A UK-based NRI's new album features the cream of Indian rappers, and shines a light on the diasporic experience
Sarathy Korwar
People tend to box the brown community in the UK into one bracket. But it's not a T-shirt that you shove into a drawer in your cupboard meant only for the garment. The diaspora, to extend the metaphor, includes jackets, shoes and trousers as well. There are Indians. There are Pakistanis, too. There are Bangladeshis and people from the Middle East. And all these different groups constitute a complex curry of sorts as opposed to a bland plate of fish and chips, each adding their own flavour to the British population.
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That's the message that More Arriving, UK-based NRI Sarathy Korwar's powerful debut album, is sending out with a mix of eclectic songs that show how brown people in Great Britain come in different shades. Mumbai, in fact, is the genesis for the compositions. Sitting in London in 2016, Korwar got wind of the city's burgeoning hip-hop scene. So he took a flight and deep-dived into the circuit, hand-picking collaborators with a son-of-the-soil attitude to rap music. They include MC Mawali and Trap Poju, and later Delhi Sultanate and Prabh Deep from the national capital. These are some of the people — outside of Londoner Zia Ahmed and Abu Dhabi's Deepak Unnikrishnan — who provided the vocal and lyrical foundations on which the album rests. The music, though, is a complex mix of jazz and, if you really keep an ear out for it, Hindustani classical, with a sprinkling of electronica added to the mix. And the overall product is a hard-hitting offering that slams the idea that all brown people living abroad can be painted with the same brush.
A still from the video for Bol; a song by Sarathy Korwar
Korwar, who lived in Pune for a while before shifting abroad, tells us from London, "I think that for me, this album was about discovering all these different MCs and poets in the UK and India. It was about understanding just how unique their voices are. Everyone was talking about stuff that's individual to them, and that drives home the point that there is no one South Asian experience as people perceive it to be. There are multiple ways of being brown, which people don't understand or expect."
More Arriving, in that sense, is meant to be an educational experience for blinkered listeners with a myopic view of race and culture. That makes it an important album at a time when the whole world seems to be huddling in individual groups; sneering at others they perceive to be alien. Kudos, then, to Korwar for pointing out how the brown diaspora, like all others, isn't like a plate of food with just one dish on it. It is, like we said instead, a wardrobe with all sorts of clothes packed in.
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