Live music or living music?

One of the examples of multiple Indias I experienced this weekend is in how different generations patronize music. This weekend I was able to attend two very different concerts. One was a sitar and tabla concert by our (Katie, Ryan, and my) sitar teacher and her son, and the other was an outdoor rock concert put on by Coke Studio (an Indian MTV live music TV show funded by Coke), which featured the bands Agnee and Papon (and his band, The East India Company).

The sitar concert was completely instrumental, with ragas that changed tempos and tones to evoke different moods and facets of their subjects. Some parts had tabla accompanying, some parts were solo sitar, and some parts were dialogues between the two instruments. Introducing the musicians before the performance were some of the organizers from the Home, most of whom seemed to know both our teacher and her family beforehand (they were speaking in Marathi, but Saum translated some for me). Before the final song, various people from the Home felicitated our teacher and her son with flowers, poetry, and even one story where a woman shared how hearing sitar music reminded her of her late husband (Saum translated for me). They even gave Katie, Saum, and I a flower to welcome us as visitors.

The Coke Studio concert, took place the next night some 10 km outside Pune on the campus of FLAME, a small (population- but not acreage-wise) liberal arts college. Saum has a two-wheeler, which we took the 12+ kilometers of badly upkept roads to the campus, traveling through the small town of Lavale and along rich-smelling dirt paths surrounded by agricultural land, bouncing on potholes and bumps the whole way. (Luckily there was a more direct route with better-maintained roads for the return.) The concert occurred in an open air stadium that made the concert feel like a nighttime Dillo Day. The crowd itself was quite a bit bigger than the 700-odd students who go to FLAME, when it all gathered, which was surprising given how out-of-the-way FLAME's campus is.

The Coke Studio concert had many characteristics. Subtly in advertising is not one of them.

The concert was introduced by the Coke Studio spokesperson, who was an energetic woman in a red dress. After two commercials projected on the large screen that served as a backdrop to the stage, and lots of exhortations to “Make some noise” in a classic rock-concert-y way, the first act took the stage. The band is called Agnee (which means fire; and yes, they were playing at FLAME). My favorite song they sang was “Sadho Re”, which was in Hindi. It began with acoustic background and the sort of rhythmless soaring sweet vocals that sounded like a mournful ghazal or Turkish ballad, but after the first verse the full rock band band came in. There was also an extended bass guitar solo, which was pretty cool. Agnee's songs were bilingual, and even quoted Holocaust wall-poetry.

Agnee on stage.

The second band was led by Papon, an Assamese musician who had written several songs for Hindi films (including for Barfi) and had a boyish stage presence that was at times energetic, playful, and sweet. His fellow musicians included a jazz keyboardist, a multi-percussion tabla-player, and an automotive engineer guitarist, who when prompted to play while Papon introduced them ended up playing music that sounded more like funk than Bollywood. The song that the audience most wanted to hear, Banao (the Hindi imperative of “make”) was about Papon's experience biking in the Himalayas and talking to various spiritual gurus, all of whom were big fans of Mary Jane. (Yes, even in India everyone's favorite is the stoner song. These Dillo Day comparisons write themselves.) However, he also had several reimagined folk songs in his set list, one of which, Jhumur, was related to an Assamese harvest and fertility dance (here's a recording from an earlier Coke Studio concert). Several people from the audience came up to show us all the dance, which was a beautiful example of how the concert combined the traditional with the modern. All in all, the Coke Studio concert was one of my favorite concerts that I've been to, even though I had never heard of the artists before and couldn't understand a good portion of the lyrics.

The East India Company onstage during the song Banao. Note Papon with the acoustic guitar and the tabla player in the background. Also the giant Coke bottle in the background.

 Looking back, there were some interesting parallels between the two concerts. Tabla was used in both concerts. Both concerts made a point of emphasizing their connection to older cultural forms, rather than their international character, though both concerts had musicians that had performed in multiple countries. Our sitar teacher has played in Dubai as part of a South Asian cultural festival, while many of the musicians in the two Coke Studio bands also have played various places outside India.

On the other hand, the two concerts were situated in totally different places. The sitar/tabla concert occurred at Navara Old Age Home in the heart of Pune as one of their regular cultural program, and other than Katie, Saum, our sitar teacher's son Suvrat and I the average age was probably sixty-someting. (This is probably not surprising to anyone who's gone to a classical music concert in the States.) The Coke Studio concert was dominated by people between the ages of 18 and 25, mostly living in Pune but originally from as diverse places in India as Assam, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat.

Papon dancing onstage with audience members

The concerts also both represented two of the most powerful forces shaping India today. Coke Studio, obviously, is funded by a massive multinational company that thrives on its ability to situate itself as a hip, socially aware vanguard of the New India, with its rock concerts, relentless star-studded commercials (Coke Zero just came out in India, as we were told several times during the night), and polyglot cosmopolitanism (both the Coke Studio representative and Papon switched occasionally from English to Hindi in order to better express themselves). However, the show's deep Indian roots were also clear in the diverse stylings of the artists, who in addition to jazz and rock elements used Assamese and Punjabi folk music and vocals drawing from Islamic prayer traditions.

The sitar concert did not have vocals to be in a specific language, but despite this the musical and cultural vocabulary was very specifically based in Hindu religious music. The one song that was not a raga had to be specifically marked as lok geet, people's music. Unlike the Coke Studio musicians, who came from all over the country, our sitar teacher is from Pune and was playing primarily to other Punekars, people who had lived in the city since long before its recent expansion. It's telling that my friend Saum, who I went to both concerts with and is from Pune, was known through his father to several of the attendees of the concert, while the only relationship he had to the Coke Studio musicians was that he was wearing the same shirt as the bassist of Agnee. This is the difference between community connections of family and individualistic connections of consumption.

This was supposed to be us excited after two concerts. Eh, close enough.