Singing in the Dark Times

It doesn’t matter whether you are genuinely persuaded by the cause. These songs are meant to hypnotise you,at least for a bit. Everything makes simple,blazing sense. Music can worm its way through your sophisticated defences,which is why it is such a powerful weapon of defiance and propaganda.

And it tends to produce belief without knowledge.

I used to be moved,in a shallow and indiscriminate way,by any kind of message music — from national anthems to Communist rallying songs,from military marching music to anti-war protest songs,even sports anthems.

As a child,I loved the rhythm and words of Rule Britannia just as I liked Balikudeerangale,a Kerala People’s Arts Club song.

Songs that spur and exhort are meant to make situations bearable,and inure people to immediate pain for the larger glory. Chivalric ballads,like the famous Song of Roland,told soldiers of heroism and duty,and reminded them of great warriors before them. (They still serve the same purpose in movies like Lakshya or Border.)

Same way,Soviet “tractor musicals” mixed song and dance with revolutionary pieties. They were about happily subordinating yourself to the collective goal,about the joys of hard labour. In Grigori Aleksandrov’s film The Bright Path (1940),workers sing,“Whether you work a machine or break through rocks/ A wonderful dream reveals itself and calls you forward”. In Britain,music hall songs egged boys to battle for the Boer wars and the First World War. (These songs also traded in crude racial stereotypes to attack the Axis forces,with songs like The Jap and the Wop and the Hun.)

All successful movements need a memorable song,all flag-flappers need a soundtrack. The French Revolution had its Marseillaise,the revolutionary socialists had the Internationale and the Red Flag,the Fascists had their Giovinezza. Yankee Doodle was first used by the British army to mock the ragtag American redcoats. But the colonials coopted it and sang it back to them as an upbeat victory jingle,a “nyah nyah-nyah,nyah nyah” taunt. As the British officer,Thomas Anburey,wrote in his diary,“Yankee Doodle is now their paean,a favourite of favourites,played in their army,esteemed as warlike as the Grenadier’s March…. it was not a little mortifying to hear them play this tune,when their army marched down to our surrender.”

Through IPTA-influenced Bombay cinema and Doordarshan’s social programming,some of these “ek duje ke saath chalein” songs have seeped into our cultural cortex. And after years of the same thing,the vocabulary seems to crust over,the images are so familiar that you cease responding to them. Unlike poetry that makes the world rich and strange,propaganda is meant to reiterate,drum in the same idea over and over again — the reddening dawn,the flaming torches,the fortresses of power.

But that’s not to say that they lose their power to surprise and galvanise. In one of Nadine Gordimer’s novels,Burger’s Daughter,there is a moment when Communist slogans are recast by angry young blacks,and the faded battle-cries are given a new and painful spontaneity — “old phrases crack,meaning shakes out wet and new”.

Think of We Shall Overcome,a civil rights song that has broken free of its origins,and become a vessel for all kinds of aspirations — it has been sung by Irish agitators,during the Velvet Revolution in Prague,in Spain,in Sweden,all over India in many languages. It’s even part of the Lokpal anthem.

Of course,this stuff is entirely subjective — you may feel uplifted by songs that leave me cold. As George Orwell pointed out,what thrilled many Continentals might often seem embarrassing to someone from the English working class. Personally,I draw the line at those consciousness-raising music videos with movie stars and pop stars holding candles and wearing pious,kind expressions. There’s a great 30 Rock episode where those We Are the World-type celebrity concerts for a cause were skewered with the silly medley,Give him a kidney,just one kidney. In fact,songs are best fought with other songs. In the Soviet Union,artists often cut,copied and circulated “unacceptable” tapes. The band Negativland mocked the jingles of cola companies with their album Dispepsi.

But for all the energising power of song,the one musical moment that gave me the goosebumps was the Beating Retreat ceremony in Delhi — when right at the end,after the national anthem,Raisina Hill suddenly lit up,to a moment of resonant silence.

amulya.gopalakrishnan@expressindia.com