One Woman Revival

Last Friday night every South Asian person in the Bay Area with even a passing interest in EDM was in the crowd at a club called the Midway. Indowarehouse, a record label that produces this event, seems to have built up quite the following. Over a thousand revelers turned out to see the headlining DJ, Nihal Singh, and rest of the line-up. I will not pretend that I was an early adopter. Rather I am often part of the herd when it comes to the latest music. When I go to shows, I feel akin to the non-believer attending church with the faithful for the sake of social graces. But then there’s a sick drop and I think maybe I do believe.

I started the night with pre-drinks at an apartment building down the street from mine. Our host played Bollywood music in anticipation and had extended invites to any friends of friends who wanted to drop by. We quickly found just a few degrees of separation between each of us at the party, much like our parents used to do at potlucks and cricket games. While I used to groan with embarrassment then, I now see the ease and familiarity in those cultural modes of operating. Since moving back to the Bay Area 3 years I ago, I found myself creating new connections and reconnections with many friends who were South Asian like me. 

I also happened to go on the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour (which had been on my list for a while) soon after returning and it crystalized to me the role the South Asian community had played in the Bay Area for over a hundred years. The tour focuses on activism while strolling through UC Berkeley and nearby leafy neighborhoods. Our tour guides Barnali Ghosh and Anirvan Chatterjee narrate the experiences of South Asians who participated in the civil rights movement and protested discrimination from then leading up to modern day. I learned that while there was a boom of immigrants in 90s, which included my family, the threads of the South Asian community go all the way back to communities like the Punjabi freedom fighters during early twentieth century who were exiled to San Francisco but formed the Ghadar Party and continued mobilizing towards the goal of liberating India from British rule. 

That revolutionary enclave would have been shocked to see the sea of brown people knit together by beats from a shared culture. Throughout the night, I bumped into people I knew and felt that warm kinship of everyone in orbit around each other. While many of us are techies and scientists, we are also artists, teachers and countless other professions. South Asians have woven our diverse complexity into the fabric of the Bay Area. I was away for over 10 years during which I moved to the east coast then to the UK and back, and while there are South Asians just about everywhere when I returned to San Francisco I could feel a resonant chord struck by the community here. It pulsed through me and knew that I had come home.