When Ravi Shankar played at the International Pop Festival in Monterey, come the year of 1967, did he think of himself as a pioneer or a transgressor? Did he worry about the caste-like rigid manacles of his gharana’s honour, which he was brushing past in favour of ‘pop’ that blasphemous youthful malaise, an anarchic society associated with what a lot of the world indignantly dismisses and reduces to the word ‘hippie’? Or did he just work with what he understood the best, the ‘sound’ of his sitar, another day’s work at best? His concert might not have been his best performance (in fact, he’s known to have said he disliked the Woodstock venue) but as he plucked his sitar that day, he became a symbol, an idea of how music is allowed to cross the seven seas and break the apartheid of genres, almost like the metaphysics of Baul poetry that intoxicated Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet.
Come 2013, we might not give so much of a thought to the Indian indie journey over the decades as India’s become more prone to engagement, on a national and international level, cross-referencing, Indian artists dotting the globe and the country, collaborating, migrating, but while you are posting about your favourite post-colonial post punk band playing while you smoke your chillum-villum on the sand dunes, here’s to how an audience which did not have access to whatever sound track they could possibly want, travelled from waiting for the latest LP of the Who to come out for months, to a today-jazz, funk tomorrow-enroute-to-work shazam lifestyle.
Even though in ‘India’, our collective memory does not go back too far from 1947, as a country and even a sub-continent of culturally and ethnically diverse peoples, we’ve thankfully never been wanting when it comes to new music. A lavani has often lent itself to a classical structure from the free flowing folk form; a minor note has adapted a raga to Carnatic terrains from Hindustani Classical. Indie music in the form of Baul has delivered local village news and spiritual wisdom, in the Qawwallis of Chishti, psychology, philosophy, faith.
Music has been an important part of collective memory-making for us, from nautankis to thaats. The sitar and the rabaab did not become distant cousins in a void where people stuck to music they were strictly familiar with. There must have been several chaotic strains of music making, maybe travelling with kabuliwallahs and nomads, in boats across the Indian Ocean from the lascars to the Tamil boatmen. We’ve entered the age of gigs and festivals, internet radio and the live music scene from cities like Bombay, Bangalore, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Goa and Shillong to mountain, desert and beach festivals.
No one knows unfortunately, what the Indus Valley Civilization grooved to. We chart out a decade-wise timeline where we deconstruct how ‘indie’ changed from decade to decade, from Salil Chowdhury to Sky Rabbit. Read about the Beat poets of Bombay and the garage rock scene of the 70s. The psychedelic underground which influenced the commercial bigwigs of Bollywood – from Kalyanji Anandji’s iconic cabaret numbers to Asha Bhonsle’s “Yeh Mera Dil Pyaar Ka Deewana”. A girl’s college that organised one of the best music competitions and Shimla Beat. The risqué glamour of Bombay nightclubs where even Protima Bedi danced to the Savage’s tunes. The psychedelic rock bands that have disappeared into oblivion, but formed the base of funk in India. About how exciting and fortunate it all was.
Join us in this journey as we take you from 2013 all the way back to the origin of the Indian Indie music. There will be some popular, some not so popular and some out right shocking faces on the way. This is a journey about an industry which was always the “other” but a very important part of our musical history.
