Indian Music and Identity

May 12, 2013 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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During the Arrival Day activities, more than one non-Indian commentator remarked on the “survival” of Indian singing in the country.  It’s part of the surprise at the “persistence” of Indian cultural forms, that I kept hearing about in school. But the question and its generalisation have an unspoken premise: these Indian customs were not supposed to “survive” or “persist”.  Those that express the sentiment expected the customs to disappear as Indians shed them and adopt the putatively superior “Guyanese culture”.
So the question could be posed another way: how is it that with all the pressures on the Indian-Guyanese to jettison their “Indian songs”, so much of it survives?
This is my personal answer. My earliest memory is of my mother singing me to sleep. I discovered, when she sang those same songs to my younger brothers and sisters, that they were old Hindi “filmi” songs. As we grew older, we would “shake” the younger ones to sleep in our hammocks, to the newer songs. There was no need to understand what the lyrics meant or the principles of “ragas” – one apprehended directly whether the songs meant love or comfort or warmth or fun or pain.
Every home had a radio in those days, but Indian songs were relegated to those hours when other groups were assumed to be sleeping: early in the morning before 5am and late at night after 9pm. We would tune in for those songs, but for the rest of the day, the radios were stuck at Radio Radica, from Suriname. I could leave my home listening to, say, Mohamed Rafi (my favourite singer then and my favourite singer now), and follow the song all the way to the shop on the Public Road to which I might have been sent.
But when I started primary school (Lil ABC) at Uitvlugt Church of Scotland School I discovered a strange thing. My new friends who were from the section in which the school was located, didn’t know any of the songs I sang. In fact because of their snickering and the teacher’s attitude of sufferance, I gradually understood that these were (among a host of other customs) a “coolie thing” and should be indulged when I was at home, or better yet, not at all.
On Wednesdays, we’d be marched to the big Church behind the school where we were taught to sing hymns to the accompaniment of Miss La Rose on the organ. As I grew older, I learnt and sang my friends’ American soul, (Sam Cooke was my favourite), Ska which morphed into Reggae, and calypsos – and even the Beatles and Stones – but they never listened to, much less sang, my Indian songs. I had no difficulty knowing Gladys Knight from Aretha Franklin but they could never distinguish Lata from Asha.
So I, along with my fellow Indian students, developed what I later learnt the US Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois describe as a “double consciousness”. We would still sing our Indian songs at home, but we would view it not only from our own consciousness but also from that of our African friends. From the latter perspective, Indian songs were not “kosher” in public and one had to be at least slightly guilty about enjoying it.
So what kept the songs alive? The Indian movies. From the age of six or so, I lived with my Nani and Nana and they allowed me to go to the Wednesday Indian movie. There was an old lady, Aunty Sampat, who would take me in the beginning, but I soon graduated to the peer group from school. The swashbuckling hero, who always got the girl in the end, invariably did so through the medium of song. This gave a great fillip to my singing aspirations.
Wedding houses were also a great preserver of the local Indian music tradition with its filmi focus. My boyhood friends and I would crowd the mandatory “jukebox” to literally get the full “blast” of the music. The arguments as to who were the best singers were legion – and were taken very seriously. Fights would sporadically break out between the aficionados of Mukesh and Rafi.
By the time I hit high school, I remember my friends and I discussing very animatedly that it couldn’t be right for us to hide the songs we loved. Transistor radios had arrived and we had a way to take our Indian songs public – and we did. These Hindi filmi songs have become a part of my very being and there is not an emotion that I cannot relate to some song of Lata, or Mukesh or Rafi or Kishore etc. When I went after high school to study in New York, there was no community there – and I do believe that it was through listening to my Indian music that I kept my sanity.
Kant and Rawls might have made satisfied to my intellect, but it was Rafi and Lata who soothed my emotions. And so my wife and children, brought up in the same tradition, had a blast last week at the Alka Yagnik and Udit Narayan show.

 

 

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