A Sound for the Deafened:
“ After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
-Aldous Huxley.
Huxley had a point. While art finds its validation in stirring a certain sentiment, music, especially has been about accessing the heart. Of all the emotions that music has demonstrated its capability to stimulate, none, perhaps has been as ubiquitous as love. A close second, however, would be protest.
It might just be the oldest story in the world. People get oppressed; people are pushed to the edge, people rise. In anger, in outrage, in unity. And they bring great music along.
Unsurprisingly, India has an extended and stunning history of sound being harnessed to claim pain. There is practically no end to the names I could take, but a few seem far too important, or interesting to pass over.
Kabir: While revolution has bristled in humanity since its very inception, Kabir is a good place to start if you are looking to this country for examples of music protests. When he crafted words to dismantle casteist hierarchies, he wrote:
“ The Brâhman priest goes from house to house and initiates people into faith: Alas! the true fountain of life is beside you., and you have set up a stone to worship.”
Thus invalidating the notion that access to the Divine depends on the intervention of the Brahmin class. In the tradition of Sufi and Bhakti movements’ creative motives, Kabir and Mirabai gave soul to songs that sought to divest the religious and economic elite of its power, held in place by the idea that God only speaks to the man at the top of the social ladder.
Vande Mataram: Closer to our memories, Vande Mataram was taken from its womb, the novel Anandamath by Bankim Chandra Chattapadhay, and converted into an anthem of protest that symbolised the anticolonial sentiment of India’ s freedom movement. It emerged as a reaction to the government’ s dictum that Indians sing God Save the Queen, the English national anthem.
Kabir Kala Manch: Unsurprisingly, the present state of sociopolitical upheaval has driven composition of thrilling and anguished music. Think Kabir Kala Manch, a cultural group that was formed in the wake of the Gujarat riots in 2002. Their pro-democracy, anti-caste message is made apparent through songs like VAAT PAHWAA:
The song of the downtrodden has to be sung! My coming has a meaning... Its the selfishness of sharing a morsel with those who starve... I shall come... But not alone... My intention is not small... Wait and watch!
MC Kash: Roushan Illahi who goes by MC Kash is a man whose work will offer a much needed reminder of the original cause that birthed hiphop. A far cry from the celebration opulence that contemporary artists use to rule Billboard, Kash takes to the anger of the American inner cities where the genre came to life. Only he’ s rapping from Kashmir:
“ I don’ t give a f *** whether live or die You go to heaven or your soul to fry Cause all I know is‘ neath this sky Let the Armageddon come but the stones still fly”( Beneath the Sky)
His sound is reminiscent of a frustration that anyone, who is not war-torn, cannot understand. He minces no words to describe a landscape devoid of hope and calls for, if nothing else, awareness of the fact that not all is well with the world we often choose to not see for what it is. Predictably, his studio has been raided by authorities more times than he, or anyone else, would care to remember.
Indian Ocean: The most inevitable mention of our times, Indian Ocean has built much of its illustrious credibility on the backs of songs like“ Bandeh” which provided the soundtrack to horrors in Black Friday,“ Gar Ho Sake” which Rahul Ram described as a“ leftie anthem”,“ Ma Rewa”, a folk song whose rendition was made synonymous with the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
The Score Magazine
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