Songs of Resistance, the Tradition Continues by Prof. Sumangala Damodaran with Mr Mark Aranha on Guitar was organised by Students Life Committee (SLC) on 13 March at Amphitheatre.
Prof. Damodaran gave examples of how music has been used to articulate resistance during the struggle for freedom from colonial subjugation and how later, after independence, the tradition has continued in different parts of the country. She performed popular songs from the 1940s to the present that have voiced resistance to the existing social and political order. With a repertoire in multiple languages, she explored the aesthetic as well as the political-social dimensions of the music of resistance in our country and also situated it in terms of the influences that have been pivotal in the emergence of the music.
Sumangala Damodaran is a Professor of Economics, Development Studies and Popular Music Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi. After 17 years of teaching Economics at Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi and a year of working with the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (the Arjun Sengupta Committee) of the Government of India, she joined AUD and was involved in the setting up of the School of Development Studies and the School of Culture and Creative Expressions. As a development economist, her research and publications fall broadly within the rubric of Industrial and Labour studies and more specifically on Industrial Organisation, Global Value Chains, the Informal Sector, Labour and Migration. Apart from her academic involvements as an economist and social scientist, she is also a singer and composer. Her archiving and documentation of the musical tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association from the 1940s and 1950s has resulted in a book titled “The Radical Impulse: Music in the Tradition of the IPTA” and an album titled ‘Songs of Protest’ and she has performed from the documented repertoire extensively in different parts of the country and abroad. She has also collaborated with poets and musicians from South Africa around a project titled ‘Insurrections’ which has resulted in four albums. She is currently engaged in researching the relationship between music and migration, particularly of women in slavery and servitude across centuries and across vast tracts of the globe that were linked through long-distance trade in commodities and symbolic goods. This work is being done in collaboration with several universities in Africa and Asia.
She did her MPhil and PhD in economics from JNU. Her doctoral thesis was on the relationship between Export Orientation, Economic Organisation and Labour Markets in the Leather Industry in India.