1 // An Introduction
Like many post-liberalisation Indians there was an inflection point in my life when I started to shift away from consuming exclusively Indian music, movies, and literature. In many ways, this shift mirrored the shift in the larger Indian culture in the nineties, as the country and its economy began to open up and media from the rest of the world started to flood the airwaves. Looking back, that inflection point, for me, was Backstreet Boys’ Millennium. If I had to explain why, this would be my short and big-worded explanation. First, the newly liberalised media landscape of India slowly globalised (westernised) my palate in the years leading up to the first ‘bau-bau-bau-bau–<pause>–ba-ba-ba-bau’ of Larger Than Life. (Of course, as a kid, I didn’t call TV that; I called it Cartoon Network.) Second, in a culture that’s never shaken off the formidable ghosts of its colonial past, being the sort of kid who had a mental cache of boyband songs came with a great cultural cachet.
Once the wheels were set in motion, Millennium led to N*Sync’s No Strings Attached, and whatever Westlife and Boyzone were doing then; and without realising it, in the two decades that followed Millenium – the first two decades of said millennium – my media diet went from primarily Indian to primarily western (and mostly anglophone). This is neither a source of pride nor a source of shame. It’s just a statement of fact. This doesn’t mean I wasn’t exposed to Indian culture; it just means that the balance between of my media consumption shifted. So with music, there was plenty of M. S. Subbulakshmi, Alka Yagnik, and Zakir Hussain. And as I became an adult, there was Lounge Piranha, Avial, PCRC, Dagar Brothers, Charanjit Singh, and many others. But I increasingly understood music and its language through a predominantly western lens.
Perhaps it was the Trinity College courses I took as a child that set the ball rolling. And once the allegros and adagios and demisemiquavers vanished, they were replaced with the colloquialisms of western popular music – predominantly anglophone ideas of instrumentation, progression, arrangement, and production. It wasn’t until my late twenties, when faced with my now quite one-sided understanding of music – an activity on which I spent (and continue to spend) an obscene amount of my free time – that I decided to attempt to enter the world of thaats, ragas, arohanams, and avarohanams. I didn’t like that I’d spend hours listening to some dhrupad or ghazal or katcheri, and have 0 idea why I liked what I liked, what to refer to what I liked as, how to talk to anyone about any of it other than by saying something vacuous like: wow that was awesome.
My understanding has only slightly improved in the last couple of years, but the intention to learn is there. Over at Stranger Fiction Premium, I’m starting a new longform series that explores Hindustani classical, Carnatic classical, and Indian folk music traditions with the wide-eyed curiosity of somebody who barely knows what he’s talking about, with the help of other people who know this stuff.
Part 2 of the series will be out next week, and will begin to explore Hindustani classical music.
