Bappi Lahiri’s unconventional music was gateway to spaces small-town India could neither afford nor dream of-Entertainment News , Firstpost
Bappi Lahiri taught an identity crisis-struck small-town India that our language could still be learned and shouted at the top of my voice, like the imported existentialism of Western music.
Art is of course shaped by the economics of creation, but its osmotic possibilities are really defined by the circumstances of its consumption. Bappi Lahiri, to most people, was the disco, synth-pop king who took a lazy, traditional Bollywood by storm, and probably, single-handedly introduced a new vertical – the party banger [long before the word banger came into existence].
But to us living in the smaller towns of the country, many first encounters were a matter of privilege. Colour televisions, cars, landlines with caller-ids, and so on were simply contours that people living away from rapidly changing cities had to map for themselves. As a kid, I had attended several weddings but it was the sight of this trippy, neon-lit floor that introduced me to a side of celebration I had not known before. It was the literal dance floor, a taped assemblage of a makeshift ground that for the purpose of letting go, belonged to anyone and everyone. It was a ‘dance floor’ that did not just become synonymous with a Bappi Lahiri song, but also with the idea of borrowed aspiration.
More than art, it is really space and access that guide the journey of art. Theatres and spaces we take for granted in urban centres merge into lived realities in smaller towns that are still evaluating cinema along the meter of affordability. We did not watch a lot of films because watching a film implied being incautious with hard-earned money, but music could still be stolen from someone’s radio or stereo. To kids who were introduced to Bollywood music in the ’90s itself, Bappi Lahiri was the king, an avant-garde sound chiseller who seemed to have abandoned the notion of sugary sur, in a youthful percussive way, for the joy of rabid sensation. Bappi Lahiri’s songs were not anthems to sing on a quiet evening in the courtyard of your rural home, but the ballad most men and women gyrated to at festivals and celebrations.
To understand Bappi Lahiri‘s relationship with small-town India, you must also unpeel the layers of obscurity. Cinema came to us via late releases on Doordarshan or the one or two channels our sputtering TVs would support via illegitimate cable hook-ups. It meant we sought rockstars in the yogic personalities on national television. For the longest time, I did not understand the concept of either performance, or the later to be christened ‘gig.’ Concerts, competitions, live shows, hangouts, pubs, and bars were are elusive misnomers we had heard of but also given up on exploring. The only live music we understood was the shaadi band, the cinema we witnessed was Sunday evening on Doordarshan, and the personalities we were forced to related to were celebrities behaving like monastic versions of their real selves. Almost as if art itself was a civil service.
And then there was Bappi Lahiri, the man with a distinct, almost baffling nonchalance about him as if his gaudiness, his extravagance was an extension of the music that demolished Bollywood’s notion of diabolically restrained rhythms and sounds for the sake of melody and melancholy.
Bappi Lahiri’s music had that raw orchestra quality, as if he set out to celebrate the unlived extremes of song and dance, like we had never seen or heard before.
To a country raised on a system of fidelity, and therefore a certain commitment to tradition, Bappi Lahiri’s unconventional methods and persona felt too audacious, maybe even trashy. But to us, the young ones, soundtracks like Namak Halal and Disco Dancer were gateways to spaces we could neither afford nor dream of. It was to us a pinch of freedom, of convention-defying audacity, of an elastic moment that though lived in the ludicrous gimmickry of a neon-lit floor, probably told many like “We can do this, we belong.”
The appreciation of art often requires perseverance that not everyone in an unequal country can afford. To us who consumed cinema and music as accessories to moments in real life, art, or at least good art, always felt alienating. The refined, almost elite texture of early Bollywood music pushed me away from classics that my parents’ generation adored. Life demanded that we learn English at a time when Hindi’s complexities in culture had become too austere to want to preserve. In that moment of uncertainty and perhaps rootlessness, Bappi Lahiri’s music became a moving anchor. It taught me that our language could still be learned and shouted at the top of my voice, like the imported existentialism of Western music.
Moreover, the musician was the balmy assurance to a country studying the soreness of wounds it had in the process of emerging opened. We, as a country, could not really embody the insouciance of Bappi Lahiri, but thanks to him, we can at least hum in moments of self-aware tranquility, “Raat Baaki, Baat Baaki.. Hona Hai Jo, Ho Jaane Do!”
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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