Hansini Bhasker
Middletown, CT| Grant Category: | Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Program |
| Project Title: | (De)constructing “Disability” in Chennai’s Current Karnatak Music Performance Scene |
| Field of Study: | Anthropology |
| Home Institution: | Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT |
| Host Institution: | University of Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu |
| Grant Start Month: | September 2025 |
| Duration of Grant: | Nine months |
Brief Bio:
Hansini Bhasker is a Tamil (ethno)musicologist, multi-genre vocalist, performer, composer, and improviser from Connecticut who deploys embodied music-making and movement for socio-ecological healing and change. She recently received her master’s in music (performance and ethnomusicology) from Wesleyan University. Earlier, she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in music (composition and musicology) from Princeton University, with certificates in vocal performance, cognitive science, entrepreneurship, and finance. She is a YoungArts winner in Voice and winner of the concerto competition of Wesleyan whose musical practice and research bridge across Karnatak, Western classical opera and early choral repertory, French chanson, jazz, pop, musical theater, gospel, R&B, Kazakh folk, Javanese gamelan, and experimental soundscape and extended vocal techniques. Her master’s thesis explored cross-cultural contrasts, evolutions, and interactions in the use and control of vibration, timbre variation, and pitch oscillation in vocalization. Following her Fulbright year, she will be pursuing a PhD in ethnomusicology, dwelling further on questions related to performers’ identity-making through interactions related to the physical environment, accessibility, and legal and sociocultural contexts. She is an avid lover of food, languages, reading, biking, and “musicking”.
Hansini’s Fulbright-Nehru research project is examining how Karnatak performers in Chennai navigate relations between mind, body, ability, and self; the study is based within three distinct contexts: the Tamil Nadu state; the nation of India; and U.S. diasporic organizations. She believes that the current inflectional moment – which celebrates local artists with disability by combining Indian concepts of disability with Western ideas introduced through migratory diasporic engagement – offers an exceptional and timely case study to explore how people negotiate legal and sociocultural conditions in framing and claiming their identities.