[Sarai Newsletter] Talk by TEJASWINI NIRANJANA

[The Sarai Programme]

MEDIA PUBLICS & PRACTICES SEMINAR SERIES

Friday, March 4, 2005, 3:30 pm

"Suku Suku What Shall I Do?" : Hindi Cinema and the Politics of Music in  
Trinidad
by Tejaswini Niranjana, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, 
Bangalore

at the Seminar Room, CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 54.

Niranjana investigates the impact of Hindi popular cinema from India on the 
Trinidadian musical genres of calypso, soca, and chutney-soca. Ever since the 
first Indian film, 'Bala Joban', was shown in Trinidad in 1935, the 
descendants of the ex-indentured labourers who form the Indo-Trinidadian 
population have been incorporating elements from Hindi cinema into their own 
cultural practices. She suggests that in the musical public sphere of 
Trinidad, Hindi film as visual product is downplayed in favour of film music 
which seems to have played for decades a crucial role in the formation of 
"Indian" identities. The Hindi films themselves have aroused a host of 
ambivalent responses amongst East Indians, while the songs and their many 
"versions" continue to circulate in diverse spaces, including 
Creole-dominated ones. 

The paper will explore, with reference to contemporary Trinidadian music,  
formations of diasporic modernity which have taken shape outside the 
narratives of nationalist modernity in India, suggesting that these 
formations may help us re-think dominant representations of "Indian culture" 
in India.

Tejaswini Niranjana is Director and Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of 
Culture and Society, Bangalore. She is the author of 'Siting Translation: 
History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context' and the co-editor of 
'Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India'.


-- 
Ranita Chatterjee
Programme Coordinator
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
Tel:  (+91) 11 23960040
       (+91) 11 23942199, ext 307
Fax: (+91) 11 23943450
www.sarai.net