Janhavi Pakrashi, professionally known as DJ Tikka Masala, is a New York City–based artist working across music production, sound design, composition, video, writing, storytelling, and community organizing. Their practice investigates the intersections of migration, queerness, gender, spirituality, ecology, and cultural representation—asking how sound, story, and creative practice can become tools for liberation, self-representation, and collective care. At the foundation is a belief formed in childhood and tested across continents: that creativity, discipline, and spirituality are inseparable, and that by holding tradition with reverence while creating space for innovation, we can build communities that don’t yet exist.

Roots: Indian Classical Music, Discipline, and the Oral Tradition

Janhavi Pakrashi began formal music study at age five, learning Indian classical vocal music—an encounter that would shape their entire artistic philosophy. In that tradition, mastery begins with rigorous, repetitive learning of structure: ragas (melodic frameworks), taals (rhythmic cycles), and the vast repertoire of classical compositions. Only after years of disciplined study are students invited into improvisational space—the ability to create new melodic variations and ornamentations within the structure. The form demands both submission and freedom, both collective knowledge and individual voice.

As a Bengali immigrant child in the United States, this musical education unfolded within immigrant community spaces rather than in public concert halls or elite institutions. The learning happened in living rooms, at community gatherings, passed down through family networks and informal mentorship. This reality—that deep cultural work happens in protected, self-created spaces, often invisible to the mainstream—would become central to how Pakrashi understands all creative practice, especially work emerging from queer and immigrant communities.

The discipline and spirituality embedded in that early training never left. Even now, when Pakrashi composes music for theater, dance, or the dance floor, that foundation remains: structure as a gift that enables improvisation, tradition as something to honor while radically reimagining it.

From Media Activism to Feminist Video Art: The Early 2000s

Pakrashi’s second major artistic formation came through video and media production. Beginning at Rutgers University, they trained in camera work and video editing under mentors rooted in feminist video art at Mason Gross School of the Arts. This was the early 2000s, a moment of seismic political rupture.

In 2001, around the time of September 11, Pakrashi became a Ford Foundation New Directions Fellow, tasked with documenting immigrant communities organizing in response to the post-9/11 surveillance state. The work was urgent: capturing stories of families facing detention, deportation, and state violence. As an immigrant themselves, Pakrashi understood this wasn’t academic work—it was witnessing and archiving the survival strategies of their own communities. This experience crystallized a central question that would guide the next two decades: How do marginalized communities claim the power of self-representation through cultural production? How do they tell their own stories before dominant institutions define them?

This inquiry led to graduate study in Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where Pakrashi continued exploring how media becomes a tool for communities to represent themselves, to claim narrative authority, and to document resistance and joy in the face of marginalization. The framework was feminist, decolonial, and rooted in the understanding that representation is not neutral—it is a site of power.

The Turn to Sound and DJ Practice: Building Queer Community (2004-2010)

In 2004, while in graduate school in New York City, Pakrashi began DJing as what they describe as “a side project.” Within six years, it had become a complete artistic and political transformation.

DJing connected Pakrashi to queer nightlife in Brooklyn at a moment when nightlife was becoming increasingly commercialized and exclusionary. They began asking: Who gets access to dance spaces? Who holds the power to curate sound and community? How can nightlife become a site of organizing, rather than just consumption?

By 2010, Pakrashi was collaborating with LAVA, a Brooklyn-based feminist dance company known for embodied, participatory performance. This partnership opened the possibility of composing sound design and original music for dance—work that required learning how sound moves bodies, how rhythm and timbre create emotional and physical resonance, how sound can be generative rather than decorative.

More significantly, Pakrashi began independently producing large-scale events for intersectional queer communities in Brooklyn—gatherings that intentionally centered queer and trans people of color, disabled queers, and folks living at multiple margins. This was community organizing disguised as nightlife. Using every tool at their disposal—DJ sets, video projections, graphic design, internet outreach, written zines—Pakrashi was building what queer communities have always built: self-created economies and protective spaces.

This work was rooted in queer history. The self-created, mutual aid–based nightlife spaces that emerged from the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s became models for survival. Pakrashi came of age in this moment, just south of New York City in New Jersey, witnessing activist movements like ACT UP formulating responses to state-sponsored violence. Those organizing principles—creativity as resistance, community care as survival, the dance floor as a political space—animated everything Pakrashi built.

As a working-class artist in New York City, Pakrashi never separated “art” from livelihood. Throughout this period, they held jobs in communications and nonprofit work. Creative community praxis happened in parallel with paid labor—the reality for most artists who are not wealthy, and certainly for queer artists of color navigating an extractive art market.

The 7-Year Residency at Henrietta Hudson: Documentation, Zines, and Storytelling (2010s)

For seven years, Pakrashi held a DJ residency at Henrietta Hudson, New York City’s oldest continuously operating lesbian bar. This was not a residency in the traditional sense—there was no formal contract, no institutional support. It was a queer arrangement: a commitment between Pakrashi and a community space to show up, to hold court, to shape the sound and culture of the room over years, not nights.

From behind the DJ booth at Henrietta Hudson, Pakrashi began writing publicly. Using Facebook as a medium, they documented what they witnessed: moments of joy and vulnerability, the politics of who felt safe on the dance floor, the stories of longtime patrons and new arrivals, the ecological and social transformations happening in the neighborhood. These posts were ethnographic in their attention to detail, poetic in their language, and grounded in a commitment to representing queer culture on their own terms.

When artist and curator Douglas Turner invited Pakrashi to participate in a group show at Architecture of Tomorrow gallery titled Our Elements, Pakrashi transformed these social media posts into a zine—a form with deep roots in punk, riot grrrl, and feminist communities. The zine felt authentic to Pakrashi’s lineage: handmade, distributed through networks, created outside institutional gatekeeping. Drawing on a design background developed while working as an instructional media specialist at Pratt Institute, Pakrashi embedded DJ sets and original compositions into the zine as QR codes, bridging the handmade and the digital, the analog and the networked.

The writing from this period also opened doors into storytelling. A piece from the storytelling series This Alien Nation at Joe’s Pub—where Pakrashi told stories about immigration, displacement, and belonging—led to publication in the anthology This Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration, edited by Sofija Stefanovic. Seeing their name in a published book, held in libraries and hands, represented a kind of legitimacy Pakrashi had long been building through informal channels.

Simultaneously, Pakrashi worked as Communications Officer at The Audre Lorde Project, the legendary LGBTQ and gender nonconforming people of color organizing center in New York City. In that role, they shaped the visual and written culture of the organization, creating social media, designing flyers, building newsletters, and documenting the vibrancy of NYC’s QTBIPOC organizing efforts. The work was not separate from their artistic practice—it was an extension of it, a way of using design, writing, and visual culture to amplify community.

Policy, Recognition, and the Nightlife Industry (2010-Present)

The convergence of Pakrashi’s DJ practice and their deep commitment to queer community organizing eventually intersected with policy and institutional spaces. In 2010, Pakrashi’s DJ work earned them an invitation to perform at the White House during the Obama administration—a surreal moment for a queer, working-class, immigrant artist whose parents had fled political upheaval. Yet it also represented something important: the increasing recognition that nightlife culture, and the people who shape it, matter.

In 2018, after years of on-the-ground organizing in Brooklyn nightlife, Pakrashi was appointed to the inaugural New York City Mayor’s Office Nightlife Advisory Board, one of the first appointed positions dedicated to the culture and economics of nightlife as a serious urban policy issue. Serving as a policy advisor, Pakrashi brought their understanding of nightlife as a site of community survival, artistic innovation, and economic justice. The work included advocacy for LGBTQ and trans nightlife spaces facing closure, conversations about the economics of nightlife for artists and communities of color, and the recognition that the people behind the music and the dancefloor deserve protection and sustainability.

This strange trajectory—from immigrant child to community organizer to DJ to policy advisor in City Hall—reflects a hard reality: that meaningful change often requires working in multiple registers simultaneously. Pakrashi’s policy work was never separate from the creative practice; it was all part of the same commitment to protecting and sustaining queer, immigrant, and working-class communities.

Returning Home: India, Spirituality, Queerness, and Cultural Reclamation (2022-Present)

In 2023, after nearly twenty years away and following her father’s death, Pakrashi returned to Kolkata, India—the city where they were born. It was a homecoming charged with grief, curiosity, and a desire to excavate cultural lineage.

The journey became an investigation into three interconnected territories: spiritual practice, queer mythology, and the commodification of Eastern traditions by Western wellness industries. Pakrashi was searching for answers to questions that had been gathering for years: What does it mean to compose “meditative” or “atmospheric” music when you come from the very traditions being extracted and repackaged as wellness products? How do you return to your roots with awareness of how those roots are now marketed? What does it look like to practice spiritual traditions as a queer person in a context where both queerness and spirituality are politically fraught?

The Bauls of Bengal and Folk Music Lineage

Pakrashi sought out the Bauls of Bengal, the folk musicians and spiritual practitioners of their family’s musical tradition. The Bauls are often understood as wandering minstrels, but their practice is deeply mystical, rooted in Tantra and Vaishnava theology, and decidedly queer in its sensibilities—focused on love, embodiment, ecstasy, and the dissolution of conventional boundaries. Spending time with Baul musicians, learning their songs and philosophies, allowed Pakrashi to reconnect with a lineage that had been mediated through their childhood training in classical music but lived more fully in folk forms.

Buddhist Practice in the Himalayas

In the Himalayas, Pakrashi volunteered at the Nyingma Buddhist Monastery, engaging with Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and practice. Nyingma is the oldest school of Tibetan Buddhism, known for its sophisticated philosophical teachings and its openness to embodied, tantric practices. For Pakrashi, Buddhism offered a framework for understanding suffering, impermanence, and interdependence—philosophical concepts that deepened their artistic and political work. The monastery became a place to sit with these teachings, to practice meditation, do volunteer work in permaculture and animal care, and to be in community with other seekers.

Mayapur and the Queer Saint

Pakrashi spent time in Mayapur, West Bengal, a pilgrimage site for millions of devotees of the Hare Krishna movement. Yet Pakrashi was there for a different reason: to honor Sri Caitanya, the 16th-century saint and mystic whose life and teachings became the foundation for what is now known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). Caitanya is read by many queer scholars and practitioners as profoundly queer—his ecstatic devotion, his radical love, his gender-fluid expressions of divinity. Pakrashi’s presence in Mayapur was an act of reclamation: insisting that queerness is not foreign to Indian spiritual traditions, but has always been there, embedded in the poetry, the ecstasy, the transgressive devotion of saints and seekers.

Auroville: Intentional Community and Utopian Critique

Pakrashi also traveled to Auroville, Tamil Nadu, the utopian intentional community founded in 1968 on principles of human unity and spiritual evolution. Auroville sits at the intersection of many of Pakrashi’s concerns: an experiment in community building, a space that attempts to transcend national and religious boundaries, and simultaneously a site where Western appropriation of Eastern spirituality, wellness capitalism, and postcolonial power dynamics play out in real time. Visiting Auroville, Pakrashi encountered both the genuine idealism of the project and the extractive ways Western seekers consume Indian spiritual space.

The Artist Talk: Engendered Delhi and India Habitat Centre

The India journey culminated in an artist talk at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, presented through Engendered, an organization supporting gender and sexual diversity in South Asia. Pakrashi spoke about the relationship between movement, spirituality, and queerness in the Indian context, in conversation with Indian creative luminaries working in visual arts, culinary arts, performance, and cultural production. The talk represented a moment of public articulation: Pakrashi’s return home and their commitment to bridging the knowledge they’ve built in the West with the lineages and struggles they’re discovering in India.

Sound Composition: Theater, Dance, and the Question of Ownership

Returning from India, Pakrashi has continued composing music for performance. Before the India trip, they created sound design for Farm Arts Collective in the Catskills—composing a sonic backdrop for a piece exploring a woman’s journey through serious illness and medical trauma. Upon returning, they produced music for another collaboration with LAVA, creating compositions for a piece about collective movement and embodied care.

This work sits at the intersection of Pakrashi’s deepest concerns: How do you compose from the traditions you come from without reproducing extractive relationships? How do you make sound that honors the spiritual and cultural lineages you’re embedded in? What does it mean to be an artist from a colonized tradition, now living in the colonizing empire, returning to your origins?

Pakrashi’s production philosophy is rooted in what they call “returning to the roots with awareness”—bringing a Western upbringing, Eastern origins, and a lived education in political awareness into creative expression that simultaneously embodies and interrogates these journeys. Embedded in this approach is a subtle critique of cultural appropriation: the insistence that when you come from the tradition, your work looks different. It carries accountability. It refuses the exoticization that happens when Western artists adopt Eastern aesthetics without acknowledgment or understanding.

Practice Philosophy: Building Realities That Don’t Yet Exist

To understand Pakrashi’s work, it helps to know that it was not created for gallery walls or prestigious artist talks, even as it has landed in those spaces. It was created for people—for queer communities, for immigrants, for the disabled, for those navigating multiple margins, for anyone searching for their voice, their music, their story.

Pakrashi writes music for the dancefloor and the performance stage. Pakrashi tells stories on stages and in public conversations. Pakrashi uses social media, graphic design, and the internet as tools for community building. Pakrashi composes from spiritual and cultural traditions while refusing exoticization. Pakrashi organizes from the conviction that the people who shape culture deserve protection and sustainability.

In an era of extractive cultural economies, spiritual commodification, and the flattening of difference into markets, Pakrashi’s work insists on another possibility. It insists that through courageous creative practice—disciplined in its craft, grounded in real communities, animated by spiritual and political integrity—we can build realities that do not yet exist. We can create spaces where queer people are safe. We can honor traditions while radically reimagining them. We can make art that is also organizing, beauty that is also resistance, sound that carries us toward one another.

It takes courage. It takes all of us.

Selected Works, Collaborations & Credits

• LAVA (Brooklyn-based feminist dance company) — Ongoing sound design and composition
• Farm Arts Collective (Catskills) — Sound design for performance piece on illness and healing
• The Audre Lorde Project — Communications Officer; visual and written culture development
• Architecture of Tomorrow Gallery — Our Elements exhibition; zine and embedded DJ sets
• Henrietta Hudson (NYC’s oldest lesbian bar) — 7-year DJ residency
• This Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration — Published contributor
• Joe’s Pub — This Alien Nation storytelling series
• Deepak Homebase — Video Production
• NYC Mayor’s Office Nightlife Advisory Board — Policy advisor, 2018–present
• White House — Performance, 2010
• Nyingma Buddhist Monastery (Himalayas) — Volunteer and practitioner
• Bauls of Bengal — Musical and spiritual lineage study
• Auroville (Tamil Nadu) — Intentional community visit and critical study
• India Habitat Centre / Engendered — Artist talk on movement, spirituality, and queerness

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