This paper studies the engagement of urban elderly adults with popular music from their youth as one mode through which they negotiate the multiple personal and social shifts associated with aging. It draws upon ethnographic research in the city of Ahmedabad, India, with senior citizens who listen to and sing ‘old’ Hindi film songs (‘puraane gaane’)—the repertoire of Hindi film songs from the mid to late twentieth century. For these participants, the repertoire evokes nostalgia, offers solace and animates music-centered sociability. The paper has two related concerns. One, it explores how these senior citizens actively attempt to redefine their identities in their old age by cultivating singing and listening as ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins 2001), even as they manage societal and domestic expectations related to age/gender, personal losses, and empty nests. Two, it examines the diverse modalities through which these songs—which are anywhere between thirty and eighty years old—have sustained as a cultural resource for almost two generations of elderly Indians. More broadly, the paper locates these musical activities within the present moment which brings together recent music-related technologies (mobile phone Karaoke apps, small Karaoke studios), and implicit discourses about ‘successful aging’ that encourage senior citizens to turn towards leisure activities (Samanta 2023).

The film, My Brother's Keeper, was produced by Rikshaw Films in 2025, is in English and is 17.5 minutes in length. This documentary is the personal account of an American musician’s life-journey in becoming a tabla performer. A former student of mine, a percussionist, experienced grief over the 1970 death of his older brother in the Vietnam war. Seeking relief by traveling there, he encountered awesome tabla playing in India. Upon returning home he entered the Indian music performance program at the University of Minnesota. The visiting tabla teacher encouraged him to continue study in India and this activity served as mental health therapy, preparation for attaining a professional level of Indian musicianship, and a bonding with his teacher. This film is a moving document of this musician’s transformation and healing through the rigors of tabla study and career. The soundtrack is his tabla playing as he expressively narrates his life story. The film visually portrays his performances with many musicians and includes scenes of his brother’s military experience in Vietnam. This draws the viewer into understanding the deep personal loss to the narrator and how he found the musical solution to his grief. It is gratifying for the ethnomusicologist to experience this transformation of the narrator’s state of mind through his engagement in becoming a musician of another culture. The full showing of the film leaves time for discussion.

Within the U.S. performing arts ecosystem, dance companies rooted in culturally specific dance forms are more often categorized as “traditional” or “ethnic,” labels that can obscure their artistic experimentation and innovation. Founded in 1992 in Minneapolis and led by the mother-daughter Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy, Ragamala Dance Company has spent over three decades navigating this representational framework, creating new theatrical works grounded in Bharatanatyam, a classical dance form of South India, that circulate beyond culturally bounded audiences and invite cross-cultural resonance. Drawing on archival research and a year-long ethnographic study of Ragamala’s in-studio practices, this paper argues that the company’s creative process is structured by a productive interplay between mobility and what I term “immobility.” While diaspora scholarship often privileges movement, circulation, and hybridity as markers of transformation, Ragamala’s creative practice demonstrates that immobility–understood as disciplined grounding in lineage, technique, and embodied knowledge–functions as a generative force. Tradition here operates not as constraint but as enabling infrastructure that supports aesthetic expansion, interdisciplinary collaboration, and institutional negotiation. Through analysis of the Ramaswamys’ representative works across different phases of creation and production, I show how rigorous engagement with inherited forms produces new choreographic vocabularies and institutional possibilities. In this formulation, creative freedom emerges not despite grounding but throughout it. By foregrounding (im)mobility as a methodological lens, this paper proposes a model of diasporic artistic practice in which rootedness and reinvention are mutually constitutive.

The Indian Farmer’s Protest of 2020–2021 has been recognized as one of the longest and largest in the history of independent India (Moliner and Singh 2024). For over a year, hundreds of thousands of farmers and supporters are said to have participated in what has been hailed as a victorious mass movement of unity and resilience. Thousands of protesters camped for months at the outskirts of the Indian capital in harsh weather conditions until the government repealed the three “farm bills” that farmers argued would put them at the mercy of large corporations capable of manipulating grain prices to maximize profits at the cost of farmers’ incomes, resulting in impoverishment that would only exacerbate the huge current social problem of farmer suicide in India. At the camps, amateur and professional musicians chanted and sang poetry for spiritual nourishment and as caustic critique of the government (Abbi 2022; Moliner 2024). They also played protest song-videos recorded by popular musicians since before the encampments, with over five hundred songs released over the course of the movement; these garnering hundreds of millions of YouTube views (Kalra 2024). Reporters and scholars have commented on how the songs enlisted and represented people across social and political divides such as religion, caste, landownership, gender, age, ableness, and border. In this paper, I analyze the sonic, musical, lyrical, visual, cultural, and historical tropes in these songs—live and studio-produced—and building on sound, sensory, and phenomenological studies, explore how sounds carry meaning, across time and space.