Flows of nationalism between diaspora and homeland
Kiss Nuka from Control Alt Delete to a debut in London
Two bodies move to Kiss Nuka's visceral dub techno live set.
The first wears a bindi on her forehead and twirls her henna-painted hands in some vague Bollywood style. Behind her, clips from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) play silently on a projector. She is at Dialled.in x Vedic Soundsystem's takeover at Southbank Centre, London on the 8th of March. Her group of friends form a conspicuous mix of skins and accents- most brown, some white, one of whom is draped with the Indian national flag. The crowd is mostly a mix of desi professionals and entrepreneurs from London's South Asian community. They have gathered to celebrate shared nationalities, and they are here having secured the necessary generational mobility and disposable income. Kiss Nuka, live artist from the homeland, is playing her debut set in London for them. But perhaps the mere 'hints' of her Indian roots in her music (Resident Advisor) isn't 'Indian' enough for them? The night doesn't climax until London’s own DJ Anu closes the night with the anthem of Jai Paul's Str8 Outta Mumbai (2013).
The other dancer wears jeans, a snapback and reflector sunglasses, in a huddle with his friends amidst packed crowd at Control Alt Delete 2024, Mumbai. Practically free entry and a diverse lineup across multiple stages has done much to heterogenise the crowd, bringing together Mumbai's tribes from across metal, hip hop, indie and electronic scenes. Here is an inclusive safe space dissolving identity and championing its DIY ethos. And yet at the end of the night, late into Kiss Nuka's set, deep in the crowd, the mantra of Jai Shri Ram is heard chanted under the beat. His friends and him whisper it quietly, hesitantly, like a conspiracy snuck in through the gates.
Both are distinct performances of nationalism — one cultural, liberal and secular, the other Hindu— both with Kiss Nuka as a focal point. But if they converge in colonial ancestry and music, our two dancers are defined by their opposition. The thought of them interacting, of transgressing boundaries of class, caste and geography, invites disgust. Through the sweat and artificial fog of the night, they should repel at the other's lingering scent of social difference, which grease the layers of the waking world outside the dancefloor. Thankfully for our caste-ist sensibilities, our two dancers will never meet.
Still, their scenes are linked beyond just some vague idea of ancestry. They reproduce each other, and their embodied ideologies of nationalism morph and mutate in contact with each other. Dhiraj Murthy (2010)1 is instructive here in revealing the dialogic relationship of exchange and production which forms the basis of 'Asian electronic music', a transnational genre of electronic music that fuses contemporary electronic beats with elements from Indian (mostly classical or Bollywood) music. It is disproportionately represented by diasporic artists, with Indian-descent artists like Kiss Nuka being a minority. In London and elsewhere, British Asian diaspora are what Graham St John (2009)2 would call a tribe in 'exile', in search of a utopian world where they may celebrate their identity which is perceived to be subordinated by an oppressive dominant culture. Their new hybridised culture is a 'mode of responsibility and identification', realised in music, style, and atmospheric 'vibes' of communal events. But as Dhiraj Murthy points out, these communities also yearn to feel closer to their lost homeland. Desiring recognition of their authentic Indian-ness, they remit their culture to India, i.e. send music back and perform in India alongside native DJ's .
Back home, Indian producers, DJs and promoters implicitly appropriate the innovations of the diasporic Asian electronic scene. Simultaneously however, the scene disregards the music’s diasporic origin because “the subcontinental musicians ‘see’ diasporic musicians as ‘not quite’ Indian” (Murthy 2010: 1417). And so diasporic Asian electronic music's success is repositioned as a 'return to roots'. This repositioning is possible because the ‘Indian essence’ of Asian Electronic music is preserved when it is imported into India— not as ‘foreign’ but already authentically ‘Indian’ due to its use of sounds associated with the subcontinent. If for the diaspora Asian Electronic music served to articulate a desire for cultural authenticity, then after import in India its ‘Indianness’ is similarly used to balm the alienation of elite urban youths who feel disconnected from an idea of an anterior, primordial ‘Indianness’. The music is so leveraged towards a progressive postcolonial identity — for example, by musicians or DJ’s branding themselves as ambassadors of a 'modern' yet 'traditional' India which needs to reaffirm its ‘heritage’ in the face of the threat of globalization. This latter ideology, is of course, redolent of Indian nationalism. In this way,—
"Both the ‘homeland’ and diaspora converge in that their shared constructions of an anterior Indian essence(s) are based on an imagined pre-modernity or pre-capitalist India where the populace was in touch with their ‘heritage’. [... Thus, Asian electronic music functions as …] a mode of perceived symbolic resistance in the diaspora (due to migration experience) and the ‘homeland’ (due to a globalized cultural threat). [...] Also, unwittingly (but very importantly), a boundary between ‘homeland’ and diaspora becomes broken" (Murthy 2010: 1421).
As Murthy points out with the case of MIDIVal Punditz' remix of Vande Mataram, it is exactly at this point of contact where boundaries are broken, that we can imagine 'secular' cultural nationalism with its 'cool gloss' mutating into the 'Hindutva' nationalism of the other. These two blurred categories problematically enable and reproduce each other, as with the two scenes that put them into practice through cultural exchange.
As an actor in this exchange, Kiss Nuka’s brand is a floating signifier — morphing between the two scenes. Immersed in two separate symbolic atmospheres, Kiss Nuka is positioned slightly differently3. But Asian electronic music remains a common and confounding site for nationalist political, religious, social and cultural identities. Traces are carried across borders, and ideologies infect each other. Their co-evolution is so revealed when, with no fault or design, the same music that celebrates a cultural diasporic ancestry in London mutates, and ignites into a clandestine conjuring of Hindutva nationalism in the otherwise secular, inclusive, countercultural space of Control Alt Delete.
Murthy, Dhiraj 2010. Nationalism remixed? The politics of cultural flows between the South Asian diaspora and ‘homeland’. Ethnic and Racial Studies. vol. 33(8): 1412–1430.
St John, Graham 2009. Technomad: global raving countercultures. London: Equinox.
A comparison of the promotional Instagram posts of each respective organiser (Control Alt Delete and Dialled.in) promoting Kiss Nuka's sets reveals this subtly. In Mumbai, Kiss Nuka's music is an 'entrancing' and 'sensational symphony' to 'trance out and vibe to' . But in London, Kiss Nuka’s music is discernably more tribal or exotic - 'earthy, sweaty, ravey', to be played in 'a cavern, or deep in a jungle, barefoot, bodies glistening, mud flying from feet thumping on the ground' .