The Casteless Collective - An Indian Folk Music Band Fighting for Social Justice

The Casteless Collective is an ensemble music band that essentially, in the words of its co-founder Tenma, comes from the soil of North Madras. Singing songs that talk about the inherent inequalities that exist in Indian society, inequalities that arise out of a rigid caste system that refuses to let people be free, The Casteless Collective’s music is both engaging and disruptive. The band refuses to adhere to the Brahmanical playbook that essentially says that if you belong to the ‘lower caste’, if you are an ‘untouchable’ then you don’t get to have a voice. The Casteless Collective has a voice — a voice that is made up of funeral musicians who learned to play their instruments in a graveyard, Gaana singers who sing about systematic oppression, rappers who talk about inequalities.

In this episode of VICE Meets, the members of The Casteless Collective talk about how the band came to be, how PA Ranjith, a famous director decided to express his activism through art, and how songs like Kaalu Rooba Dhuttu gave voice to the plight of manual scavengers, Finally, they talk about how the goal of a casteless society cannot be achieved by ‘refusing to see caste’ (something that upper-caste India is guilty of), but it can be achieved by acknowledging the divides that continue to exist and fragment Indian society and then working towards eliminating them — essentially by creating a truly casteless society.

**Translation of Tamil to English in the video by Shrishti Mathew.

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Видео The Casteless Collective - An Indian Folk Music Band Fighting for Social Justice канала VICE Asia