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Paper short abstract:

The anti-caste musical platforms is a form of 'sonic-counterpublics', and the musical production at these sites has encouraged the voices from the caste-margins to speak about their identity and culture. The 'political' nature of anti-caste music explains how it destabilizes existing caste hegemony.

Paper long abstract:

The paper will discuss the intersection of Resistance discourse with cultural parameters like music. Popular music is not purely aesthetics or humanist but it is also 'political', as it redistributes power through the very ‘practice’ of such popular forms. Like effervescence, music is part of everydayness and it is constituted within the micro-structures of society. The dimension of resistance in music can be seen as a ‘semiotic resistance’ in which refusal of dominant meanings and re-construction of meaning becomes the political device to question the existing hegemonic order. Thus ‘resistance’ is the significant way in which culture moves, is formed, and re-formed. The rise of music-of-resistance was witnessed during the Civil Rights movement in the USA with the emblematic poetry of Martin Luther King's ‘We Shall Overcome’. Within the subaltern communities in India, the efforts like Casteless Collective, Kabir Kala Manch, Youth for Buddhist India, etc. too establish a subculture of musical traditions. Through a case-study of anti-caste musical platforms, the paper aims to develop how music has shaped the political and anti-caste ethics in India. The paper will establish the socio-political-cultural context of such musical performances and how the musical production has encouraged the voices from the margins to speak about their identity and culture. Through the conceptual framework of ‘sonic counterpublics’ the paper aims to explore how anti-caste music has intersected with the political sphere and how it has destabilized the existing dominant caste narratives, if so.