Copyright by Peter James Kvetko 2005
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Copyright by Peter James Kvetko 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Peter James Kvetko certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Indipop: Producing Global Sounds and Local Meanings in Bombay Committee: Stephen Slawek, Supervisor ______________________________ Gerard Béhague ______________________________ Veit Erlmann ______________________________ Ward Keeler ______________________________ Herman Van Olphen Indipop: Producing Global Sounds and Local Meanings in Bombay by Peter James Kvetko, B.A.; M.M. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2005 To Harold Ashenfelter and Amul Desai Preface A crowded, red double-decker bus pulls into the depot and comes to a rest amidst swirling dust and smoke. Its passengers slowly alight and begin to disperse into the muggy evening air. I step down from the bus and look left and right, trying to get my bearings. This is only my second day in Bombay and my first to venture out of the old city center and into the Northern suburbs. I approach a small circle of bus drivers and ticket takers, all clad in loose-fitting brown shirts and pants. They point me in the direction of my destination, the JVPD grounds, and I join the ranks of people marching west along a dusty, narrowing road. Before long, we are met by a colorful procession of drummers and dancers honoring the goddess Durga through thundering music and vigorous dance. The procession is met with little more than a few indifferent glances by tired workers walking home after a long day and grueling commute. It appears that such processions are taken for granted as part of an everyday public experience. A few hundred yards ahead, I see a wall of aluminum slats outlining the perimeter of the large festival grounds. As I work my way to the front entrance, I hear a sound check under way. “It sounds as if I’m in a box,” complains a voice that I think I recognize as belonging to the star of the show, pop singer Lucky Ali. I try to peek through the aluminum wall but am unable to see the stage itself. Rounding the corner, I arrive at the front gate, a large wooden archway covered with white fabric and topped by two squatting men who begin to tear down the printed signs affixed to the top of the gate. There are about a dozen people waiting in the area, standing on the dirt curb or in the alley itself. As I wait, several motor-rickshaws pull up and drop off groups of two or three more people. Everyone is young, teenagers or college students. The women wear salwar kamiz, light dresses, or jeans and tee shirts, while the young men mostly wear jeans and shirts. As for me, I’m in khakis and a shirt, sweating a bit as it is only my third day in Bombay and I’m still adjusting to the October heat and humidity. The monsoons have passed, but a second wave of summer heat has returned. It will be another month before the air feels cool and comfortable. As I wait for the arrival of my contact (a cousin of a friend at UT and one of the only people I know in this city of some twenty million residents), I watch the men hammering at the arch. The worker on top of the arch finally removes the sign (from a sponsor for the previous night’s dandiya festival) and signals his partner below with what sounds like a blown kiss. On the ground, another worker makes sure the coast is clear, then watches as the sign is tossed down. It catches a little wind and, rather than falling straight down, glides and seems to accelerate to a collision with the man on the ground. The sign hits him squarely in the chest. At first the man seems ok, but then he crumples down to the ground. Eight men quickly gather around him, one vigorously rubbing his chest. I offer my water bottle, which the man doesn’t really want but is forced to carry as they lift him up and take him over to a plastic chair to sit and recover. v I then turn my attention to the event staff and ask at the ticket booth how many tickets they expect to sell. The young woman seems taken aback by my question, but finally directs me to Zafar, one of Lucky Ali’s managers. He’s a large, portly man with a serious look to him, but he kindly tells me that they expect 4000 people, even though “there was no advertising for this concert, not in newspapers, not on TV or radio.” Zafar says that so many people must’ve passed by the pavilion and seen the signs in the last 10 days because of the Navratri holiday, that that would provide enough publicity. They’re relying on word of mouth, he says. Zafar also tells me, “Lucky Ali has a small but loyal fan base. He has about 10,000 people in each city, but they are very loyal and always support him.” As I continue to wait, a bank of storm clouds rolls in off of the Arabian Sea and the winds suddenly pick up. One of the plywood signs promoting the show near the entrance falls over and hits a security guard on the shoulder. As I wince in sympathetic pain, the other sign tips over and lands directly on my head. “Good thing my head is hard from years of playing soccer,” I joke to a nearby guard. I help Zafar and his staff get the signs battened down, and then the rain starts. It absolutely pours for about 10 minutes, in the midst of which my contact arrives and finds me. We enter immediately and find cover and snacks in the food pavilion. When the rain lets up, we take our chairs and move into the main stage area. The stage is quite elaborate, much more so than I had expected for a mildly publicized pop music concert. A large backdrop displays the names of the artists: Lucky Ali, Shaan, Sagarika, and the host, comic Sajid Khan. Hanging near the stage are several large signs for Loaker Italian Cream Filled Wafers, apparently a major sponsor of the show. On either side of the stage, the event managers, Transfusion Events, have placed large letters spelling their name. But a few letters have already fallen off both sides, so that one says “Trans us on” and the other “Tra sfus on.” Two large video screens stand on either side of the stage, and a small tent to control the sound and video effects faces the stage. The stage area is rather large. In fact, the band’s equipment lies on the main stage under the backdrop, but an extension of about 10 yards more stage makes it feel like the drums, guitar and keyboards are rather far away. On the front right side of the stage, a ramp extends so that the singer can walk into the audience if wanted. There are several tall scaffold towers near the soundboard area out in the middle of the audience, from which more advertisements hang while video cameras and spotlights lay waiting for the show to being. Finally, the concert beings with a spoken introduction by Sajid Khan, who announces that the very special opening act would be none other than Lucky Ali’s younger brother, Mansur Ali, who is “sure to be a huge hit and will be on your TV screens all the time in the near future.” Like everything else that night, Mansur Ali’s set starts out with problems. Thirty seconds into his first song, Ali asks the sound engineer to restart the track. Once he gets going, Ali’s show seems quite similar to the Bollywood spectacles shown on television - with confetti exploding from the stage, choreographed dances by costumed men and women, and minus one singing. After the first piece, a camouflaged, militaristic hip-hop jam with machine guns shooting off vi firecrackers at the end, the artists clear the stage. Sajid Khan returns briefly to tell a few jokes and then welcomes back Mansur. The second number is a bizarre song featuring the lyrics, “Only Adam’s son makes mischief in the night,” with Mansur cloaked in black, naked men and women groping each other and tasting the forbidden fruit, and ghost-like bodies dancing across the stage in white sheets. After waiting too long for the next pre-recorded track to start, the set closes with a happy reggae tune about Bambi. Although the concert has only just begun, I begin to wonder if my choice to write a dissertation on popular music in Bombay was perhaps a mistake. How could anyone take this stuff seriously, I find myself thinking. The next artist enters to uninspiring music, but Blaise (pronounced as an equally uninspiring “blasé”) from Zambia tries his best to energize the quiet crowd by shouting, “Whassup Bombay City?!?!” After more waiting for the tracks to start, Blaise rocks the house with the Will Smith hit “Get Jiggy With It.” He does add a few Hindi phrases such as “nacho aur gaao mere saath” (sing and dance with me) and “ek do teen” (one, two, three), but it is only as his set ends that the crowd becomes more attentive to the stage in anticipation of one of the night’s headlining acts, Lucky Ali.