Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia

Ali Sethi is a New York-based singer, composer and storyteller whose music advances a syncretic South Asian identity. Fusing classical ragas with contemporary beats, his music feels “stealthily subversive” (The New Yorker) and marries the metaphors of Punjabi poetry with camp and queer sensibilities. In 2022 his song ‘Pasoori’ became the first Pakistani single to top Spotify’s Global Viral chart, and was Google’s most ‘hum-to-search’ song in the world. In 2022 he was named to Time’s ‘100 Next’ list, his music praised for showing that “differences of culture, language, religion and gender do not need to be antagonistic; they can, and always have, enriched us, and given us some of our greatest works of art.