Name: Ditty
Nationality: Indian
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, ecologist
Current Release: Ditty's Skin EP is out via Clouds Hill.

If you enjoyed this Ditty interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, and Facebook.  



In preparation for the South Asian Sounds festival in the UK, I'm currently talking to a few artists about the feeling and influence of being part of the Asian diaspora. For you personally, how does this feeling manifest itself and how does it influence your creativity? Do you think that a sense of rootlessness instils in one the realisation of the importance of roots?

Yes, in my experience, being away from home really brings you closer to your roots in some ways. I am currently writing a lot about, and working on finding a home in myself and in my surroundings. This is part of where the inspiration for my record Skin comes from.

Going away from the usual, banal, known is a really important step for my creativity. I think the further away that we go from our comfort, the more we can allow ourselves to question and critique the world around us.

[Read our Jason Singh interview about the South Asian Sounds festival]

You recently returned to New Delhi. What are your impressions?

I grew up in Delhi, but I haven't lived there for 12 years.

I was very fortunate to have grown up in the 90s in Delhi and be a part of the indie scene. It was wonderful – and still is. There’s a lot of love and a big sense of community and support for each other. I grew up singing in choirs, several bands, doing competitions and singing on the streets.

Returning here is a bag of mixed feelings– black air, love, friends, family, home, familiarity, pain, sadness, disbelief, joy.

You've stated that the sensation of “coming home to ourselves” can be “hard and beautiful” at the same time. Can you expand on this idea of coming home to oneself and why is it both hard and beautiful?

We are living in a hyper capitalist world. Our bodies and minds are full of suffering and to be able to embrace what goes on inside of us, and to take care of ourselves is beautiful and painful at the same time.

I think we are all running away from our suffering by distracting ourselves. These days, there's social media, earlier there was the TV, phone, news. Feeling ugly, feeling like we’re not enough is great for the market. Not taking a stand against what’s happening in the world is convenient. Not seeing the dark sides in ourselves is easy.

So to accept ourselves fully and to say no to the things that are pushed at us is hard, yet beautiful because it means to understand we are enough even though we’re not perfect.

Sarathy Korwar told me about the importance that indofuturism has had on his work and about he started using a more cyclical time view in his drumming. Are there Indian musical perspectives that find their way into your work would you say?

I do not come from the classical world. I am not a trained musician. I was always singing, and picked up my first instrument in my early 20s. Freedom of expression is the main thing!

Some elements from my culture that have made their way into my work are the ideas, topics, stories, struggles of the people. And then there are some rhythms and few traditional instruments.

What's your take on fusion versus purism?

I do not think I need to be a purist of any kind and I enjoy the freedom I have as an indie musician to be able to experiment, and reinvent myself.

Can you briefly talk about how singing in English fits into this, as it is singled out in the press release?

India was colonised, and I grew up in the 90s in a post colonial India. We were taught to speak English. My parents and other family elders would punish us when we spoke our mother tongue. It’s violence that was imposed on us and still continues.

English continues to be our official language and that's how I was brought up. I think in English. So naturally, I write in English. After I moved to Germany, I started writing in my mother tongue Hindi, and these songs will be on my next EP titled Kaali, and that's another story to tell.

You've referred to your beautiful new EP as a loveletter to earth. How do you see the connection between caring for a better world and music?

Our problems today are intertwined. Poverty, capitalism, racism and the climate crisis all have something in common– injustice, oppression, extraction.

I am interested in speaking about society as is. My songs are just reflections of what I see– they comment on the state of the post-colonial world, cities in the global south, water woes, climate crisis, capitalism, discrimination, migration and racism amongst other things.

I am a hopeful being. I think through music, we can care for our emotions, and empathise with ourselves.

What do you still remember about the process of writing and recording these songs?

It has been a beautiful journey.

Recording ideas in my bedroom to recording sounds in the forest outside my place in Goa, arranging the songs with my band in my drummer’s old terrace studio in Delhi, to mastering it here is germany – its been a wonderful time.  

How do your work as an actrivist and a musician overlap and mutally feed each other?
 
I have been working on the ground as an urban ecologist for a decade and have experience with restoring landscapes, teaching permaculture, working with indigenous communities in India to document their interrelationships with the forests and planting forests. This is where the inspiration for my music comes from.

I am constantly thinking and questioning my role as an artist. I want to make space for important conversations through this music and enable people to connect to the part of themselves that we are now losing! The part of us that feels connected to ourselves, to others and to all life on Earth.

Briefly, what are the technical problems of getting water to the people who need it? What is the situation like in India with regards to this topic?

This is a really complex topic. Unlike Europe which has spring rivers, in North India, we have rivers that come down from glaciers. These are changing because of the climate crisis. We have a short monsoon that lasts 2 months. People must save all the water for the entire year at this time.

And therefore we have ancient knowledge systems – which have been destroyed due to capitalist and post colonial constructs. We are seeing the worst draught at the moment.

How would you describe your involvement with Viva Con Agua and what have you been able to achieve so far?

Its been wonderful working with VCA. I’ve been working on creating an artists collective to be able to comment on and make space for speaking about the climate crisis in pop music.

We released our first record Rain is Coming in 2021. The album documents several water conservation movements across North India and includes the voices of people who are working to protect it.



We are now working on our second project – to comment on the state of the Baltic Sea.

You said: “Now I understand that we're part of [earth's] wonderful body. Earth can heal itself. We just have to get out of its way.” What does that mean in practise?

In my culture, we are not separate from the environment. We all inter-are. There's water in us, we are made of the same stuff as the Earth and we are the earth. The 'environment' is a western construct made to be able to extract and exploit what is 'outside of us'.

To get out of the way, is to stop extractivist systems from existing. To find new ways of co-existing with all species on Earth. To allow the Earth body to heal, rest and recover.

How important is sound for our overall well-being and how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health?

We perceive the world through waves of sound. There's a lot of noise at the moment.

I am appalled by how difficult it is to find a nice film to watch for example. There is gore, violence, deception and all sorts on Netflix and other media platforms. In the real world, there's war, confusion, and destitution. Instagram has become a source for news for several of us. And this news is sold by various groups.

Exploitation is justified. We’re living in a really hostile world.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?

I spent a lot of time by and in the ocean. I suppose that’s primarily why I moved to Sri Lanka and then lived in Goa for about a decade. This one time, I went diving with my partner and some others, we were done with our second dive and came up to the surface.

We climbed back on the boat and there was a shark fin circling our boat. It was a whale shark. She was 5 m long. Perhaps a baby. She had separated from her family. Stuck under her belly were three little fish who were eating some creatures off her body.

We jumped back into the water with only our fins on. She went around the boat, and arched up again and again to be petted by the boatman. All she wanted was love. She sang, and played with us for half an hour and then she swam away. It was an encounter with a gigantic soft being that I will never forget.

I suppose my time on the island is encapsulated in that moment. My experience of living away from home, meeting some beautiful creatures and spending time learning about myself.

The world is currently full of noise, and I think we need more silence, peace and calm.

You mentioned the earth as being a living body. Do you feel as though we can learn about its needs by listening to its sounds – which Bernie Krause described as the “geophony”?

We can definitely listen to the increased frequency of Tsunamis, forest fires, pandemics, and other disasters to gather what is going on.

When I mentioned the Earth as being a living body I was more referring to the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock for example. In my culture, the Earth is a living being, whose body we are part of. The biosphere, (the skin of the earth), is the only place where life exists, known to the human race. It is here. The biosphere is a small blanket wrapping the Earth. A few kilometres over land and a few underwater.

I had a chance to work with an amazing astrophysicist, Vikram Soni, for a few years. He told me, ‘Whilst we search for life on other planets, life slips away from under our feet.’