As the first note echoes, the basement is awash with blue, the song a mix of jazz and electronica, each note a pebble skipping over longing vocals. The floating, psychedelic layers of synth that sculpt this song are what bring me to these spaces. I have always mourned having no Leo placements (the zodiac sign known for beauty and confidence, bordering on vanity) in my astrological chart, but something about a club or rave moves me to pretend I’m a limelight-loving celebrity about to get photographed by paparazzi. When I’m on a dancefloor, I want the glitter of my eyeshadow to catch the glint of the disco ball. Every inch of my skin vibrates to the bass. The song playing is “Neeli Roshni,” which means blue lightin Hindi. Its bouncy reverb has a foggy quality, like walking through neon mist. 

Static River’s voice is sultry with melancholic emotional crests as she croons in Hindi, “aansu dikhte nahi hai, neeli roshni mein.” The translation: these tears don’t show in the blue light. The world shimmers at the edges, the shame of existing dissipates for a couple hours, and I am a ball of unbridled potential. According to the singer herself, this song is about “trying to forget, and about escapism.” There can’t be more than a hundred people here, but we don’t need the crammed dancefloors of mainstream clubs. In Static River’s music, we have the elements of any good night out.

This is Static River’s debut performance, titled “Karakorum”  and celebrating the release of her first EP, Iraade, in February 2025. The space itself, BSMT 254, is located in a bare bones building at the intersection of Toronto’s Lansdowne Avenue and College Street where a set of stairs leads down to a basement with a bar and a small stage in the corner. Inside, soft blue and pink light pools across the room, echoing the show’s poster: a deep, royal blue sky, a bright pink lotus at its centre, and the white-grey ridges of the Karakoram Mountains in the Kashmir region. At the entrance, guests were asked to choose stickers to match their mood: a woman with a spray of Medusa-like hair for heartbreak, or a serene woman crowned with a lotus for hope. I chose the former.

Static River wears a silver crop top and jhumkas, heavy bell-shaped earrings, oxidized silver and encrusted with gemstones, like moonlight glinting against her dark hair. A bright pink dupatta is wrapped like a sash around her shoulders. Her voice is airy then syrupy like honey, with coarseness reverberating at the edges. Throughout her set, hypnotic synths put the listener in a trance, until the tempo picks up and hands fly in the air. Girls in all black, leather pants, chunky gold jewelry and dramatic dark eyeliner jump up and down to the beat. 

I snap out of my daze when at the close of Static River’s performance, I spot a short, square-looking man in a plain grey sweater with buzz-cut hair. He stands to the side with his hands in his pockets, awkwardly shifting his weight between his feet. His friends are all dressed in some version of office attire. 

These adults are exactly the people my parents hoped I’d grow up to become. At fifteen, I was convinced I would graduate from a business program, go on to law school and rake in millions of dollars via my corporate law practice (psych!). I spent countless hours mastering the SAT—limp hair, bare face, glasses, furrowed brows. I started finding myself on dancefloors like this, precisely because the party girl archetype is a direct affront to the academic expectations placed on me in my adolescence, and marriage pressures that came later in adulthood. At twenty, when I was away at university, my father yelled into the phone that if I didn’t start considering marriage prospects right that minute, the only options left for me would be divorced men in their fifties. The party girl, though, moves freely in a world that wants her to doubt her every step. She prioritizes pleasure, beauty and bodily autonomy when fear and shame are used to control her. I recognize that my parents wanted me to excel quietly and swiftly enter a white-picket heteronormative life that elevated their reputation in the Muslim, Desi community. But God forbid a Brown girl have any fun.

Square-Man explains that Static River is his co-worker and that he came out to support her. I ask him if he comes to stuff like this often. He stares at me and looks as though I just asked him to do a shot with me on a Monday afternoon. “No,” he says, like both a question and an exclamation. His eyes crinkle when he smiles. “I didn’t know she could do that,” he says. “Makes me wonder what I’m doing with my life.” I wonder if he too, even for a couple moments, has found some magical escape on the dancefloor. Another DJ has taken over the set by now. While Square-Man bobs his head to the new beat, any existential angst that may have emerged has dissipated as quickly as it arrived. 

British-Indian musician Talvin Singh coined the Asian Underground  amidst the popularization of his 1997 record. Twenty-four years old at the time, he had made a twelve-track album featuring music from across the multi-ethnic South Asian diaspora in Britain. When he played it in front of Pete Tong, an influential executive at London Records, Tong deemed it uncategorizable and rejected it. Singh took the feedback in stride. If the music was indeed so unusual to a mainstream perspective, he decided to call the record Anokha: Soundz of the Asian Underground. Translated from Hindi to English, anokha means unique, the album title another quiet act of rebellion. 

When he eventually released it, the record—full of drum beats layered with rhythmic tabla, breakbeats, drum’n’bass, and sonorous Bollywood lyrics fading in and out—took the diaspora by storm. South Asians comprised a mix of first and second generation immigrants, with some clinging to tradition via the devotional elements of qawwali music, while others sought to remix their identities through upbeat bhangra and hip-hop. At the time, this record gave the diaspora “a common roof,” wrote Adwait Patil in NPR. Anokha club nights took place every Monday at the Blue Note club in East London, with lines stretching across the block. Legend has it that even the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and Bjork walked through the doors to see what the music was all about. Listening to tracks like “Flight IC408” by producer State of Bengal, the anxiety of dislocation sounds delicately looped into staccato string notes and jittery breakbeats. The rhythms mirror the experience of cultural in-betweenness, capturing the tension of alienation both at home and abroad, neither fully departing nor arriving. What made Anokha club nights so special went beyond having a space to let loose—this was music that resonated with the collective diasporic experience, bridging ethnicities and generations. 

Across the ocean in Canada, a similar scene was starting to brew, particularly among queer South Asians. Khush, founded in 1987, was a collective of gay South Asian men in Toronto aiming to bridge South Asian and LGBTQ+ communities through art and activism. Early members included filmmaker Ian Iqbal Rashid, now known for his work on the CBC TV series Sort Of. Khush organized Salaam Toronto, a one-day event at the 519 Community Centre with the aim of showcasing South Asian culture, clothing and food that drew hundreds of attendees. In 1990 that gathering evolved into Desh Pardesh, which translates to “home away from home,” with a focus on arts and cultural programming. Sharon Fernandez writes in the Canadian Journal of Communication that, over the next decade, Desh grew into a five-day multidisciplinary arts festival with thousands of attendees. Each day was packed with films, theatre and panels including content as diverse as “aunties in black-lace saris reading erotica and Sri Lankan community theatre about workers’ rights,” according to a 2004 essay by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Zahra Dhanani, community organizer and former DJ, wrote in 1999, at the height of Desh’s impact: “Nowhere in the world is there a festival like Desh Pardesh.” In her twenties at the time, she had been involved in the Desh community for over seven years.

In 2025, at fifty-one years old, Dhanani sits by a window at her East York shop and community hub, Old’s Cool General Store. She wears thick-framed glasses that take up most of her face, hoop earrings and a chunky flower-shaped ring. “I still feel nostalgic for that whole era of the nineties” she says, recalling: bass dropping, standing behind the decks at the Desh Pardesh closing party, watching as bodies surged forward.

She remembers one particular year where Desh attendees had spent the entire week putting up panels and film screenings to dissect issues as heavy as the violence of forced marriage, the spectre of caste oppression and the quiet cruelty of sons being prized over daughters. At the end of the week, as the lights pulsed low, Dhanani ripped the sound system with classics from the eighties film Qurbani and the room erupted in collective release. Hands flew up. Shoulders shook. The same people who had spent days dissecting pain were now screaming lyrics in unison, clinging to each other, sweat and joy blurring the edges. A protest, a party, a balm.

“It’s this combination of holding suffering and still being able to celebrate,” she reflects. “At Desh Pardesh we could be non-conforming and politically progressive … and not give up any of our South Asian identity … even though we lived in a world where we had to be fragmented.” She pauses, then lets out a small “hmm,” her eyes shut, her head gently nodding. In 1992, the first issue of Rungh magazine was launched at Desh Pardesh, creating a print forum for South Asian art, politics and cultural critique. Rungh continued in print until 1999, before relaunching in 2017 as a Vancouver-based web platform with an expanded focus on BIPOC voices in the Canadian arts landscape. The late nineties also saw the founding of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), an artist-run organization in Toronto that emerged from the networks and ethos of Desh, providing ongoing exhibition and programming opportunities for South Asian and other racialized artists.

Desh Pardesh came to a close in 2001 amid funding challenges. The election of Ontario’s Conservative premier Mike Harris in 1995 ushered in a wave of funding cuts under his Common Sense Revolution, applying austerity measures to social assistance programs and public healthcare. As safety nets collapsed, so did funding for arts and culture. Piepzna-Samarasinha also writes that as North America later reeled from the tragedy of 9/11 in the United States, it became harder to develop talent, or for artists to build a global following, due to extensive restrictions on visas and movement placed particularly on those in the South Asian community. 

Still, there were off-shoots, Dhanani explains. “Just as this was closing up, we started Funkasia,” she says. The first Funkasia parties, created by Dhanani and DJ Amita were held in 1998. They started at the now-defunct Red Spot, a tiny, slightly shabby lounge on Church Street where Dhanani says Latina drag queens often performed and queer BIPOC people gathered. “The first few months, it was like twenty-five people,” Dhanani says. “But then, one night, I looked up and there were a hundred. And then slowly, we started having lineups up and down the street.”

Funkasia soon outgrew Red Spot, Dhanani tells me. It moved to the B-Side at College Street, then to Fly Nightclub at Yonge and Gloucester, with its mid-size capacity (both venues have also since shuttered). “I was nervous,” Dhanani admits. “But the first night, there was a lineup all the way down Yonge Street. It was out of this world.” She describes how the Funkasia Boys, a group of dancers, would appear draped in skimpy sari material, dusted in gold glitter and jewels. At midnight, a nearly-naked “fruit boy” might be wheeled into the room on a trolley, his body surrounded by mango slices and grapes for dancers to pluck. One night, Dhanani herself was carried down Fly’s staircase on a palanquin, joining burlesque dancers and the Funkasia Boys in the middle of the crowd. They erupted into a choreographed routine to “Chaiyya Chaiyya”—the Bollywood anthem from Dil Se (1998), famous for its music video of dancers atop a moving train.

“We did nonstop theatrics,” she says. “It wasn’t just about the music—it was about the message, the vibe, and pushing beyond what was seen as normal.” At one point, Dhanani recalls, the attention spilled beyond the community. “There was so much press, it was like, okay, the mainstream is getting it.” But looking at the scene now, she says, something seems missing. Funkasia ran until 2011 and spawned offshoots that carried pieces of its energy into new spaces. In 2004, DJ Amita also launched Besharam (meaning “shameless”) at Fly Nightclub. It took place at the start of each month, sometimes letting women in for free before midnight—a luxury I have never personally experienced in today’s clubbing scene. Besharam nights—often marketed in its tail-end as Toronto’s longest-running Bollywood party— continued until 2020 and ended amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Fly meanwhile closed in 2019 after the building was sold for a high-rise development. Another Funkasia-adjacent series, Rangeela, began in 2011. Initially conceived as a fundraiser for relief efforts after the 2010 flooding in Pakistan, Rangeela grew into a full-scale production with glittering costumes and choreographed performances, running until a final party in June 2025.

Each of these events filled a niche: Funkasia blended everything from reggae to rock and roll, Besharam honed in on Bollywood hits, and Rangeela amped up the visual spectacle. But something of Desh’s cohesion was lost. “When Desh was on, you saw the same faces every year, every day for a week,” Dhanani says. “It was like a retreat.” Community was built through sustained effort. Offshoots filled gaps, but fragmentation makes it harder for people to continually engage and grow together.

Today, while there’s no longer one common roof for Toronto’s South Asian underground, there are a handful of collectives shaping what the scene’s evolution could look like. Groups like the Tawoos Initiative and Que’d Up are reimagining South Asian nightlife by curating spaces that are queer, hyphenated and musically expansive. Founded in 2018, the Tawoos Initiative  has been instrumental in platforming independent South Asian artists and developing live music spaces that stretch from experimental fusion to indie pop. They’ve platformed DJs the likes of Tamil-Canadian Lady Pista and Bangladeshi artist Dameer and brought renowned Pakistani artists like rapper Faris Shafi to Toronto stages.

But, according to Pratishtha Kohli, co-founder of Tawoos, there is still work to be done. “Seeing the ways this scene developed in North America is super disheartening in some ways, because it’s almost the opposite of what happened in the UK,” she says. ​​ Unlike in Britain, where dense South Asian communities, strong public arts funding, and national media attention in the early 2000s allowed youth to build music movements in tandem, North American scenes were more fragmented and received little institutional support. With more than 2.4 million South Asians currently inhabiting Canada, the population is spread primarily on two opposite sides of the country: Toronto and Vancouver. The result is an arts and nightlife culture that thrives in bursts—parties like Funkasia or Rangeela pop up and meet community needs but struggle to sustain in the long-term. 

“There’s a bit of an over-saturation in the market at the moment actually,” says Kohli. While that may sound like a good thing, Kohli says that it indicates people are working and creating in silos rather than collaborating and building movements together. That means there are too many options and not enough dollars to go toward each micro-scene. This can lead to burn out for organizers, lack of succession planning, financial concerns and even consumer fatigue. 

Sometimes development challenges boil down to institutional constraints. At a lecture series on the South Asian underground in March 2025, Kohli explained that last year Tawoos applied for funding to develop talent in traditional folk music and successfully received the grant. However, this year, they applied for the same grant to develop events with electronic dance music but were rejected. Some of the feedback her team received was that the project lacked artistic merit. “It’s like … we’ll [white institutions] give you funding if you stay in this box and perform music that we’d expect you to perform,” says Kohli.

Many outside of the community still largely associate South Asian cultural production with Bollywood or bhangra as opposed to the hybridized space it is becoming. Roshanak Kheshti, a professor at UC Berkeley, posits that the South Asian dancefloor is a post-colonial disco that tackles the collective grief, alienation, and disconnection from the homeland. Kheshti writes in the academic journal American Anthropologist: “Is grief a dance with loss whose choreography is learned balanced upon your mother’s hip, or is dance a grievance with time where no choreography can predict the next move?” Reading Kheshti, I thought back to the indigo glow of that tiny dancefloor at Lansdowne and College, how Static River’s ringing vocals captured this rupture Kheshti describes. In her analysis of Discostan, a popular LA-based party that aims to “decolonize the dancefloor,” she says that the desire to lose yourself in the rhythm transforms diasporic melancholia into a shared, embodied experience, where loss becomes world-making rather than isolating. For many South Asians that act of “decolonizing” is about creating a space where our sounds and bodies are centred, not tokenized. 

Grrlcrrsh, the founder of LGBTQ+ DJ collective Que’d Up, finds that mainstream club culture caters to certain demographics. She describes it as dominated by “white techno bros, rigid house music” and “people who just don’t understand personal space.” Even in “cool” or supposedly progressive circles, she says, there’s a layer of pretentiousness. “You have to work really hard to get their respect and even then, you’re still trying to prove that you deserve a seat at the table.” Instead of chasing validation from scenes that never truly embraced her, grrlcrrsh carved out her own. “So those people would have to come to me instead of me having to kiss their ass.”

Many of her own sets layer booming house beats and glitchy textures, a mix between sharp percussion and throwback pop hits. Then, often right as she gets the sweaty dance floor on edge, she’ll cut to a warped vocal sample of a Bollywood track like a knowing wink, her small frame springing up and down at the controller. Other DJs mixing South Asian music into their sets include Raf Reza and Nino Brown, each building their own unique following.

One vision of a unified dancefloor is Discostan, which has branched out from its LA roots and last came to Toronto in August 2024, co-presented by Tawoos. It took place as a daytime jam at Standard Time on Geary Avenue in the city’s west end. The venue is next to an auto parts dealership. If you didn’t know where to look, you could have easily walked or driven right past its unremarkable facade. Inside, Arshia Haq, the party’s founder, spun everything from qawwali records and acid house, to Egyptian artist Felukah, to Pakistani pop singer Nazia Hassan remixed with Charli XCX’s “Club Classics.” Projected behind the DJ and across the walls were live visuals by artist Public Ganja: neon edits layering the streets of Karachi, motorcycle rides through the Indian countryside, jewel-toned embroidery designs painted on trucks, and hookah smoke exhaled from a pipe. 

The crowd swelled, swaying then jumping. Keffiyehs were wrapped around necks, worn as bandanas, and shaped into crop tops.  Someone came onto the stage swaying, belly dancing into the centre of the dancefloor adorned in lacy red tights and a sequined mini-skirt. She ran her fingers through her thick dark curls before whipping out her matching red paper fan. She waved it the way ballet dancers do with ribbons, slicing through the air thwack thwack thwack. She moved to the front of the crowd, eyes and bodies moving with her, where she finished her routine by falling perfectly into a split. Finally, she gave her girlfriend a big kiss before joining the cheering, clapping, screaming crowd. 

It was mania. As Kheshti theorizes, melancholy and mania are two sides of the same coin. Loss and displacement take the form of “both depression and jubilation,” she writes. And mania, characterized by euphoria, hyperactivity, and reduced need for sleep all manifest on the dancefloor. Ancestral nostalgia meets the neon glow of reinvention. The guttural ballads I recognize from my mother’s cassette tapes seamlessly flowing into bubble-gum pop, like looking into a shattered mirror ball. 

Toronto’s South Asian underground nightlife has shifted over the decades from the unified energy of festivals like Desh Pardesh and large-scale parties like Funkasia to a more fragmented network of smaller events and collectives. While the 1990s and early 2000s offered consistent spaces for queer and diasporic South Asians to gather, funding cuts, political climates, venue closures due to gentrification, and institutional bias have made it harder to sustain that same cohesion. Today, groups like the Tawoos Initiative, Que’d Up, and parties like Discostan continue the work of building spaces where South Asian sounds and bodies are centred, even if these events happen on a smaller scale. Despite the changes, the spirit that fuelled past scenes—joy as protest, music as a way to connect across displacement—still pulses on. When I find myself back on the dance floor alongside people like Static River’s co-worker and genre-bending DJs and fellow shameless women, I see through the glitter, strobe lights and moving bodies that for a few hours we are all allowed to be more than what we were told we could be. ⁂

Larayb Abrar is a Toronto-based writer whose work explores art, culture, and diaspora communities. Her writing has appeared in Chatelaine, Xtra, the Aleph Review and various UAE-based publications.