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LAKEER

LAKEER

Not on this record

What this album leaves out, and why.

This record follows two roads to Britain: one from Punjab, and one from the Konkan coast of Goa by way of East Africa. A great deal of South Asian history isn't on either road, and some of it is left out on purpose. This page says what, and why.

Kashmir

Kashmir is not on this record. Its dispute dates from 1947. It lies outside the two routes this record follows, and this album does not attempt to tell it. Every telling of it belongs to someone who is still grieving. It deserves more than a verse and better than a machine. Lal Ded, on MAA BOLI, is the only Kashmiri voice here.

Kashmir appears twice, as facts only: sold for seventy-five lakh rupees in 1846 (SHER-E-PUNJAB), and as the country behind the Mangla Dam (a side-room of ABADKAR).

Punjab after 1947, and 1984

The Punjab on this record stops in 1947, where this record's road leaves it. For Sikh Punjab, the most painful chapter came later: the Golden Temple in June 1984, Delhi that November, and the decade after. Those years are still being argued over in courts and in families, and they belong to the people who lived them, not to an album made by an outsider with a machine.

Other things that aren't here

  • Most of the subcontinent. The south beyond the Malabar coast (the Cholas, Vijayanagara, the Tamil and Telugu worlds), Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Himalaya and the North-East aren't on either road.
  • The Mughal Empire as a whole. It appears through one prince, Dara Shukoh (MAJMA), and one emperor on an armchair (DIWAN).
  • Adivasi histories, the histories of India's forest and hill peoples. The herders at the edge of the canal colonies (ABADKAR) get one line, which isn't the same thing.
  • The indentured communities after the ships. Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana, Natal and Fiji are named in GIRMIT and then left. Each has its own long history.
  • India, Pakistan and Bangladesh after independence: the wars, the Emergency, the coups, and the politics of the present, including the religious nationalisms that are argued over now.
  • The Gulf, where millions of South Asians have gone to work since the 1970s.

Why an album leaves things out

A song needs one image it can't get anywhere else. Where a subject had no such image on this record's road, or where it is still an open wound for people living now, it stayed out. Some of these deserve records of their own, made by people closer to them.