Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music

Organized by the MIT Writers Series.

Combining music documentary and social documentary, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music charts the meteoric rise of South Asian music in 1990’s Britain and the decades of cultural cross-pollination and political struggle that led up to that historic moment. Through a dynamic mix of live performances, candid interviews, and rare archival footage, Mutiny presents the story of a generation that grew up defining itself in an environment of racial violence while drawing strength from both British street culture and South Asian roots. The artists who emerged from this generation became some of the greatest innovators in British music, mixing the influences of their parents’ cultures with electronica, hip-hop, reggae, and punk and producing unique and powerful new sounds.

Featuring: Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, State of Bengal, Fun-Da-Mental, Anjali, DJ Ritu, Black Star Liner and many others.

Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. His previous films include “Taxi-vala/Auto-biography” (1994) about the lives, experiences and activism of immigrant taxi drivers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in early 1990s New York City, as well as “Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music” (2003). His current work, which examines the desertion and settlement of Indian Muslim merchant sailors in U.S. port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the basis for a forthcoming book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York, and a documentary film, “In Search of Bengali Harlem.” He is Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Program in Comparative Media Studies.