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Independence Rock

I love rock. Hard rock. Acid rock. Heavy metal. Techno. I love even the nostalgia stuff. Rock 'n roll. Bill Hailey and the Comets. Elvis Presley doing the Jailhouse Rock. They bring back memories of my school years when rock began as a statement of protest. Of anger. Of defiance. Defiance against what we saw as a stupid, unyielding, despotic establishment that had no idea of what we were craving for.

An establishment that not only forced us to conform but actually believed, in their incandescent arrogance, that they were teaching us what was good for us. It was like enshrining slavery and teaching slaves that chains were fashionable designerwear.

Rock was a way to protest. It was not home grown in that sense. It may not have been the best weapon but it somehow succeeded in getting under the skin of the bullying system.

Its defiance angered them. Its insouciance left them in cold rage. It was a clenched fist raised against the forces of deadly boredom and undying stupidity. It was our way of saying Up Yours to those who thought they knew better than us what we (as a generation) needed, wanted, craved for.

They saw rock as insolence. As sex, violence, vulgar noise. As decadence and cultural disgrace. As a cover for doing drugs. Something that left us less Indian, more firang.

We saw it as freedom, challenge, defiance. Exorcising the phantoms of the past. We thumbed our noses at the familiar cliches and opted for rock. Not for what it was. But for what it stood for. It could have been swadeshi rock for all we cared. What we wanted was simple: an alternative to what was being rammed down our throats in the name of music, culture, good taste. We wanted the right to choose our own high.

Rock was our stick of dynamite blowing up their obscene status quo.

Years have passed. It is almost three decades since I left school. But my admiration for rock has not dimmed an iota. Nor has the ardour of those in power to stop young people from having their say. It is their way of keeping control. Of breaking down the barricades of protest that every generation sets up against its preceding power elite, hell bent on keeping them in balls and chain.

Elvis gave way to the Beatles. The Beatles gave way to the Rolling Stones. Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Pete Seeger. All sang different music. But their language was the same. The language of protest. They were protesting against the mindless brutality of the State, the sickness that power breeds in the name of different political systems. They were doing what the great poets of our time were also doing, in different nations, in different cultures, different literatures. Fighting for you and me. Under the guise of a popular culture. Subverting the system as it were. So that we can think free, behave free, live free. And, ultimately, be free.

There was no difference between what the rockers were doing and what, say, Ginsberg or Ferlinghetti were doing to modern American poetry. They were rewriting the rules. They were crying for the same freedom that Neruda or Nazim Hikmet were. Their anguish was as genuine, as heart-rending as Aragon's or Yevtushenko's.

It was the language of the underground trying to reach the heart of the mainstream. To tell them what it means to be free.

For freedom has always been the leit motif of rock. Today's rockers are completely different from the ones I grew up listening to. But they are actually doing the same thing. Standing up for freedom, for you and I. Subverting the tyranny of the establishment and speaking for justice, truth and liberty. Yes, they use the flamboyant symbolism of sex. They use the desperate language of violence. They use the metaphors of defiance to lend image and voice to the loneliness of the young. So what is wrong with that?

It is the voice of the counter culture. It is our children talking to themselves, to us. As we once spoke to our parents even though we knew they would never listen.

But what saddens me is that we (in free India, modern India) are still allowing this voice to be beaten into silence. We are still allowing foolish politicians, corrupt law-enforcers and a stupid bunch of educationists to denigrate rock as something vile, wicked, decadent and corrupting. We associate it with sex and violence and drugs. We want to ban it, beat it, finish it off. As an aberration that modern Indian society can be well rid of.

That is why Maharashtra's flamboyant Culture Minister Pramod Navalkar is trying his best to stop the Independence Rock concert in Bombay. Just as West Bengal's Jatin Chakravarty had once tried to ban poor Usha Uthup as a corrupting influence on the minds of the young. The argument is the same: Rock is a bad, corrupting influence on the young. In private, they will tell you that rock is a cover for sleaze.

Nonsense. Rock is just the voice of the young, crying out to be heard by a cynical, degenerate, corrupt and ruthless mainstream that rules our politics, our lives, our education and value systems. It is the voice of our conscience.

Like rap is.

Like poetry is.

Like magic fiction is.

To see it as anything else is not only stupid. It is dangerous. It reveals the intolerant and fascist mindset of those who rule us. Who are frightened every time we speak out in any language other than the one they understand, that they have taught us. That is why our educational system is so moribund. That is why we are producing graduates who step off the assembly line to enter their sorry lives without ever having the courage to protest, to defy, to fight back the corrupt and venal system that has reduced them to caricatures of what they could have been.

Societies grow, mature, discover themselves when they allow every voice within themselves to be heard. No government has the right to bludgeon anyone into silence, under whatever pretext. If you silence a rocker today, you will silence a poet tomorrow. After all, is Gaddar less dangerous than Guns 'n Roses?

Does a government that allows accused like Sukh Ram and Buta Singh to walk around as free men -- and rule over our lives as powerful ministers even after allegedly committing the most shameful, most heinous crimes -- have a right to tell us what kind of music we should listen to, what kind of lyrics will corrupt our lives?

Even if it does, must we listen to them? Or should we simply tell them to go to hell?

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Pritish Nandy