Writing Initiatives

Recording of a khayal in Raag Jogiya by Gauhar Jaan, 1902. The first Indian artist to record commercially for the Gramophone Company of London — the technology arrived in India on a mission, in the company’s own words, “to record native voices.” She ended every recording with the words: “My name is Gauhar Jaan.”

If Fanon’s mimicry describes the colonised consciousness ever-split by the white world it is performing for, Homi Bhabha argued that the same-same-but-different performance of the coloniser’s grammar back with enough fidelity to be recognisable but never mistaken for the original, disrupts the white man’s claim to cultural authority. Ironically, market logic has since perverted that disruption. It now commoditizes the slight deviation from the original – as long as it doesn’t threaten real power. The Guardian profile celebrates this achievement of the not-quite-an-imitation.

In a 2019 interview, Music Unplugged reproduced the Guardian’s observation that the music “features none of the stereotypical sitars and tablas that dominate India’s music scene”, verbatim and without attribution. Somehow the whole thing has the effect of confirming, rather than dismantling the stereotypes, because the dance is happening inside the frame where Indian pop music is evaluated against the Western default and everyone keeps turning up to dance.

A Crisis of Vocabulary

The Indian music criticism scene is a small ecosystem. Publications like Rolling Stone India, The Indian Music Diaries, Wild City, and a few other independent outlets are mostly oriented towards scene documentation, artist discovery and industry development rather than deep engagement with the music and the conditions producing it. There is, in other words, little infrastructure platforming music criticism as a serious cultural object, although, in 2026, it would be inaccurate to call the Indian pop music scene itself nascent. Perhaps what’s missing is the critical vocabulary. Qualities like placelessness capture at once the yearning and dissonance of growing up in India in the nineties. If Prateek Kuhad was irked at landing in Spotify suggestions next to Arijit Singh rather than John Mayer, it is because this costs him global legibility.

Amanda Weidman, in her history of Carnatic music, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India, shows that the dynamic is structural, not incidental, when Carnatic music’s claim to being ‘classical’ indigenous high culture was assembled in dialogue with colonial standards of legitimacy. The tradition presenting as purely native is already pregnant with the encounter that produced it. The ecosystem is gestating a newer kind of Indianness now, pioneered by a diaspora gaze that brings the Western legacy home. Hanumankind does not need to market his fluency in Southern rap the way that Kuhad had to shop his influences.

Now, the Western gaze is no longer outside, gatekeeping credibility. The diaspora artist’s gaze completes the cultural circuit. Hanumankind, like others, reaches back into Indian culture from presumably hard-earned Western fluency and presents fun bits that the West already recognises. The discordant underdog self-myth that contradicts his affluent ex-Goldman Sachs background and 2024 stage embrace by Prime Minister Modi slips under the radar. The unattributed cholo-masculinity aesthetic aggressively pulsing through his visuals is forceful and recognisable, and gets written about, unnamed, as the serious image of India having made it.

There is a sigh of relief we are granted somewhere in all this. “Indianness” has become interesting to write about again, if only because its market-value has gone up. 

Meanwhile, the Indian music press suffers from a crisis of confidence. The critical vocabulary it deploys, at its best, mimics the international press, or uncritically peddles the narrative-packaging designed by the musicians themselves. And at its worst, it is the equivalent of what the internet calls vague-posting – watery non-claims underlined by a fear of accidentally saying something. And so these reviews end up gushing about how the album is “a journey,” and that the artist “does not disappoint,” and that the sound is, and a minute of silence for how important this proclamation is, “uniquely their own.”

The vague-posting makes sense once you understand what it is for. There is the thing made – the song, the video, the brand, the narrative – the product arrives pre-interpreted, packaged with its own talking points. Then there is the press content reviewing the product. Everyone has put out their content, everyone is satisfied. Everyone has done their job.