What did you listen to growing up? is a question we don’t ask nearly as much as we should. I want our stories of sound, music, and heritage to be documented as an unofficial pedagogy of joy—a way of history making, a means of which we make sense of the past before charting on increasingly uncertain futures. Give vocabulary, beat, rhythm, groove to an untethering temporality. Make sense of our future nostalgia.
This week we deep-dive into my homeland, India. It is beautiful and complicated and something that can’t be given justice to in one episode. I’ll be splitting up my discussion about India in 3-4 parts over the upcoming weeks.
We start in the late 70’s and 80’s, a time of seismic change for India, and the world. The musical developments of the country ran parallel to the socio-political and economic changes that were unfolding in the subcontinent.
It’s 1984, my mother is 13 and the Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi is assassinated by one of her bodyguards.
The political reforms that developed in a post-independence India were defiant reactions to the legacy of British colonialism. In the Nehru years, India saw widespread land reforms and the nationalization of major industries. However, the global recession in the late 1970s saw India’s economic growth stagnate. Coupled with a growing state inefficiency, it left many Indians disillusioned with the failed promise of a sustainably functioning “Made-in-India”. The 80’s saw a shift in the interests of the government, opting to liberalize the Indian economy, radically shifting its culture and politics.
While globalization saw the importation of Western styles, aesthetics and political ideology, there were also movements that saw a revitalized interest in Indian classical music, a growing fascination with a pan-Indian identity, and Hindu revivalism. The way that India permuted globalization is not unilateral, nothing in India is for that matter, and it’s important that we acknowledge its inherent heterogeneity. The confluences of these forces are integral in articulating the way that dance music and subsequent nightclubbing cultures were forged.
