Ditty's KALI challenges colourism and beauty norms while celebrating womanhood
She sings of the world, of nature, of those who suffer and survive, and of quiet love. Her music has long asked difficult questions about humanity. But this time, Delhi-born singer-songwriter Aditi Veena, known as Ditty, turns inward, singing of her own life — of growing up kali (dark-skinned).
In our society, the word kali often slips out as a snide or insult, a reminder of how deeply colourism runs through our culture. With ‘KALI’, the title track of her latest eponymous album, Ditty pushes back against that attitude — one that has long dictated narrow standards of beauty while denying countless women the right to see their own skin as beautiful.
Growing up in Delhi in a Rajasthani family, Ditty recalls being called kali “at home, in school, and everywhere,” and enduring a relentless stream of remarks about skin colour. “I grew up with my grandma, who was fair-skinned and unhappy to have a girl in the house,” she says, adding that her complexion was a constant topic of conversation: from worries over whether she should play outside in the sun to anxious speculations of “how will she find a man?” The track becomes an intimate exploration of those memories, opening with the stinging refrain: “Kaash meri daadi yeh kehti, khoobsurat hai tu, meri jaan” (I wish my grandmother would say, you are beautiful, my love).
These scars she bares in an aching chorus, “Hoon Main Kali” (Yes, I am Kali). The track plays with the layered meanings of kali — both “black-skinned” and Kali, the goddess of death and destruction in Hindu mythology to say dark-skinned is beautiful. “I wanted to address the everyday discrimination against dark skin and show how the same word can mean goddess, and simultaneously be used as an insult,” says the Berlin-based musician.
The recently released music video, co-directed by Sri Lankan cinematographer Kavindu Sivarajha and art director Akshita Garud, opens with women sitting in circles, braiding one another’s hair — a familiar sight in South Asian households that grounds the song’s defiance in rituals of care, intimacy, tenderness, tension and intergenerational trauma. The pared-down set draws on South Asian elements — golden earrings, bangles, and strokes of deep blue alta — paired with simple white skirts and a bodice reminiscent of the old-style breast-band drape. Sivarajha calls it “a celebration of South Asian skin, and the undoing of centuries of colonial conditioning.”
Singing of many worlds
Ditty often sings in English, but ‘Azadi’ — a single released in 2024 and part of the new album — marked her first foray into Hindi. It was followed by ‘KALI’ and ‘Dunya’, songs in which she feels freer expressing herself bilingually. “I feel like I’m integrating with myself, like I’m expressing myself in my own culture,” she says.
For her, Hindi carries a depth that English can’t capture. She quotes a line from ‘Azadi’: “Parvaton ki khamoshi ko samjho na tum buzdili.” The word parvat, she adds, carries a spiritual resonance: “The word itself has gravitas because we know the gods reside in the mountains. But in English, it’s just ‘mountain.’ That meaning, that weight, can’t be transported into English.”
Ditty’s discography has long been a mix of the personal and political. With KALI, she ties together 10 tracks in her mellow voice — from her journey from Delhi to Berlin, grappling with colourism, language barriers, love, climate grief, and political disillusionment. She began working on the album after Covid-19, focusing on the changes and slowing down.
“The pandemic forced the world to pause, look inward, and reimagine a future — to think about the damage the Anthropocene has done to the natural world,” says Ditty. She resists the idea that artists can stand outside politics. On ‘Dunya’, one of the record’s standout tracks that took shape during her 2024 tour, she writes about Palestine, the Global South, the yawning gap between billionaires and the dispossessed, and the war on the underprivileged. “Music can’t just be about love songs anymore,” she insists.