Indian dance music throws political punch

I was invited to India to cover the seventh Jaipur Literary Festival — but while there, I also looked toward the vast musical landscape in hopes of better understanding a country I know so little about.

In my hotel, Indian MTV played the usual commercial pop tracks by artists resembling a cross between Tamer Hosni and Sherine, with a more colorful, dance-laced Bollywood filter — people running, dancing and singing in gardens. Topping the playlist were songs from the soundtrack of a recent hit, the coming-of-age romance adventure film, “Yaariyan,” such as dance-pop track “ABCD” (Yo Yo Honey Singh, Shefali Alvares and Benny Dayal) and the more melodramatic, crying-in-the-rain sort of love song, “Baarish” (Mohammed Ifran).

On the journey there I had listened to the Beatles’ Revolver album, after having had a discussion about the sitar with Vinod Kalra, an entertaining 50-something gentleman, in his small family-owned instrument store in Agra.

On my first day at the festival, my senses were dominated by literature and text. The only sounds I heard were that of conversation, except for the sounds of people eating at the press and delegates’ lunch buffet, shoveling in food while engaging in intellectualism. Occasionally, the cacophony of chirping birds drowned out the sound of pattering food particles that mushed along burped ideas.

But on day two, I came across an utterly impressive live music show — enough to keep me going for the festival’s remaining three days. After discussions stopped for the day, I went by the grounds of the nearby Hotel Clarks Amer to hear a couple of bands: The Ska Vengers and God’s Robots.

God’s Robots headlined: Mumbai-based vocalist Shriik and San Francisco-based electronic music producer Janaka Selekta. On that evening, sarani player Suhail joined them, adding classical ornamentation to their otherwise dance-poppy compositions. Their sound — which can be heard on their recently released debut album on SoundCloud — is a pretty dope mixture of dancey dubstep, synthesizers, kick drums and layers of Hindi-English vocals, with light embellishments of classical Indian instruments.

But it was The Ska Vengers that blew me away. We rarely, if ever, get a big-band-dancing-and-decked-in-full-costume experience like theirs in Egypt.

As their name suggests, The Ska Vengers are an eight-piece band that blend “sky” rhythms with dub, punk, jazz and rap into socially-conscious yet very danceable music. Indeed, out of all the music I’ve heard in my life, I’ve never quite experienced a band so political and danceable and yet utterly spectacular live.

With saxophones, two jumping lead singers, a wild drummer and an English keyboardist, their set moved playfully between ska, dancehall, jungle and dub, with vocals that sound like contemporary Nina Simone backed by the rapid rhymes of rap and the “brrrrppp, brrrppps” of reggae.

The band’s lead singers/songwriters are Delhi Sultanate and Miss Samara C.  Delhi Sultanate tells me he reads a lot of Ashis Nandy and Homi K. Bhabha, but cites his other great influence as reggae music.

“For me, it was always like an alternative news broadcast, a news broadcast for brown people, black people, for people from the colonies,” he says.

“Suffer in silence, news never cover you much/Cus dem love violence and now it’s in a newsflash, ” he raps in “Gunshot.”

Singing mostly in English, The Ska Vengers are known for such provocative lyrics.

Miss Samara points out, though, that they don’t really have an official agenda when they begin composing songs. Sometimes it just begins with a bass line, and then someone feels inspired and lyrics emerge.

“It comes naturally, it’s natural to reggae music to do this,” says Delhi Sultanate. “I don’t have an agenda to write protest songs, it’s just at the moment I feel so disturbed and troubled by the things that are happening, and also in India there are a lot of revolutionary movements. You have armed insurgency, you have tribal wars in the jungle, you have various other forms of peaceful protest.”

This struck a chord with me, as Egypt’s many conflicting factions and violence against peaceful protesters came to mind, as well as the car bombs, checkpoints and millions of polarized people.

“In the urban environment, it’s a very tough and very segregated scene here,” he adds. “And those are the types of things I find extremely disturbing — it’s these islands of prosperity, which are growing in huge ghettos, in utter misery and human and environmental devastation. Often people are quite clever at shielding themselves from it, and you have this whole machinery of cultural production that kind of cloaks that, particularly within mainstream media and film.”

Toward the end of our conversation Delhi Sultanate and Miss Samara C. turn the tables to ask me about Egypt’s indie music. I give them the gist of it, and play tracks by Madfaageya and then PanSTARRS to show them how wide the spectrum is. I tell them that in Egypt, music, expression and our illusions are maybe the only tools we have left in the revolution’s fight for bread, freedom and social justice. My voice wavers.

Delhi Sultanate looks at me consolingly and says, “Hey, well just think of it this way. Music is a form of constructive confrontation. It gets into peoples minds and makes them think, even if it’s not always directly political. Either way, it’s a lot better than shooting off guns.”

They say they would love to come to Egypt and we proceed to go on a 10-minute tangent, plotting hypothetical ways to make it happen — we figure the best chance is for them to get a spot performing during the India by The Nile Festival this April.

“We’d love to play in Egypt,” says Dehli Sultanate after receiving a nod from Miss. Samara C. “We’ll see what we can do.”