Women and Music in the South Asian Diaspora


DATE
Tuesday February 11, 2025
TIME
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
COST
Free

Presented by the Centre for India and South Asia Research (CISAR) and UBC’s Department of Asian Studies.

Join Dr. Nicole Ranganath, Associate Director, and Assistant Professor in Middle East/South Asia Studies at the University of California, Davis, for an illuminating talk on women’s history in the South Asian diaspora as revealed through their musical performances. Challenging the traditional portrayal of men as mobile and women as stationary in diaspora studies, Dr. Ranganath explores how Sikh women in the Punjab region and beyond were culturally associated with the fluidity of water and air. Her work introduces the Ocean as a framework to examine women’s mobility and resilience. She proposes the metaphor of ‘pearls from the seven seas’ to encapsulate the global dispersal of Sikh communities and women’s transformative experiences through song. Drawing from her upcoming book, Women and the Sikh Diaspora in California: Singing the Seven Seas, and her acclaimed PBS documentary, Jutti Kasoori, Dr. Ranganath offers a unique perspective on gender, music, and diaspora.