The Queer Sound of the Dandiya Queen, Falguni Pathak
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/t31fr-cc826
Our listening practices are discursively constructed. In the sonic landscape of India, in particular, the way in which we listen and what we hear are often normative, produced within hegemonic discourses of gender, class, caste, region, and sexuality. . . This forum, Gendered Soundscapes of India, offers snapshots of sound at sites of trans/national production, marketing, filmic and musical texts. Complementing these posts, the accompanying photographs offer glimpses of gendered community formation, homosociality, the pervasiveness of sound technology in India, and the discordant stratified soundscapes of the city. This series opens up for us the question of other contexts in India where sound, gender, and technology might intersect, but, more broadly, it demands that we consider how sound exists differently in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Afghanistan. How might we imagine a sonic framework and South Asia from these locations? —Guest Editors Praseeda Gopinath and Monika Mehta
For the full introduction to the forum, click here.
To read all of the posts in the forum, click here.
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The late 1990s was a pivotal time for activism around queerness in India. The violent response of the Hindu right to Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1998), a film portraying a romantic and sexual relationship between two women, prompted widespread debate on the question of censorship generally and of sexual-minority rights in particular. By rendering homosexuality explicit in its visuals and dialogues, and charting a linear trajectory of queerness—the protagonists move from unhappiness to happiness, denial to acceptance—Fire valorizes “coming out.” In the film, as in liberal strands of LGBT activism, it matters not only that one is out, but that one is seen as such. The premium placed on visibility in this formulation is undercut by the “queer” figure of Falguni Pathak. A tomboyish singer with a high-pitched voice, Pathak shot to fame with her debut album Yaad Piya Ki Aane Lage in the same year that Fire was released in India. Her performances mobilize disparate, even contradictory, signs of gender and sexuality at once, inviting us to examine the relationship between visuality and aurality in constructing queerness.
Falguni Pathak’s stardom is typically understood in the context of economic liberalization and the reconfiguration of Indian public culture that followed. The 1990s boom in the music industry was facilitated by the spread of satellite television, which gave non-film singers a new platform and a new set of audiences. Pathak’s “cute” and catchy love songs circulated endlessly on television countdown shows, turning her into an unlikely sensation. I say “unlikely” because Pathak’s apparent tomboyishness seemed at odds with the hyper-femininity and heteronormativity of the narratives in her music videos. Romantic quests, schoolgirls giddy with love, feminine bonding over make-up and men—these are standard features of Pathak’s videos, as is her own smiling presence as the singer-narrator. Through her gestures and lyrics, she comments on the lovesick teen’s plight and steps in occasionally to comfort or help the young girl, as in her first hit, “Chudi.”
For instance, in “Maine payal hai chhankai” (“The tinkling of my anklets,” 1999) she cheers on a group putting on a dance and puppet show for a school function. In songs like “Chudi/Yaad piya ki aane lagi” (“Bangles/I remember my lover,” 1998), “O piya” (“O beloved,” 2001), and “Rut ne jo bansi bajai” (“The music of the weather,” 2012) she is portrayed as a pop star.
The singer-as-pop-star was a common trope in early Indipop music videos (Kvetko). But Pathak dressed very differently than other pop stars. Whether on or off screen, she was (and is) always in men’s clothing, with a short, unfussy haircut and little make-up. Pathak’s style was mirrored on occasion by a minor character in her music videos. (“Chudi” includes a tomboyish school girl who struggles with the dance moves her friends choreograph.) Thus, Pathak’s visible presence in her videos brushed against the pitch, timbre, and style of her singing, which together articulated a hyper-feminine pop sensibility.
This sense of a “mismatch” (Fleeger) continues in Pathak’s contemporary performances. She is the most sought-after vocalist for Navratri festivities in Mumbai each year. On each night of this nine-day long Hindu festival, the “Queen of Dandiya” appears on stage dressed in a brightly colored kurta, vest, and trousers, and sings traditional Gujarati songs and hymns. The women in her audience dress more conventionally and more elaborately, in saris, salwaar kameez, and ghaghra-cholis. They dance in circles, performing recognizable garba moves. Meanwhile, Falguni Pathak saunters around the stage, engaging cheerfully with her fellow musicians and fans. Neither Pathak’s clothes nor her unfeminine dance moves bother the revelers as they dance the night away. For example, note how Pathak sways and rocks to the beat 34 seconds into this lively 2012 stage performance of Suneeta Rao’s hit song “Pari hun mein.”
Falguni Pathak’s temple performances at other times of the year are similar. They draw huge crowds unconcerned with the apparent mismatch between sound and image in her star persona. She tends to be as immersed in the devotional songs she sings as her audience. But her movements, plain clothes, and floppy hair-style make her look more like the male percussionists who accompany her, rocking and whipping their heads from side to side as they keep the beat, than the middle-class women clapping and singing along.
Performative traditions of mimicry and cross-dressing abound in India. But Pathak’s gender performance does not align with those religious, folk, and filmic traditions (and tropes) because it never registers as masquerade. The very casualness of her look, the fact that she dresses in t-shirt and trousers in all of her public appearances, suggests that this is not a temporary or theatrical adoption of a gender role. When asked in interviews why she eschews traditionally feminine clothing, Pathak always responds that she never has worn anything other than pants and t-shirts and is comfortable as she is. There were certainly other pop stars in the 1990s whose musical performances had masculine elements to them. Recall, for instance, Shweta Shettty’s suited look in “Johnny Joker” (1993). But none of Pathak’s peers sported a butch look as consistently and nonchalantly as she did—and none of them sang in as saccharine a voice. After six decades of Lata Mangeshkar’s vocal hegemony in Hindi cinema, such a “sweet,” contained, and unadorned voice has come to represent ideal Indian femininity. Pathak sounds charming and benign in her songs and interviews, but she does not dress the part.
Pathak’s challenging of conventional gender norms through her appearance and through the fact that she has never been married raises the specter of queerness in public discourse. But even that is difficult to pin down. Popular commentators and fans sometimes suggest that she looks like Kiran Bedi, a high-ranking (retired) police officer who enjoys celebrity status, making it hard to read the masculine details of Pathak’s persona as “gay.” Even as she is a queer icon (Giani), Pathak never comments on her sexuality or love life. She either evades questions about relationships or simply states that she is single. Where some celebrities come out publicly or keep alive innuendoes about their sexuality (Singh), she treats it as a non-issue. All in all, what we get in Falguni Pathak’s music videos and star persona is a queerly gendered performance that seems both utterly “natural” (because it seems comfortable and casual) and profoundly mismatched.
To be clear, my argument is not so much that Falguni Pathak looks or sounds queer. The latter point is as hard to prove as the former is easy. If, for just a second, we manage to shut out of our mind’s eye the image of Pathak singing, her voice sounds thoroughly conventional. She sings in a traditional idiom, of traditional themes. No matter how intently I listen, no “queer timbre” (Bonenfant, Chaves Dasa), no “butch throat” (Glasberg) reaches out to touch me. Thus on the one hand, Pathak, like the other “mismatched women” Jennifer Fleeger writes about, confounds heteronormative expectations about gender and sexuality. On the other, her voice eludes “queer listening” (Bonenfant). What do we do with a queer figure who doesn’t sound queer? How might we understand her voice vis-à-vis queerness in Indian public culture? How do her live performances today continue to disrupt the emphasis on visibility in queer studies and politics—that is, the fixation on visual representations and “coming out” of the closet? Finally, how might Pathak’s “vocalic body” (Connor) help us conceive of the intersection of aurality and queerness in South Asian public culture?
Falguni Pathak intervened in a cultural field that was just beginning to deal with LGBT visibility. This becomes apparent when we remember that the 1990s was a period not just of economic liberalization but of vibrant queer activism as well. Pathak’s non-feminine image was startling for a pop star, but her voice was familiar and “good.” Her safe sound allowed her to push the boundaries of desire in televisual representations of the time. But it did more than that, too. The disjuncture between her feminine voice and butch look was critical to the complex landscape of desire her music videos evoked. It created space for ambiguity and incongruity amid charged debates about alternative sexual identities.
In “Main teri prem diwani/Indhana winva” (“I am madly in love with you,” 2001), Pathak stars as the neighbor to whom the protagonist turns for advice in matters of love. In an amazingly campy move, Pathak urges the young woman to seduce her lover by donning outfits inspired by Moulin Rouge (2001), specifically the song “Lady Marmalade” (00:36-00:55), and The Mummy Returns (2001) (1:59-2:03). Queerness is also writ large in “Meri chunnar udd udd jaye” (My scarf flies away, 2000), where Pathak appears as the beloved friend of a young girl in exile. The girl misses her friend intensely and attempts to recreate the dance moves and games she played with her older friend, this time with another mysterious woman who steps out of a painting.
Men’s roles in this and other Falguni Pathak music videos are ambiguous at best (Giani). Thus, despite the happy ending to the teen love stories, what lingers is Pathak’s simultaneous disruption and enabling of straight romance. This is why she is remembered fondly as a queer icon, even as the music scene in India has moved on from the “cuteness” of the 1990s. She offered LGBT audiences a way to read and revel in non-normative desires (Giani), without completely unseating “traditional” ways of living and loving.
The broader lesson in Falguni Pathak’s performances is that we cannot think of visuality apart from aurality, and vice versa. No matter how hard NBC’s “The Voice” tries to convince us (Tongson), we cannot in fact understand the sound of a singer’s voice as separate from the image of her as a performer and the contexts in which she emerges on the scene. It is not Pathak’s tomboyish appearance so much as the apparent disjuncture between that look and her voice that is key. What is queer about her voice is the look of it.
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Featured Image: Falguni Pathak’s classic pose.
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Pavitra Sundar is Assistant Professor of Literature at Hamilton College, where she teaches courses on global film and literature. Her scholarly interests span the fields of cinema studies, sound studies, postcolonial literary and cultural studies, and gender-sexuality studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of Bollywood film sound and music. Her work has been published in journals such as Meridians, Jump Cut, South Asian Popular Culture, and Communication, Culture, and Critique, as well as in anthologies on South Asian and other cinematic traditions.
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Sounding Out Tarima Temporalities: Decolonial Feminista Dance Disruption
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/czn4b-qda53
For the full intro to the forum by Michelle Habell-Pallan, click here. For the first installment by Yessica Garcia Hernandez click here. For the second post by Susana Sepulveda click here. For last week’s post by Wanda Alarcón click here,
The forum’s inspiring research by scholars/practioners Wanda Alarcón, Yessica Garcia Hernandez, Marlen Rios-Hernandez, Susana Sepulveda, and Iris C. Viveros Avendaño, understands music in its local, translocal and transnational context; and insists upon open new scholarly imaginaries. . .
Current times require us to bridge intersectional, decolonial, and gender analysis. Music, and our relationship to it, has much to reveal about how power operates within a context of inequality. And it will teach us how to get through this moment. –MHP
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The knowledge presented in this piece is reflective of countless conversations, and the many interactions I have had with teachers, practitioners, and extended fandanguerx communities in Mexico and the U.S. In my scholarly work, I draw from these conversations and my personal experiences as a bailadora in the fandango tradition to illustrate the power of community music as a practice to generate and articulate knowledge in relation to personal and social change. My work centers the study of rhythmic synchronicity in the fandango tradition from Veracruz, Mexico embodied in Zapateado; the percussive sound of women rhythmically stomping their feet on wood.
I am particularly interested in conversations that approach the study of rhythm from a feminist perspective as it allows us to claim visibility to the gendered and racialized voices of resistance that are often absent in academic discourse. My analysis builds on the contributions of Martha Gonzalez, who through her term rhythmic intention explains in “Sonic (Trans)Migration of Son Jarocho Zapateado: Rhythmic Intention, Metamorphosis, and Manifestation in Fandango and Performance”: “[rhythms] processed by the body are not varying forms of making time in music practice, but they are indeed political acts rooted in a history of resistance” (60). To this, I theorize the ca-fé con pan––a polyrhythm cyclically played by women in the majority of sones in the fandango repertoire––to argue that rhythms embodied by the tarima speak of a learning practice that moves beyond the idea of individual knowledge to the concept of relational knowledge. The polyrhythmic zapateado that bailadoras sound out on the tarima is rooted in, and flourishes through interpersonal relationships among women as dancers, and through a more profound awareness and synchronized relationship with nature, all the plants, animals, and natural resources which comprise it as Shawn Wilson discusses on Research Is Ceremony : Indigenous Research Methods (4). The relational embodied knowledge of the bailaoras through zapateado, can thus be understood as a political act, one of decolonial resistance.
My approach to the study of this rhythm comes from the perspective of a bailadora. Although, I respect the work of scholars who capture the technicality of sound and rhythm, I do not offer an analysis of it from the perspective of a trained musician. I learned to dance and play music in informal settings, with my family and the people in the neighborhood. With a working class background, formal training in music or dance was a luxury enjoyed by the elites. Even though I lived in Veracruz for many years, I did not grow up within the tradition, but knew about the music through my dad who taught me some steps. My formation in community dances was primarily through family parties and the sonidos in Mexico City; block parties with huge speakers blasting a variety of tunes ranging from old cumbias, salsas, banda, merengue, and Mexican urban rock. Sonidos in the capital city are most popular in neighborhoods with high concentration of workers in informal economies, many of whom are migrants from states through the republic, who have been displaced due to neoliberal capital flows, various degrees of violence related to drug trafficking, and other socio economic devastation. I grew up going to sonidos in Iztapalapa, and “Neza’–Short for Netzahualcoyotl–a working class neighborhood outside Mexico City., where I lived before moving to Veracruz. From a young age, my ear became familiar to the sound of polyrhythms in family parties and sonidos dancing to cumbias and salsas.
Even though I attended a few fandangos before I emigrated to the U.S. in 2004, I started to regularly practice them in Seattle with my mentor and friend Chicana artivista Gonzalez who co-founded the Seattle Fandango Project, a collective of students of the fandango tradition based in Seattle, WA. Martha was the first person who I heard using the term polyrhythm to describe the texture and rhythmic basis of fandango. With Indigenous, African, and European influences, amongst many elements in the fandango, the tarima is a notably polyrhythmic instrument that in its majority is played by women. It also carries the driven pulse of the fandango, where multiple bailadoras stomp with their feet fixed rhythms and syncopated improvisations. The basic fixed rhythm danced in the majority of sones is the ca-fé con pan composed of two independent rhythms of duple and triple meters playing simultaneously. This foundational understanding of polyrhythm as the simultaneous sound of two independent rhythms allows us to perceive the manner in which the cyclical repetition of the cafe con pan, embodied by bailadoras on the tarima, disrupts colonial logics of linear an individualized progress marked by the hegemony of the single bit of a clock. The dancer, processing and articulating rhythms through the body, engages in decolonial (learning) practices that generate a shift in consciousness from individual to relational knowledge.
This recording of “El Siquisiri” from a huapango (another name for fandango, most used in communities in the South of the state) in Michapan de Osorio, Vercruz with Colectivo Alteppe, from Acayucan gives us two in a half minutes of community soundscapes.
“El Siquisiri,” Chacalpa, Veracruz
.We can hear fireworks, the tuning of strings, “aganse para aca” (“como this way/come over here”) and “No se pongan atras” (“don’t stay behind”). Followed by the requinto’s call of the son, the jaranas join in, almost in unison, with the percussive footwork coming at last. In some cases bailadoras dance after the first verse is sung. With the sound of the footwork, in between taking turns to get on and off the tarima, you can hear dancers showing their skills in the afinque de su zapateado, their grounding of the step. By listening to the changes in style, rhythm, and force of sound of the zapateado, you can tell different bailadoras have taken their turn to get on the tarima. There are changes in the volume, intensity, and grounding sound in styles of stomping on the tarima. I say that these changes articulate through sound the inclusive nature of fandango, particularly the collective listening that makes space for each other’s rhythms.
Articulated by Gloria Anzaldúa, I often think of bailadoras as Nepantleras: boundary crossers, thresholders who initiate others in rites of passage, activistas who from listening, receptive spiritual stance, rise to their own visions and shift into acting them out, haciendo un mundo nuevo (making a new world). They encourage others to ground themselves to their own bodies and connect to their own internal resources, thus empowering themselves. Empowerment is the bodily feeling of being able to connect with inner voices/ resources (images, symbols, beliefs, memories) during periods of stillness, silence, and deep listening or with kindred others in collective actions.
The bailadora in fandango is an example of someone who listens with a decolonial ear. Bailadoras recognize that the rhythmic vibrations they collectively create on the tarima are potential spaces to embody Nepantla. Anzaldúa explains in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscúro: “Nepantlas are places of constant tension, where the missing or absent pieces can be summoned back, where transformation and healing might be possible, where wholeness is just out of reach but seems attainable” (2). Nepantla is the space where change happens, the kind of change that requires more than words on a page: it takes perseverance, and creative ingenuity. In learning the percussive footwork in fandango one practices listening in relation to others. A good dancer has to be aware of the space and improvisations of other dancers.
As a bailadora myself, I have often been reminded by teachers,––Ruby Oseguera, Laura Rebolloso, Martha Gonzalez and Gemma Padua–– to always stick to the cafe con pan and improvise when a good moment in the son comes up. Zapateado fandanguero cares about the cadencia del son, the feeling in the fixed rhythm: the ca-fé con pan. To maintain the groove of the son, bailadoras engage with one another in a decolonial listening practice that extends to the rest of the fandango soundscape changing the focus from a personal to a collective awareness. When we are referring to a decolonial listening practice we must understand that we are talking about an active sensorium that has personal and collective implications. Best articulated by Chela Sandoval in Methodology of the Oppressed, a decolonial praxis “depends on the practitioner’s ability to read the current situation of power, and self-consciously choosing and adopting the ideological stand best suited to push against its configurations. This is a survival skill well known to oppressed peoples” (50). The conditions that people within communities create in polyrhythmic music practices extend beyond the musical experience. Fandango and polyrhythm are the materialization of ways of being center on the awareness of our relationships and the relationship one shares with reality.
Collective rhythmic practices are potential spaces where alternative consciousness to the hegemony of coloniality can originate. They activate an epistemology of differential consciousness that relies on the integration of the self as tuning into reality through sound. These acts of knowing connect to notions of relationality situated at the center of indigenous epistemologies. As Walter Mignolo claims in “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: on (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking and Epistemic Disobedience,” Relationality gives us the ability to think and do decolonially dwelling and thinking in the borders of local histories confronting global designs (277). Using music as a tool to organize collectively, fandanguerxs in Mexico, and the U.S. challenge global designs of social organization that continue to displace communities of color around the world. To exemplify this sentiment I share this video of el son de la morena, the Dark skin woman performed by Collectivo Altepee’s in one of their visits to the U.S. Before the beginning of the son, Sael Bernal shares:
There are many types of music. This music has to do with people’s hearts, and everyone is different and this is the reason why this music sounds different depending on where you are, but in our hearts we all have this characteristic of humanity based on our capacities to relate to one another. This is the reason why we can share space and live together… ¡y qué viva la diversidad!
Chicago, 2012. Mario Gervacio, Sael Bernal, Gema Padua, Luis Sarmiento, Alberto Alor, & Simon Sanchez.
Featured Image: “encuentro de jaraneros y decimistas, tlacotalpan, veracruz, enero/febrero ’14” by Flickr user boerries nehe (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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Iris C. Viveros Avendaño was born and raised in Mexico. She is a Ph.D. Candidate and a McNair Scholar in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Washington. Her academic interests emphasize the integration of third world feminist approaches to the analysis of colonial legacies and projects in present-day systems of violence. To this effect, she focuses on the role of social structures and state-mediated technologies of power and domination in perpetuating violence against Afro Indigenous [descent] women. In addition, Iris’s scholarly work focuses on study of decolonial cyclic temporalities embodied on the tarima, or platform drum center stage in fandangos as practices of resistance, recovery, and healing from trauma. A central idea throughout her scholarly work is the exploration of the rhythmic body in fandango–In its collective and individual manifestation–particularly on the tarima, where knowledge is produced, reproduced, and transmitted.
A major source of Iris’s academic and personal inspiration comes from her involvement as a bailadora/percussive dancer and active co-organizer in the Seattle Fandango Project, a community dedicated to forging relationships and social activism through participatory music, poetry, and dance.
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SO! Amplifies: Sounding Board Curated by Leonardo Cardoso–Jay Loomis
Spaces of Sounds: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States –Vanessa Valdés
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