MY TAKE
THE TROUBLE WITH UMBRELLA TERMS
Karan Aujla became the first Punjabi artiste to win the viewer-voted Juno Fan Choice award last year. Image credit: Screen grab from YOUTUBE.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
The Junos are growing, according to a report by Canadian Press. Two new categories are to be introduced at the 54th Juno Awards ceremony in March this year.
“The new South Asian Music Recording of the Year award will toast home-grown musicians who work in genres inspired by the region, including Punjabi and Bollywood music.”
The report went on to say that the additions come after British Columbia musician Karan Aujla became the first Punjabi artiste to win the viewer-voted Juno Fan Choice award last year.
A big congratulations to Aujla and wishing him more success! But one has to wonder, a category focused on “South Asian music” and “genres inspired by the region, including Punjabi and Bollywood music”?
Is South Asian music – that by home-grown musicians and not created by someone sitting at the other end of the world – not Canadian enough?
And if those who know more about music than I admittedly do decree that there must be a category for South Asian music, why do Punjabi and Bollywood music get special mention? There are so many more facets to “South Asian” music.
That’s the trouble with umbrella terms.
Under the guise of simplifying, they dumb things down and throw a blanket over a vast group of mismatched people. They provide a sense of collective identity, while obscuring individual ones.
In A New Word for Indigenous, an essay in his new book Beneath the Surface of Things, Wade Davis, that clear-eyed thinker and philosopher (and also explorer and professor!) shares suggestions on how we can do this better.
There are words that, through overuse, lose their power and authority, causing the eyes to glaze over. Sustainablity is a sure one. Indigenous may be another.
He devoted some of his talk at the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) last fall to the subject.
He explained that the people for whom the term was conceived have embraced it as an essential part of their identity. Much like most of us who come from the subcontinent and those of the diaspora have adopted South Asian, I might add.
But the word – and Davis was talking about Indigenous – is problematic, he said.
“It implies that some of us are, and others are not, indigenous to the planet, which is both incorrect and the wrong message to send to our children.”
The other issue, he writes, is that “the great majority of the world’s seven thousand languages – some 6,500 or more – are spoken by those deemed by academic convention to be Indigenous. But to wrap the lion’s share of the world’s cultural diversity in a single category, slapping upon it one word as a convenient label, suggests a uniformity to culture that ethnography vehemently denies.
“Every culture is the product of its own history. The Nenets reindeer herders of Siberia, the Barasana living in the forests of the Colombian Amazon, and the Dogon dwelling in the cliffs of Bandiagara escarpment in Mali have no more in common culturally than the French, Russians, and Chinese do. Associating the former as Indigenous peoples is as arbitrary and ultimately meaningless as subsuming the latter into a contrived category of industrial peoples.”
The friend I had attended his talk with marvelled at his erudition and ability to unpack a complex issue in such a chatty, non-overbearing manner. We agreed with everything he said, and joked about encouraging him to turn his lens to “South Asian”.
Beneath the Surface of Things by Wade Davis is published by Greystone Books, $34.95.
After all, in Beneath the Surface of Things, there’s also an essay titled Mother India, in which Davis describes the country as more a state of mind than a national state, a civilization that has endured for thousands of years as an empire of ideas rather than one of territorial boundaries.
In which Davis writes about India’s fifteen official languages, fourteen major language groups, and more than sixteen hundred distinct dialects. And that’s in India alone. What about all the other countries grouped under South Asia? And while we are at it, if the music of different ethnic groups isn’t “Canadian” and requires a separate category, then what about all the other countries we come to Canada from?
If the people who plan the Juno categories read the book, they might have a better idea of just what they have taken on with the “South Asian” category!
Others will discover a fascinating and deeply engrossing read that ranges from “war and race to mountains, plants, climate, exploration, the promise of youth and the essence of the sacred” as he writes in his introduction.