Playing indie music in Chennai certainly comes with its own challenges. For a metropolis of over 10 million people, the independent music scene just about barely exists. If you want to play music in this town, you have to be open to playing in juice bars or church social clubs where organisers have been known to shut a concert down upon an utterance of singular profanity. To play in this town, you need to be prepared to deal with toddlers walking onto the stage during gigs and overprotective parents asking to turn the music down….

The TASMAC

There are plenty of barriers to going for a beer and a gig here in Chennai. For one it is an intensely conservative state,one which isolated by a brutal climate, and language. Tamil Nadu is affectionately known as the armpit of India. The state licensing laws are extremely strict, TASMAC (Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation) is the sole alcohol vendor in the state and rigorously controls the trade. Drinking at “the TASMAC” is considered a sordid affair to say the least and culturally speaking is a mens only affair. The TASMAC is usually, a dark dingy place and the predominant tipple is a type of cheap brandy (Indian made foreign liquor) that you can feel burn your sinuses as you wash it down.

Considering beer is almost the most expensive item on the menu, most people don’t come here for an afterwork drink, they come here to get drunk. The only other venues that can serve drink are hotels with at least (arbitrarily) 21 rooms which leaves the numbers of viable venues for concerts at the grand total of three. Hotels are quite picky in who they let into their bars, presumably to get away from the stigma that the TASMACs carry, they do not allow entry to stags (single men), you need to come with a lady or you ain’t getting in. This rigid conservativeness is in stark contrast to the graphic and celebratory nature that sex occupied in Indian history, this was at first stifled after the Islamic invasion, then further suppressed by Victorian sensibilities and reinforced by Gandhi’s (a reformed sex addict, who battled this addiction his whole life) attitude against sex which become synonymous with the emerging independence movement.

Kollywood

Kollywood, it’s everywhere..

So in conjunction to the legislative and historical difficulties, there are other factors to explain why the independent music scene is so weak here. Well fairly obviously, India is not Europe or North America, there is not a comparable tradition of live music here. Independent music as we know it is a purely western phenomenon. There is simply not a tradition of going to gigs here. What there is a tradition of is going to the movies. Down here Kollywood (named after Kodambakum area of Chennai) is the biggest player in the South. Kollywood is massive, it is everywhere. It is a hegemonic behemoth that tows an ultra conservative line. Which makes sense seeing as it has extremely close links with the political establishment. Since 1967 every democratically elected Chief Minister has had links with Kollywood through leading acting roles or script writing, most famously actress Jayalalithaa Jayaram who has been Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu on numerous occasions from 1991 until 2014. Tamil Cinema is an industrial machine that aims to please and pacify the large masses. One will not see any movies addressing dominant power structures here oh no. Going to a Kollywood picture is an event in itself, the temporal and spatial limits of the movie and theatre offer an escape for the weak and poor in society from the very inequalities they perpetuate.

The music scene in Chennai

source: The F16s

The sheer dominance of Tamil Cinema does not leave much room for those who want to play music for a living. I met up with the talented and up and coming Chennai band, The F16's to ask them about the challenges of playing music in Tamil Nadu. Singer Josh lays it out

“A couple of years back, I don’t think any musicians could really sustain themselves by just playing music, unless they were working in the film industry. Movies, and the type music that we play are so far apart, we are in such a minority they wouldn’t even consider us as competition”

Saying that though, the music they are making hasn’t gone unnoticed, as guitarist Abhinav explains

“a lot of local cinema houses around here are taking the rock sound and making it *BIG*, especially local cinema. They have tried to re-appropriate our rock sound and it just doesn't work. That is far more enraging to us a musicians than us not getting a foothold in on their scene”

There is no doubt that the cards are stacked against them here in Chennai, this is a city with a dearth of venues available to play. They put the number of viable venues as the grand total of three, this increasingly has them touring around the country to do what they love (they were just about to embark on a 26hour bus ride to play a festival in Goa).

Apart from sounding great, the F16's do not dress in a typically South Indian style, their dress sense is more Kasabian than Keralan. They look like your typical indie band (think skinny jeans, afros and tattoos). This talented bunch are looking westward and appropriating culture in their own terms — and they are resolutely middle class. There is nothing new here, middle class kids have been doing this for generations, look at posh white boys Mick Jagger and Keith Richard taking black American blues music and making it their own. This points to a common theme for what exists of the independent music scene here in Tamil Nadu; of all the artists I spoke to, they may have different musical styles, opinions but they all share the same socio-economic demographic, independent music is the preserve of the moneyed classes.

Independent music & the middle classes.

Class is pervasive here, coming from a country like Ireland, outside of the University campus or political circles, it’s just not a term that you hear and may be construed as impolite to mention. In India though, you cannot get away from it. Kishore Krishna, the man behind the critically lauded “Adam & the FishEyed Poets” explains to me that

“there are invisible lines in this country, there are places like the slums where people like me just don’t go, likewise there are places where the poor just don’t go, the middle classes here do not engage in society here, they just put their heads down, pay their taxes and try to get on with it”.

He recites (visibly disgusted) the recent story of a street kid getting thrown out of McDonald’s in Pune by staff as he was being bought a drink. To Kishore, the poorer classes “are the most represented in society and at the same time the most exploited”. There appears to be a certain disempowerment and a sense of dejection amongst the middle strata of society here in India. I ask him if there was any political will from musicians to make some inroads into the changing the conservative alcohol laws in the city. Kishore replies

“there is an unspoken moral card that exists here which kinda goes like this: “how can you even think about these things when there are people starving to death on the streets — you spoilt brats””.

The emergence of an Independent music scene points to some rather profound changes to Indian society as Kishore explains,

“I made my first album in 2008, just me on my laptop, nobody else here was doing this kind of thing, and I got literally hundreds of emails for interviews, people asking me to play….people used to finish college, then immediately get married and that was it, then you start a family. Today kids are finishing college, then going to the big cities to work for a few years before settling down, career now comes before tradition — there is a void there that needs to be filled and in case music seems to be filling that”.

Adam & the Fisheyed Poets are about to release their 4th Album. Kishore’s last album explored the intricacies, frustrations involving an arranged marriage. His lyrics angrily engage with the frustrations of middle class life “to fucking spite your rabbit-like, your- Security-obsessed, middle-class mind”. His lyrics clearly portray him as a man who definitely has something to say — and he can say it pretty well.

Kishore Krishna: The man behind “Adam and the Fish Eyed Poets”

I ask him has he ever approached or written any subject matter about the inequalities in India today, he has approached the subject but to him, it just doesn’t work. He cringes at the thought of a friend who wrote a song about the life of an auto (rickshaw) driver. Kishore’s visible discomfort points to a certain transgression that middle class kids should not sing about inequality, especially not in a society as unequal as India’s.

It’s not that the middle-class are politically blindsided, they know exactly what’s going on. Independent music producer Siddesh M recounts with frustration and regret the land grabs that are happening in Odisha and Chattisgarh at the moment. I tell him about the struggles against Water Privatisation in Ireland that we are having at the moment and the resistance that I am involved in. To him this all seems rather quaint, he tells me in no uncertain terms that

“if you show up in the tribal belt and pursue some direct action, bad things will happen to you…. there is a privilege and guilt associated with being middle class in India”.

To fully explain this sense of dejection and helplessness echoed, a brief synopsis of the middle class and it’s relationship to greater India is required.

India’s middle-class, a synopsis:

On the eve of Independence, Jawaharlul Nehru addressed the nation, not in Hindi, or Tamil or any of the regional vernaculars, but in fact English. The reasons may be debated but the fact remains, that they inaugural speech of a nation was in a language that 99% of the public did not understand. This was not just a precedent but a culmination of a long process, the middle class in India have long occupied a peculiar space. A feature of early colonial India was the baboo, described in the Webster Dictionary as “a native clerk who writes in English”. They acted as a buffer between the colonisers and the colonised. English speaking, but not English, Indian but resented by their fellow countrymen, they benefited from the colonial project but were equally resentful. Congress, later to form the first Government in independent India was a distinctly English speaking upper middle affair. The British system of government was continued after independence and English was chosen as the language in parliamentary matters were to be discussed. This is turn permeated down through society, in a closed economy if one wanted a government job and all the benefits that went with it, one was required to speak in English. English became associated with progress and modernity. The early years of independence set the precedence for a post colonial hegemony whereby British sensibilities and standards were coveted at the expense of an infinitely older Indian culture.

Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu.

The reforms of the Nehru government attempted to address the abject poverty the country that they inherited, an India that had been stripped bare and it’s indigenous industries destroyed. The reforms attempted to transfer the wealth and property down to the poorest of society but instead ended up in the hands of the landed farmers instead of the destitute. The professed socialist nature of Nehru’s government absolved Indians of any personal responsibility for the poor as the consensus was that the government had inequality covered.

Combine this with a lack of social responsibility in the dominant faith, in Hinduism the path to moksha is achieved through the individual’s relationship with their chosen god. Hinduism lacks the social message that one may find in Judaism, Islam or Catholicism, it has been argued that elsewhere“it is Hinduism’s greatest flaw”. Hinduism offered the implication that those who are suffering are only doing so because of their own karmas or actions in a previous life. The majority of societies in the West may be considered post religious, but the fact remains that the social messages those faiths espoused still exist.

Paradoxically, modernity brought with it a renewed interest in religion, Nehru believed that progress was to be found in modernity and urbanisation, religion was considered archaic and backwards. Yet during the urbanisation and mechanisation of India’s industries and the subsequent societal shift, religion was the one constant in a life amongst the chaos of an upheaval from traditional rural kinship structures to an urban nuclear family based kin unit.

Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu.

The implementation of the reforms never worked, the destitute and the poor did not improve their lot even though the country was awash with cash, at one point the Black economy was estimated to be worth 50% of GDP. This emerging wealth was finely demonstrated when the Indian Government hoped to stop the smuggling of gold into the country by selling it’s own stash. This influx and saturation of gold on the market actually led to an increase in gold prices, such was the demand for it.

Continued political scandals and the notion that politics was dirty combined with logic of democracy, (the simple calculation of a lot more poor people than middle class) gave rise to feeling of disempowerment from the english speaking middle strata of society and a withdrawal from civil society ensued.

The economic reforms of 1991 opened up a new epoch in India. Financial liberalisation ended the legacy of Nehru and his failed vision for a socialist egalitarian India. A new India was born, an India supposedly free from the shackles of regulation and bureaucracy. The failure to deal with India’s poorest through an attempt at redistribution would now be replaced by the ever-so dubious trickle down theory. This situation created a space where the middle-class were free to pursue their own interests in the belief that it was in everybody’s.

Chennai

So where does this leave us today, and what the hell has it got to do with music? As a result of the process outlined, the middle class in South India today simply do not have a voice in the public discourse. The middle class are not represented, politically or otherwise; this is certainly true if we examine the Kollywood industry. As a result they choose to look elsewhere for entertainment or intellectual sustenance. Siddesh is very proud of the production values in the Kollywood film industry, he proudly cites examples such as Ilaiyaraaja- the famous movie composer but the movies just don’t appeal to him

“The problem here is that the industry here perpetuates existing class structures, patriarchy is rife, the girl always has to be saved from being killed or being raped”.

Issues of inequality are never addressed, they predominant mantra of capitalism is enlivened through these movies. There does appear to be a paternalistic quality associated with these movies, Kollywood portrays how to “be” in modern day India, it constructs a reality and reflects it to the masses. Issues that are not considered politically useful are not included nor addressed.

The adoration that these movie star receive undergoes a transformation and emerges as a form of political hegemony. This leaves the young middle-class individuals in India increasingly alienated and genreally looking to the West (more specifically to the counter-hegemonic movements that have emerged there since the 60's) for their cultural influences and tropes.

Cue the emergence of “Indian Idol” and the music channel “Pepsi MTV Indies” with it’s brutal co-option and ownership of the term “indie”. It’s not that Pepsi and MTV don’t get “indie”, in an attempt to corner the market it’s more like the just don’t care. Indie music may not have much of a tradition in India, this appears to have left a gap for the postmodern capitalistic machine to take the term and change it’s meaning however which way it chooses.

Yet the above process is wholly indicative of what happens when an economically liberal atmosphere is combined with a socially conservative one. The well oiled processes of late capitalism when can take advantage of a westward looking audience and produce a type of indie that is anything but. Engagement and contracts by musicians with these major global players of industry ultimately and inevitably lead to limits of artistic freedom where commodification takes precedence.

Madurai, Tamil Nadu.

Speaking of the music channels, Siddesh describes how the channels “MTV / VH1 / PepsiMTVIndies” are “fluff, they simply do not engage with real world issues, they are all about selling shit to people”. Kishore also dejectedly recounts how

“Eristoff Vodka using independent music on the MTV India show Bring on the Night was the best thing to happen for independent music down here in a long, long time”.

This sums up the entertainment industry in Tamil Nadu, on one hand you have a local film studios pumping out movies and songs on an industrial scale which are incredibly political as they serve in offering an escape from the inequalities in society that they perpetuate. For those who do not feel that these movies speak to them, there is an alternative in the allure of the West, yet this emerging market has been cornered up and carved out by global players and corrupted by commoditisation. This contributes to a cultural landscape which is politically barren and devoid of what makes us human, the material struggles that people face are instead substituted with one that sells us a false reality or insinuates that everything is for sale.

Music thats does not sell us false reality or is involved in selling shit to us gets crowded out of the discussion. Amongst the din there are some solid talent emerging, albums like Kishore’s or offerings from fusion band Le Pongal do exist, but it’s another matter entirely if they can be heard.

Emma Goldman once said “If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution”. If she was around these parts today, one muses that she definitely would not be part of any revolution happening here anytime soon…