MADAME SPUNK

Women are not programmed to question what they want, says musician-activist Kiran Gandhi

- PRIYANKA BHADANI

At the age of four, Kiran Gandhi remembers watching the Disney movie Aladdin (1992) and wondering why the impoverished Aladdin was the one on the magic carpet, saving everyone and living the best life. What about Jasmine? She was the princess who had everything going for her. Why was the focus not on her story? “Problematically, we always tell boys’ stories with three-dimensionality,” she says. “We tell girls’ stories in a very limited way where she either has to be saved, or is secondary to the main character. We never learn holistically about her journey.” Even as a child, Gandhi— an Indian-American electronic music producer, drummer, artist and activist now popular as Madame Gandhi—understood that it was a major problem in society.

“It was early on that my passion for gender [parity] started,” she says. This awareness developed with her growing interest in music. When she watched videos of songs she liked, she would feel upset about the sexualising of women in them. She wondered why men were not objectified in these videos. “I don’t have a problem with male fantasy, but I do have a problem with the fact that the majority of what we see is normalised misogyny,” she says. “And there is nothing to balance that. That is why in my music, I am constantly trying to combat these norms and re-depict the world I wish we lived in.”

She is speaking from her mother’s house in New York, close on the heels of the release of her latest music video—Waiting For Me. The video, shot in India in February, encapsulates everything that Gandhi talks about in the interview and as a TED speaker. It is directed by Misha Ghose and produced by Aastha Singh with Chalk and Cheese Films. The video features 10 women who act out their journeys of gender and bias.