Karshni’s Nair's New Single Confronts The Politics Of Language, Power, & Consent
In Malapropism, singer-songwriter Karshni Nair explores consent, power, and the linguistic trivialisation of harm through deliberately unsettling visual language. The self-funded, self-directed music video uses the Japanese art of ‘Shibari’, or rope bondage, as a counterpoint to coercion — foregrounding choice, trust, and bodily autonomy.
“Spanning the expanse that is the English language are words and phrases that can be prioritised within morality. Somehow, when the meaning of one word was forgotten, and another was remembered, the malapropism appeared to be the speaker himself. The malapropism thrust itself in places where it was unwelcome, making every other sentence that surrounded it, uncomfortable. It was a glaring error, a phallic oddity. It was incorrect.”
— Karshni Nair, excerpt from an unpublished essay, ‘Take You To The Candy Shop’.
There is a certain unspoken violence in how harm is often softened by language. Singer-songwriter Karshni Nair’s ‘Malapropism’, the penultimate track from her upcoming album Buck Wild, is built around this slippage: the moment where language fails morality, and women are left to carry the weight of that failure within their bodies. It is co-produced by musician and visual artist Shoumik Biswas aka Disco Puppet.
The music video for Malapropism — directed and edited by Karshni herself — does not attempt to illustrate the song so much as argue with it, complicate it, and push its narrative further. It stages a deliberate confrontation between coercion and choice: at its centre is the Japanese art of Shibari, or rope bondage, performed by Shibari artist Amiya Bhanushali, and experienced on screen by Karshni for the first time.
Filmed in Bangalore by cinematographer Armaan Mishra, the video is both energetic and unsettling. It features close-ups of Shibari binding techniques — knots, loops, wraps, and pressure points — intercut with Karshni’s face as she experiences being tied for the first time. Mishra’s camera emphasises the tension of this act: this is not simply eroticised restraint; it is a methodical, precise, and unsettlingly personal exploration of bodily autonomy.
The use of Shibari in the music video is deliberate and carries both cultural and political significance. Although ‘Malapropism’ as a song questions the violation of consent, the video shifts the power balance by emphasising voluntary restraint. Historically, Shibari and Kinbaku-bi were developed as techniques of restraining prisoners during the late Edo period (circa 1600s-1800s). However, it became widely popular in the Japanese underground counterculture scene in the post-war liberalisation period.
When practiced ethically, contemporary Shibari is based on trust, negotiation, and clear consent. Each knot and wrap exists only because it is permitted. Unlike the song’s focus on minimising harm and superficial politeness, the rope in modern-day Shibari often serves as a means to reclaim bodily autonomy.
Visually, too, the music video rejects comfort. It uses warped frames, negative images, and rough textures that distort both Karshni’s body and its surroundings. These effects are not only stylistic choices but deliberate strategies to prevent passive viewing. The viewer is pushed into close contact with Karshni’s face, her body, and her discomfort. There is no narrative escape or metaphor to soften this message. The viewers’ gaze is held and is held accountable.
The result is a body of work that is deliberately uneasy to sit with. It does not offer resolution or catharsis in familiar ways. Instead, it asks what it means to choose restraint in a world that so often imposes it without permission. In doing so, Malapropism becomes less about shock and more about clarity — about naming the mechanisms through which harm is trivialised, and the radical power of refusing that trivialisation.
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