#275 Caste In The Playlist

We connect caste to the music we stream and the pride we carry, tracing how power moves through South Asian culture from temple traditions to Punjabi pop. We sit with Sikh commitments to equality, name how caste discrimination shows up in Canada, and look at how Dalit artists use music to document life and fight back. 

• Defining caste as a system of birth-based hierarchy and why the four-varna model misses lived reality 

• Naming Dalit as a reclaimed identity and why caste persists despite being outlawed 

• Linking Sikh Heritage Month to the gap between equality in doctrine and caste in social practice 

• Explaining how caste travels into the diaspora through migration, capital, and community institutions 

• Pointing to Canadian and US examples where caste discrimination is formally recognised 

• Outlining Brahmin gatekeeping in Carnatic music and how access to instruments and spaces is policed 

• Highlighting Dalit music as resistance through folk traditions and projects like The Casteless Collective 

• Tracking Punjabi pop’s global rise and the normalisation of Jatt identity as “just Punjabi” 

• Questioning what caste signalling does to listeners seeking identity in Canada and beyond

• Sharing ways to listen differently by asking who is centred and who gets erased 

Thank you for listening, you can hear Ravia every Thursday on 97.9 FM or through our live-stream at www.theuniversalradio.com

IG: @theuniversalradio

Transcript

Why Caste Shows Up In Songs

SPEAKER_00 0:05

What up everyone, it's Ravia. Welcome back to the Universal Radio Network. Before we get into it, like I'll just do a little a quick quick little introduction is I'm gonna be talking about cast and music today. So up next, I'm gonna give you a little bit of a definition of what cast is and how does it play in music. It's DJ Rara Ravia, and today I get to mix in a little bit of arts media and politics, a little bit of that it lets get political vibes, you know. Like I'm I get to speak a little bit about power issues, and I love digging into that. I love unpacking that, and I am really excited to talk about this because this month is Sik Heritage Month. And here in Canada, we celebrate this, and I I introduced Sikh Heritage Month last week, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what events are happening in the city. But I want to take you somewhere where most mainstream Punjabi culture conversations don't usually go. I I've I've heard other South Asians in the you know community speak about it more than Punjabi culture, so I think it's important that we we talk about this today because it isn't literally on every at least not every, but maybe every second song you hear, you hear references to caste. So today we are talking about caste, we are talking about music, and we're talking about how those two things have been tangled together for thousands of years, actually. This isn't a new phenomenon, and me talking about it today is is a very like you know, surface level look at the deeper issues that come with cast and and music. So I'm trying to provide a primer on these things today. So one of the things that's important is why do we talk about it in Canada? Because, you know, this is a tradition that has been happening for a like a very long time in South Asia and not just India across South Asia. It's it's prevalent in Bangladesh, it's prevalent in Pakistan. And even though Pakistan is not technically, you know, a Hindu nation, the the I'm getting ahead of myself here. The caste still prevails there. But before I, you know, jump to the lead, there is some things I want to talk about is that how that caste that existed in South Asia has, you know, boarded the planes that we gone on, boarded the ships that people got on to get to Canada, to get to the US. And it it followed us here and it lives with us in our homes, in our communities, despite our efforts to, you know, live in an equal, multicultural, um, respectable society, respectable society. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one of the things I want to talk about is how it is Sikh Heritage Month, and it's important to talk about this because one of the key tenants of Sikh heat is equality. And a key part of that equality was eradicating the caste system that divided many people. But we'll get more into that in a little bit. But I just want to give a little bit more about my own background. So I am still learning. I am implicated in this work. My name is Ravya Garthalival, and my last name has a caste signifier to it. It means I come from an agrarian, most likely landowning background. I do, but you know, that's that's the caveat, most likely landowning background. And some of what I am about to say implicates my own community and maybe even yours. And I'm not here to lecture anyone like it's uncomfortable, it's you know, whatever, but I'm here because this conversation matters and because I believe we owe it to each other to understand how power relations impact us and impact those around us. So we'll start off with what caste actually is. We'll move through how caste operates in classical South Indian music and how it shaped who gets to sing and who got to listen in North India, and how it crept into commercial Punjabi pop, and then we get to how artists are fighting back. By the end of our show today, I hope you're asking the same question I've been sitting with. When we celebrate South Asian music, Punjabi music as a culture, whose culture and what parts of the culture are we celebrating? So, what is caste? That's the question I'm asking. There are many ways to describe it, and scholars and you know, religious scholars, I guess, and social sciences scholars have filled entire careers defining it precisely, seeing how it impacts people, but the way it's described in most kind of cases, and maybe it's a simplification, but here's what we'll we'll start with this today is caste is approximately a 3,000-year-old system of social stratification. So that means social hierarchies, so social status being put as one above the other, basically. And it classifies people into rigid hierarchical groups based entirely on the family they were born into. And there is a classical kind of model that describes four varnas, and it's said to have come from the Hindu traditions, maybe not the religion. There is some conversation on is it part of the Santanam Dharm? Like what does that mean? So there's, but that is the popular vernacular, and it is held up by a lot of Hindu practices. So that's what we're gonna start with today is that there is a classical model that comes from the Hindu tradition, and it is four varnas, so four kind of ways of being, and it and it is very much a pyramid with Brahmins at the top at the pinnacle. They were the priests and scholars, and then second place, we have Kshatriyas, who were the rulers and warriors, and then third place we have the Vashyas, the traders and merchants, and then at the bottom of this pyramid, the largest one was Shudras, the laborers and servants. So this tidy four-tier model was supposedly theoretical, and India's actual social reality, and you know, as things often are, was way more complicated than just having four roles for people in society. So this is built on thousands of years of endogamous and endogamy, you know that term, subgroups called jatis, and they don't neatly map into these four categories. Consider some of the most powerful communities in India, so the Jats of Punjab, the community I come from, the Gaysat of the Gangetic Plains, the Reddis of Telugu speaking regions, the Velalas and Tamil areas, they are not Brahmins. You know, they're not the ones at the very top of this caste pyramid that is supposedly like a sticking point for a lot of you know people's ways of lives. Anyways, they're not the warriors, the merchants, the laborers either. They are landed communities with enormous economic and political power. And where do they fit into this four-section Varna caste model? And the honest answer is they don't really fit into this model. The classical model is an abstraction. And there are ways that those systems and then there's like, you know, let's talk about like there's so basically what this means is if there's like people that don't really fit in the system, is the system broken? Probably. Is it like a social construction? Probably. But there's also people who are in the system but placed outside of it. So people who become known as quote-unquote untouchables, who today assert the powerful self-designation of dalit, a word that means broken or ground down and has been reclaimed as a statement of dignity and resistance from what used to be called the quote-unquote untouchable. And I want to say used to, but a lot of people have a lot of prejudice and still use words like the untouchables or lower caste, etc. But today we're gonna use the verbiage delit. So caste discrimination was actually formally outlawed in India over 70 years ago, yet it persists in hiring, in housing, and very, very devastatingly in violence. So Dalits continue to face abuse across the country where they attempt upward social mobility. And this isn't just, you know, 3,000-year-old ancient model. It lives in the lives of people today. It is now. One of the things I talked about earlier this week or last week it was, was that this month is Sik Heritage Month. And I think it's important to talk about caste today because of that. And here's what a lot of people get wrong about caste, especially a lot of us in that are part of like the Sikh community or part of the Sikh diaspora, or you know, live within that community. We think it's someone else's problem. We think, well, caste is a Hindu institution, and you know, technically, Sikki is explicitly rejected caste. And Guru Nanak said, clearly, there is no Hindu, there is no Muslim, and you know, we're supposed to eat from the same lunger, we're supposed to eat on the same floor. Supposedly, we, as insects, are different. And yes, Sikki has it as a faith, has a tradition, as a powerful, foundational commitment to equality. And that is real and it matters. And and those commitments, I think, just are not being followed in the way that we often think. So, according to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 98% of contemporary Indians, including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains, identify with caste. 98%. The institution of caste crossed every religious boundary it has encountered, it has migrated, it has adapted, it has survived. And the Madras Courier, the this article I was reading there, what's it well? For the Orthodox Hindu, the faith is timeless and eternal. For the social activist, Hinduism is fundamentally about casteism, and casteism is about untouchability. The debate over which of those is true, quote unquote true, can obscure a simpler, harder truth. That regardless of religious doctrine, the social practice has taken root everywhere. And for those of us in the Sikh community, specifically the Judge community that holds a dominant position in Punjabi Sikh social life, emerged as, and I'm quoting the researcher Farmji Singh Judge, who I've um quoted a lot throughout my work, that quote, he says, the topmost caste among the Sikhs have leveraged land ownership to build a kind of aristocracy within tradition that has explicitly rejected aristocracy, aristoc aristocracy. That tension is not a small footnote. It is a central contradiction we need to sit with. And in music, I see this contradiction come up consistently. The social practice of enforcing caste is everywhere. You might be asking, fair enough, caste is this complex Indian, South Asian institution situation, but why are we talking about it here in Canada? What does this have to do with me? That is because caste came with us. That's why. I mean, came with, you know, the community. And in 2023, like there's proof of this across across North America at least, is where I looked into. So in 2023, the Toronto District School Board became the first school board in Canada to formally recognize caste discrimination. And in November 22, the academic staff of the institution where I graduated, I went to grad school, Carleton University in Ottawa, passed a motion to add caste-based discrimination to its policies. In the US, at California State University, one of the largest public university systems in the US, specifically added caste to its non-discrimination policies. This is important. These institutions don't add it because it just sounds good. It's because students and staff reported experiencing caste discrimination. Caste discrimination has also come up in the tech industry as well. It's not just in schools, it impacts people's lived experiences while they work. In January 2020, a discrimination lawsuit was filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing on the behalf of a Dalit engineer who alleged two of his Indian supervisors from the upper caste communities committed workplace discrimination against him on the basis of his caste at a tech company, Cisco Systems Inc. The engineer complained that his future at the company was hanging by a thread after both supervisors, graduates of IIT. So IIT is like this really, really big, smart schools, like the MITs of India, even smarter than MIT, I would argue, but those his supervisors were super powerful. They jeopardized this Dalit engineers' promotions and career prospects. And the state argued that Cisco's treatment of the Dalit employee violated the Fair Employment Housing and Civil Rights Act. So they argued that the laws against discrimination enshrined under this act also covered caste discrimination. Now, the outcome of this, of this like lawsuit that happened in 2020 was not all like it was a little bit complicated. I won't get into that. But the fact that these things are coming up, that these problems are like happening, I think is a good enough point for us to realize that caste is alive and well in our communities in North America across the diaspora. So now let me share something that I think about a lot. And this is about my own community. So I ask myself, you know, this is something I got into when I was doing my research for my master's. How did my family have the funds to come to this country? And for me specifically, it was the ties to agrarian landowning background that my family has. And there is a caste-based connection to capital. Even though technically the caste, the jet caste is outside of the, you know, Varna system, there is still power that is attached to what family, what place you're born into. And the ability to emigrate because of that is not politically neutral. Caste privileges didn't get checked at the airport. They are actually the ones that pay for my plane ticket, my parents' plane tickets to get to this country. And as I've written in my own work, discussions about culture must be understood within the context of power relations. The homeland privileges are often carried overseas to differentiate certain sects of the diaspora from others. Economic privilege, cultural privilege, caste stratification, these travel on documents across borders and they recreate themselves in the new country. And this is why it matters, and this is why we are talking about this today. Finally, I can talk to you about music. Let's turn to music because that's what this show is about. And I'm gonna start with South India. Let's go, let's take a, you know, travel down to the shores of South India with those beautiful palm trees. We're in Kerala, we're in Tamil Nadu, we are enjoying the beautiful mango trees, the lush greenery that the South has to offer. Maybe some waterfalls. That's where I am in my mind. Let's go to South India and we're gonna talk about Garnatic classical music because that tradition gives us a clear, a clear window into how cast and music have been woven together. So this is something that I watched a couple documentaries about and I read about. So if you have more information on this, I would love to learn. But this is what I've learned. In South India, in for many, many years, uh, the Brahmin communities. So if you remember from earlier in this this evening, the Brahmin communities were the spiritual kind of top, the academics, the scholars, the priests, uh, they are the top of the little pyramid of the Varna caste system. So they're the tippy tippy top there. And they are they exercised tight control over classical music education, performance, and sacred musical spaces. The result was that Belets and other communities outside of this upper caste hierarchy were for generations excluded from learning and performing music, especially from playing certain sacred spiritual instruments, let's say. So the one of the ones that was mentioned that came up a lot was the Vena. So the Veena is a long-necked string instrument, kind of like a lute, like a plot lute that's central to South Indian classical music. It's considered the favorite instrument of Saraswati, the goddess of arts, knowledge, and learning. But the Vena is not just an instrument, it was a sacred object. And access to it, who could learn it, who could perform it, whose hands were considered worthy of touching it, was policed by caste. So communities of Devadasis, women who were dedicated to temple service, who were often from Delit backgrounds or backgrounds that were outside of caste, performed music and dance in sacred contexts for a long time. And they kept musical, they kept the musical tradition alive for many years. They were relied upon for their artistic labor, but at the same time were treated as morally suspect by upper caste institutions that benefited from their art. When Brahmins quote unquote cleaned up the Karnatic system and their access to powerful religions, religious institutions stopped there. So this dynamic consists, like it continues to consist in contemporary Karnatic circles. So in 2024, a major Karnatic award, so Karnatic, like the traditional singing form award, was given to the artist TM Krishna. TM Krishna is a wonderful artist, and he has openly and vocally criticized caste discrimination within the music world. The response from him winning this award across the Karnatic establishment was pure outrage. There was hate campaigns, there was like debates on TV, on the news anchors were yelling about it. And I think that reaction tells me everything I need to know about what it's like when power feels like it's being threatened. When a person who is very qualified to win an award wins an award, and the reaction to it is he can't win this because he doesn't like caste. I just I think there is something there that really is clear to say what when power is threatened, it fights back in a way that is quite vicious and in a way that is quite unsettling. Because from, you know, from the the world I believe in, I believe in equality, I believe all humans are equal. Why is this person not worthy of this award if they are openly criticizing a system that has oppressed so many people for so long? Let me know your thoughts at The Universal Radio on Instagram. Okay, now wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. And Dalit communities across South Asia and South India specifically have used music as a site of resistance for as long as they've been excluded from the dominant music traditions. There's a beautiful piece of research that I want to bring to your attention here. Antara Bhtacharye wrote this in 2025 as a part of her music honors thesis at McAllester College. She studied the Dalit work of singer-songwriter Smiritekana Hawlader in West Bengal. Hawladur was born in 1960 and has spent her life creating and performing work, performing folk music as a form of what Batacharye calls Dalit historiography, using song to record a history that dominant institutions have tried to erase. What Batacharye argues is that folk music becomes more than an art in this context. It becomes a document, a record, a mode of testimony. Like a story about like, I lived, I am alive, I live here. These are the struggles I have, this is the life I have, this is the love I feel, and how leather's performances combat dominant caste discourse and Dalit erasure. It evokes a shared humanity and it transcends caste boundaries, through song. And in a recent documentary that I uh watched on the YouTube, you can find it there. It's called, it's by Vice and it's called the Castless Collective, a group of Dalit musicians from Tamil Nadu, you hear it directly from those artists who are talking about this. They describe the heavy discrimination that they feel as people who are trying to learn instruments, who were um, you know, musicians that were like, Oh, I want to learn how to play the Vena or the Tabla or, you know, these instruments that are used in like um spiritual settings, I guess. And and they describe being told, you play music at funerals, don't come near me. Or people say things like, We have to shower because I talk to you. There's like generations of humiliation in those disgusting comments that, you know, are are voiced. And and those aren't just comments, those comments have real. Impact on access to power, to schooling, to like, you know, being able to like make money, to be able to like even just have access to an art form that could like change your life, or even having access to joy in a way that you have complete control over. So those are things that are implicated when we talk about caste and music specifically. In this uh documentary, um, they they also have, you know, the castless collective isn't isn't just talking about all the ways that they are oppressed. They also talk about all the ways that they are working to break these castes, the shackles of caste, right? Like the castless collective has great songs, and one of the ones I'll play for you, but the the lyrics is the the lyrics translate to your forefathers kept mine oppressed. Isn't that why we are given a quota? So a quota system is uh a system that in India is supposed to like help combat caste-associated privilege. So it's like having um, like, you know, let's say there's like four seats that are kept for Dalit workers, like workers in a in a medical college, let's say. Like that's what the quota system is. So your forefathers kept mine oppressed, isn't that why we are given our quota? Don't be so proud because you get all you want. Unlike our ancestors, I will not remain calm. This song is a call to equality, and this like music that they make with the Castless Collective is is like pop music, rap music, and they they find their traditions actually coming, like the the way the artists talk about it is coming from a similar place of creating something because of the pain in the experiences. Like turning that experience into music is a deep part of why they are creating this music. And that music they relate to blues music that comes out of black communities from the US. That feeling of pain and powerlessness and the blues, the jazz, the experimentation that comes from those communities, and also they also compared it to hip-hop communities making their own music, making their own sound, and they see their own music as a part of that rising up against the upper cast, the upper class. So, music when it's made from the margins, I think is really important because it's not just entertainment, even though it is good music, like let's be real, but it's evidence of lived reality that otherwise would not be centralized or even documented in a way that seems quote unquote legitimate. Oral histories are often, you know, sidelined because of that. And these songs are not often bragging about my big gun, my big car, but sometimes they are. So that's an interesting thing we can dig into. They talk about their lived realities. We are now taking the train, taking the plane, and we're going from South India to North India, and we are landing in Punjab and the broader Hindi-speaking belt. So let's think Haryana, let's think the deliriya, let's think parts of the Pradesh. And this is where I'm gonna talk about the relationship between cast and musical performance, because this is a music that a lot of the music that we play on this radio station and the music I listen to has its own specific history, and it is a little bit different from the history of South Indian music that I just, you know, got to talk to you about. So, in the classical and folk traditions of North India, um, singing and performance were historically seen and different types of singing, right? So there's like temple singing, then there's like singing for weddings and cultural ways, but right now we're gonna just talk about the general kind of cultural traditions that existed and what I've read about. So, again, if you have more information on this, please let me know. This is just what I've been able to find. So, in the traditions of North India, singing and performance were historically seen as the domain of people who were from Dalit communities, from the quote-unquote service caste communities. So upper caste households would hire performers for weddings, for celebrations, for religious functions. The idea of the quote unquote upper caste person being a singer themselves carried a social stigma. You, you know, you paid musicians to sing at your wedding, you didn't become one, was the the little thinking they had back then, which is not not ideal. Like, come on, singing is so fun. If I could sing, I would totally be a singer. Anyways, that's beside the point. But think about what this means for music. So music was simultaneously essential to social life, but it was also considered quote unquote low status work. And that is that is the social stratification like reality of it, right? Performers whose labor was animating every celebration, every ritual, every gathering was simultaneously something that was seen as like this isn't us versus them, this isn't something that my family would do because we're from X community and they're from Y community. Like this is this is that classic, you know, me versus you situation in in this in this case, right? That's an oversimplification, but you know what I mean. And this is the same logic that operates in the south, just with different surface features. So in the south, Brahmins controlled high status music, um, but the you know, quote unquote, like the Delit communities could do funeral songs or songs at places that weren't like at temple, temple spaces, etc., or Mundur spaces. And in the North, performance itself was designated as low class, low status work for specific communities, while the economic and social rewards of that work often flowed upwards. So there's something that has shifted. So this is something that I want to note has come up in the previous episodes I've done, like on the episode I did on Garn Odla, the episode I did on Diljeet, there's like there's a dramatic change. So a lot of these artists said, you can't be a singer. Like they were told by their families, oh, singing, that's not something our families do. This is something that is done by people from other castes, let's say, right? So this generation, we saw a shift. We saw a dramatic change. Commercial Punjabi music has exploded globally. And we see that with, you know, Punjabi singers winning Juno's, like Doljeet playing at Coachella, and us like, you know, selling out stadiums across North America. This suddenly is like saying that these Punjabi singers are no longer being a Punjabi singer is no longer a quote unquote low-status action at all. In fact, it is an economic and cultural pathway that could take you from your bandier village in Punjab to performing in stadiums in Brampton, Birmingham, Brisbane, blah, blah, blah, everywhere in the diaspora. And when that happened, the communities at all who controlled land and power found new reason to claim space that they had previously outsourced. And I don't want to say that this was like as clean as like a oh, they see it as an opportunity to make money, they jumped on it. That is just one way of looking at it. There is obviously some nuance here. When you think of listening to Punjabi music, what community is called out to the most? What cast community do you hear about the most? I'm gonna give you a second answer. Five, four, three, two, one. Did you get the right answer? Ding ding ding. The right answer is jat. You hear the song. All these songs say jat jat jat, jat hundeani, jat hundea, jatane potta jat, blah blah, blah, bat, bakery balonde, jata jata jata. You hear that throughout Punjabi pop music, Punjabi folk music in general. And there's one song that really like gets my attention that kind of like brings us up, is the song by Tegipanu. It's a song called Schedule. And one of the lines that he says is, uh, so the son of a Brahmin is, but I'm even bolder than a judge. So that's the premise of this like pop hook he has, because it is one of those like songs that evokes caste in a way that's not just saying I'm a jud, I'm a judge. It's it's interesting because there's like this conversation between the quote unquote caste systems that that not quote unquote, they're real, the the caste systems that like run through diaspora, South Asian communities and in India. So I'm gonna be honest when I hear something. When I hear music that is talking about like that, these these songs often are very pump-up songs. They're very like, yeah, I'm gonna do this. And I'm gonna be honest, when I hear this music, it gets me excited. It speaks to my identity, it speaks to my pride, it's you know, it's like, oh, I belong somewhere. And especially growing up in a diaspora, it's complicated because I think that like pull towards like identifying with the jet, the blah blah blah, etc., is real and it's worth taking seriously and unpacking. So according to like Amer Kosla's research published by NYU, the jet community maintains what he calls a spiritual and tangible control over Punjabi pop music. You know, like that's that's what I feel. I feel that pull. But the industry promotes an ethos where agro-feudal valorization of the jet identity and jet masculinity in particular is constantly reinforced. You see it in some of the names of like the biggest people in in Punjabi pop music. So this is this is one of the things I want to get into is that like, yes, the agro-feudal, so like agricultural farming feudal system of the jet identity is like central to a lot of the music, but and it is it is like a uh considered a caste. But one of the things I want to talk about is how jet caste that we hear so often about is not traditional in the Hindu caste hierarchy, and we're not actually like considered upper caste until they became peasant landowners, and in post like like I don't want to say post-Sikh Punjab, but like in the post like British takeover of Punjab, um, they rose to become dominant caste economically and politically. So, what does this mean? This means that caste is something that is malleable, it's something that can shift. But for those communities that it doesn't shift for is Dalit communities. And that that is a very real reality. But for Jets, the agricultural revenues were declining and urbanization was fragmenting. So people were losing, you know, their money. And a lot of Jet identity in music has become a compensatory assertion. So, like, let's make money off of this. It is an and a way of singing those songs to say, yeah, I'm the best, I have this, I have this, etc., is a way of holding on to social dominant dominance when material basis for that dominance is slipping. And this, this, you know, slipping of material dominance is is something we can we can like unpack here. Like, I don't know if that's the entire story, but that is one analysis of what it means to have such a jet identity in the music when when things used to not be like that way. And Americosla, who published in NYU who I just quoted, he also says, Jet music, because of its ubiquity, can shed the title of caste music, even when caste is right there in the lyrics all the time. It gets presented as quote-unquote Punjabi music. Meanwhile, music's made by Delith artists is treated as niche, as community-specific, as cast music for caste people. This double standard is not an accident. It is the structure of power operating through culture. So when you are able to shed the title of cast music, when you are able to shed the title of white music, of ex-music, right? Like those titles, you're able to shed those because you are the status quo. You have power in that community. It is quote unquote Punjabi music for sure, but it is casted music if we think about it. Let me ask you a harder question now. Is the constant invocation of cast identity in Punjabi music just a good sales strategy? Is it speaking to the wealthy, globally dispersed population that will pay for concert tickets? Like, you know, like me, I'll pay for a concert ticket and stream tap tracks and buy merch? Maybe, maybe in part it is. Maybe it is part of this neoliberal system we live in and it's a good way to be successful. But I think it's doing something more specific than that. I think for some of what we're hearing, it's a type of virtue signaling and not virtual signaling in the way that I normally mean, but it's a signaling of caste status in a way of saying, I am judged, I'm not Dalit, I belong to a dominant group. I want you to know that. But sometimes the thing about being from a, you know, privileged community is we don't realize the violence or the pressure that is invoked when we invoke things like your status. Because when we say when people that say I am judged, I do this, it is for them maybe a neutral statement. But what is the impact of that statement? I wonder, I wonder what that kind of what that unpacking can look like. And this is what um Americosa's research calls the ability, ability of upper castes to disguise overt assertions of descent-based identity behind the veil of castlessness. The Jut artist doesn't say, I am making caste music, they say I am making Punjabi music. But the lyrical content, the constant naming of the Jet identity, and the valorization of landownership, and the specific masculine archetypes that are reinforced are all very specific to the Jut caste claim. So it is caste music that we're listening to. And I think that's an important designation to name it as, uh, not just being like this doesn't exist, because that is what how you continue to participate in powerful systems that are harming people. And I don't know if I really am into that. Like that to me doesn't sound like I don't want to be doing that, you know? And when I know better, I want to do better. That's that's just what I want to do. But here's why this matters in the diaspora specifically. When you grow up in Canada or the US, the UK, Australia, and you are looking for identity and looking for something that connects to a homeland that you may have never lived in, music is often the first step that fills that vacuum. So for some, it might be religion, for some, it might be, you know, family stories, but music is a very normal way for to feel connected to your culture. It tells you who you are, and if it's telling you you're jucked, and jucked means powerful, and powerful means better, you know, you might not stop to ask better than whom at whose expense. Because you don't really know the cultural context of it, anyways. And even if you do, if you're benefiting from it, I don't know if we want to talk about it because it's kind of uncomfortable. And I'm not saying don't listen to Punjabi Pock, don't listen to Jetcast music. Like I play it, I listened to it, it is a part of part of like the cultural fabric I participate in. What I'm saying is listen to it with your eyes open. Let's just be aware. Like, ask the question. Because music is never just music, it carries the politics of who made it and who it was made for, but also like enjoy it as well. Enjoy. Kaupio Ashkarometro. So now I want to make sure that we don't leave this segment talking only about the problem without talking about the people who are changing things and trying to build something a little bit different. So there is a growing body of Dalit artists in Punjabi music scene who are naming their identity, reclaiming their cast history, and making music that directly challenges a Jack, Jucta, Jack, Jack monolith. This is a newer, less commercially viable, but enormously significant. And the thing is, what's interesting is there is a like um, there's this like phenomenon that occurs in in this music that is sometimes not rejecting, like, oh, jatta music is this. It's more like they're like, you know what, we are also the economically viable. Oh, jets have cars, but also we can have cars. We can have the big weapons, etc. etc. So there's like this like duality of that that music there. So like people are imitating the music that is popular and aim like riding towards a lifestyle that is seen as progressive, as seen as better, quote unquote better, and and that exists in both communities. So I thought that was interesting. But another, another Dalit organization in Punjab, the Bazigar groups, the Ravidasi communities, and these other organizations have through urban urbanization and political organizing began to assert themselves in culture production in ways that were not possible when caste hierarchy was enforced through agricultural labor relations and in the city, wherever its other violences created a small amount of breathing room. And the result is that music, as Kosla writes, is this music positions itself directly against the ject monolith and tells a different story about what punjabia or punjabiness actually means and contains. These artists are not making music for an audience that doesn't exist yet, they are making it for each other. And they are telling the lived experiences of what it means to like what's your day-to-day life like, and what is like it's just like hearing a story that you relate to and songs that you relate to, and for anyone that's willing to listen. And one of the ones I talked about previously is the castless collective in Tamil Nadu, is a high-profile example of the same impulse in South India where Dalit artists are using music explicitly as a political and social instrument, naming the oppression in their lyrics and refusing to perform under conditions of caste erasure. And I want to note like some of the biggest names in Punjabi music, like Amr Singh Jamkila, comes from a Dalit community. There's even a scene in the in the movie where Diljeet acts as Diljit Dosange is acting as Amr Singh Jamkila, where someone says to him, like, well, you should know your place in the caste system. Then there's clearly like some caste, you know, issues that singers went through back in the day. But there's this like that shift in that like music, in that, in that, in the like, I don't know, there's like this economic shift, this cultural shift, this caste shift that happens in the last 30 years that we got to talk about is is important. And I think we can, you know, unpack that more. And if you have more about it, please let me know. But I really want to say that Delith music is not fringe voices, they are a lineage of tradition of resistance that is older than a pop in industry that often, you know, doesn't give them the credit that they need. I want to spend a moment on something personal before we close, because we started this hour by saying that this is Sik Heritage Month, and I think it's worthy naming the tension directly. The Sikh Faith has built a foundational commitment to equality. Lungar, the free community kitchen that feeds anyone who walks through the door, regardless of caste or class or class or faith, is one of the most radical social institutions in the world. But this is something that has has, you know, changed. So caste has persisted in Sikh communities, despite gurus explicitly challenging the Brahminical hierarchy and Sikhi and the Khalsa supposed to be a community of equals. That is a, you know, the tenets of Sikhi are the creations of a very radical social institution. It's a revolutionary idea, even in today's day and age, when supposedly, you know, we're supposed to like be at a better place. I don't know. That this is things I'm thinking about right now. So there's caste as persist has persisted within Sikh communities, like separate gurduras for different caste groups existed in Punjab and in the diaspora. Marriage advertisements in community papers still list caste very clearly when people are getting married and they marry outside of caste. This still carries a very real social weight. And families are still very into endogami, endogemy, like really like let's marry our own community, and that's it. Like, okay, all right. But I think this tradition explicitly says one thing that the social practice does another. And I don't think the answer to this is cynicism. I don't think we conclude, well, Sakhi has failed, so forget it. I think that you're given the tools to do better. And I think the artists we talk about today, the Lith musicians, the Castlist Collective, and the scholars documenting this, they are using these tools, they are providing knowledge, they're calling back to the thing that Saky said we believed. And the question is, are we are we listening to those to those lessons? Are we acting those lessons? I I'm curious about that today. Oh my goodness, we covered a lot of ground today, so let me bring it all together. Caste is a 3,000-year-old system of social stratification. So putting people in different sections and putting them above each other and below each other that persists across religious lines, affecting 98% of Indians regardless of faith. It was outlawed, but it didn't leave. It came us, it came with us to the diaspora and lives in Canada today, unfortunately. And in South Indian classical music, castes determined who could play which instruments, who could learn, and who could enter spaces of sacred music. Thalith's resistance to that exclusion is documented, it is powerful, it is ongoing, and I would love to keep supporting it. In North India, as we went and traveled up there, the commercial Punjabi music industry has become a site where jet identity, the landowning dominant caste of the farming caste, is constantly amplified. While Dalit music musical voices are treated as niche, but sometimes there are some artists that are able to shed some of those casted uh notions put on. Them. This is not a neutral cultural expression. That is the power of structure of caste operating through the playlist of algorithms and concert bookings. Like there is their concert bookings, like there is a real like money-making possibility here that is taken up by people when they're pursuing music. And here in Canada, our school boards, our universities, and our community organizations are beginning to name and reckon with caste discrimination because this caste discrimination followed us to where we are now. And in our documents and in these, you know, hidden hierarchies, our unexamined assumptions end up rising to the top and end up coming out in different ways. Like who's successful? Who at the you know tech firm is being promoted? I don't know. Like that, it comes up. But the question is, what do we do about it? So here's my honest answer. And I don't know everything. Like I'm the first to admit I am learning. Is I think we start by listening. We seek out the artists, we amplify their work, we ask when we consume Punjabi music that celebrates caste identity, what identity is being celebrated, and at whose expense? When we support institutions like school boards, universities, community associations that are trying to name and address caste discrimination, what does that look like? And how do we make sure that it is happening in a way that feels equitable to all? And when we have these hard conversations in our families and communities, I think it's important because it is difficult to have that conversation, especially when we ourselves are implicated and there is a long-standing stigma in talking about caste or interacting with people of different castes. So there's there's one thing I want to note is as the NYU research concludes in the paper I was talking about earlier by Amr Khosla, was only when we acknowledge that strides Delit artists and diasporic organizations have made against the odds, only then can the Punjabi music industry become a true space for social mobility and action. Until then, it remains highly aestheticized, but ultimately performative space that falls short of the very ideals it come it claims to embody. And thank you for spending this hour with me. It's been such a treat. I I really I really want to like, you know, talk about how I want to keep talking about things like this. So if you like, if you like this episode, if you like this, this, you know, this is gonna be turned into a podcast episode later. So if you like this, let me know. But I'm gonna leave you with one last quote from American. Quote is starting now. Now that Punjabi music is being opened up to a global audience, it is imperative that the nuance is brought to discussions around Punjabi, the vastly unequal nature of its cultural representation. It is time to acknowledge that vast strides that Delit artists and diasporic organizations have managed to make despite odds and bad faith actors in powerful positions. It is time to acknowledge that regardless of their popular representation, these folks have come to embody the true essence of what most consider to be Punjabi, perhaps even more so than their upper caste counterparts. Only with such reconciliation can the Punjabi music industry become a space for social mobility and action and reckon with the very real fears, fears around class, strife, brain drain, and shifting employment opportunities that plague the state of Punjab in India. Until then, it remains a highly aestheticised, ultimately performative space that falls short of the very ideals it claims to embody. I really just wanted to hit it home with that quote. Again, let's keep talking, let's keep thinking. This is Ravia, this is TJ Ra Ra Ravia. Thank you for listening.