Shruthi Vishwanath

Shruthi Vishwanath is a singer, composer and educator. Trained in the classical and immersed in the folk, her work is rooted in the oral traditions of mystic music in South Asia. It revolves strongly around community and intersectional feminist practice, with the aim to make music and musical education more accessible. Through this grant, she intends to create space online for womxn artists.

In this project, womxn artists, both rural and urban, will occupy cyberspace at midnight for 25 nights over two months, through a series of live and pre-recorded videos. These will be three to 15 minutes each and include short performances, conversations and feminist readings. Of these at least 10 will be invited artists of who five will be from rural areas. They will have varying levels of familiarity with the internet. Some of them may be those with limited access to the internet only through a male family member, while others may be internet savvy, doing regular performances online. Each artist would be encouraged to celebrate the womxn they are and bring their struggles and journeys into this collective cyber visibility. For the rest of the sessions, Shruthi will perform solo, drawing on her artistic practice with songs and poems by women poets and composers. She plans to invite at least one non-cis, womxn artist as well as explore the possibility of going beyond country borders by having a couple of sessions with artists who are not based in India.

Inhabiting cyberspace at midnight may seem much easier than inhabiting streets at midnight, but it is also an exercise in itself. Even inside their homes, womxn artists are typically responsible for household chores and are less likely to want to disturb the family by being in a conversation at midnight. In spite of 25 years of the internet in India, it is still biased in favour of the urban male. Statistics show that only a third of internet users are female, with the number dropping further in rural areas since the internet penetration in rural areas is about half that of urban areas. The project is also an ode to the resilience of female artists everywhere, especially performers finishing work late into the night, and the agency that non-urban women have to claim and exercise in order to stay out that late. The series may culminate on New Year’s Eve when midnight gets a special meaning.

The outcomes of this project will be these 25 sessions online which will remain on the internet across YouTube, Instagram and Facebook - except in exceptional cases where the artist may want to take it down; and a condensed five-minute video. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA will be recordings of the 25 sessions and the five-minute video.

This grant is made possible under the special initiative 25x25, with support from lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners, Titan Company Limited, Priya Paul, and Sethu Vaidyanathan.