The third edition of Lollapalooza India wrapped up in Mumbai on 9th March 2025. A two-day spectacle of music, lights, and energy. Fans left with memories. But the word “Lollapalooza” carries a history few talk about. A history that is darker than the festival’s neon glow.
Lollapalooza was born in 1991, a farewell tour for Perry Farrell’s band, Jane’s Addiction. It was an instant hit. A melting pot of musical genres. A traveling circus of alternative culture. The name itself? A quirky, old-fashioned word meaning something extraordinary.
But before it was music, “Lollapalooza” had another meaning. A sinister one. During World War II, American soldiers fighting in the Pacific used it as a deadly test. A shibboleth—a linguistic password to identify enemies.
What is a shibboleth? The word comes from the Old Testament. In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites used it to catch their enemies, the Ephraimites. Those who could not pronounce “shibboleth” in correct dialect were executed on the spot.
The practice continued through history. From the Dominican Republic’s “Parsley Massacre” in 1937 to Nazi Germany’s use of Yiddish phrases to identify Jews in hiding language has often been a matter of life and death.
Lollapalooza was one of those words that determined who lived and who died. During WW2 Japanese spies often tried to infiltrate American and Filipino ranks. At checkpoints, sentries would issue a challenge: “Say Lollapalooza.”
The test was brutal. The Japanese language has no distinct L or R sounds. If the response came back as “rorra-parooza,” there was no second chance. The sentry pulled the trigger.
A simple pronunciation test could mean the difference between walking past a checkpoint or being gunned down on the spot. A word meant for joy, turned into a weapon of war.
A festival named after a shibboleth of death. History hides in plain sight.
The backstory of Lollapalooza would take us straight to another chilling memory. Closer home—once an ordinary word became a ‘password’ used to identify and kill Tamil minorities in Sri Lanka. A story that few of us still hauntingly remember.
Let’s revisit the story once again. The month of July in 1983 was one of the bloodiest in world history – The Black July – when the Tamil minorities were targeted and mercilessly killed by the Sinhalese rioters in Sri Lanka.
After a deadly ambush on the Sri Lankan army by Tamil militants that killed 13 soldiers, violence broke out. Sinhalese mob rampaged on the streets and selectively attacked, looted, burned and killed Tamil civilians.
Shops, factories and houses owned by Tamil minorities were set ablaze by the rioters with aid from the administration, army and police. They used voter registration lists to identify Tamil residents.
Based on eye-witnesses, the rioters stopped cars on the streets and asked the people inside whether they were Sinhalese or Tamil. If they were Sinhalese they would be let go, if they were Tamils they would be murdered.
To isolate the Tamils from Sinhalese the mob devised a unique approach, a special kind of password. They took a leaf out of the infamous Parsley massacre in 1937 where the Haitian immigrants were killed by the Dominican dictator.
In 1937, Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the Parsley Massacre. Soldiers held up a sprig of parsley—perejil in Spanish—and asked suspects to name it. Haitians, struggling with the Spanish ‘r,’ gave themselves away. Up to 35,000 were slaughtered.
In Sri Lanka, the rioters carried out a similar plan by asking for a linguistic password to reveal ethnicity. Every vehicle was stopped and civilians were asked to pronounce ‘Baaldiya’, the Sinhalese word for bucket/baalti.
A true Sinhalese would fluently pronounce the word as Baaldhiya, but a Tamil would find it difficult to pronounce the word and that would determine their fate – life or death.
Many who couldn’t pronounce Baaldiya fluently were burnt alive that week. Based on various sources, almost 3000 Tamil minorities were killed in Black July, when language became the password to life.
Sources:
Anver, G. (2019). The Politics of English in Sri Lanka: Perspectives from Postcolonial Anglophone Literature. ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/21
Tambiah, S. J. (1986). Sri Lanka–Ethnic fratricide and the dismantling of democracy. University of Chicago Press.
Boyle, F. (2010). The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka: The Global Failure to Protect Tamil Rights Under International Law. SCB Distributors.
Davies, W. D., & Dubinsky, S. (2018). Language conflict and language rights: Ethnolinguistic Perspectives on Human Conflict. Cambridge University Press.
Remembering Black July 40 years on | Tamil Guardian. (n.d.). tamilguardian.com/content/rememb
Wikimedia Commons, Lollapalooza India
