This month I focused on tying up final interviews, compiling them and visiting libraries in my hometown of Jalandhar. I also met a few up-and-coming Punjabi musicians, who primarily dabble in hip-hop, who provided me with some fresh perspective on how they are tackling identity-hood and wealth creation in an industry that is quickly becoming an ‘export one’, with huge diasporic audiences, but only allows artists to live within their means in India, instead of those very diasporic shores, albeit with full encashment of their own social privileges. These meetings were an interesting contrast to the ones I had had with a slightly older group of artists the month prior, as their respective concerns and expectations were quite different.
With my library visits, and further online research, I also plan to begin writing my paper in the coming week. Most of this week and the previous one was spent in planning the paper itself, and framing it around some of the questions I had raised within my abstract and ones that had come up in light of the interviews I held in the past 30 days (I am yet to go through each interview and transcribe them, and also plan to do that this coming week [the longest one of which is already in English]). The next few weeks of writing are going to be more daunting than this research period that has come before but I do look forward to it, and to prying out some coherent answers to the big questions that this research project has been based around.