Deepawali across KL- Brickfields, Batu Caves, Sentul and Masjid India.

The firecrackers and the songs linger, celebrating life in neoliberal modernity is a resistance itself.

A day of festivities and food, and of great significance to the Tamizh Hindu Diaspora in Malaysia. Batu Caves is a temple yet a site of cultural geography linking South Asia and Southeast Asia, through the Karaikudi-Kuala Lumpur cultural corridor.

I have been to Batu Caves multiple times since the past decade and a half. There is a major upgrade in the infrastructure bordering on gentrification. There is a Tamizh School next door to the temple complex. Tamils make about 6 percent of the population and days such as Deepawali are the biggest cultural node of the year for the community. I am covering Brickfields and Batu Caves this year to capture the sentiment on the ground. Diasporas are living beings with multiple negotiations with the homeland-host land dyad, depending on the stage of migration. Many families have no tangible link with India.

Spaces such as the Batu Caves are sites of a certain typology of cultural resistance, as expression of faith is often not linear. This is my second visit to Batu Caves two times in a row on Diwali, and this time the crowds are a bit thin. The tourists from India have made their presence with chirps in Gujarati and Hindi infiltrating the airwaves.