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BlindianProject

@blindianproject

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Black × Brown art, food, & community in everyday politics
Sister: @southasians4blacklives
Building cultural & institutional infrastructure together👇🏽

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In October 2024, we gathered in a living room in NYC.
About 20 of us. No structure. Just a question.

What could BlindianProject become?

Been looking back at that night.

Since then, that room has started to extend—
into other rooms, other cities, other conversations.

Most recently, co-presenting In Search of Bengali Harlem at @asiasociety.

Another sold-out room.

A quiet reminder that these histories,
and the spaces to encounter them are resonating.

This isn’t just about recovering history.
It’s about what happens when it meets people in real time.

And what begins to form from there.

Before it had structure, it had people.

And sometimes that’s enough to begin. by @blindianproject

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6 months ago

Some of the most important BlindianProject work happens off-platform.

In group chats.
Through hand-offs.
IRL — when someone lands somewhere new, needs to learn the lay of the land, and the work keeps moving.

Recently, Carissa traveled to Kenya for research on mixed Black/South Asian identities across East Africa and met up with BP family on the ground — Karibu. She later wrote about Nairobi as the first place her work felt truly understood — through diasporic recognition, care, and being taken seriously as a woman.

I met Aleya (@aleyakassam), Rushab (@rushabnandha) Karishma (@karishmabhagani) and Eric (@ericwainainamusic) through their work developing Pani Puri — a Black–Brown love story that illuminates the trials and tribulations of staying together across cultures, with music that invites us into Asian-Kenyan and African-Kenyan soundscapes. They’d seen the work BP was doing globally; it resonated. They reached out, and we’ve been WhatsApp family since — supporting, collaborating, and conspiring to bring our dreams to life.

This is what global solidarity looks like in practice.
Not spectacle — continuity.

Bandung wasn’t a moment.
It was a method.

And it’s still alive.

If you’re about the work and looking for a global, likeminded circle — DM me.

🎵: @rushabnandha Tear by @blindianproject

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10 months ago

These moments aren’t just photos.
These rooms aren’t just events.
They’re reminders of why we build—
living testimony that our ancestors’ work didn’t stop with them.
It continues in us.
In community.
In real time.
And in every room where we choose each other again and again.

This month, we filled two cities —
sold out Rich Mix in London, sold out Soul City Arts in Birmingham —
not because of hype,
but because people are hungry for stories that hold all of us.

What’s happening here isn’t accidental — it’s cultural infrastructure in motion.
Black × Brown audiences are gathering, listening, and moving together in ways brands rarely invest in — but absolutely should.

BlindianProject and SA4BL were never meant to be content.
They’re living infrastructures — made possible by real people, real stories, and the quiet labour of solidarity across Black × Brown worlds.
What you see here is not a highlight reel.
It’s lineage.
It’s practice.
It’s the work.

I’m pinning this series as a foundation for our next chapter —
a signal of the rooms we’re building,
the relationships we’re deepening,
and the futures we’re shaping together.

If you see the vision, lean in.
If you feel the energy, stay close.
We’re just getting started.

#BlindianProject by @blindianproject

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10 months ago

ROUTINE MAINTENANCE

18 / 13 by @blindianproject

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2 days ago

Work hard. Meet the criteria. The door will open.

That was the promise.

Recent conversations about anti-Indian racism in the U.S. have returned me to a broader question about race, merit and belonging already sitting inside MERIT-BASED ENTRY:

What happens when you meet the criteria and your presence still becomes the problem,” what exactly is being defended?

MERIT-BASED ENTRY, 2026 — @realjonahbatambuze
Reconstruction Studies / @blindianproject by @blindianproject

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2 days ago

Sometimes the rumor is the archive.

I left this in the margins while reading Carissa Chew’s (@carissachew) Remembering Interracial Intimacies: South Asian Perspectives on Black/Brown Sex and Romance in Colonial East Africa with the first Reconstruction Lab cohort.

Then Neeraja (@neeraja.np) replied. Then Maya (@mayakalaria)

Who gets to determine what counts as truth? What makes it into the archive, and what gets dismissed as rumour? What happens when shame, secrecy or silence push parts of our histories underground?

This is Reconstruction Lab.

Read. Annotate. Converse.

See you in the margins.

Reconstruction Lab / Reading 01– by @blindianproject

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12 days ago

Some South Asian media outlets are quick to celebrate Indian appointments at the highest levels, but slower to ask what those leaders do with the power.

Representation that remains silent when our communities are under attack isn’t solidarity. It’s branding.

🧵: @anildash by @blindianproject

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14 days ago

From the margins.

In a world of surface-level takes and acts of representation, we decided to go deep.

We started Reconstruction Lab with Carissa Chew’s (@carissachew) Remembering Interracial Intimacies: South Asian Perspectives on Black/Brown Sex and Romance in Colonial East Africa.

Carissa’s research moves beyond the histories of migration, trade and expulsion that so often frame conversations about Africans and South Asians in East Africa. It asks what else was happening between people: relationships, sex, marriage, family, secrecy, memory, anti-Blackness and the things that didn’t always make it into the archive.

We’ve been reading the paper together and writing in its margins. People have brought questions, family histories, oral histories, films, books and other research into the conversation. One note leads somewhere else. Someone replies. Another reference appears.

Carissa has now joined us in the margins, and we’re planning a live conversation with her to continue some of what has started there.

The margins are still open.

If you want to read with us, there’s still time to join the Lab, get into the paper and add to the conversation before we meet.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll share some of what we’ve been finding, questioning and arguing through.

Read. Annotate. Converse.

Reconstruction Lab / BlindianProject
Apply via 🔗 🔗 🔗 by @blindianproject

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15 days ago

Been following @yng_skib for a minute. His latest track has been getting a lot of play over here, so we reached out to learn more.

Skib is a Siddi hip-hop artist from Gujarat, India. He’s part of the Siddi community, an Afro-descendant community with centuries of history in India, and describes himself as one of the first Afro-Indian / Siddi hip-hop artists coming out of Gujarat.

The record moves between gratitude, struggle, brotherhood and the everyday realities around him. Alhamdulillah and Mashallah Khair anchor the hook: giving thanks even when the pockets were empty and the grind was heavy.

The song is predominantly in colloquial Hindustani—a blend of Hindi and Urdu, with Bambaiya street slang, regional dialects and Arabic phrases woven through it.

There’s another layer to what Skib is doing that matters to us. He’s conscious of hip-hop’s roots in Black American communities while making music from his own Siddi and Gujarati experience.

In his words:

“Being Black and Brown in India, holding down the Siddi heritage while bridging that raw Black American hip-hop spirit with Desi street sound, is a core part of my identity and why this record exists.”

Go run up @yng_skib. 🖤🤎 by @blindianproject

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18 days ago

Meet Raj Makhija (@cookedbyraj)—sound engineer, culinary artist and founder of @rootschai, making ancestral healing tea in NYC.

Handcrafted in small batches with organic single-origin black tea from Assam and fresh whole spices. A portion of every sale supports essential aid—from the Bronx to Palestine.

Community means recognising the people putting in the work for something bigger than themselves. Raj is one of those people.

Don’t take our word for it, NYC—go find Roots Chai. ☕️

🎥: @offeringrain nataliepenapeart by @blindianproject

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19 days ago

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20 days ago

Pay attention to what is being said.
Pay attention to who it is being said about.

Is your day-to-day life better?
Who reflects your values? by @blindianproject

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21 days ago