Sriram Emani, the founder of IndianRaga, a global platform for Indian performing arts, has an album on Facebook showcasing all the cups he’s collected from different Starbucks outlets in New York. Each of the 74 images shows his name being misspelt.
“It’s one of the most common names on the planet. But it was still spelt as ‘Syrian’, ‘Shadam’; not a single person got it right. If you can say Schwarzenegger, Saoirse Ronan, you can say Sriram,” says Emani.
This frustrating experience, commonly faced by immigrants, planted the seeds for Jam Boy, Emani’s first film as a writer, director, co-producer and lead actor.
Sriram Emani
Jam Boy is about a model immigrant who has done everything to be chosen but has not noticed what it costs him to choose himself.
Spanning 22 minutes 22 seconds, the film has already won Best Film and Best Web Series at DC Independent Film Festival, received Special Recognition at the Boston International Film Festival, and is now travelling through a growing international festival run. It will premiere on October 13 at the International Film Festival of South Asia, Toronto, North America's largest South Asian film festival.
In 2012, Emani started IndianRaga while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fourteen years later, IndiaRaga has grown into a global performing arts organisation. Its online education programme, Raga Labs Academy, teaches Carnatic vocal music, Hindustani vocal music, Bharatanatyam, and Kathak through a structured syllabus with certification at every level.
IndianRaga, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, also offers a Raga Fellowship that selects artists through a competitive international panel to create professionally produced collaborative performances. Its artists have performed at the United Nations General Assembly, Lincoln Centre, Jacob’s Pillow, and TEDx.
When Emani first spoke about IndianRaga, the platform was just beginning its journey of taking Indian classical arts to new audiences. Since then, several moments have marked its rise.
When Shape of You - New Age Carnatic Mix crossed a million views in less than a day, critics who had questioned the blending of classical music with pop began to reconsider. “Maybe this actually works, and maybe this is what's required,” Emani recalls.
Another defining moment was Shiva Shambho, which went on to become the world’s most-watched Bharatanatyam video online.
The pandemic pushed IndianRaga to move its fellowships, collaborations, and education programmes online. Its artists have since performed at iconic venues, including Lincoln Centre, and at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where three young dancers earned an opportunity after someone in the organising team discovered their work on YouTube.
South Asian stories on the global stage
Emani is now embracing his own identity as an actor and filmmaker, with a desire to bring South Asian stories to the global stage. He explains, “I wanted IndianRaga to stand on its own, without my name overshadowing the brand. Over time, I realised people also wanted to know the person behind it, so I’m embracing that through acting and filmmaking, telling global stories with South Asian heritage at their centre.”
Emani's foray into acting got off to a great start.
“I played the first-ever South Asian Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol, with 20 shows for 20,000 people. We staged Tiny Tim's funeral in the Hindu tradition, and I did some Sanskrit chanting on stage,” he says.
With Jam Boy, Emani is beginning to explore his next chapter, combining his experience of building a platform for South Asian arts with a larger ambition to bring South Asian stories into mainstream global entertainment.
The origin of Jam Boy
A still from Jam Boy
Jam Boy has its roots in Emani’s experiences navigating the South Asian diaspora in the United States.
He often noticed that many Indian families stayed within their communities. Children hesitated to take familiar food, such as idli-sambar, to school for fear of being told it smelled. Even accomplished professionals were reluctant to assert their cultural identity. This hesitation percolated into the performing arts space as well, he observed.
After graduating from MIT, Emani spent a year hosted by 50 families across 50 cities. It shaped his understanding of how people engage with Indian performing arts beyond the stage.
“For IndianRaga, I wanted to see what people think of Indian performing arts when they’re at their least guarded: at dinner table conversations, during a hectic morning, when college applications are coming up, and they have to submit an art supplement,” he says.
While working as a summer intern at Lincoln Centre, he found that the Indian diaspora had no idea what they needed to present about South Asian culture on stage.
“Indians are building most of the tech in North America that powers the world’s technology and leading these companies, but they are just a simple face. Nobody knows anything behind it,” he says.
Hollywood was no different, Emani realised. Actors of South Asian heritage were often restricted to comic roles rather than romantic leads, detectives, or action heroes. He understood that this stemmed from the lack of stories that captured the complexity of South Asian lives.
“The diversity, richness and texture I want to portray can only come if I write the story,” he says. That conviction gave rise to Jam Boy.
Set in a near future where immigrant workers promised freedom are secretly indentured, Jam Boy follows an Indian coder who smuggles his mother’s forbidden tamarind rice into work and discovers why the company needs him to forget home.
Emani says Jam Boy is speculative fiction that plays on the theme that the model immigrant is rewarded for being impressive. “But being impressive is not the same as being fully seen. It’s a character who’s done everything possible to be chosen, but doesn’t realise the cost of choosing himself. He’s led to believe that if he just reaches the next milestone, he can go home or get certain things. But the goalpost keeps changing, because they know model immigrants just keep working, working, working,” he elaborates.
The sci-fi element in the film also lets audiences see something that might be happening in the present but isn’t being seen, by imposing boundaries through exaggerated worlds.
Emani points out that the film is based on the real-life stories of many of his friends, some of whom have had to refuse promotions to protect their positions because of their H-1B visas, which keep them in technical roles.
There’s also a segment about food racism that Indians experience in the US, and also internal gaslighting.
“There’s a scene that resonated most with kids growing up here: the protagonist opens his pressure cooker and wants to smell the food, but he’s worried the smell will get on his shirt. So he puts on a rain poncho and comes in to work like that. Every kid from age four to 18 who has watched it says, ‘Whoa, that’s so true.’ That’s what the next generation is taking from it.”
A personal connection
The film also brings a deeply personal connection—Emani's mother plays his mother in Jam Boy. She has already featured in two IndianRaga videos that garnered over 2 million views across platforms. “On a spiritual level, it feels like an ancestral blessing to have my actual mom in my first film about my culture,” he says.
The international premiere in Toronto is a meaningful milestone for Emani as the city has a large South Asian community.
“We are waiting to get into one of the festivals in India so we can come to the country through that route first. Then I have a plan to release it online next year,” he says.
Meanwhile, the short film is opening doors to larger possibilities: a feature-length version of Jam Boy. He is now working with the Rickshaw Film Foundation’s writers’ room to revise the script while exploring a web series adaptation.
Beyond Jam Boy, Emani is developing thrillers that place South Asian protagonists in global settings. As a Trust and Storytelling Fellow at Boston University, his mission is to use storytelling devices to build trust in institutions and people.
“I’m calling my umbrella Ancestors and Algorithms. It examines what we inherit and what happens to it as the world around us changes: inheritance through migration, technology, and cultural change,” he says.
Edited by Swetha Kannan