Davindar Singh

Davindar Singh

Davindar Singh

Davindar Singh is a Presidential Scholar and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology. His dissertation project examines the role of supply chains in Punjabi-language popular music, focusing on how a long history of popular media about Punjabi trucking — song, poem, and musical film spanning the gramophone to digital streaming platforms — is bound up in a century of resource extraction from Punjab. This extraction, primarily spanning flows of grain, labor, money, and blood, underlies both enterprise-driven environmental destruction and violent regionalized political conflict between various Punjabi political collectivities and the central Indian government. Peoples’ attempts to navigate this extraction and its social effects, whether in work in agricultural supply chains in India or in trucking work in North America, are central themes in Punjabi public discourse and mass (musical) media. Today, mass media industries and the industries more obviously key to Punjab’s resource extraction, including agriculture and transportation, calculate the value of resources and their distribution through digital platforms in remarkably similar fashion. These patterns of calculated distribution of resources in space and time are known as “logistics.” The core of this dissertation is ethnographic research with Punjabi truckers and music industry personnel to examine how these patterns of calculating value, borne out of this history of extraction, bridge the contexts of economic enterprise, artistic form, and personal life through reflexively circulating cultural discourse.

Davindar is co-chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Sound Studies Section, and is a member of the SEM Council. He has conducted research with undocumented emigrants and religious leaders who left South Asia for Fiji. He studied jazz saxophone and composition at Berklee College of Music (B.M) and New England Conservatory (M.M), and used to play the saxophone for cash.

 

Project:  Cultures of Cargo: Trucking, Musical Media, and the Logistics of Punjabi Mobility