Kiran Ahluwalia makes music that’s part subcontinental, part English, part American and funky — a great masala mix. Her new album, “Comfort Food”, embraces that kind of diversity in a new kind of protest song. It celebrates the joy of diversity in the face of intolerance in the West and in modern India — a message we desperately need.
Ahluwalia joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss the album and her upcoming performance in Lexington on May 4. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: I love this record, and there’s a lot to talk about with it. There’s serious stuff, but let’s just talk about the fun stuff first because the first track starts off rocking with a great groove. Tell us what this song is about because I love it.
Kiran Ahluwalia: The song is called “Dil”, and first off, Dil in itself as a word is a very hard word to translate into English. Dil is like a mixture of your heart, your brain, your soul, your desire. It’s not an anatomical place in you, but it’s a mixture of all these things.
It’s like, if I want an apple, my Dil wants an apple. That’s the part of myself I’m talking about —my heart, my brain, my everything. The song is saying that my Dil is going to shed shame as a woman. As Indian women, we are often taught that shame is a wonderful, delicate thing that women should have.
But in the song, I’m saying I’m going to shed my shame. I’m going to throw it away because it’s been getting in the way of all sorts of lust. I’m going to take the hand of my beloved publicly and parade my love out in the open.
Rath: This is kind of a Punjabi feel, right? Sort of like Bhangra [music]. I should tell people: the Punjab is in the western part of India.
Ahluwalia: Yeah, the Punjab is a large, largely farming state in the northern part of India and in the southern part of Pakistan. It got divided in partition. And I did — you are correct — write the song and compose it in the style of a Punjabi folk song. We didn’t do the video yet. That’s not up yet. We did it for [the song] “Pancake”, but not for “Dil”.
Rath: Awesome. This all kind of ties into the theme of the album and your title: “Comfort Food”. Comfort food can mean a lot of different things, and it does over the course of this record. It can mean music, and that’s one thing I really am dying to ask you about because you combine so many influences. You were born in India and raised in Canada. I’m curious — when you were growing up, and where you were growing up, what was your musical diet?
Ahluwalia: It was a little bit of everything. It was definitely a very heavy stream of Indian music. I listened to all sorts of genres of Indian music. I listened to Indian classical music, both vocal and instrumental. I listened to Indian ghazals, which are love songs. I listened to Cavalli, which is known more as a Sufi, mystic-type song form, even though that can be about love as well. I listened to Punjabi folk music. I listen to Bollywood, which is like the pop music of Indian.
And I listened to whatever was on the Canadian radio, so I bought my Rush albums and rock-n-roll. I listened to disco, you know, I had my Bee Gees and ABBA. It was all these things — a little bit of Canadian folk, Canadian singer-songwriter. Then, later on, when I was in university, jazz. I didn’t really listen to a lot of Western classical music, except for when we went as a school to listen to it together.
Rath: You and I have been talking before this interview about the political context of this record, because there are some political songs on here that take on the situation in India right now. Maybe we can set up the conversation to explain it by going right into one of the songs, especially because you talked about how female desire is considered in India and the state of shame. The last song on this record is about a women’s protest in New Delhi. Tell us about that.
Ahluwalia: Yeah, I mean, there are plenty of women in India right now that are okay with showing their desire and bringing up their daughters to show desire, like what I was talking about when I was growing up in India.
There are a few songs that are — I mean, we can call them protest songs — but they’re songs that are lamenting the loss of brotherhood within India right now. There are factions that are creating religious divisions between Hindus and Muslims, between Hindus themselves of different castes. All of this division has been coming to a head.
Many of the songs that I’ve written are trying to remind us that we are of the same root. If you cut me, if you cut you, it’s the same shade of red that comes out of us. Our tears have the same salt in them. I’m trying to remind all of us that we are the same — the same human species. The song that you’re referring to is “Tum Dekhoge”, which translates as “you will see.”
It’s a poem that was written by a poet in India. I liked the poem, so I composed it and sang it. He wrote the poem in response to an all-women peaceful protest in an area of New Delhi called Shaheen Bagh. Even though it was a peaceful protest, the police got violent with the women. In response to this, he wrote the poem, which he made into a song.
It’s definitely a protest song — a song of dissent. The general message behind the song is that you, too, will see, meaning that when we see others being oppressed and we stand by silently and don’t do anything, then we are basically giving consent to the oppression. The tyrant is oppressing one segment of society, but once you unleash a tyrant, you don’t know who else they will oppress. Then, you will see that you were there, and I was there, being oppressed.
Rath: In India, the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi — it seems safe to say — has a long record of performing actions that would be taken as discriminatory against Muslims. It’s very much a divided country, in some ways similar to the U.S. right now. I have to imagine you must have encountered some difficulties as an artist making the statement.
Ahluwalia: Yeah. It’s really odd to be talking about the situation in India and about a Hindu fundamentalist government. But at the same time, if we don’t voice concern and talk about it, then that’s not going to lead to any kind of love between Indians.
All of this is important because Indians have the largest diaspora worldwide. When we do talk about the situation in India, it’s very different from when you are dissenting Hindu fundamentalism in India and the Indian diaspora in America, where there is no sizable population cheering them on. There is very much a loneliness in this dissent.
When I post on social media about this, I get a lot of people telling me I’m misguided. People that I’ve worked with — the camera person who took one of my videos — will do a long thing about how misguided I am. People will say on social media that I haven’t done my homework. I’ll post three articles backing up what I’m saying.
There’s a lot of backlash about talking about this. At the same time, if I can lend my voice to people who aren’t being heard right now, then I feel like I just can’t cut it down.
