What juxtaposition? I think there was none, certainly no friction between the Indian classical and Opera CDs lying on top of each other like restful lovers on the shelf in my childhood living room. Unlike the princess and the pea, I had peaceful dreams while resting my chin on that pile, noticing no great gulf between the Occidental and South Indian. Those songs were all my own because they reached the ears and permeated a yet to be scrambled brain…
Many have spoken of the horrors of migration, what it does to the mind and soul, and it sounds like an MK Ultra experiment rather than that natural journey humans have made for centuries. They speak of lullabies that shriek from distances: I think the physical distance of 9,120km from Sydney to Chennai represents the leagues at which my childhood memories are buried.
Since the days of the East India company, we have found ways to milk the Indian cow. India was bled dry: rajahs penniless, precious gems looted, and the devastating effects on Indian society and economy go without saying. Not only was spice and cotton exported from India to the West, but yoga and enlightenment. In searching “yoga” on Google, I find images of mostly white yogis. It shocked me to learn that many don’t know of yoga’s origins and history, which I find to be inalienable to the practice. I felt that the Western conception of my home came to colonise my own definitions and perceptions. The reality follows not far behind, with Westernisation looming as a cultural threat. Westernisation, however, might be a red herring in our current moment of ‘deculturation’ rather than cultural colonisation. It might not be the case that one dominant culture usurps another in an era where social media and globalisation reduces cultural differences to markers of style. The virtual world of signs is colonising our real one: culture becomes a post, a tweet, a Pinterest board. I am not as pessimistic as these arguments of French political scientist Olivier Roy in The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms (2024) a book which echoes Christopher Lasch’s famous The Culture of Narcissism (1979). They share a paranoia of cultural institutions crumbling: one such institution is definitely those physical collections of CDs, DVDs, cassettes, vinyls handed down from family and friends.
I know enough to piece together my family history of music, even if those collections are in storage far away. The women of my family gravitated towards Carnatic music, becoming classical vocalists and playing the veena and tanpura. The men on both sides found a different kind of mysticism in Jimi Hendrix’s arcane guitar improvisation or Wagnerian tendencies. The women, be it a symptom or a cause of their love of devotional music, were far more religious: God’s name was a presence in their songs and their daily mutterings. That isn’t to say that rock and symphonies held nothing except the allure of status: it holds, for all its listeners, a frisson. Whether this same electricity is produced in a cultural vacuum is another inquiry entirely.
Eastern aesthetics and mysticism are exoticised and commodified in the West. Auteurs like my beloved Wes Anderson have been enchanted by arcane practices of South Asia. I dearly thank Wes of the West for his film The Darjeeling Limited (2007), which brought together Satyajit Ray’s movie soundtracks from my childhood with the comedic genius of Owen Wilson and the talents of Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman. The meaning of ‘cool’ as an adolescent in my creative arts high school meant using Letterboxd as soon as you set foot in the film classroom with Amélie, Black Swan, Mulholland Drive, and Paris, Texas posters adoring the walls. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dead Poets Society were pervading the malnourished minds of teenagers aping some classical (colonial) definition of academia. My English-medium primary school in Chennai followed that canonical strain of intellectualism handed down by the British Raj: to recite Coleridge from the heart was the mark of a learned Indian. Artists of my home country beleaguered to make good art, as Satyajit Ray once called the Indian audience “backward” and “unsophisticated”. I heard the familiar flute of ‘Charu’s Theme’ from Ray’s Charulatha (1964) and Ali Akbar Khan’s stringed sarod in The Darjeeling Limited soundtrack, playing alongside English bands The Kinks and The Rolling Stones. This meant that these two corners of the world were not irreconcilable. James Baldwin put it best: a good artist is like your lover, who makes you conscious of the things you don’t see. Wes Anderson’s poignant story, with its childlike colour saturation, recontextualised for me the mysticism of Hindu chants and the melodies of sitar.
British authors like Kipling, Ruskin Bond, and Roald Dahl (whose short stories were adapted by Wes Anderson for Netflix) have based successful works around this alien paradise. In Wes Anderson’s new series of short films, he adapts (minimally) the shorter works of Roald Dahl, the late prolific writer known for shaping the literary landscape of many childhoods including my own. Culture is stratified into those upper-echelon consumers of high art (imports from abroad) and those consuming local lower media. I struggle as an Australian teenager to find good Indian works: they warranted a stamp of Western approval for me. Perhaps each diasporic recollection of home, its sounds and sights, has to be filtered through a foreign lens. Equally, in the opposite direction, I will keep a keen ear for whatever chords sound like the Carnatic raga, and whatever words sound like my rusty mother tongue.