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Feature
Dancehall and Dalit Poetry
A Group of urban musicians comes together to immortalise a legendary
Sikh Dalit farmer's songs of rebellion
By MARGOT BIGG
Published :1 December 2010
T HE IMPLICATIONS OF FREE SPEECH have been a hot topic in India
lately. Dissent has been dismissed as sedition and opposition to the
status quo labelled unpatriotic. But these debates are, for the most
part, the reserve of urban, educated thinkers, who have the means to
make their opinions heard. After all, free speech is meaningless if
you aren't given a voice.
Imagine you are a poor farmworker, with no land, no stock options and
no Google. Your only source of income is tilling land to which you
will never hold the deed. You won't likely have the time, resources or
know-how to convey your message; you'll risk being silenced by your
very condition.
Bant Singh and locals with the Word, Sound & Power crew.
Bant Singh defies this assumption. Now in his 40s, he has been singing
revolutionary songs since adolescence. Singh is a landless Dalit
agricultural labourer from the village of Burj Jhabbar, Mansa
district, Punjab. He's also an activist with the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha
(MMM), a local affiliate of the Communist Party of India
(Marxist-Leninist) Liberation. Despite having undergone atrocious
trauma, including a brutal attack that cost him two hands and a leg,
Singh remains steadfast, refusing to keep quiet. He continues to sing
songs of protest that detail not just his story, but also that of
poor, low-caste labourers across the country.
Earlier this year, a group of urban musicians—Samrat Bharadwaj, Taru
Dalmia and Chris McGuiness—travelled to Jhabbar village. Bharadwaj,
who performs under the moniker AudioPervert and with his band Teddy
Boy Kill, had been working with the Max Mueller Bhavan's Goethe
Institut (Germany's international arts and cultural organisation) on
projects to promote electronic music across India. Dalmia, who
performs as Delhi Sultanate both independently and with the
BASSFoundation collective, is a poet and an MC whose lyrics and
performance style are heavily influenced by the Jamaican dancehall
sound. McGuiness is a DJ, producer and multimedia artist working
primarily with electronic genres. Although the men had already worked
with each other in various capacities, this is the first time all
three of them came together to produce one major project.
The men spent four days living with Singh in Jhabbar, collaborating
with him musically in what they dubbed the Bant Singh Project. With
them was videographer Lakshman Anand, who documented the process. The
result was four bilingual tracks featuring the vocals of Singh and
Dalmia, and a 12-minute 'making of'-type documentary, Word, Sound &
Power, created as part of the Goethe Institut initiative spearheaded
by Bharadwaj. The documentary, freely available on YouTube, tells the
story of the revolutionary singer through his interviews and music,
without any need for narration. "The biggest challenge we faced was
when we reached [Jhabbar] and we realised that there was a huge
language barrier," says Bharadwaj. "Once we overcame that, we saw that
our ideologies matched a lot more." The documentary is in English and
Punjabi with English subtitles, and the tracks are sung in Punjabi and
English. Dalmia collaborated with Singh through a translator, writing
English lyrics on the spot and then explaining them to Singh.
McGuiness and Bharadwaj composed the electronic beats, setting the
backdrop for the collaboration between Singh's Punjabi folk and
Dalmia's dancehall-tinged English lines. Surprisingly, the two voices
speak as one on the tracks. "I had planned for a long time to find
revolutionary singers in India and to do bilingual collaborations with
them," says Dalmia. "I read about Bant Singh and he seemed ideally
suited both because of his personality and orientation towards music
as well as his sound."
The story that the men had read about was confirmed by Singh and
retold in Word, Sound & Power. In July 2002, Singh's 17-year-old
daughter was raped by the local landlords' henchmen. Outraged, Singh
took the perpetrators to court, eventually winning justice (three of
the four defendants were sentenced to life terms). But his move was
avenged with further violence. In 2006, while returning home from an
MMM meeting, Singh was attacked so severely that he nearly died. He
was rushed to Mansa's civil hospital, where he was refused treatment,
reportedly for some 36 hours. There is considerable speculation about
why Singh was denied care, and many have believed that the refusal was
politically motivated; it was, after all, a Congress-dominated
district and many of the area's more powerful people were believed to
have felt threatened by the MMM's activities. Others argued that the
refusal of treatment was to do with Singh's status as a Dalit—that his
life was somehow not considered worthy of saving. Whatever the reason,
the doctor refused to attend to him. Gangrene set in, infecting
Singh's wounds and moving into his bloodstream. Singh was finally
transferred to PGI Hospital in Chandigarh, where doctors had to
amputate both his hands and one of his legs in order to save his life.
He also suffered kidney damage in the assault. Today, Singh lives
without hands or prosthetic limbs, and requires the help of his family
members and other attendants to do even the most basic of tasks. He
can't walk, and has to be carried around on a charpoy. Despite his
misfortunes, however, Singh remains dedicated to fighting the
injustices that are carried out against the downtrodden people of his
community. The assailants, as he puts it, couldn't take away his
voice.
"The people [in Jhabbar] took great offence to the fact that I, a
small-time labourer, had taken the landlords to court," he says in the
film. As a 'low-caste' landless labourer, Singh's choice to stand up
for the rights of his family clearly upset his town's status quo.
"Bant Singh points out a lesser-known fact," notes Bharadwaj, the
project's director, that like many agricultural workers in rural
Punjab, Singh is a Dalit Sikh. "Most people think that Sikhism is
without caste, but [Sikhs] actually have fallen prey to the caste
system. Caste distinctions exist very deeply within the culture and
landowners have taken up the upper-caste positions, while landless
labourers have become the Dalits."
Singh's ideas, however, are relevant to more than just Dalit Sikhs.
"From what I gathered, Bant Singh's songs and politics speak more the
language of class and labour rather than caste," says Dalmia. Singh
draws much inspiration from Sant Ram Udasi, a celebrated revolutionary
Dalit poet-singer from Punjab, and some of the songs he sings in the
documentary are taken from Udasi's repertoire. Despite having their
roots in the 20th-century Punjabi Dalit literary tradition, these
songs tell a story that speaks to the sentiments of a much larger
segment of the population. As one song goes:
We have broken the chains of slavery
And have endured much suffering
We want this government to know
That we will not let them sell our nation.
Although his is the story of many landless labourers across the
country, Singh's audience is limited to his community due to the
language in which he sings. True protest music and revolutionary arts
have played an important role in spreading political messages at the
local level since the early 20th century through poets such as Udasi
in Punjab and groups such as the Indian People's Theatre Association
in Bengal. However, in the large, linguistically-diverse country that
is India, language and other restrictions have kept such arts from
gaining a widespread following. Most rural revolutionaries are
virtually unknown outside of their communities and select academic
circles. In the rare cases where arts from rural communities are
brought to the attention of metropolitan consumers, they are often
perceived as folksy entertainment rather than potential vehicles for
empowerment and mobilisation. The Bant Singh Project set out to change
that.
"Music and other creative forms of lyricism have much more impact
because most people don't want to take up guns or political
propaganda," Bharadwaj points out. "Using creative forms of expression
to highlight [issues] is a fairly new phenomenon in India, where most
action is taken using social non-creative platforms, such as through
litigation or political propaganda," he continues, a nod to the fact
that the average urbanite's understanding of the rural struggle is
inextricably linked to what is showcased by national news media. "Now,
with the clever use of technology, people can see a lot more," he
adds. "A message like this is much more empowering than publishing a
book or having a seminar."
Indeed, a big part of the Bant Singh Project's appeal stems from its
accessibility. While Word, Sound & Power succeeds in making Singh's
narratives available to the net-savvy urban elite, it also has been
well-received back in Mansa district. Bharadwaj notes that some of the
people he met in Jhabbar seemed a little sceptical during the
recording of the project, but that they were relieved when the film
finally came to fruition. "They were more appreciative of it and liked
the crossover," he says.
The internet is the global agora of our era. However, even in our
text-driven information age, literacy is not a prerequisite for the
dissemination of knowledge or community empowerment. In the days
before the internet or the printing press, when man had yet to develop
any form of written language, the stories of entire civilisations were
kept alive orally, through arts such as storytelling, dance, drama and
song. Systems of writing were gradually formed, initially used as a
means to keep records and convey political information, but reading
and writing remained the reserve of scribes and learned men. When the
urban masses eventually learned to put pen to paper and, later, to
type, email, blog and tweet, the voice of the formally educated became
the presumed voice of the masses. However, any good historian will
tell you that in order to understand the way a society operates, to
truly comprehend the way its people think, you must first examine its
cultural artefacts, the fruits of its artistic traditions. The arts
are certainly not the strict reserve of literate urbanites; instead,
with the proper distribution, art can serve as a voice for those who
most of us erroneously presume to be voiceless.
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