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#313 Canadian-Punjabi Music, Power & Culture with Dr. Vanderbeek

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Ravia sits down with Dr. Conner Singh Vanderbeek to unpack what ethnomusicology reveals about culture, power, and the stories people force onto music. We dig into Canadian arts funding, censorship, and diasporic cultural memory. This conversation looks at Dr. Vanderbeek's research and ask who defines “authenticity” and who pays the cost when multiculturalism needs a feel-good headline. Here's what we get into in detail:

• Ethnomusicology as fieldwork-driven cultural analysis of music 
• Why “music is a universal language” can erase meaning and history 
• Diversity policy in Canadian arts and how it commodifies racial identity 
• Grant logic that pressures Punjabi Canadian artists to “serve” a community 
• Curatorial flattening of nuance through tokenizing descriptions of work 
• Sidhu Moose Wala and Chani Nattan as case studies in censorship and respectability 
• “Song and dance diversity” and the limits of palatable multiculturalism 
• Sikh kirtan traditions, Gurmat Sangeet, and debates over authenticity and access 
• Cultural memory across the Sikh diaspora including regional histories 
• Practical realities of making a living in the arts including grant writing and admin labour 

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_02

Welcome back to the Turn It Up Podcast. This is Ravia, and today I got to sit down with Dr. Connor Singh Vanderbeek, a mixed Punjabi Sikh and American ethnomusicologist who lives between California and Arbor Vancouver and Toronto. He studies Punjabi diasporic art, culture. He is a composer, a pianist, and most interestingly, we got to talk about his dissertation research, which engages diversity policy in Canadian arts and its relationship to the commodification and tokenization of Punjabi Canadian artists. Let's get into it. This is Ravia. I am sitting down with Connor Singh Vanderbeek, who is a Punjabi Sikh and American ethnomusicologist who explains himself based all over North America and holds a master's in South Asian studies from the University of Michigan, a BABM dual degree in Asian languages and civilizations, music composition and musicology from Northwestern University. That's a lot of degrees, and also a PhD in ethnomusicology. And as a as a platform that loves to focus on turning the spotlight on South Asians and music, Connor, I am so gr glad that I get to have this conversation with you. I want to hear all about you first.

Ethnomusicology And Cultural Context

SPEAKER_02

Let's start with what is ethnomusicology?

SPEAKER_00

What is that? Um thank you so much for having me on and taking the time to talk to me and also talk about ethnomusicology. Um, so ethnomusicology is broadly speaking the study of music and what music can tell us about culture. So you can think of it as music from an anthropological perspective, in the sense that our methods are drawn from anthropology. We do field work, we do ethnography, we study culture, we do observations of cultures, conduct interviews and things of that like.

Music Is Not A Universal Language

SPEAKER_00

That is that is so much of a product of what people understand the music to do socially and functionally. And so this idea that music is not a universal language is sort of like what we as ethnomusicologists really like to teach our students on day one of world music and just be like, stop saying that to people, stop saying that to people.

SPEAKER_02

Because it is it one of those things that it's a phrase that I feel like I've heard throughout my life in various different ways. But it's one of those things that one of those phrases that music is a universal language that kind of flattens music as a whole instead of making it unique and understanding that to fully understand, let's say, a song, like let's just uh example Raph Zapara singing about Heed, we probably do need a little bit of information on Punjabi folk tales and how those like Punjabi like love stories have been told and retold and what is this angle on it? Like I that that makes that actually makes a lot of sense. And that's I've I've learned something new, so thank you. You're doing great. This is amazing.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and and on on that, it's like, well, if you're if you're fitting it in the sort of like he did onja Leila Majnu Majnoon spectrum from like South Asia, the Middle East, and you're trying to say, oh, it's a universal language, then you're gonna be like, oh, what's the closest thing in the West? Romeo and Juliet. And it's it's not quite the same thing because we can, you know, as as you know, as somebody born in the diaspora, I read Romeo and Juliet in high school. I'm educated on what brought Romeo and Juliet about. It's a it's a comparison that doesn't quite work because Romeo never goes and tends and wanders around cows for 20 years.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. No.

SPEAKER_00

There's just there's just so many things that are specific to Punjab in that in that storytelling that are evoked every time there's a hiatunanja telling of the exactly.

SPEAKER_02

That evocation is it that is the crux of like how using heatanja is becomes so powerful and it immediately links us to a broader culture, a broader, also like sonic world that is built around a lot of and like sonic world, literary world, various retellings in various languages across South Asia, the Middle East, that and like artistic depictions that like, you know, play with all of these different like layers. So that that makes it really, really important. And that I guess like that is the point of ethnomic musicology, then is to really unpack what's going on in not just one song, but the culture that is around

Behind The Dissertation Process

SPEAKER_02

it. I want to actually talk about a little bit about your dissertation. Congratulations. I this is a recent dissertation, I hear.

SPEAKER_00

Um, this was about two years ago. Um amazing. Yep, yeah. So I finished I finished my PhD two years ago. It still feels recent.

SPEAKER_02

It is. Congratulations. And how may I ask, just because I recently um graduated myself, how long did this dissertation take you?

SPEAKER_00

Um I was in my PhD program for eight years. Um, in the middle of those eight years, uh COVID happened. And so my one year field work period ended up taking two years. And then also in the middle of that, I did a master's thesis because I was already a graduate, I was already a graduate student and I already had the credits, and I was like, let me add a let me just add some more letters. Yeah, let me add a let me add some letters. It won't cost me anything because I'm already enrolled. So the the dissertation itself, um, because I can't help but always overcommit myself at all times, um, took about three years. Um it took it took about a year for me to digest the experience of field work and everything I did, and then two years to write the thing. Um, and then it was like I would say it was one year to write the the first two chapters, one academic year to write the first two chapters, and then about six months to write the chapters three through five. But it was just like it took time of just like sitting and thinking and digesting, and um sitting on the couch and being lazy and going on walks and sending my friends podcast-linked voice notes of me thinking through my ideas.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so there's a lot of thought, a lot of reading, a lot of research that went into this body of work. Tell me what it what it's about.

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

Tokenization In Canadian Arts Funding

SPEAKER_00

So my dissertation is titled Talking Over Each Other: Diasport Punjabi Artists and the Ideologies of Public Arts in Multicultural Canada. And wow, and it's it's long and specific because the idea is I was looking at diversity policy in Canadian arts. And this work was inspired by and greatly in conversation with an article by Simon Bri Anund, who is um a visual artist originally from Surrey, BC slash Vancouver. Um, she wrote this article called Tired or the Institutional Rhetoric of Equity and Diversity, while she was on part of doing a residency at Simon Fraser University Galleries, where she talks about how um there is a certain tokenizing of BIPOC subjects in the structure of Canadian arts, such that if galleries and arts institutions are diversifying, they tend to do so from the bottom level and the project level, and do it in sort of an outwardly performative way, and less so at a at a top level, changing the structure of the institution life. And that was especially apparent in Vancouver in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, when a lot of galleries were having this racial reckoning of, oh no, our leadership is white, our boards are predominantly white, we need to go through this process of reevaluating our personnel and what we're about. And they go through these processes, and a lot of galleries end up going from white director through this process of reckoning to a new white director. And there's no actual substantive change in the process. And so where my dissertation came in was okay, we have a large number of South Asian artists. I mean, for me, it's large relative to coming from the United States of America, where we don't have the system of public funding in the arts that Canada has. Okay. And if you are a racialized artist in Canada and you were applying for funding, at some point, when you're applying for funding or you're getting programmed or you're getting curated, your artistic output will be made into there, there will be some direct relationship being being made between your ethnic identity or ethnic subjectivity and your artistic output.

SPEAKER_02

Okay. So in what way does that happen?

SPEAKER_00

Like so, so say you're applying for a grant and you check a box that says you are Punjabi or you're South Asian. And then the next question will be: what community are you serving? How are you serving that community? How will you be bringing in that community? So at that moment, you're expected to be a bridge between your artistic output and a specific community. As though artists were ever meant to be representative of the Punjabi community. We're all supposed to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers.

SPEAKER_02

Um the disappointments that you know that wavered off the path that was set out for us.

SPEAKER_00

How are you gonna make money off this?

SPEAKER_02

Uh how are you good question?

SPEAKER_00

And and then on top of that, there's this certain expectation that what that person is doing is somehow traditional or informed by um their ethnic subjectivity.

SPEAKER_02

Um there's an expectation that they know what they're talking about. They're representing their culture from a way that is from a place that is very like in touch with the roots and the values and like the trueness of the music and the art. Is that kind of what's expected of an artist that's doing this, walking into this space?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And and so an example of this is um the artist Kirit Gore, who's um visual artist, trained in architecture, does a lot of painting with some beadwork in the painting, um, also trained as a vocalist. Um, she released an EP, I think in 2019 or 2020, called Pink Guaba, which is these sort of lo-fi covers of Bollywood songs, of evergreen Bollywood songs. Um, I want to say the the production was done by I think Sounds by Wise, um a California-based producer. And this was programmed in the Toronto biennial in 2020. It was it was during the the pandemic. The way it was written about curatorially, the the curation said that Kirat Kore recalls her Punjabi folk heritage.

SPEAKER_01

Oh.

SPEAKER_00

And these are Bollywood songs, and so there's a sort of flattening of the nuances of one's ethnic identity that are inevitable when a BIPAC subject enters Canadian arts. But at the same time, those are people who are entering Canadian arts and are making money and they're able to produce artworks and they're able to enter the system. So there's this constant tension between being supported in order to perform and letting the art speak according to what they want to be able to have it do, versus what is being said about the artwork. Um, and so the broader theoretical thing that happens in the dissertation is that I break the Canadian arts world into different, basically, spheres of activity, of policy, of funding, of curation, of exhibition, and of creation. And all of these are overlapping and intertwined at all times, but each group is sort of saying its own thing about what art is doing and what art is accomplishing. And that's where the talking over each other happens. Where a policy writer doesn't actually care about the content of a South Asian artworks or a South Asian artist's work because that work is signaling diversity for them and they're performing multiculturalism in Canada. Similar to a funder, they're performing multiculturalism by supporting an artist, whereas on the ground for an artist, they're actually receiving the funds and the material support to create artwork that can say something that's that's much more nuanced than what is being said at the top level. And there's this constant push and pull between those different spheres of activity.

SPEAKER_02

And it's like a negotiation that the artist is going through as well, because you are negotiating the art that you make and then also how it's represented by other people. Like I imagine the Kirithkar example you gave, I imagine she is pretty aware. She's like, Yeah, this is a Bollywood rendition. This is, you know, just a part of a different part of who I am, not necessarily my Punjabi folk heritage, because it's not Punjabi folk. But at the end of the day, it's an article written about her that she has no control over, essentially. Is that kind of what's happening in these spaces? Is like there's a conversation happening about an artist, and it's like, okay, this person checks the box for us. That's fine.

SPEAKER_00

Uh yeah, but sometimes it's also the artist has to present themselves in a certain way to make themselves more palatable in order to get the grant, in order to get the funding and whatnot.

SPEAKER_02

So it's impacting the creative process then.

SPEAKER_00

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

So like as an artist, you're like, I just want to write about, I don't know, a breakup or something. But all of a sudden it becomes about how you're a breakup and you're brown. Yes. It's like it's like you just have to throw that in because it's maybe it'll provide you some funding.

SPEAKER_01

Yes.

SPEAKER_02

That's that's kind of yeah, that's what's happening. So there's so I think what you called it was the commodification and tokenization of Punjabi Canadian artists.

Censorship Of Punjabi Music In Canada

SPEAKER_02

Have you seen this come up in a lot of the more popular um singing artists that we have coming out of Canada? I'm thinking of like Epitellon, Garnajla, um those like bigger names that have, you know, been on the Juno stage, um, and in that world. Did you see that at all in your research?

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Um, that that's an interesting twist in the the research, in the sense that uh, so in my dissertation, I talk specifically about Siddhussiala. And later I tal in um uh in a separate article that I I publish separately from my dissertation, I talk about Apite Demont. Uh, but I talk about in my dissertation Siddhusala and a Surrey based um singer and producer Chani Nathan, um, and how in their lifetimes, I mean Siddhusseala R.I.P. Um, Siddh Musiala was censored from performing in Metro Vancouver. He was actually barred from performing on two separate occasions, once at 5X Festival in Surrey in 2019, and then at um P ⁇ E, a performance at the Pacific Coliseum in 2023. And both cases, both cases were um the RCMP stepping in and deeming that his performance was not family friendly, that the the content of his music and also um things that would happen around his music were were unbecoming of how the Canadian state wanted to represent multiculturalism as like happy and harmonious and non non-confrontational. Um so there were earlier in 2019 the the 5X Fest performance in 20 June 2019 when Sidu Mussiala was barred from performing. This was because there was like a February performance in Surrey where there was a stabbing at a banquet hall Sidumusiala performance. And I think March or April there was uh um gunshots at a performance. Performance and Calgary. And so there was this immediate equation drawn between like, oh, Siddhang Musiala performance equals violence. A sort of like similar trajectory to how early gangster rap was treated in the United States. And so Siddhang Musiala was barred from performing in spaces where public funds were being used to support the arts. And that was the case with 5X Fest, and that was the case with PE and Pacific Coliseum. Whereas with Janinathan, who started out with Sings Doing Things and has these hardcore Khalistani songs earlier in his career, like Karku Life and Kali and Rose, um he caught some flack when Jigmeet Singh was rising to the position of leader of the NDP because they were like, oh, like, you know, Toronto Sun or Toronto Star and Vancouver Sun and all our favorite conservative winging papers were like, oh my god, Jigmeet Singh, he has a turban and beard, and he doesn't tie his beard up. He's the scariest person in all of politics. Let's go dredge his Instagram for people whose associated. Oh my god, Johnny Nuthan, he's he makes violent music. So Johnny Nothan got flack and um at one point during the pandemic, scrubbed his Instagram and then went more towards the side of producing like less contentious and less pointed gangster-y songs. And then he did the song Umbrella with Diljeep Assange and a few other collaborations with Diljeet Assange. And after that happened, Suri, now leader, was like, oh my god, it's the Punjabi wave. And we have all of these artists who are coming out, like Johnny Nathan and Gudin Ojla, and all of this talent that's coming from the lower mainland. And that's where multiculturalism is fine and dandy, and multiculturalism, everybody gets along. We can kind of forget our problematic relationships with people or the ways we've we've censored people or punished people if they start making money for us.

SPEAKER_01

Ooh.

SPEAKER_00

And if they start generating capital, you realize that the if if the all the scapes of activity, the spheres of activity are in the interest of performing multiculturalism and multiculturalism isn't quite doing it, if they're making money, money can making money can forgive a lot of things.

SPEAKER_02

Making money can forgive a lot of things. This is fascinating because I was recently watching this um just Instagram post, I think, with Rag Inder, who was talking about they realized a lot of people are realizing that South Asians, broadly, specifically Punjabi people, have a lot of money and they're willing to spend a lot of money on concerts. And that's why people are, you know, selling out arenas and this this is now happening. So there's this like shift of like this capital shift that is allowing diversity to happen. It's not necessarily, like from what I'm hearing from you as well, it's not necessarily the talent, the culture, the people that is allowing them to get to these stages that are representative of multiculturalism that are allowed to these government-funded institutions. But it's the capital that they bring in that become becomes more appealing. But as long as they are still following the rules of multiculturalism, has there been any, like after that, like any like, let's say, like waverings around the multiculturalism conversation that you've seen since this since this work?

SPEAKER_00

Um I mean, during my dissertation field work and and in the time after, um, it's it's basically like if there are artworks or or topics by musicians, I'm I'm speaking both in terms of visual arts and music, that are deemed too contentious. And those tend to be conversations around 1984 evocations of the Air India bombing of 85. Um galleries, institutions, media channels, what have you, will reserve the right to prevent a work from being shown. Um, and so it's it's usually the case that the works that are too contentious don't get shown. And those are those are internal conversations between or or within institutions, between institutions and curators or institutions and producers, sometimes involving the artist, sometimes behind the artist's back. Where I I know of examples of artworks that haven't been shown because institutions are like, we don't know if that's an appropriate conversation for us to have in our historically white space that doesn't have the kind of staff that can speak to Punjabi cultural issues. What if a, you know, what if somebody raises an issue and we can't was specific to their community and we can't speak to it?

SPEAKER_02

So it seems like it's almost like double-layered, like the institutions aren't prepared on like a basic like staffing level or educational level, like educating their staff or themselves to prepare themselves for multiculturalism essentially, for diversity to be set within these artistic institutions.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And and that's not to say that you know, every institution is a villain and every institution is is terrible. That's just a it's a it's a structural fact of like, you know, Canada made this sort of multiracial, multicultural diversity part of its national fabric since the 1980s. And we're 40 years since then, and it's not actually a lot of time at the at the rate of institutional change for those things to take over.

SPEAKER_02

At the rate of institutional change, and then also I imagine actually during your dissertation, there were various points where Canada has switched up our immigration policy. So when you were writing, or when you were researching in the earlier part of the 2020s, Canada opened up immigration. We were told we needed immigrants, we were told on various levels. Do you have anything to say about the censorship that you've seen and diversity in general in Canada?

SPEAKER_00

Um, the the term that I encountered in my reading for my dissertation, which was just some scholar throwing it out, was song and dance diversity, which is this idea of this was how diversity was performed in like 1970s Canada, which is that diversity is palatable as long as it makes the people consuming the media feel good. And this applies to any racialized subject position, any BIPOC subject. As long as the media that's being put out makes it seem as though the system is empowering those groups, then it is a positive. As soon as those groups start to make people feel uncomfortable or challenged, or like the system is damaged and needs to be fixed or reconcile its greater structural problems, then there starts to be pushback. And when you start to involve capitalism and capitalism's need to never alienate any buyer because any buyer brings in the potential for greater growth, you start to see this mix between multiculturalism and the mass depoliticizing of ethnic identities.

SPEAKER_02

That is super complex. Thank you so much, Connor. Um, we briefly talked about your research on Janinetta and Siddh Musiala. I wanted to follow up on that. And what did you find? Where did you start looking at them? Like, I wanted to get a little bit more into the granular stuff with their interactions with like Canadians, the Canadian institutions, the Punjabi community.

SPEAKER_00

Um, yeah, so for Siddh Musiala, um I looked at his interactions with um basically like performing in public spaces, publicly funded spaces, I should say, because there's a difference between um performing in a banquet hall and performing at uh a space that gets public funding in the arts. When you get public funding in the arts, you're subject to the to a certain level of government oversight. Um, and I I basically look at his career as it stands in Canada. Um, you know, his breakout when he releases so high, um, up until he moves back to Punjab, runs for office, uh, he gets offered PR in Canada, he turns it down because he wants to go back to Punjab and make a political difference. Um, and then he's murdered by gangsters. In the case of Siddhusiala, a lot of his music was deemed too violent by Canadian press outlets, um, or by the sort of bodies that are invested in seeing racialized subjects be friendly and non-threatening to the multicultural order. And so his performances, there were just two performances. It was one at 5X Fest in downtown Surrey in 2019, and then uh at Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver in 2023, um, that were subject to scrutiny by the RCMP, where they basically said, Hey, this guy, violence has happened at prior performances of him in Canada. We don't know that we can support his music happening in public spec in public settings. Um, and Siddamusyala famously was somebody who, when he received any sort of criticism, he would pop onto social media and just blast his critics and say, you know, expletive this, expletive that, we're just gonna, you know, he he never backed down from the fight. So that was sort of what happened with him was that he got censured and censored. I mean, he ended up not even getting the chance to perform at Pacific Coliseum because he was murdered before that performance would have taken place. But he he got censured and censored because um his kind of artistic output refused to portray Punjabis or these the masculine jut brand of Punjabis that he was looking at as respectable. They were always sort of violent and dissident, and it was coming from certain material and economic circumstances that he grew up in in Punjab. You know, he he grew up in southern Punjab, the cotton belt of Punjab, where cotton production has been decimated since the 90s, and southern Punjab has some of the highest cancer rates in all of India. So he's commenting on very real material conditions from the perspective of or from the aesthetic standpoint of like a pretty dissident um subgenre of music, gangster music. Um, long story short is that the Canadian government doesn't want to hear that because they want to hear, you know, they want to see Punjabis doing banger in a snowfield somewhere. Like they want to see the happy stuff. In the case, in the case of Jenny Nathan, Jenny Nathan's videos, um, for example, Gali. Um, if you look up Gali on YouTube, the music video is actually blurred out for it. So you can still listen to the song. And the the video is basically talking about like, you know, we're Khalistani operatives, we have uh black masks, black shirts, black pants, like we're all dressed in black fighting for Khalistan. Um that received criticism because Tanya was shown as being friends of Jigmeet Singh. Jagneet Singh had risen to the head of the NDP in 2019. And so media was was drudging up anything they possibly could on Jigneet just to see like, you know, what dirt, what dirt can we can we get on him in terms of his um his racial politics? Like what about his his sick identity do we deem unacceptable within the Canadian state? And that includes his public stances or refusal to take public stances on Khalisthan, for example, on the Air India bombing, for example. And so Jenny Nathan's music became one of the discursive flashpoints for that happening. So even Jenny Nathan's music, um, as part of his group Sings Doing Things got a little, you know, censored, censured. They came under a little bit of flack. And during the pandemic, Jenny Nathan made a decision to sort of sidestep that or tone that down a bit and start doing more, more mainstream Punjabi music styles of production, still like very masculine and still in line with a lot of the masculinist tropes of Punjabi music, but he started to have wider financial success. And when he started to have wider financial success, then him and Indrapal Mogha and some of the producers he worked with started to be put on the 5X festival stage, for example, started to have more performance opportunities. And then as they succeeded, when Shani Nathan collaborated with Doljito Sanj on the song Umbrella, it was like, oh my God, look at this successful Punjabi artist as part of the Punjabi wave. So it's this balancing act of as an artist, you can only be so political in what you're saying. And sometimes those are obvious, you know, discursive flashpoints. 1984, 1985, in the Canadian state, in the institutional imagination, are kind of like tread very, very lightly topics. But it does happen to be the case that you, you know, you do have to be sensitive around bringing up racial politics within the state. Um, because they don't always want to, you know, let you be political. They want you to be, you can have your politics within your community, but to have it have it in the mainstream is something different.

SPEAKER_02

They want something that's palatable, something that they understand that doesn't evoke violence or even like a connection to violence in any way. Um, you also focus on cultural memory and identical identity politics in the Sikh diaspora, particularly.

Sikh Kirtan Debates And Authenticity

SPEAKER_02

I want to know more about that and how you see that come up in music.

SPEAKER_00

That's a that's an interesting part of the of my scholarship because as as an ethnomusicologist, I'm supposed to write about music, but I'm I'm still figuring out the connection between between music and music and cultural memory and cultural performance. What I what I can say, where my music scholarship on Siki has gone lately, is the distinctions between sick kirtin, what we understand when we go to the Gurdlawada and hear harmonium, dabla voice, the very standard setup, the ubiquitous setup. You throw on a um a recording on Spotify or YouTube of by Harjinder saying Shirinagarwale, of the classic recordings of Kirtin that maybe a lot of us in the diaspora grew up with, versus the emerging movement of what is called Gudmad Singhit, which is sometimes called the revivalist movement, is sometimes called uh a sort of return to the tradition of the gurus, of what instruments would have been played in the time of the gurus. Um, and so my my research looks at um what are the sort of historical and political moments that led to the emergence of these different streams of music. Um, and you can actually trace whether it's the harmonium tabla, even though the harmonium really didn't emerge as a mainstream instrument in Sikkiirtin until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Whether you're looking at the Dagi Jatta practice of Sikhgiftin or the Ababi derived practice of Gurmatsany, you can trace both of those to the time of the gurus, and both are technically authentic as long as you're treating them with intention because it's about the ability of the Sangat to connect with with Gudbani and the the message of Gurbani. So where that plays into um cultural memory is this sort of distinction of who gets to vocalize the Shabd, who gets to vocalize Gurbani. If you're on the side of we should be doing Kirthin in the way that the Gurus practiced it, using the classical instruments and using the most sort of formalized versions of Rag and Thal and the poetic forms of the Guru Granth sub strictly interpreted, then you are placing authenticity in the body of the musician, which is then sort of compounded over time in the codification of Sikhirtin as something that only six may do, according to Sikrat Mariada, uh published by the SGPC. So that there are all of these layers of not only do you have to be trained specifically as a musician in these particular modes, but you also kind of have to be an Amritadi male. And there are the all of these politics that go into it, these unspoken rules, um, of like, and you see these ramifications of like why can't women do kijdan at their bars up. We've seen those kinds of things.

SPEAKER_02

I see those conversations come up. And is that what you're looking at at all?

SPEAKER_00

Um yeah, it is it is in the sense that like I don't want to say that that any one stream is um is better than the other or more authentic than the other, because like the the more harmonium bubla stream emerges as a result of a recording industry. Um in in the 1930s and 1940s, all India radio um recording artists like Surrender Kore and Mohammed Rafi uh performing Girten, and then familiar tunes get set to Girtin, and some of them are filmy tunes, and some of them are folk tunes, and even that is is seen to be as a as a um as a misinterpretation of what girthen is supposed to be.

SPEAKER_02

I had no idea that happened. That's such a crazy fact.

SPEAKER_00

Um, it's it's written about by a number of scholars, including Germinder Bogle and I think Francesca Cassio. She writes more about the um the Goodmutzen Gate side of things, but Germinder Bogle writes about the this the sort of rise of of um recorded Gaython in the in the 20th century.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And then so you're saying there were some Bollywood and folk tunes that are set to the compositions of Kirtan. Do you were were there any examples given? Because I I had no idea, but I'm curious.

SPEAKER_00

Um not off the top of my head.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, but but as as somebody who is I I

SPEAKER_00

Have to say, like a disclaimer for myself, as somebody who is theoretically trained in rag, but does not have like a anustad, like I I cannot claim myself to be a practitioner of a rag in the sense that I don't have a a guru, I don't belong to like the guru shishia lineage. I've just read a lot of books. You would be hard pressed to find girthan that is in a rag. Okay. Just in in any everyday setting, a gurdhawada setting, girthan that is that is in a rag according to how the dogs are supposed to be defined, as they are categorized in the gurugrand sab. It's up to us collectively as a Sangit, as a bunt, to decide whether that's an issue. Because as a scholar, I don't it it doesn't particularly matter to me if it's an issue of if we should we be doing kirtan in adag, should we not be doing kirtan in adag? Because the conversations I've had with people in Gurtaware over the years that I've been doing research is if we connect with it, if we feel that you know the Gurbani can resonate in our minds, that's the most important thing. It's it's like the the intention and the resonance and the ability to participate in Kichen is the most important part.

SPEAKER_02

So your your research, it looks like it it spans both like looking at uh I don't want to say pop culture, but the more popular culture phenomenons of Sadumusal and Janina than Canadian artists, because you were looking at Canadian worlds of like how the Canadian government supports artists. And then it also goes into the sick Girthin world. And in your research, I guess I want to know more about cultural memory because I wrote a lot about cultural memory.

Cultural Memory Across The Sikh Diaspora

SPEAKER_02

And I so I guess for context, when I wrote about cultural memory, I was writing it in the context of the farmers' protest, where protest music evokes different, like there's daddi jathas that like were doing work that was also like recalled during the protest, and there's all of these connections that are made through music and cultural memory. But I want to know in what way do you focus on cultural memory and what what is it in your scholarly world?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so I relate cultural memory to how I sort of formulate diaspora in the sense that like cultural memory can be history, it can be what narratives and stories and dates and facts and figures were taught over time to constitute a collective sense of who we are. And so it's interesting, like as somebody born and raised in the United States, talking to other Americans and saying, hey, in this grade, did you have this curriculum? And they grew up in a different state or a different part of the country, and we have common things that we talked about that constitute our American education and shared cultural upbringing as Americans. When you get into diasporic subjectivity or religious subjectivity, that gets much more complicated because you don't have these formalized bodies per se that can tell you who's who and what's what and what happened when. So in the case of cultural memory of Sikki, one thing that I've written about is that a lot of it comes down to, you know, what portraits we had in the home growing up and what sounds we had in the home growing up. And this is something I thought about when I started um traveling and visiting family or meeting friends in other countries, where it's it's funny because for me, my sense of being Punjabi and being sick was really formulated strongly in diaspora. My first Punjabi immersion happened in Brampton, Ontario, before it bef before I ever went to India for the first time. And it's interesting for me to like, you know, like my family is centered in the Yubacity area in California, which is an old community in California. And it's interesting to go from Yuba City to visit a branch of my family that's in Southampton, UK, and see the same portraits of the gurus in the homes and see the same kinds of radios playing loosely, sometimes you know, bungura during the dam daytime and then nom-simran at like 2 a.m.

SPEAKER_01

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00

And then to go to to to have studied abroad in India and go to like the Gurdwada in Malviya Nugad in Dili and see that it has the exact same carpeting as one of the gurdwada in Yuba City that my family goes to. So it's it's interesting, these sort of like piecemeal connections that are made along the way that are part of my personal experience that I realize are collective points of reference for other people. So that's sort of how I define cultural memory is that we have these shared touchstones and shared references, and then they grow outwards into common references to moments in history for a lot of the diaspora, as as Brian Keith Axel writes, and as Michael Nijwin writes, 1984, and the police state in Punjab from 84 to 95. Um, that is a huge part of our collective memory. And that's something that plays out in diaspora, whether that's on social media, every June. Every June we we have like the commemoration of the 10 days of what happened over those 10 days in June. There are protests that happened throughout the the diaspora. Or there are other other touch points that are regionally specific, like the Komogata Maru is more of a part of Canadian sick memory than it is of American sick memory. And we don't necessarily have those as part of our our history as we as we tell it in the in the United States. There are different nuances to California's sick history than there are to like New York, New Jersey Sik history. So it's all of these these different layers of what are the things that we perhaps all share across the the Sikh diaspora or our collective understanding of Punjabiat. And Punjabyat is a big thing that's mixed into Sikh diaspora, whether you're mixed race or you're not even Punjabi at all. It's just it's kind of an unavoidable fact of the Sikh diaspora, like the Sakis and the history of the gurus, and I certain ideas of Shahidi and um certain Sikh values. And then there are certain things that are that are more you know specific to each individual place, the the the appearance of certain public figures, um, people like Jagmeet Singh or Harjit Sajin in Canada. We don't have nearly as many people like that in the United States. Um that that constitute multiple layers of cultural memory or cultural reference points, and and collectively our abil our ability to identify with those and then connect with those and then see the the the sickness or the the Punjabiness or the diasporicity of someone else in the sharing of those things, that is what constitutes our our shared diasporic subjectivity.

SPEAKER_02

And that's how we to put that in a term that maybe is easier to unpack, maybe is like the way we relate to each other. The diasporic subjectivity is like the way I would see Connor, and I'd be like, oh, hey, how are you doing? You grew up in the States. Ooh, okay, I'm a Canadian. Ooh, how did 9-11 affect you? Ooh, like interesting. Like, oh, okay, like what does that mean? When you meet someone from the UK, you're like, oh, UK six have, or UK Punjabi people have this type of culture, but you still have a lot of similarities. There's um various like intersecting similar memories that people have. I guess an interesting part of like cultural memory is even looking at the impacts of like 9-11 on six, especially turbaned men living in the US and Canada at that time, because there is there is like a depth of research on that now, but it definitely is something that is built up for our community in a way that is significant and and you know what plays a part in the identity politics of like, why aren't there more turban men in office in the US? I wonder how that influences who's gonna vote for them. So there's so many, so many like layers here. Um, I want to go back to your work on diversity policy in Canadian

Practical Strategies For Working Artists

SPEAKER_02

arts. What are kind of the main takeaways that you got from that project about what can be done for Canadian artists? Let's say it's a singer, um, a producer, a visual media artist, and in whatever craft they might work in. Does your work provide a strategy for artists to engage with diversity policy? Or is there is there like a another way for artists to kind of move through the art scenes globally that kind of can subvert looking at diversity policy at all?

SPEAKER_00

Um I don't know that I have a a global or broad-reaching solution. I think within Canada, one of the things that I that I really emphasize is that even though the system has the potential to tokenize artists and reduce their work and read their artistic output as a fact of their ethnic identity, it's still paying them. And there are still people who have successful artistic careers as racialized subjects or as BIPOC people. And that in itself is not a bad thing. There are some people who are absolutely happy tokenizing themselves and reducing their um their artistic output to these vague expressions of my culture, my culture. And when they get pressed on what my culture is, it's just my culture. And then there are artists who are extremely aware of these politics and are very aware of its ramifications on their art practice. And so they navigate the world with an extreme amount of nuance. And both those types of artists can exist in the system at the same time. And so, my sort of advice as somebody who also navigates the Canadian arts system, I'm I'm the president of a board of a of a theater company in Vancouver. Um, I have done arts projects in Canada, applied for grants. It's I mean, co-applied as an American. Um I don't have the status in Canada that makes me legally allowed to apply for things. So it's like me uh co-applying with with collaborators who are Canadian. But I've I've co-applied for grants, I've had exhibitions, I've done performances, and one of the things I've encountered is that I've had experiences where institutions can be difficult. I've also had experiences where institutions can be absolutely wonderful places to work with. One of my favorite experiences was uh Simrem Pri and Ananda and I have a touring exhibition called Shishe Chit, which is which is named after a surrender core song. It's a it's a body of work by Simram Pri, uh, or sort of a span of works by her. And one of the major bodies of work is a uh a body of work we collaborated on. And the the exhibition most recently showed at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and was one of hands down, one of the most wonderful experiences of working with them. Simrimpri and her mom did a Punjabi language tour in the gallery space. All of the didactic texts for the exhibition are in English and Punjabi, not as translations into Punjabi, but as like you take the same content and think through how you would explain it in Punjabi to a Punjabi audience with those cultural references in mind. Um, and so I don't want to say that like institutions just don't know how to do things and they're gonna be they're gonna be bad and they're gonna uphold system. It's it's just that, you know, you can also hope assume good faith or hope for good faith actors and and work according to that. Um, but what I will say is to get into Canadian art, you need good grant writers. And it really takes good grant writers because being an artist is not just making art, it's also writing grants, it's also responding to tons of emails all the time. It's also, if you're a visual artist, knowing the measurements, materials, dates of production, artist statements, image credits for every single work you've ever made and cataloging it, cataloging those really meticulously. Um, and there's a lot of labor that that goes into that that I don't know that we necessarily sufficiently talk about. I know from having studied composition as an undergrad, my own program only taught me how to write, arrange, and rehearse music. It did not teach me how to publish music, how to submit it to festivals, how to do copyright, how to collect royalties, how to do any of the more practical things. It was just how to produce art in its own bubble. And being an artist is a profession and it is a financial sector. If it's something that you're making your livelihood off of, and there are tons of really practical skills, and the more familiar are familiar you are with those practical skills, the more space it actually grants you to be political and to be subversive, because you can navigate the system and and work from it, work, work with it from within.

SPEAKER_02

Like you're saying, cataloging, grant writing, emailing. There's all these like operational tasks that you're doing in addition to creating art. And I feel like this is not to assume that all artists are the same. There's like almost the various types of personalities, but often those um meticulous tasks don't often they're like a very different realm from maybe the brain space you're in to be creating something. So it seems like there's a lot of like opportunities for support for odd artists that are working through the progress process of like learning. But also what you're saying is that once you know the system, you can work within it. That's really fascinating. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00

But I I think it also it also takes a team.

SPEAKER_02

It also takes a team. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So for all the artists that are, you know, out there, like rely on your team members, is what I'm hearing.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, make it make good friends, make art friends. Art friends are great.

SPEAKER_02

Our friends are great. We can work together, you can do all the things. But it seems like you're doing a lot, like you're composing, you're a pianist, you're a media artist, and you're playing harmonium and other things. So you're you're working on a lot at the same time. That's awesome. Is there anything that you would like to reference?

Teaching World Music And Bollywood

SPEAKER_02

I actually want to know, are you teaching any classes this year on music? What do they look like?

SPEAKER_00

Um, so this last year, um, so I teach at Davidson College in North Carolina. Uh, it's a small liberal arts college about half an hour north of Charlotte. Um, I'm a visiting assistant professor on my entering my third year, which is probably going to be my final year of my of my time there. This past year, I taught five different courses. So in the fall, I taught world music and world music theory. Um, world music is pretty much like a requisite course of my field as an epimusicologist. It's just a survey of music around the world. World music theory was looking at um sort of building blocks, theoretical systems of of two styles of music. I split the semester into two halves. So the first half was Hindustani music. So Urag and Thal, basically. And then the second half was Javanese gamelon. Um, so in grad school, I was part of the Gamelon for three years. And when my teacher retired, I bought her Gamelon. So I have this this whole like small Indonesian percussion orchestra, this like village orchestra that um I have to figure out how to take it with me wherever it goes because it's quite heavy and and cumbersome. So that was my my fall slate of courses. And then for winter, I taught Bollywood. Uh, we watched 11 films and talked about music, music production, composition, the styles that came about, the different eras of music, from the oldest film being Mother India to the sore sort of more genre-specific films like your hip-hop film Gully Boy, or your rock music soundtrack in Thought is Aminpar. Um, we also went off Bollywood specifically and watched like Slum Dog Millionaire, Monsoon Wedding, Punjabi film Angrage, and RRR to look at how other cinemas are depicting India um visually, dramatically, musically. Um, I have a course, South Asian hip-hop, which looks at the emergence of um hip-hop among South Asians in the US, UK, and Canada. And since I started teaching this course in in 2022, increasingly India and Pakistan, and I have to like keep um adjusting my course material to account for the emergence of artists like Bedin Odla and um a whole bunch of artists in India and Pakistan and Raf Sperra, and like makes make space for them so that my material is current. Um, I taught a course religious music of South Asia, which looked at um how music is used as a part of religious practice in Hinduism, um in Sufi Islam in India, in Sikhi and in Buddhism. Um, and I took my students on field trips to the Charlotte Gurdhawada for that, um, which they had a lot of fun with. And then this coming year, I'm doing world music, world music theory, music and the colonial encounter, um, which looks at uh basically canonical works in uh Western music history and how they're depicting the other that they're encountering through colonization and then what those cultures actually look and sound like.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, wow. Um that's really cool.

SPEAKER_00

And then in the winter, I'm doing religious music of South Asia again, and then a course called Methods and Music Studies, which is about um it's sort of an ethnomusicology methods course of doing field work, ethnography, um, observing performances, rehearsals, documenting things, writing about performances. Um, I'm basically going to train a small group of um, I guess I can just call them music journalists to run around campus or Run around town and write about stuff.

SPEAKER_02

That sounds so fun. I want to take all of your classes. This is so fun. Are you able to share your syllabus?

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

That would be like the dream because I feel like those are all fascinating things right up the alley of like what we do here at the Universal Radio, but also stuff that I'm personally interested in. So that is so cool. Any upcoming research projects that you are percolating on?

New Research On Punjabi Poetry

SPEAKER_00

I have a chapter that's coming out at some point. Um it's it's currently in the editorial process. Who knows how long that takes? Um that looks at the poetic archive of my late nanaji. Um, my nanaji was a poet and short story writer who moved to California in 1963 and started writing. He he co-founded a writer's society in his farmhouse garage in like 1994. Um, and I never had the sort of fluency in Punjabi as a mixed kid to engage his poetry um until just after he died. Um, and so I'm engaging his poetry, and I even found a video of him singing one of his poems. And so I have this project where I am looking at his poems and songs, and also looking at um some of the songs of his younger sister, my Mindalpua, who's still alive, and seeing how, like what they mean to him as a diasporic subject, as an immigrant, a diasporic subject, what they mean to his writer society, as people who build this poetic community, and also what it means symbolically to my family, where we don't necessarily understand this high register of poetic Punjabi because nobody really speaks it or teaches it in the diaspora, but it still has certain like sentimental value to us because we have memories of his poetry. Um so I've been working through that both in academic written forms and in a lecture performance um that I gave at University of Toronto, Mississauga in March and at Davidson College in April. Um, and that's sort of my my current body of um scholarly work, which I know is very confusing because we went from grants in Canada to uh hip hop to Sikhirtin to um now Punjabi poetry. It's like if it's happening in if it's happening in the diaspora and it can say something about diaspora, um, at some point I'm going to be fixated on it and then maybe or get

Where To Find Connor And Us

SPEAKER_00

something about it. That's kind of just where I am. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I actually I do think there is a through line we can create here because the first thing that you and I talked about was one of the core tenets of ethnomusicology is that music is not a universal language. And your un you know, unpacking of your Nanaji's poems and poetry, and you, you know, being like, I don't know if I understand this because I don't have this register of Punjabi to understand this type of poetry is a part of that understanding of music is not a universal language. We can still connect to it, we can still find great meaning from it, but we do need to learn more about it to really know what's going on and what are the layers and the histories that are connected to it. So that's that's amazing. Thank you so much, Connor. I hope I can like talk to you again. This is amazing. Thank you so much. Yeah, whenever you can find you anywhere.

SPEAKER_00

Um, yes, you can find me on Instagram. I post very rarely. Um, I'm really mostly on Instagram to send my friends like a hundred memes a day. It's kind of obnoxious.

SPEAKER_02

That's kind of um the purpose of that app.

SPEAKER_00

My my um my handle is at Sir Vanderbeek S-I-R, and then my last name Vanderbeek. It's uh a nickname from one of my friends from when I was growing up, so it's not Punjabi coded at all. Um and then my my website, uh, which is csvanderbeek.com, which has an array of my artistic projects, musical projects, my writing, and then also a tab um basically cataloging the stuffed animals that I sew and the outfits I make for them.

SPEAKER_02

That is so fun. And you're learning, I feel like you're learning a multitude of arts at the same time and creating like academic works related to the arts you're making, the arts that you see in the world, and really relevant things because as a person who was like a junior scholar at one point was heavily relying on your work actually to be like, hey, yeah, people are talking about this. And I have something to say about this too. And it's coming up in the conversations I'm having with interviewees and in my research. So I I thank you for the work you do. I am so grateful we had this conversation. Thank you so much for listening to the Universal Radio Network. Thank you for listening to the Turn It Up Podcast. My name is Rabia. You can follow us across socials at the Universal Radio and tune in from 5 p.m. to eight p.m. every day on ninety seven point nine fm or live stream us at www.theuniversal radio.com