing, and parodying, in order to extract meaning out of texts.

!17
 CHAPTER 2

In this chapter I attempt to discuss the evolution of popular Tamil music, with particular reference to

Tamil Nadu. S. Theodore Baskaran distinguishes between music forms that are “subaltern in

character and appeal”, and those that belonged to the “upper classes” (755). According to him, folk

music forms meant to be performed for specific life situations such as lullabies, songs sung while

transplanting paddy shoots, songs to be sung on pilgrimages, or songs of lamentation, and

traditional theatre forms like therukoothu fall into the first category because they can be enjoyed by

an untrained public. Forms such as Carnatic music, which fall in the second category, are directed at

an audience thought to be already familiar with it through long periods of training and exposure

(755).

Stephen Putnam Hughes notes that the increased emphasis on Tamilness from the late nineteenth

century — privileging the Tamil language as a marker of identity, and as a marker of a great and

continuous tradition — was a reaction, spearheaded by Saivite Vellala elites, against the dominance

of English-educated Brahmins in the colonial administrative and cultural set up. Even within music,

the “Brahmin led reinvention of classical Carnatic tradition” had embraced Telugu and Sanskrit, the

languages patronised by the courts of Marathas of Tanjavur and the descendants of the Vijayanagara

kingdom, at the expense of singing in Tamil (223). This response gained strength from increased

access to education and developments in the late nineteenth century such as the discovery of an

ancient corpus of texts by Orientalist scholars, to launch a Tamil/Dravidian revivalist movement

(224). Soon the film song, as an object of mass consumption, became a stage to demonstrate Tamil

language’s “linguistic and stylistic purity” (224).

!18
According to Baskaran, the gramophone industry radically altered the highly socially stratified

music listening habits of the Tamil public (756). From 1905, the His Master’s Voice (HMV) label of

the Gramophone Company of India (GCI) pioneered the output of recorded South Indian music.

Hughes notes that recording houses first created a market among the elite and middle class

audiences by reifying a social hierarchy of music listening. For instance, Carnatic music, which had

enjoyed royal patronage, acquired popularity among well-to-do urban classes who were originally

outside such networks, as an aspirational symbol. At the same time, record companies also

highlighted the ability of mechanically reproduced music to distance its listeners from the context of

its live performance, such as its being sung by devadasis (451). By 1911, an extensive catalogue of

Tamil music that consisted of “mostly Carnatic music, some devotional songs … folk songs …

comedy recitations and songs … and classical instrumental music” was already available as records

(451).

The company drama, a dominant popular cultural form in Tamil Nadu in the early twentieth century,

was a live performance form driven by music where the dialogues remained almost incidental. An

important influence on this form was the Parsi theatre which began during the 1850s, and citing

Ranga Rao, Hughes observes that a “locally adapted mix of Karnatic music, Hindustani ragas, Parsi

drama music, and Maharashtrian bhavgeet influences … combined to create a cosmopolitan,

uncomplicated and accessible music”. The mainstays were the vocalists with sparse instrumentation

in the form of a “harmonium in the lead accompanied by percussion (usually the tabla or cymbals),

and at times, a violin”, often arranged by the “harmonium master” (7). This style arose from the

limitations of sound amplification technology as well as from the mobility and spontaneity that live

performance required.

!19
The growing gramophone industry developed thriving relationships with dominant performance art

forms such as the company drama, and later the emergent form of sound film or talkies which went

on to become the centrepiece of the Tamil music industry. In addition, the music produced was

shaped by the technology that prevailed in the industry. The widespread use of 10-inch 78rpm

phonograph discs, which became an industry standard during the early decades of the twentieth

century, provided space for three to four minutes of recording time on a single track. From a genre

like Carnatic music which encourages interaction between performers, elaborations, embellishments

and improvisation over long sessions in front of a “knowledgeable” audience as ways to interpret a

music text and also to signal virtuosity, recording artists innovated to devise renditions that could be

fit into this limit. In addition, by drawing on folk music for material, they contributed to a

standardisation of orchestral arrangement and lyrical content in place of multiple versions that co-

existed after they were put in circulation through oral retellings. Altogether, Hughes notes:

gramophone recordings helped to contrive a new category of Tamil music which was (and

still is) known as light music (mellicai): a kind of new popular, non-specialist, non-serious

music meant for the widest possible audiences and no association with the earlier contexts

and patronage of the courts, landed gentry, temples or Carnatic music associations (sabhas)

(463).

Hughes argues that by the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the Tamil music industry experienced a

“music boom”. He quotes contemporary accounts that characterise this as an “increasing interest in

music and a wider diffusion of music education”, or as arising from a “change of ‘patronage from

discerning princes and patricians to the mixed crowd on the street’” (445). This was a result of the

convergence of the “rapid expansion of the south Indian gramophone trade … with other media

practices of print, radio and loudspeakers” to create a “new mass culture of music” (445). As
!20
Hughes also notes, most “gramophone singing stars” of the period started out as professional stage

artists (460-2).

Technological changes in the performance, production and reception of music helped even overseas

Tamils to imagine themselves as part of a “larger Tamil collectivity” through “shared music

practices”, as Hughes notes while discussing a gramophone song compendium edited by C. Candiah

Pillai of Jaffna, published at Klang in present-day Malaysia in 1922, “stamped by a bookseller in

Burma”, that he came across at the Roja Muthaiah Research Library in Chennai (Hughes 2010b 78).

The publication of promotional literature including songbooks and advertisements in newspapers

and magazines was instrumental in making “recording stars” the first recognisable icons of the

industry.

The Indian Tamil film industry dominates Tamil music today in terms of the reach of its products,

not least because of its capacity to assimilate intertextual influences, diverse genres of music, well

developed networks of production, and multiple modes of communication into cohesive cultural

products. Hughes argues that Tamilness of Tamil cinema was constructed as a matter of “production

practice and critical discourse” after the technology of sound film first foregrounded notions of

linguistic identity within a highly limited but nevertheless pan-Indian market for silent films

(213-4). From the “first” Tamil movie Kalidas (1931) which contained both Tamil and Telugu, to

the “first” movie produced in the new studios that had come up in Madras rather than the ones in

Bombay and Calcutta, to the “first” movies directed by a “native Tamil” person, and later to matters

of “cultural and regional pride”, “familiar settings”, or “local flavour”, what was authentically

Tamil rather than “aping” other movie industries continued to be redefined (221-224). Film music

emerged as a focal point of discussions on Tamilness, which was soon constructed by successive

contemporary commentators as “much more than a matter of linguistic identity”.

!21
Early Tamil talkies made extensive use of blueprints laid down by the company drama and practices

of the recording industry. Several successful plays were remade into talkies just as they had been

recorded and sold as multi-volume sets by recording companies until then, and the importance of

song-and-dance was instantly carried over into the new medium, with each movie typically carrying

over 50 songs (Hughes 223). Almost immediately, due to the availability of relatively cheap

gramophones machines imported from Japan, the potential of film songs to be released on discs and

marketed independently was realised (Baskaran 756).

Many of these early sound films were shot by hiring drama companies to recording studios in

Calcutta and using a floating crew of technicians who worked across different regional film

industries (Hughes 222). Yet, technological possibilities open to the new medium allowed the film

industry to develop in new ways. For instance, the replacement of live sound recording with studio

recording not only made playback singing and greater use of musical instruments possible, but also

opened up non-diegetic applications of music within the film’s narrative. Within Tamil film music,

when recording studios came up in Madras in the 1930s and made it cheaper to record vocals and

music instruments rather than use songs from films already made in other languages, the “music

director” became a prominent figure in the production of film music. This paved way for a move

away from drama music, to evolve a mixture of Indian and European instruments and styles in a

way that held an “all-class appeal” (Hughes 27).

In India, film songs became entrenched in popular imagination when they began to be aired on

Radio Ceylon and later the All India Radio in the 1950s (Baskaran 756). Successful attempts by

Indian Tamil film music to cater to the interests of larger sections of the public made it a medium of

choice as a carrier of political commentary and messaging for artists involved with nationalist,

!22
Dravidian and leftist movements (Baskaran 756). As Baskaran notes, the importance of song-writers

in Tamil film music where “poets of repute wrote for film music” also owes a lot to its drama song

antecedents where playwrights “wrote the songs, composed the music and also directed the

plays” (755-7). He lists the nationalist poet Bhaskaradas, the rationalist Bharathidasan whose lyrics

amplified the Self-Respect movement led by “Periyar” E.V.Ramasamy in the late 1930s, Pattukottai

Kalyanasundaram from the communist movement in the 1950s, and the poet Kannadasan from the

Dravidian movement in the 1960s and 1970s, among a long line of songwriters who infused their

songs with their ideological convictions (757).

The music director’s dual role as a creator of popular music and an important part of the film

industry is a general feature of Indian movie industries, as opposed to North American or European

markets where popular music that airs on the radio and television has traditionally remained

separate from original music scored by composers for films. Within Indian Tamil film music,

Karthikeyan Damodaran notes that the music director Ilaiyaraja, aside from his unprecedented

combination of Carnatic and Western Classical music, also “paved the way for a fresh, down-to-

earth wave of creative artistic flavour tinged with elements of rural and folk practices”. Damodaran

argues that his use of musical instruments such as parai drums and thavil that have historically been

degraded as “polluting” (along with people of the Paraiyar caste who traditionally play the

instruments) represented folk musical practices much more powerfully than the earlier practice of

inserting folk music into classical idiom.

Vijay Devadas and Selvaraj Velayutham use the term “platform cinema” to refer to an “emerging

digital sociality, and platform multiplicity” that give rise to new modes of producing, distributing

and consuming content (194). These new platforms do not replace conventional structures within

the industry, but encourage “increased interdependencies amongst various industries, actors,

!23
networks and users”, and a “dynamic between amateur content producers and professional,

established outfits” captured in Stuart Cunningham’s notion of “new screen ecology” (195). With

particular reference to Tamil cinema, they note the emergence of a “Tamil screen ecology that has

moved beyond the established networks of stars, producers, directors, film studios and financiers

that dominate the Tamil film industry” (195).

The music industry is an important node within these emergent structures due to its compatibility

with multiple platforms. Single tracks and full soundtracks are strategically released on the internet

to market a film at various points of its rollout and release. These pieces of music also remain

extremely accessible and encourage digital sociality through its own sampling practices as well as

in the form of remixes and video edits. Such practices sometimes even upturn the conventional

wisdom of film music as a genre that is constrained by the formulaic requirements of a language

based film industry. For instance, the 2019 Hindi language movie 99 Songs, which released in India

in 2021, was co-written and produced by A. R. Rahman. It featured 14 songs each in Hindi, Tamil

and Telugu in addition to instrumental score in a soundtrack spanning almost 63 minutes. The

soundtrack was also the first in India to use the Dolby Atmos Music system, which is currently not

common on music streaming and listening devices. Beside A. R. Rahman’s attempt to push the

frontiers of film music in the country with the best available technology that artists from other parts

of the world already use, and the expectation of autobiographical insight (Rahman is credited with

the story), the movie and its director seem like afterthoughts.

The incorporation of music practices from marginalised communities is not simply an aesthetic

decision. For instance, the ethnomusicologist Zoe C. Sherinian has worked extensively on the

theology and practice of Rev. James Theophilius Appavoo (1940-2005), also known as Parattai

Annan, who was instrumental in using musical instruments such as parai, urumi, tabla, nadasvaram,

and oral genres like Oppari, boat song, oyilattam, kummi and cintu traditionally associated with
!24
Dalit and folk performers in general to build a participatory culture into religious music. Appavoo’s

practice convinced him that the traditional model of indigenisation of Christian doctrine in the

Carnatic style through kirttanais or using straightforward translations of English hymns was

inadequate to communicate his anti-caste theology (17).

As Sherinian illustrates, Appavoo’s attempt is part of a complex of responses by communities to

late modernity and subject positions accessible to them within the caste system. Artists have chosen

to discontinue practicing a certain art form, to replace a degraded art form with another that grants

them greater social status, or to maintain an art form while rejecting the attached caste functions, or

reclaiming the art form altogether by embracing new and positive contexts of performance

(Sherinian 609). Manimaran A., founder of the artist collective Buddhar Kalai Kuzhu, discusses

how their attempts to reclaim the parai as a means of upliftment and assertion are informed by the

many fights against being tied to menial and degrading work as a result of their caste. He points out

the historical importance of the Parai Marruppu Porattam — a longstanding movement where

traditional parai artists demonstrated by breaking and burning the instrument in defiance of

dominant caste demands to perform at their funerals and temple festivals, as a precursor to his own

efforts (Singaravel). At the same time, as Stalin Rajangam notes, the stories of figures like

Immanuel Sekaran, Angambakkam Kuppuswamy and Reddiyur Pandian whose struggles for the

betterment of their people faced the might of dominant castes as well as the institutions of the state,

are also communicated through music as themmangu songs circulated by kirameeya (folk) singers.

At the same time, such decentralised music production and consumption practices are also a result

of technological developments. Peter Manuel provides an extensive account of the cassette boom in

India that started in the early 1980s. He notes that the value of sales of recorded music jumped from

$1.2 million in 1980 to $21 million in 1990 (Swami quoted in Manuel 62). At the same time, the
!25
new technology also enabled rapid and inexpensive transmission of music through informal

networks so that by the mid 1980s, “pirates allegedly accounted for some 95 percent of the

prerecorded-music market” (Manuel 83). Manuel’s study is situated largely in the North Indian

popular music context, where he discusses several genres like ghazal whose consumption

mushroomed as a result of mass mediation. In the context of Tamil Nadu, Paul D. Greene notes that

while on the one hand, artistes like Pushpavanam Kuppuswamy have collected, archived and

popularised folk music from all over Tamil Nadu as popularly consumed audio cassettes since the

early 1990s, mass mediation has also significantly altered listening and performance practices.

According to him, the oral transmission practices through which folk music embeds itself in daily

life and evolves polyphonically to address local contexts have been replaced by standardised lyrics

and other “performative uniformities where, prior to inscription, none existed” with an eye on

commercial viability (Greene 162).

The representation of marginalised music practices by itself does not indicate a movement away

from dominant aesthetic judgements. In Ilaiyaraja’s thousandth movie Tharai Thappattai (2016),

director Bala uses three folk-based song-and-dance sequences to depict the commercialisation and

sexualisation of karagattam performances. While the “Hero Theme Intro Song” and “Vathana

Vathana Vadivelan” were released on the YouTube channel of Think Music India who own the

music publishing rights to the movie, “Vandi katty koottam varum” is an extended medley featuring

popular film lyrics altered to accommodate a live back-and-forth between a male and a female

performer brimming with double entendres which was not formally released as a single. The

degraded popular form is implicitly valued less than songs such as “Paruruvaya” and “Idarinum”

which carry much greater emotional weight within the film. While “Paruruvaya” takes its lyrics

from Manickavasagar, “Idarinum” takes its first verse from Thirugnanasambandar and continues in

!26
Ilaiyaraja’s own words. Manickavasagar and Thirugnanasambandar are among the most prominent

poet-saints in Tamil Shaivite tradition.

Manimaran observes that after the emergence of director Pa. Ranjith many contemporary Tamil

movies have begun to place a spotlight on parai artists and credit their contributions rather than just

make use of their music (Singaravel). This is evident in the recontextualisations of music from

marginalised communities in their movies. For instance, Mari Selvaraj’s movie Pariyerum Perumal

(2018) features the song “Engum pugazh thuvanga” which is picturised on a folk performance with

a group of karagattam dancers led by the protagonist Pariyan’s father who performs as a woman.

Shots from the performance are intercut with a montage of the father’s extremely understated,

everyday displays of affection as remembered by Pariyan. The use of “Engum pugazh thuvanga”, a

pared down version of a popular song among people from the Pallar caste remembering political

activist Immanuel Sekaran who was lynched for his defiance of Thevar leader Ukkirapandi

Muthuramalinga Thevar, emphasises how the performance itself can also be an act of self

expression and resistance in the face of ridicule and mistreatment of a casteist society (Damodaran

7). Witnessing the father’s performance, which has thus far been a source of shame for his college-

going son, evokes a strong emotional response. The version used in the film omits explicit

references to Immanuvel Sekaran, but folk singer Kallur Mariappan, who along with singer “Folk

Marley” Anthony Daasan performs the song in Pariyerum Perumal, credits the compilation of the

song in its popular form to Chinnaswamy Annavi (Channel 4Tamil).

The stigma attached to several folk music practices and artistes also extends to forms of

marginalised urban popular culture. For instance, Karthikeyan Damodaran and Hugo Gorringe note

that while there have been several representations of North Chennai neighbourhoods in Tamil

cinema since the 1990s, they have predominantly been characterised as “undesirable”, without

“proper working infrastructure”, or as a “breeding ground of criminal activities”. This contribute to

!27
a “stigmatisation of North Chennai and its inhabitants” as a “zone in need of state intervention

(often police violence), explication and transformation” (9). Chennai’s pervasive influence on Tamil

film music is often experienced through the ubiquity of Gaana music practices, particularly the use

of “Madras Bashai” — a dialect that reflects the linguistic and cultural diversity that assimilated

into the urban working class settlements of North Chennai over more than two centuries of

urbanisation. Gaana is an urban music form native to the kuppams and burial grounds of Chennai

(Vijayakumar). “Kuppam”, which etymologically signifies an accumulation and has been used in

Tamil literature in reference to fishing hamlets, has over time been saddled with the function of

marginalising its inhabitants (“‘Seri’, ‘kuppam’ have become derogatory words over the years”).

There are several typologies of Gaana music according to practitioners and enthusiasts. Marana

Gana Viji, a popular Gaana artist and playback singer, lists five types of Gaana. In attu gaana, film

songs are altered for a particular situation; all gaana is where the singer composes both the tune and

the lyrics; jigiri gaana are songs about intoxication and pain; deepa gaana are songs about

“ancestors and founding fathers”; and marana gaana are songs “either in praise of the dead person

or in praise of death as such” (Vijayakumar). Tamil Prabha, a novelist and writer from North

Chennai, adds other types: a poti gaana is a competitive impromptu performance (similar to rap

battles in hip-hop culture) between two Gaana singers usually held on the sidelines of community

events and festivals; the thozhil gaana is usually sung as an accompaniment to their work by

fishermen and coolies; and the route gaana, like the song “Aadi Pona Avani” in Pa. Ranjith’s movie

Attakathi, “is made up by young college boys to tease one other or a girl sitting in their

bus” (Diwakar 64).

Viji calls the song “Vaa Vathiyare” from the movie Bommalattam released in 1968 the first Gaana

song in Tamil cinema (Vijayakumar). The film itself plays out like a Shakespearean comedy based

on mistaken identity where the Jambajar Jaggu - Chinna Ponnu pair act as the comic sub-plot/foil to

!28
the educated and sophisticated hero and heroine. As such, everything from the characters’ use of

Madras Bashai to the gender relations portrayed in the song seems to be laced with subtle mockery.

The song features Chinna Ponnu (actress Manorama) attempting to woo Jaggu, the wannabe tough

guy played by Cho Ramaswamy:

Vaa Vaathiyaare1 Oottanda2, Nee Varaangaatti Naan Uda Maatten

Jaam Bajaar Jaggu, Naan Saidapetta3 Kokku4

Come home with me mister! I shan’t let go till you do

Hey Jaam Bajaar Jaggu, I’m a heron from Saidapet (my trans.)

In lines that follow, Chinna Ponnu complains that she is being stood up and left to somehow blame

herself after Jaggu, having checked her out and returned her interest earlier, flees the scene5. At this

point, lyricist Vaali’s decision to have Chinna Ponnu compare their situation to the legendary

doomed romance of Amaravathy-Ambigapathy promptly decontextualises the Madras Bashai of the

lyrics from its Gaana provenance to place it before a literate Tamil audience familiar with dramatic

conventions in comedies. There is an obvious comparison between the two couples. The princess

renowned for her beauty and the young poet-scholar son of Kambar (the author of a famous Tamil

1 The word “vaathiyaar” (literally “teacher” in Tamil) is used as an honorific by the Madras Bashai speaking
labouring class in this movie. It does not imply that the addressee is a teacher by profession.
2 Translatable as “(towards) home”; an example of word use characteristic of Madras Bashai, in place of
standard alternatives such as “Veettukku”.
3
Jam Bazar and Saidapet are neighbourhoods in Chennai.
4 The imagery in these lines is reminiscent of the behaviour of herons, who have the ability to wait for the
right moment to pounce on their unsuspecting prey and then hold securely on to it. Several species of herons,
storks and cranes populate Chennai’s extensive wetland birdlife.
5
This is a loose translation of the lines “Varavadhile Ninnukinirundhen Amaravadhiyattam / Sight Adichu
nee Jagaa Vaangina Amaravadhiyattam”. Note that “sight” and “jagaa” (modification of “jagah”) are English
and Hindi loan words. Here they each combine with the succeeding Tamil word to form phrases that, in
Madras Bashai, mean “to check out” and “to flee the scene” respectively. Madras Bashai contains words
from several other languages such as Telugu, Hindi, English and Malayalam.
!29
Ramayana) were deeply in love with each other; meanwhile Chinna Ponnu’s “aasai” or desire

(rather than love) for Jaggu is only met with active avoidance on his part.

As a musical genre, Gaana began to achieve widespread popularity within Tamil film music since

the 1990s, which Antony Arul Valan traces to the “advent of recording devices” allowing Gaana

musicians to “tape their compositions and record it for posterity” (83). However, as a genre that

frequently dealt with “themes of fun and romance”, it also became associated with the use of sexual

innuendo and misogyny. Pranathi Diwakar also notes that music directors like Deva who

popularised Gaana within film music in the 1990s “eschewed the husky vocal texture of self-

produced cassettes by Gaana singers in favour of “upper” caste playback singers, who met the

standards of dominant aesthetic standards for “melodious” vocality” (69).

More recently, efforts to recontextualise Gaana as a means of expression of Dalits and other

oppressed people in Chennai that originated in the colonial era “Black Town” outside the British

Fort St. George, have strengthened its obvious parallels to hip-hop music. For instance, S. Anand

calls it the “rap-like musical idiom of the Dalits in Chennai” (Arul Valan 83). For a viewer today,

the Gaana influences within “Vaa Vathiyare” along with the subversion of the traditionally male

Gaana singer’s role in the film song avatar seem to allow Chinna Ponnu to assume what in the era

of social media is called “main character energy” — living life as if you are the protagonist rather

than someone else’s sidekick. The Amaravathy-Ambigapathy story, which by then had already seen

several dramatic and cinematic iterations, sheds the idealising aura of “legend” and becomes just

another story in a repertory — thus, aattam. And it makes sense that since the poet had been roped

in to tutor (be a literal “vaathiyar” to) the princess, Chinna Ponnu imagines herself and her

vaathiyar performing the Amaravathy-Ambigapathy routine.

!30
Aside from incorporation into film music, opportunities for other modes of performance also

strengthen the place of marginalised music practices within Tamil music. Film director Pa. Ranjith

is among those who promote efforts to train and support new artistes, and provide them

opportunities to perform. His organisation, Neelam Cultural Centre, collaborated with music

composer Tenma to form The Casteless Collective. The band began what Tenma, in a 2019

interview by Carnatic vocalist and author T.M.Krishna with members of the band, calls its “socio-

musical-political journey in 2017 with 19 members from hip-hop, rock and folk music backgrounds

(Krishna). Apart from their popular singles and studio album — some of their material have also

been used in movies — live performances are a very important way to connect to their audience and

respond musically to topical affairs. Members of the band note that while Gaana “used to be sung

only in homes where someone had passed away”, and even their musical instruments used to be

stigmatised due to their association with funerals and death, TCC had provided them with

respectability and a “huge platform with thousands watching (them)” (Krishna). TCC and its

members also brought about several innovations in Gaana performance. For instance, the

emergence of Gaana Isaivani, who has several notable songs and live performances to her credit,

broke away from a tradition of exclusively male Gaana performers.

Pranathi Diwakar notes that Gaana music is a “site where anti-caste cultural expression flourishes

and fuses with new forms such as hip-hop, as well as older arts like parai” (27-28). As a result, for

instance, aspects of hip-hop culture like the emphasis on authenticity by “celebrating their

friendships” and representing the area or neighbourhood become prominent in Gaana music,

strengthening notions of “‘turf’ and territorial identity (that) are central to the affective reimagining

of alternative spaces for Dalit men to inhabit in a city where their actions and occupations of public

spaces and streets are constantly surveilled and policed” (110). This has in recent years given rise to

a new format of independent, self-produced music videos by Gaana musicians. Diwakar also
!31
discusses how such “countercultural expressions of defiance” have been liberally appropriated into

Tamil film music in ways that void them of their immediate contexts (108).

In the context of a “concerts-in-the-parks” series organised after Chennai was named a “Creative

City for Music” as part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) in 2017, Pranathi

Diwakar illustrates how amidst the celebration of Chennai’s Carnatic music tradition, Gaana and

other marginalised music traditions were only reluctantly platformed, and even then only tolerated,

by the organisers (1). Yet the internet has also provided a platform to “(make) mobile” such musical

genres. She argues that “the virality of Chennai-based Gaana musicians’ videos often make them

visible at different levels to new fans and countercultural cyber-publics” (159). She also illustrates

how the intersection of the “digitalisation of music dissemination” with “caste and migration flows”

make these “distinct musical genres portable” in vastly different ways (158). In contrast to Carnatic

music which has been entrenched for a long time in cities and suburbs of North America with a

Tamil population, “members of the Tamil “working class” diaspora in countries like Malaysia,

Singapore, U.A.E., and Sri Lanka prefer Gaana, often sponsoring the production of music videos …

and also providing circuits for Gaana musicians … to travel and perform shows in these

locations” (159).

Apart from India and Sri Lanka, significant numbers of Tamil people also live in South East Asia

and the Arabian Gulf, Mainland Africa and several Indian Ocean islands, Europe, and North

America and the Caribbean. In many of these regions, hip-hop and practices associated with it now

occupy a central position in popular culture. It is one of several music genres that evolved rapidly

out of efforts by urban immigrants to form communities through informal methods like block

parties and raves, using the fledgling possibilities inaugurated by sound systems and sampling

technologies in the 1970s. Meanwhile in Tamil Nadu, some hip-hop practices such as rapping and
!32
break-dancing came to popular attention through film music, such as when A. R. Rahman composed

his 1994 song “Pettai Rap” from the movie Kadhalan over a hip-hop inspired sampled drum break,

using instruments like parai drums to connect the lyrics rapped in a mixture of English and Madras

Bashai musically to life in Chennai neighbourhoods.

With respect to the popularity of hip-hop music in the 1990s, Ajay Nair and Murali Balaji argue that

among South Asian youth in the USA the listening publics (to borrow Kate Lacey’s term) they gave

rise to provided a sense of belonging and identification (viii). Similarly, for Tamil youth who grew

up in Malaysia, the burgeoning hip-hop culture provided both inspiration and a promise of

expression. Outside the context of United States centric racial discourse, they identified with

karuppinar sollisai or spoken-word music by black folk (my trans.) as an invulnerable aspirational

discourse suddenly made available to them. In the song “Madai Thiranthu” (2006) by Malaysian

Tamil musicians Yogi B (Yogeswaran Veerasingham) and Natchatra (the duo of Dr. Burn and

Emcee Jesz), they stake claim to this culture as Kavithai Gunderkal — which they translate as

“Lyrical Gangsters” in a clear allusion to the Gangster Rap that emerged from marginalised black

urban youth in the USA in the 1990s — as Dr. Burn (Ruban Manoharan) sings:

Thotakal thulaikadhu, anugundu thakarkaadhu

Avamanam en uyirai alikkaadhu

Adhikaram en kanavai thadukkaadhu

Bullets cannot pierce me, nor atomic bombs shatter

My life, I will not be undone by shame,

My dreams will not be suppressed (my trans.)

!33
The track is an interpolation of Ilaiyaraja’s song “Madai Thiranthu” that featured in the 1980 movie

Nizhalgal. The Ilaiyaraja song starts out with a single performer, an aspiring music composer, on

vocals and harmonium, and then expands into large orchestras and choruses. The new track starts

with an impromptu performance in a barbershop blends Tamil film music and hip-hop, and then

opens up into several sections of Tamil and English rap that respond to the source track’s theme of

an artiste experiencing his world expand beyond all recognition in the act of composing music.

Towards the end it features a section where the driving boom bop beat is juxtaposed with choral

alapana and konnakkol that reflect the role of Carnatic music in indexing Tamilness for diasporic

Tamil populations in Malaysia, before cutting with a scratch of vinyl to the M.R.Radha sample.

Although Yogi B had been rapping in Tamil and English since 1997, this was one of the first Tamil

hip-hop tracks that made its way to Tamil audiences outside Malaysia. It received a great deal of

airplay on SS Music, an Indian satellite TV channel devoted to music that was launched in 2001,

and its immense popularity led to Yogi B making his Indian Tamil film industry debut with

Polladhavan in 2007 (Ganeshan).

!34
 CHAPTER 3

Within the music industry, independent or indie music refers to work released partially or

completely independent of the Big Three “major” record labels. Over the years, many genres of

music like hip-hop and grunge in the 1990s originated as niche music patronised by such smaller

“independent” record labels before they became commercially successful and mainstream. The term

travels from a North American context where there is a much greater role for indie music labels as

tastemakers and trendsetters due to their integration with the music industry. Aside from the

recording industry, many aspects of music performance in that region such as promotion and event

management have also been corporatised through transnational companies. On the other hand, the

Indian Tamil film industry remains the dominant segment within popular Tamil music with music

rights being purchased before release by major and prominent independent record labels. In

addition, a broad swathe of popular Tamil music practices lie outside the music industry. The launch

of Maajja is part of an emerging indie music scene that has grown out of Chennai in the past

decade.

In January 2021, the launch video of Maajja, a “technology-enabled (music) label alternative” that

aims to release and promote music by “South Asian independent artists globally”, garnered

widespread attention on YouTube (“About Maajja”). While their lineup features a number of artists,

A. R. Rahman’s participation in Maajja’s vision of promoting “independent” artists and M.I.A.’s

show of support are highlights. The thumbnail of the video — centred purple lettering that reads

“maajja” styled like music visualisation on a white background flanked by black-and-white medium

close up shots of A. R. Rahman and M.I.A. — supports such a reading. In addition to working with

major record labels, Rahman and M.I.A. (Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam) are Oscar-and-Grammy

winning artists from India and Britain respectively who share a Tamil heritage. Their endorsements
!35
connect what artists speaking in the video refer to as a Tamil indie music scene, simultaneously to

the dominant producers of popular Tamil music and to the global music industry.

A. R. Rahman started his career in music as a child in the early 1980s. The start of his career

coincided with rapid advances in recording, dissemination and performance of music in India. He

worked as a session musician, arranged orchestration and assisted several music directors, created

advertising jingles, and put out music albums under prominent Indian independent record labels like

Magnasound before establishing himself quickly as a leading music composer in several Indian

language movie industries soon after debuting in director Mani Ratnam’s Tamil film, Roja. When

Sony Music Entertainment, one of the largest recording companies in the world, entered the Indian

market in 1997, Rahman was their first signing as a recording artist (Trilok 254). Krishna Trilok

notes in his authorised biography that Rahman’s pitch for a celebratory work that could “market this

country to its people” in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence resonated with

SME’s search for a “hot new face of Indian music” (254). Trilok and Rahman’s frequent

collaborator Bharath Bala also indicates that his musical hat-tips to Michael Jackson may have

“made sense” to SME as a fresh, yet commercially appealing ambassador of Indian popular music

(254). Jackson’s music is an important touchstone for a lot of Rahman’s early music, such as his

work in Kadhalan.

Starting from tracks like “Thamizha Thamizha” from the movie Roja (or “Bharat Hum Ko” in the

Hindi version), Rahman’s oeuvre, both in film and non-film music, contains a large number of

songs with anthemic qualities. Even many of his iconic compositions across languages for corporate

clients — memorably, the signature tunes for the media company Asianet (titled “Shyama Sundara

Kera Kedara Bhoomi”) in 1994 and the telecom company Airtel in 2002, and the track “Hum Main

Hai Hero” for two-wheeler manufacturer Hero MotoCorp — are tethered to performances of
!36
collectivity. Rahman’s projects with Sony resulted in tracks like “Maa Tujhe Salaam” (“Thai Manne

Vanakkam” in the Tamil version) from his 1997 album Vande Mataram, and the “Jana Gana Mana”

music video in 2000, composed in time for the fiftieth anniversaries of Indian independence and

republic-hood respectively. They feature several prominent vocal and instrumental artistes with

music produced and arranged by him, and have both gone on to become staple choices for

performances of patriotism.

Maajja released a teaser for the song “Mooppilla Thamizhe Thaaye” (in translation, “Ageless

Mother Tamil!”) on April 14, 2021, with Tamil New Year greetings to their viewers. It was their

third release, following their launch video and their debut single, “Enjoy Enjaami”. The song

premiered on YouTube almost a year later, on March 25, 2022, with the description “Tamil anthem”

in parentheses on the video’s title. It was composed, produced and arranged by A. R. Rahman, who

brought on poet and film lyricist Thamarai to the project. While the Rahman-Thamarai combo has

been highly successful in the Indian Tamil film industry, they used their freedom from diegetic

restrictions to move away from film music conventions and produce a nearly seven-and-a-half

minute long track. But this was not Rahman’s first Tamil anthem.

Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi wrote the lyrics for a theme song titled “Semmozhiyana

Thamizhmozhiyaam” (“Tamil, the Classical Language,” in my translation) to promote the World

Classical Tamil Conference which was to be held in Coimbatore in 2010, and Rahman, fresh from

his success at the 2009 Oscar awards, was roped in to set it to music. Ramya Kannan notes that the

song blends “the traditional Tamil nagaswaram and tavil … with the guitar and drums, even as the

carnatic notes wind seamlessly with the rap”, and quotes Rahman as saying that they had “kept the

instruments to a minimum so that the words are clear”.

!37
The newer anthem sounds different, driven by a combination of swifter vocal lines, electronic

music, piano and orchestral strings, but the effort is still to blend genres in which Tamil musicians

all over the world express themselves and to make the vocal portions easy to follow. Both musically

and lyrically there is an emphasis on the forward-facing and all-encompassing qualities of Tamil:

the newer sounds are complemented by new vocabulary like thattachu (keyboard) and kanini

(computer) which become instruments of puthunutpam (innovation). Allegories of the nation as

motherland and the native language as mother tongue are extremely common. But here, Thamarai

writes of pregnancy as a period of learning and self-discovery, to convey how Tamil expands to

contain and enrich the contemporary lifeworlds of its speakers:

Ayatham kollum azhagai

Adaigal aniyum puthithai

Embracing motherhood gracefully

By donning new garments (my trans.)

The two anthems are also similar in the hegemonic position accorded to the Tamil language as the

well-spring of Tamilness. This is reflected in the total exclusion of other languages in their lyrics, as

well as in the music videos where the Tamil script is featured prominently. For instance, the special

character A(h)kenam which is particular to the Tamil alphabet and probably better known as ayutha

ezhuthu (“ஃ” — it could either be glossed as an ayutham (tool) that acts by shortening the vowel

preceding it and aspirating the consonant-vowel combination succeeding it, or more literally as a

character whose three markings resemble an ayutham (weapon), namely shield), appears in

“Semmozhi” at 5:04 minutes. Throughout the video of “Moopilla Thamizhe Thaaye”, the character

looms large against the horizon, marking the world of Tamil speakers with its suggestion of

!38
uniqueness and of unification. These suggestions of the language’s importance gather force towards

the end of the song:

Mozhiyillai entral ingae

Inamillai entrae arivai! Vizhithukkol Thamizha munne … !

Pinaithukkol Thamizhal unnai … !

Know that without language

The race6 perishes! Look ahead, Thamizha7!

Bind yourselves to one another through Tamil! (my trans.)

A Tamil immigrant displaced as a child by the Sri Lankan civil war, first to India and then in 1986

to the United Kingdom where she lived as a refugee with her mother and siblings in flats in

London’s council estates8 , M.I.A.’s musical career also began as an outsider (Wheaton 3). After

initially associating with musicians and bands as a visual artist and filmmaker, she taught herself to

produce tracks on a borrowed Roland MC-505 drum machine. Since the 1990s, raves and dance

clubs in the UK became sites where highly localised music scenes formed and interacted with each

other. Such sites gave rise to a slew of Electronic Dance Music genres such as UK Garage, Grime,

Jungle and Dubstep among others that drew influences not only from genres that originated in the

USA and UK, but also from those like reggae and dancehall which evolved in the urban youth

cultures of the Caribbean. While much of Rahman’s early popular work were products of Indian

language movie industries (chiefly Tamil and Hindi), M.I.A’s music started circulation in the early-

6
I use race as a shorthand for an ethnic group, bound together by perceived shared attributes including but
not limited to language, history or common origin.
7 A Tamil person. Although the word signifies a male addressee, it is used here as a general term of address.
8
Housing complexes built chiefly by local civic authorities in the UK to provide affordable housing. While
debates surrounding the raison d’etre of public housing shifted according to prevailing political winds, by the
1980s council estates became synonymous with “social deprivation and institutional neglect” (Wheaton 3).
!39
to-mid 2000s as demo tapes that were shared informally within this underground music economy of

multicultural London, popularised by DJs and receiving airplay on pirate radio stations9. On her

early singles such as “Galang” (2003), amidst an atmosphere of routine violence, drug abuse,

paranoia and a fraught relationship with the police, she uses Multicultural London English with its

heavy Caribbean influences equally as a unifying tool and to talk about life in London’s working

class, ethnically diverse neighbourhoods:

London callin'

Speak the slang now

Boys say, “Wha gwan10?”

Girls say, “What, what?”

Slam!

Galang, Galang, Galang11

Shotgun, get down

Get down, get down, get down

Too late, you down

D-down, d-down, d-down

9
Radio stations that operate without a valid licence. Starting in the 1960s, the United Kingdom has a long
history of unlicensed radio broadcasting. Soon they became an important forum for popular music, featuring
new and local styles not yet patronised by mainstream and licensed broadcasters.
10 Caribbean English expression of greeting that originates from the English phrase “What’s going on?”
11
Galang is a Caribbean English expression that compresses the phrase “go along”. In English, “behave” is
an approximate substitute, although the actual meaning differs according to context. For instance, this line
appears to be a recontextualisation of an injunction commonly addressed to young people: “behave
yourself!”
!40
Meanwhile, in the accompanying music video, M.I.A. combines the sort of unchoreographed

dancing one could expect to find in communal spaces of working class youth from older iterations

such as dancehalls in the Caribbean to the underground clubs and raves of London, with her own

expressive fashion choices and street graffiti, which has a highly visible history as urban protest art

including numerous references to Banksy’s work in London and elsewhere beginning in the 1990s

(See, for instance, Madelynn Green; Will Ellsworth-Jones; Susan Hansen and Flynn Danny).

Alongside more straightforward depictions of protest through images of tanks, bombs and

protesters, tigers12 and stencilled Tamil graffiti13 show up throughout her visual art for “Galang”.

These performances of Tamilness point to a systematic marginalisation of immigrant communities

in London, a theme that she explores further in her debut album Arular (2005) where she includes a

36-second skit — such, usually comic, interludes that may serve to provide contextual cues to

listeners through snatches of dialogues including cultural references, can be found in several hip-

hop albums from the 1990s. In the skit titled “Banana”, a teacher tries to teach English to students

by breaking down a word and getting them to repeat it after her. M.I.A. says in an early interview

that the skit represents the way refugee children were taught in the United Kingdom, under the

assumption that if they didn’t already know English or found it difficult to pick up a language that

operated far away from the social contexts familiar to them, they were stupid (McCann).

M.I.A.’s music was quickly noticed, especially in the United States of America, where Interscope

Records added her to their roster alongside hugely popular stars such as Dr. Dre. But even after

M.I.A. became well known following the critical and commercial success of her first album, she

12 Tigers are mentioned frequently in ancient Sangam literature and associated with honour and
righteousness. From the “jumping tiger” on the flag of the Medieval Chola empire to its association with the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and other Tamil outfits, the tiger and the qualities it symbolises
have become integral to Tamilness (Ashraf).
13
In the music video, the word “eppidi” appears to be graffitied in the background (0:05 - 0:08). In the
absence of more definitive information, I am inclined to agree with discussants on an internet forum who
speculate that it may be a non-standard form of the word “eppadi”, which means
“how” (linguaphiles.livejournal.com/3407945.html).
!41
also became one of the first artists to use the internet to circulate her music, pioneering a form of

self-publication by releasing music outside the aegis of the music industry as freely downloadable

files on her webpage. At the same time her musical practice de-emphasised adherence to

conventions evolved out of a local music scene, in favour of an eclectic approach in which she

freely interacted with other music and cultures as sample tracks, featured artists and instruments,

and multiple music producers. A critic notes that if “Arular had used the dominant tools of the time

in a fresh way, … diversifying the sounds of the club”, her second album Kala (2007) was made

“centring those voices and instruments of individuals traditionally unheard in the music

industry” (Trewn).

So even while several of her tracks on Kala feature Tamil instruments like the urumi and samples

from popular Tamil film songs, she affirms that her music “doesn’t sound as if it’s from a particular

place” (McCann). Instead, her Tamilness is articulated through political positioning that has

repeatedly challenged the bounds of the entertainment and music industry. She was unable to get a

long-term work visa to the United States of America while making the album and even after,

reportedly for ties to the Tamil separatist movement — her father, Arulpragasam, was a founding

member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS) and a prominent ideologue

— and for her alleged endorsement of the activities of the Tamil Tigers through symbols and lyrics

in her work (Goodman). As a result, the production of the album became a global enterprise which

she recorded and produced in countries such as Liberia, Australia, India and Trinidad. The track

“Paper Planes” from Kala, which incorporates her criticism of the way immigrants are perceived

and treated, became its most popular single.

The global music industry’s recent turn towards regional markets with high potential for growth is

reflected in the way Rolling Stone India magazine covers the release of “Enjoy Enjaami” and
!42
“Neeye Oli”, two highly popular singles released by Maajja released in March and July 2021

respectively. Anurag Tagat’s cover story focuses on how “international Tamil artists Dhee and Shan

Vincent de Paul are blurring local and global music boundaries”, as part of a broader trend of

“South Asian music” going mainstream like Latin pop and Korean music in recent years. Dhee is a

Chennai-based musician with roots in Jaffna who grew up in Australia, while de Paul, also from

Jaffna, migrated to Canada during the Sri Lankan Civil War and has lived there since.

Like Dhee who sings in Tamil, the “mother tongue” remains an important marker of Tamilness for

SVDP. But as a second generation Sri Lankan - Canadian, his use of English indexes a growing

diasporic Tamil population who do not speak the language. In the music video, he uses a title card

with English and Tamil scripts as well as tiger iconography, and his English verses are accompanied

by Tamil lyrics penned by Arivu and performed by Sri Lankan - Canadian Tamil artiste Navz-47

(Naveeni Athanasious Philip). However in “Enjoy Enjaami” and “Neeye Oli”, Dhee and SVDP

respectively employ globally understood genre conventions of pop and hip-hop music alongside

avowals of Tamilness.

Tagat quotes music critic Ashanti Omkar’s observation that over the last thirty years, songs with

“strong sonic quality” no longer require that the lyrics “be necessarily understood on the first listen

… due to (the listeners’ familiarity with) multilingual film songs … as well as OTT platforms

displaying subtitles across languages”. According to Andy Sloan-Vincent, Head of Global Music

Programmes at the streaming platform Spotify, Dhee’s “powerful voice” and the potential for

combining contrasting styles led them to announce a collaboration with her and “one of the biggest

global music icons”, DJ Snake, as the first single from India to be remixed under their Spotify

Singles programme (Krishnan). Similarly for SVDP, it is his prowess in the globally dominant hip-

hop genre that he highlights throughout “Neeye Oli”. In keeping with hip-hop conventions, he
!43
writes the themes of resilience and striving for excellence in the song into a personal narrative

where he recounts his journey as a musician from a long struggling phase to eventual success, and

raps it at breakneck speed in a demonstration of his “flow”:

Back when I was blooming

Couldn’t buy my mamma shit

Used to look up to my idols on my TV

Now I look up to my idols on my mantle

When I told you I was greatest brown rapper, I was lying

I meant any mammal, I meant any pigment

I meant any everybody, eeny, meeny, miny, anybody, get it?

Meanwhile, although as Pranathi Diwakar illustrates, marginalised genres such as gaana music have

recently acquired international mobility through the establishment and reinforcement of working

class diasporic circuits in an era of increasing internet connectivity (159), under the operations of

the global music industry, such elements are often devalued or considered exercises of sampling

within a composite artwork, in favour of an appreciation of a lead artiste’s sensibilities.

Maajja and Rolling Stone India’s decision to take cues from the global music industry by marketing

these artistes as the faces of a new Tamil independent music scene faced stiff resistance within

India. Film Director Pa. Ranjith and several others pointed out that Rolling Stone India and Maajja

had invisibilised Arivu (Arivarasu Kalainesan), the lyricist, co-composer, and co-performer of

“Enjoy Enjaami” and lyricist behind the Tamil portions of “Neeye Oli”. Arivu is an Ambedkarite

musician who debuted in Pa. Ranjith’s Kaala (2018) as a lyricist and quickly established himself as

a singer and lyricist in the Tamil film industry. Simultaneously, as a member of The Casteless

Collective, he also became a notable presence in Chennai’s independent music scene. Apart from
!44
his role in the band’s music, he has also released a studio album, Therukural (in collaboration with

fellow TCC member OfRo, 2018), and several singles.

In “Enjoy Enjaami”, Arivu’s lyrics ground the song figuratively in a civilisation raised on the sweat

and toil of generations of Tamil people, for which he finds a microcosmic parallel in his

grandmother Valliammal’s role in raising him. The music video is shot in his ancestral village of

Kaganam, in Tiruvannamalai district, Tamil Nadu (Viegas). He also draws on the Oppari tradition,

where (usually) female relatives of deceased persons perform songs of lament and celebration at

their funeral, along with weeping and striking their own body. With a lot of room for creative

imagery, wordplay and improvisation, these performances often go beyond grief to deliver social

critiques. Arivu uses an elderly parent’s funeral lament to mirror the relationship between nature

and humans, but his words also specifically recall the history of the Indian Tamil (Malayaga

Tamilar) community who had migrated to Sri Lanka as plantation labourers in the 19th and 20th

centuries. were disenfranchised and repatriated en masse to India by the Sri Lankan government as

part of a spate of anti-Tamil legislations, and left landless and culturally uprooted:

Naan anchu maram valarthen/ Azhagana thottam vechen

Thottam sezhithalum en thonda nanaiyalaye

I grew five trees, kept a beautiful garden

The garden prospers, but my throat runs dry (my trans.)

In an online press meet organised by Maajja CEO Noel Kirthiraj to deal with the backlash, film

critic Baradwaj Rangan asks why, when in an Indian context “Enjoy Enjaami” might be considered

a duet, it was credited as a “Dhee song featuring Arivu”. Kirthiraj responded that “(Maajja) don’t

agree with a lot of things done in the Indian context;” unlike in India where the music industry was
!45
“intertwined with movies,” in the West a featuring artist is “someone the lead artist brings in to

work on a song”. He explained that the stories were meant to promote Dhee’s upcoming album and

de Paul’s album titled Made in Jaffna which released in September 2021, and not just the two

singles. Rolling Stone India reacted by issuing a series of digital covers for their August 2021 issue

featuring A.R.Rahman, Santhosh Narayanan, Arivu and Navz-47, highlighting their association with

Maajja as evidence of the mainstreaming of a Tamil indie music scene.

!46
 CONCLUSION

The catalogue of Tamil independent music has expanded considerably over the last few years.

However, while local Tamil music scenes flourish in many parts of the world, Maajja’s attempt to

bring together Tamil artistes from all over the world into contact with a larger audience through the

global music industry has had limited success. Their productions continue to enable new artistes to

produce technically accomplished music and videos, and release it on popular platforms such as

YouTube, Spotify, and others. But there is a massive difference in viewership between singles by

popular film music composers A. R. Rahman and Santhosh Narayanan on Maajja’s platforms, like

“Enjoy Enjaami”, “Neeye Oli”, and “Mooppilla Thamizhe Thaaye”, which have all crossed several

million views, and their other releases.

The transnational networks of Tamil music make it an object of interest to scholars studying

technologically mediated global cultural flows. Jasmine Hornabrook’s “Getting Louder: music,

“feedback loops”, and social change in the transnational Tamil music scene” is an example of very

recent work that pays attention to the interrelations arising from the migration histories of Tamil

people. Drawing attention again to Pranathi Diwakar’s observations (“Resounding Caste” 205) of

the simultaneous dismantling as well re-entrenchment of social hierarchies through music, she

expresses hope that the “experiences of migration and exclusion (which) are inherent characteristics

of the current transnational music scene … (reflect a) potential for a cross-border Tamil solidarity

and a more inclusive global Tamil sound” (16). Other scholarship on the “south Indian independent

music scene” (several scholars, including Menon 231-250; John 14-39) too speak of its counter-

cultural potential for globally oriented subjects who are disenfranchised under dominant nationalist

imaginaries; however, although an independent music scene does provide a site for critical

!47
engagement, claims of its “blatant questioning of authority and subversion of the mainstream

cultural imaginary” (John 38) are overstated.

Similarly, while such attempts at “cross-border Tamil solidarity” have certainly resulted from the

globalisation of independent music scenes, these scenes continue to be tied to various regional and

local frames of meaning-making — which Elena Westinen in her discussion on the discursive

construction of authenticity in Finnish hip-hop calls “scales” (71). For instance, the song

“Ceylonkaar” by Arivu and The Ambassa Band attempts to extend solidarity on the basis of shared

marginality in relation to the ruling class in the context of widespread popular protests in Sri Lanka

in 2022. They use spoken Tamil lyrics as a shared popular medium of discourse and are dressed in

shirts and vettis, but they choose not to wear a specific colour, with Arivu wearing golden yellow,

two band members wearing blue and the two others a pink and a green shirts and matching borders.

The song is set to the uniquely Sri Lankan (by way of Portuguese colonial influence) “Baila” beat,

and they address the population collectively as “Ilankai” while disavowing ethnic and religious

fundamentalism. Yet, despite the overt focus on a message of unity, some Sri Lankan Tamil listeners

in the YouTube comments section of the song were sensitive to the performers’ disavowal of an

ethnically divisive Tamilness and apprehensive that Arivu’s association with Dalit Buddhist politics

translates into support for Sri Lanka’s Buddhist majority and an absence of commitment to justice

for historic wrongs. The original video is no longer available on the official channel of Arivu, taking

down with it the comments section. A copy of the video uploaded by Yazhinall channel is available

on YouTube at the time of writing.

Yet, comparable to how Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan identifies digital hip-hop and performances of

black American masculinity as a “global familiar by which the young men … in Delhi’s hip hop

scene come to understand and creatively mobilise their perceived and experienced gendered
!48
(classed, and racialised) difference” (4), performances of Tamilness provide another shared frame of

reference to these artistes and listening communities which share in their experiences, and open up

new possibilities of expression.

!49
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