Sometimes, music finds its way into quite unlikely spheres. In doing so, it extends and subverts the paradigm of performance with which it is most naturally associated. Protest music is one such area, a unique genre with resistance embedded deep within, where the first protest is, ironically, against being categorised or defined as a homogenous type of music.
For these very reasons, it is hard to recreate a timeline of protest music, for protest is inherent to human existence and may certainly have existed since the Stone Age. Shephali, a research scholar from Jawaharlal Nehru University who has been working on theatricality and resistance, will never forget a scene she witnessed in a Bihar village some years ago. “Some people, mostly women, had congregated near a small shrine under a peepul tree. It was a Tuesday, so they first sang a song dedicated to Lord Hanuman. Since we were only a few days away from Holi, they chose a hori next. Immediately after that, they switched to a happy, entertaining song where they teased each other. But what followed left me stunned, for they ended with a protest song that was full of their anger, experiences and suffering as women. It was fascinating, because the same physical space kept transforming, first acting as religious, then entertaining, and then providing a space for resistance,” she says.
Academic and singer Sumangala Damodaran, who released Songs of Protest, an album of protest music last year, feels that any music representing a rebellious stance which disagrees with something happening in the mainstream can be called protest music. Her research deals with the musical traditions of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), which was set up in 1943. “The IPTA is one of the first examples of an organisation consciously set up to be used for protest. They had ideas on how protest could be articulated, and creating music to bring forward the protest was an important part of this structure. Their music drew on folk traditions, but also included extensive classical contributions from stalwarts like Pt. Ravi Shankar, who was an IPTA member. Their music was never documented and has mostly been lost over time. I managed to find a large number of songs once I started collecting them. My album features nine songs from this collection in Hindi, Malayalam and Bengali,” she explains.
Damodaran’s documentation also brings out the stylistic wealth of IPTA’s protest music. In Kerala, the Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC) moulded folk tunes to make them more melodic, as it was felt that the Malayalam folk tradition consisted of repetitive and monotonous musical forms, an aesthetic unsuited to the needs of messages that are intended to change the world. This new identity had to depict the hopes, aspirations and conditions of the Malayali people, because dominant popular commercial traditions drew heavily on Tamil. The KPAC also drew on Hindustani music, because it was a familiar source for many listeners in Kerala.
Meanwhile, in Bengal, Salil Chowdhury was shaping a harmonic tradition that moved away from what Damodaran terms the “modal” nature of Indian music, where a basic melody uses a certain combination of notes. She studied Chowdhury’s impact on the Indian choir tradition through his brand of harmonic orchestration, which introduced more than one modal melody into a song, thus making different parts of a song sound different. This, she writes, points to innovation not just in poetic content but also in form.
The IPTA’s music is assimilated into its theatrical practices; however, protest music can be packaged in many other ways, also originating from poetry. While Paash and Faiz are names that easily come to mind, Shephali points to the teeming kavi sammelans in rural India, where villagers arrange for poets and revel in all-night expositions of poetry, extending simple hospitality towards the poet in return. Issues that touch people’s lives often find their way into such poetry. Protest poetry serves to locate aesthetic possibilities in the lives of common people, making them realise that they are the subjects of lore; they are the story.
Shephali cites examples of grassroots movements generating songs from their experiences. She talks of the Arwal massacre in 1986, which is now immortalised by a song in the Magahi dialect — Arwal mein katela jansanghaarwa dubey sarkarwa o bhaiyya (It was the Dubey government, o brother, at Arwal, that cut down people like we cut grass). “It is an issue that every child in Arwal is aware of. The song goes on to recite the facts, including the date and the way men, women and children were slaughtered. They still sing it,” Shephali says.