This paper presents survey and fieldwork results from a collaborative digital music-mapping project on the parai frame drum of the Dalits (formerly “outcastes”) of Tamil Nadu, India. Our dataset includes 75 in-person surveys and 15 interviews of senior drummers, gathered using participatory fieldwork methods and comparative musical analysis across seven styles zones in Tamil Nadu. It is supplemented with comparative rhythmic data from the nineteenth-century indentured Tamil diasporic communities in Mauritius and Réunion, who continue to play the “tappu” (a predecessor of parai). We argue that the sonic manifestations of ritual and social purpose (adi rhythmic patterns) are affectively linked through style to distinct places and histories of culture contact, which we demonstrate through geographically pinpointed audio-visual analysis (Hsu 2014: 3). Our analysis functionally and demographically contextualizes rhythmic patterns to comparatively show how they vary in different locations resulting in distinct style zones. We observe that adi patterns for the same function, drum nomenclature, and other style markers differ most significantly between language groups (Telugu vs. Tamil), subcastes, and locations with distinct cultural contact influences (e.g. Western military bands). Yet, rhythmic patterns for village goddesses (Mariamma and Kali) persist in former indentured communities and are traceable to locations in Tamil Nadu reinforcing their geographic origins. However, these rhythmic patterns face attrition as Saivism shaped by class mobility and Brahminization reshapes diasporic practice. These findings underscore the rich diversity of historical and contemporary parai performance in Tamil Nadu and its diasporas, and the importance of supporting its continued transmission among artists.

Tappu drumming is emblematic of Indo-Caribbean “Madrasi Religion” that reverberates throughout New York City where it has proliferated and been revitalized in Guyana and Trinidad despite decline due to migration (Vertovec 1992). “Madrasi” was a British appellation for the minority of indentured laborers who embarked for the New World via the southern port of Madras (1838-1917). Negative associations of Kali worship, mostly by mainstream Sanatan “Hindus,” with backwardness and blackness (Williams 1990) as linked to Madrasis, produce ambivalence about similarities of ecstatic sonic practices with Afro-Caribbean religions. Today, devotees mitigate anxieties by emphasizing an “ancient Tamil” origins narrative from Tamil Sangam literature (Sherinian 2024:193). This narrative disavows Indo-Afro mixing, reifying deeply entrenched notions of racial purity alongside religious hierarchy from British colonialism within post-emancipation plantation indentureship and post-independence contexts. Indo-Caribbean Madrasis, who encounter discrimination from South Asian Americans as having “lost” their culture, seek to reclaim respect. I argue that they mobilize tappu performance to gain prestige as they seek forms of belonging within South Asian American diasporic culture. I analyze an example of Madrasi tappu drummers joining Tamil-speaking Singaporean drummers for an impromptu performance playing particular rhythms, “Permaul” and “Victory Dance,” that interlocked with urumi melam drummers (Sykes 2015). This provides Indo-Caribbeans proof of Madrasi Religion’s Tamil origins and shared history of alterity within South Indian tappu/parai drumming culture. This unprecedented performance and my analysis contribute to ethnomusicological theorization of sonic density as “copresence of layers of temporalities” (Jankowsky 2010:130) and transformation through entrainment (Becker 2004 and Clayton 2013).  

The dappu is a frame drum historically associated with religious rituals, communication, and folk musics among India’s Telugu-speaking scheduled castes. For the last century, its musical repertoire has been mobilized by activist groups, identity-based organizations, and, most recently, the Telangana state movement, leading to the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh in 2014. Telangana is viscerally audible during Bonalu, a government-sponsored festival in which percussion ensembles and DJ trucks move throughout Hyderabad, asserting both the dappu’s repertoire and the city's sonic architecture. These large public address (PA) systems, paradoxically, are socially constructed in how they remediate dappu recordings, yet are also deterministic in that they replace live drummers, empowered by their own technological capacities. This essay intervenes in debates between technological determinism and social constructionism by foregrounding the concept of transduction (Helmreich 2007). I argue that transduction – the transfer of energy between media – is a mutually constitutive process in which: 1. aesthetic decisions are made around loudness, density, and distortion; 2. acoustic pressure waves reconfigure sonic movement (Eisenlohr 2021) in the city. Ultimately, the dappu, as remediated on Bonalu PA systems, not only transduces electricity into air pressure, but also into public affects which bolster claims about urban space. As such, noise pollution and its concomitant, social organization, are redefined through aspirations to develop Hyderabad into a global city. Drawing upon ethnography between 2014–26 in Telangana, this work traces the distribution of agency among technological artifacts, repertoire, aesthetic evaluation, and relations of production.