Flushing Town Hall will host Indo-Constellations on Sunday, March 23, marking its first-ever mini-global mashup festival as part of The Ragini Festival.
This one-night-only event will celebrate Indo-Caribbean music and culture, blending pop influences with Indian classical music, chutney, and the vibrant rhythms of island sonic traditions.
The collaborative event was curated by Roshni Samlal, a Queens-based tabla player and DJ who is the coordinator and producer of The Ragini Festival, a five-day event held at different venues in NYC that began five years ago. Samlal created the event to provide a platform for Indo-Caribbean artists to assert their heritage and identity and expose audiences to many talented artists, especially those from the Queens community.
“We program a lot of heavy Indo-Caribbean artists who are working in contemporary spaces and responding to traditional music and folk music from the Indian side of the diaspora but are really Guyanese or Trinidadian or Surinamese or Fijian, and that story needs to be told too,” said Samlal. “What happened with that culture when it got to those places? And raising that to the same platform that the South Asian classical and traditional arts would be represented- this too is an element of that same music.”
When Samlal first created the Ragini Festival, she originally sought to provide a platform for female Indo-Caribbean artists during Women’s History Month. The event was first presented through the Brooklyn Raga Massive, a collective of musicians rooted in Indian Classical Music, which Samlal is a part of, but recognized a platform for female artists was important in the largely male-dominated industry.
“It grew out of programming around Women’s History Month and doing a femme takeover within the Brooklyn Raga Massive Collective, which I’m a part of,” said Samlal. “That musical community is largely male and patriarchal in its lineage, so we were just using Women’s History Month as a platform for doing more sound programming.”
As the event continues each year, the Festival and every evening offer a different piece of the culture to celebrate. This year, the Ragini Festival is a meditation on the concept of reclamation and highlights the influence of Indian classical music across genres and places in art and music that listeners may not have known about before.
“I really shifted into [the mindset of]], I need to help audiences understand, Indo-Caribbean is its own identity,” said Samlal. “And here’s how it warped in its movement to other places, here are the Afro influences that you might hear, or how a traditional song may have morphed into pop music in the collective memory of the people. So that’s, in a nutshell, the current intention behind the Ragini festival.”
For the first time since its inception, The Ragini Festival is making its way to Queens—a full-circle moment for its Richmond Hill-raised creator as she marks the event’s fifth year. The festival’s Indo-Constellations collaboration with Flushing Town Hall, located at 137-35 Northern Blvd in Downtown Flushing, will take place on Sunday, March 23, at 5 p.m.
FTH’s event will feature performances by Josanne Francis, a steel-pan player from Trinidad and Tobago, whose music blends and draws inspiration from traditional Calypso music, jazz, Indian, funk, rock, and classical music. The evening will also feature Fijiana, a rapper and singer who explores Indo-Caribbean identity through hip-hop, jazz, and storytelling. Keeping with the Queens theme, the special event will feature Queens native Ben Parag, a Guyanese American vocalist who blends Bollywood classics with chutney and tassa influences.
The event goes beyond featuring incredible music and will also include speakers from Queens-based grassroots organizations, including Jahajees Rising, a gender justice organization that provides outreach and support for Indo-Caribbean women against domestic violence and sexual assault. There will also be representatives from the Caribbean Equality Project, which offers outreach for Afro and Indo-Caribbeans in the LGBTQ community.
“To put art and the social needs of the community hand in hand, I think that’s just necessary,” said Samlal. “This is part of the ethos and the background that the show is intending. I’m hoping that people respond to that, and the show can be not just an esthetic experience, but that it can take greater meaning and relevance.”
Tickets for the Indo-Constellation event at Flushing Town Hall cost $30 for general admission and are free for FTH members. To purchase tickets or learn more, visit their website.
To learn more about the Ragini Festival and future event dates, visit their website.
