dakshin 2 // the rebirth
Ok, first things first,
here are the links
Now, a little background on the song. A while ago, I visited the land of my ancestors, Tamil Nadu, for the first time in a very long time. It was a short visit, and involved no socialising, only sightseeing and trying to take in my part of the world. This meant temples, heritage sites, tourist traps, everything that could’ve possibly been fit into two weekdays.
And there’s a lot of culture to absorb in Tamil Nadu. For much of the region’s history, the area that forms the state today has been the cultural hegemon of southern (dakshin) India. Tamil is the oldest of the Dravidian (and arguably Indian) languages still in use. It was the first Indian language to be printed. The majority of historical edicts discovered in India are in Tamil.
Even post independence, this hegemony continued to some extent. Its political parties defined Dravidianism. Its was the first fully developed film industry in the South. And much of the administrative services in the South were occupied by Tamilians. Of course all of this is irrelevant to the song.
The Tamil Nadu I visited was beautiful, and reminded me in many ways of home. All these history lessons didn’t once occur to me when we were there, and I didn’t once think of Chennai as a once powerful ancestral home that had long ago lost its status as regional power to Bengaluru. I was just glad to be back to a place to which I would always (hopefully) belong.
Wonder what the point of music is on the sixth of March, twenty twenty two. Wonder if it serves the same purpose it served fifty, eighty, one hundred, one thousand years ago. Maybe six thousand years ago, that age’s Leonard Cohen wrote wryly of the migration patterns of wildebeest. I’ve been working on new music over the past half year. Here’s a pleasant house cover of the Cure’s Just Like Heaven.