The words “my mum needs to see this” aren’t ones you often hear after 2am at Glastonbury, but that’s what festival-goer Shivali said as she took a video of her fiance dancing to a DJ set inside a new south Asian space in the festival’s iconic Shangri-La area.
From Indian to Nepalese, Bangladeshi to Sri Lankan, and beyond, the representation at Arrivals – Glastonbury’s first ever dedicated south Asian space – was as diverse as the music genres they brought to the stage. As a British-Indian journalist with ties to west Africa, I felt seen and at home in a place that seamlessly and joyously blended sounds and influences from across cultures.
It also felt like a turning point in a UK festival market that often overlooks south Asian artists and audiences. Despite being the country’s largest minority ethnic group, south Asians so often have to curate their own music festivals, which attract an overwhelmingly south Asian audience, while we remain mostly uninvited to perform on the mainstream British festival scene. Those festivals – held by cultural organisations such as Dialled In, Daytimers and Going South – are joyful, meaningful events, but so many young south Asian artists draw from influences right across club culture, pop music and beyond, so it feels baffling to not be able to fully participate right across the British festival scene.
Credit to Glastonbury, then, for enabling that crossover, and on south Asian artists’ own terms. “With our lineup, we’re not about tokenism, we’re about everyone bringing their own unique sound to the stage,” DJ Gracie T told me. She played to a vibrant audience from a mix of backgrounds and ethnicities, many of whom waited over an hour to enter the buzzing space. “We’ve got a lot of people playing a mixture of UK dance music with lots of south Asian edits and inspirations … I’m Sri Lankan Tamil and it’s really cool to hear a mixture of Tamil beats with footwork that you wouldn’t necessarily expect.”
Arrivals was a futuristic alien-like world that centred south Asian identity. Inspired by retro sci-fi films, at the centre was a spaceship-themed hub for the decks that was woven with plants – a nod to a jungle planet – alongside a wall of colourful illustrations by the artist Osheen Siva and art-deco-themed speakers created by Vedic Roots.
“I feel like we’ve pulled together the sort of brown Avengers,” said Shankho Chaudhuri, who led the set design alongside Esha Sikander and Shirin Naveed. “The design is really an answer to the question: what if we were the main character? There’s no one type of south Asian art, no one type of south Asian creative. We all have our inspirations. What’s amazing about the British south Asian diaspora experience is that we’ve built our identity often without role models in the arts, having been systematically kept outside those spaces. But now, as our community matures, builds power and networks [within the arts], we’re bringing together that wonderful jigsaw puzzle.”
From jungle to techno, electronic, hip-hop and house, over four nights, esteemed artists such as Bobby Friction and DJ Ritu, an icon of the 90s Asian underground scene, as well emerging talents such as Anish Kumar, Nabihah Iqbal and Nikki Nair performed not just at Arrivals, but across various stages, winning over diverse audiences.
This year if you looked across Glastonbury’s programming, you’d see more south Asian artists than ever before. As Ahadadream’s mix of Tere Bin Nahin Lagda echoed across Block9 as he performed on the Genosys stage, I knew I had more than made the right choice to skip Dua Lipa’s headline act. And there were lines of more than two hours to see Girls Don’t Sync and Jyoty’s performances on the Temple stage; neither of which – despite my best efforts – I could talk my way into.
A personal highlight for me was taking my friends to see my cousin, Rohan Rakhit, who is part of Daytimers, play at the Rum Shack to an even bigger crowd than his Glastonbury debut in 2022. Sharing what I love – with the people I love – and watching them embrace it, too, made me feel a new level of pride, and a real shift.
“It’s important to note that stages like Arrivals don’t happen in a vacuum,” said Rohan. “We might have had our own stage this year. But south Asians were everywhere this year. From Asha Puthli, to Nitin Sawhney to Tara Lily. Our roots run deep. Having these spaces shifts culture and hopefully by us all being there and visible across the weekend, we would have inspired others to follow their dreams.”
I also spoke to Dhruva Balram, one of the people behind Arrivals and a co-founder of Dialled In, a collective showcasing the breadth of south Asian talent in the industry. Speaking in the Arrivals garden, designed for all attenders to chat, bond, and “recover for the next bout of dancing”, he said: “It’s not just having an artist from one region of south Asia, it’s having Nepalese, Bengali, Afghani, Mauritian, Indian, Pakistani, Tamil artists all together on one lineup or one space together, showing that the south Asia as an entire region made up of many ethnic divides and representation. If you come together, you can build together.”
While the project was programmed, designed and conceptualised entirely south Asian team, Dhruva emphasised it wouldn’t have been possible without the collaboration of the Shangri-La team, who built the space.
“Arrivals is a reminder that if you silo yourself off, you can’t do anything … You have to work with different communities to build together to have proper representation, whether it’s in front of the camera or behind the scenes, it doesn’t matter. We have been shut out of the industry for so long, to find a space and to have a space that does that at a renowned festival like Glastonbury means so much to us.”
Every year, the festival’s organisers invite new collaborators to create spaces, so although Arrivals isn’t a permanent fixture, its impact in 2024 will be impossible to forget and hopefully a catalyst for yet more success in this arena. It feels all the more galling that it’s taken this long for festivals to catch up to this music – but it’s gratifying that they have.
“It was really special to have a place [to celebrate my culture] and be able to share the experience with so many others,” said Shivali. “From the art installations to seeing people have the best time on the dancefloor. I was so happy to come home and tell my parents all about it!”
As was I.
