Symphonies And Epiphanies

How immersion in Indian classical music uncovered a piece of me

Today is the beginning of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. It is one of the main anchors to my Indian roots that has always been part of our family traditions.

I don’t speak Hindi, the main language spoken in North India, nor do I speak Bhojpuri, the dialect spoken in my village. I have a few words, and when I go home to India I pick up some more, but I can’t converse. Becoming a Yoga teacher and continuing to deepen my practice has given me connection to my heritage in ways I never thought I would be able to access. Learning Sanskrit terms and Mantras gives me a deep, primal joy. It touches something ancient in me. Wrapping my tongue around the sounds, which, when they click and come out as I want them to, feels like I’ve found a piece of myself that I didn’t realise I had lost.

Last weekend I attended the Darbar festival at the Barbican centre in London. A several day celebration of Indian classical music. Growing up, I listened to a variety of music, but rarely Indian music. I only experienced this when my parents played it on the record player, or my Chacha played harmonium, or we visited India and a local musical family would play at our house in the village. I have always loved classical music, but focused on European classical music - particularly pieces with strings and piano. It is only writing this now that I realise that they are similar to the sitar and harmonium, two instruments that feature in the majority of North Indian classical music. In the last few years, I have gravitated more and more towards Indian classical music, and realised that it speaks to something within me that I can’t fully articulate. At the Darbar festival, I was lucky enough to see the Ramachandran family trio perform - Manikandan and Damodar played the Nadhaswaram, a double reed wind instrument, and Shanmugam played the Thavil, a barrel-shaped percussion instrument. The Indian classical music I heard growing up was all in the North Indian style, so it was a rare treat to experience live, South Indian classical music. When Manikandan began his opening solo, I felt such a profound sense of connection, of safety and peace. I felt home.

So many things crossed my mind as I travelled on the waves of the music. I thought about how South India is my home too because ultimately my lineage is Dravidian, how my ancestors migrated initially to what is now called South India and Sri Lanka when they left Africa. I thought about the North Indian woman sat next to me who had made a comment about ‘their names being hard to pronounce’ - referring to the South Indian family in front of us. I thought about how colonialism and white supremacy culture has stolen so much humanity from South Asian people. I felt angry at her, and sad for her too. That she had convinced herself these beautiful names were ‘hard to pronounce’, perhaps as a way to solidify her separation from ‘them’. I am no stranger to the prejudice and racism that North Indians project on to South Indians and Sri Lankans, and while not shocking, it was still painful. This person had come to listen to the talents and skills of this family, and even as she ‘shushed’ someone for talking during the performance with one breath, she casually threw out a micro-aggression against our southern siblings with another.

I also thought about the name I was given at birth. I thought about how it had always felt somewhat uncomfortable. Some of this, early on, stemmed from being teased about it by white, English children. In my teens, I leaned into whiteness and Englishness to try to protect me from racism. I remember being jealous that my sister had an English name, and angry that my name ‘betrayed’ my Indianness immediately. We are both brown-skinned and dark haired, but being half European means it isn’t obvious what our heritage is to look at us. Well, not to everyone, some Indians see it in me immediately, something I now love with a great deal of affection, but as a child it stopped me from hiding in whiteness. It is hard to write that now, but it is the truth, and I have compassion for the child who was hurting and trying to find safety. As I started to come into my true gender, years later, my name became a source of gender dysphoria, and changing it helped to ease that pain. But there was something else, something about my old name that I have never been able to make sense of, until I was sat listening to Manikandan Ramachandran play his soulful solo.

My name has always been pronounced wrong.

The name I was given at birth, was ‘Asha’. It means ‘hope’ in Hindi (and Sanskrit). Except, it isn’t really ‘Asha’, because Hindi and Sanskrit are script languages, so it is really ‘आशा’. And if we are going to try to phonetically translate that to English, it is ‘Āshā’ or ‘Aashaa’. The ‘a’s are long sounds. My family in India have always pronounced it this way, and when I was a teen I remember finding that ‘cringey’. Again, it is hard to write this now, but it is true. I was used to the anglicised pronunciation of my name, and the Indian ‘version’ sounded foreign and distant. The realisation I had, as I was enveloped in the beauty of South Indian sounds, was that the rejection of my birth name wasn’t, as I had thought, just about my gender. It was a rejection of the anglicising of my name. I repeated Āshā in my head, pouring over the length of the sounds, and I felt a rush of love. There I was.

Being mixed heritage can be a beautiful thing. There are many things about my Scottish, Irish, Welsh and English heritage that are rich with knowledge and ritual, and peeling back the colonial layers to the culture and lineage underneath is a significant part of my journey back to myself. As well as being the first day of Diwali, it is also Samhain today. Samhain is the Celtic festival celebrating the end of summer and beginning of winter - when the veil between worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest. I will be observing Samhain with music, food and ritual alongside my Diwali celebrations. It is vital that I acknowledge and honour both sides of my ancestry if I wish to reclaim myself, even when it’s hard. And it’s important that I don’t try to pretend either side of me doesn’t exist. My ‘bothness’ has shown up even in the naming of this piece- ‘symphony’ refers to European music, but I enjoyed the way it chimes with epiphany, and English is the only language I am fluent in. Recognising how the colonisation of my Indian ancestors by my English ancestors is still showing up in me and my life today, is a painful but necessary part of claiming ‘both’. By reclaiming my Indian name, I honour my Indian ancestors, and I heal my English ones.

It is too recent, and still too complex, for me to use Āshā again (or for the first time) in general. AJ is most definitely a huge part of my reclaiming of myself and my true gender, but something has shifted. I am attending a Diwali party on Saturday, hosted by dear friends who are essentially family, and many of my Indian 'family’ (family friends from forever) will be there. It is likely that some of them, particularly my elders that I don’t see very often, will forget my name change and call me Āshā.

And I don’t think I’m going to correct them.

— AJ

Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

• Our reality built on systems of harm seeks to disconnect us from our ancestral roots and replace them with whiteness and colonial norms. How are you claiming your roots today?

• How can you avoid appropriation and observe Asteya (non stealing) in your pursuit of ancestral connection? What belongs to you? What does not?

• Colonial ancestry is painful, but must be faced and claimed in order to heal. Who were your ancestors before colonisation? What were their rituals? How can you connect to them?

• To my mixed heritage siblings, how can you honour both/all?

• How does intersectional reclamation show up for you? Are you trying to separate aspects of your identity (gender and culture, for example)?. How can you honour both/all?