FOR a large part of the years I have called Ahmedabad ‘home’, the city has served as a mere bit player in my story; the backdrop against which the bildungsroman that is my life has played itself out. It began to protest this role I had reduced it to over the course of the rudest coming-of-age imaginable: living through and then living with the searing memory of what transpired here in 2002. I was insulated from the massacres playing out across the state; my various positions of caste, class and socio-economic privilege shielded me from the direct brunt of the violence and madness.

What I remember most clearly is traversing the old city – Mirzapur – in a police convoy, as we escorted some relatives home late one curfewed night at the beginning of March, 2002. This is the quietest I have ever heard the old city. This sensorially experienced memory is enough to set my heart racing to-date, even as my location within (and not on the other side of or facing down) a police convoy continues to haunt me. But this is not the Ahmedabad I want to re/explore here. Instead, in this piece, I’ve decided to play bard and sing to you of another Ahmedabad (and there are many), closest to my lived reality. She needs a troubadour, does this city.

I have long held that Ahmedabad is conducive to the building of ivory towers, and I inhabit one such. Mine are oases – literally and metaphorically – of calm, allowing me to live a life of the mind as I float from one physical periphery (home, to the North of the city, ‘far from the madding crowds’) to another (my campus, located in a lush, semi-rural settlement far to the South of where Ahmedabad pretends to end).

And then there’s the music. I’ve grown up convinced that the Beatles, Queen, Janis Joplin, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Uriah Heep (but also Dave Brubeck, Al Jarreau and Charles Mingus) are as much mine as anyone else’s, because I inherited them from my father, Vispi Siganporia. These artists form the musical score to my childhood and adolescence, marking and aiding my passage from one liminal state to the next. Dad is the founder of a band called Purple Flower: a cover band that has always been about classic and folk rock (with liberal dollops of the bluesier-end-of-jazz thrown in for good measure), and has been playing to Ahmedabad since long before I was born. Drummer and lead vocalist, it is still his voice I hear when ‘I Want to Break Free’ or ‘L.A. Woman’ randomly start playing in my head, as they are wont to do.

 

All of 16, and about to finish high school, I was inducted into the band, despite many protestations to the tune that I had board examinations to prepare for; that I had places to be and things to do. All of which amounted to nothing. I found myself on stage that Christmas season in 1998. Now I’m no stranger to performing in public: one of the least subtle ways in which the presentiment towards hereditary essentialism plays itself out is to be evidenced in what happens to a child in school. Knowing I was the daughter of a musician, I have been made to sing in every school assembly and competition since I was three-and-a-half years old; significantly before I got my head around concepts like ‘agency’ and ‘choice’.

But this was different. Despite the fact that my first gig with the band was a little over half a lifetime ago, I can still summon the feeling of that knot in my stomach and recall the (acidic) taste of fear it left in my mouth, as if it were yesterday. It is similar to the feeling I still get each time I walk into a classroom of new students for the first time. We slowly find our groove. We then start jamming.

 

One of the courses I teach is deliciously titled ‘Imagining India’ (a name I inherited from my friend and mentor Rita Kothari, who used to teach it at my institute in years past). I like thinking the course is playful; it would have to be, if we are to so much as begin unravelling what Rushdie once described as the many-headed monster that is our polyphonic polity. One of the sessions is on what might be meant by the term ‘Indian music’. I argue there’s no such thing. There is such a thing as music, and I’m given to understand that there is such a thing as India, but I refuse to speak about Indian music as if it were a given; as if it were a monolithic category. The musics of India – that works for me.

I follow Naresh Fernandes¹ in making a case for just how ‘Indian’ jazz is; how it is several generations old in this country, and the extent to which it had, for a time during the ’50s and early ’60s, seeped into that dizzying marker of popular culture we know as Hindi film music. I then talk students through Sidharth Bhatia’s² thesis that in the late ’60s and ’70s, rock ‘n’ roll served as a kind of antidote and corollary to jazz, swing, and Hindi film music – the sounds urban India was suffused with – and became a metaphor for rebellion and angst here, much as it had world over, alluding to a global ‘youth’ consciousness which was greater than a sense of kinship born from accidents of geography or nationalism.

 

To then illustrate how this phenomenon was not relegated to Indian metros alone, I play my students ‘Mod Trad’,³ the first song you will encounter in the NPR article I reference here, asking them to hazard a guess as to where this Indian band might have hailed from. Most think it must have been Bombay or Calcutta; some suggest it could have been Bangalore. But they’re wrong. This band came from Ahmedabad. It was called the Black Beats then, and was an earlier avatar of what became Purple Flower the following year (1970). It features dad on the drum track, and Bali Brahmbhatt (or ‘Uncle Zulu’ as I was introduced to him), who would go on to become a well known Bollywood musician, on guitar.

The first time I heard this recording, I knew I was listening to something special; an aspect of my father I’d never had access to. ‘A portrait of the artist as a young man,’ as it were. But more, it gave me a sense of the Ahmedabad that had been his, or theirs (my parents’), more accurately; an Ahmedabad where there was room for the psychedelic rock they created to make an organic sort of sense.

My folks tell me stories which make Ahmedabad sound like a veritable playground, and I’m envious of their relationship with what had to have been a very different city from the one I have inherited. They tell me of Sunday morning jam sessions at Bankura (where a young and lovely Mallika Sarabhai was the cynosure of all eyes); about the Christmas dances the band would play following midnight mass at St. Xavier’s in Mirzapur; about people jiving and doing the foxtrot and mashed potato and twist as easily as I dance the garba; about bands coming and playing ‘residencies’ at several hotels in town (this lasted into my own lifetime, with Purple Flower playing two that I can remember, through the ’80s and into the early ’90s), and it all sounds... delicious.

 

There was a (small) stream of women musicians who have played and sung with our band over the decades as well, and I have loved them each and all. Most stopped performing when they either left the city – Ahmedabad has always been something of a transit point for students coming through one of our many educational institutions – or, and I can think of several examples of this, when they got married and seemingly ‘retired’ from the performative aspect of public life. In all the years I’ve been part of the Purple Flower story, only one man every stopped playing because he got married and realized his career, and nascent ‘domesticity’, did not allow him time to play music any more. But to explore this gendered double-standard will yield nothing you don’t already know: of course music is gendered; of course there are only a handful of us women musicians, and of course most people still perceive and ‘understand’ the existence of female vocalists more than they countenance female instrumentalists (although, however glacially, it would be remiss of me to not recognize that this is changing).

The code of the double hermeneutic is strong with us: as Giddens⁴ suggests, the relationships between ‘lay’ concepts and the social sciences is not a one-way street. I can theorize the performative aspect of my practice as a musician, but that theorizing also informs my practice, and vice versa. I set up this idea to explore, at long last, what I thought I was going to use this article to think through in the first place: what does Ahmedabad do to my practice as a musician, and what, if anything, does my presence/existence do to the shape of Ahmedabad?

 

Despite having played music all my adult life, I only seriously began to think about what it meant to play what I play *in* Ahmedabad a few years ago. We perform thrice-weekly at a little arts venue en route to Gandhinagar, and a colleague of mine brought down one of his academic mentors from the U.S. to hear us play one weekend. She came to meet me once we finished our set, and then observed that I didn’t ‘talk’ the way she thought I would based on how she heard me sing; that there were two different accents and modalities at play between my speech and song. This made me listen, when next I sang, as if I were ‘hearing’ myself for the first time. Of course I rolled my Rs and flattened the Is and drew out my Es when I covered a song delivered by artists with strong American accents; heck, even the British and Scandinavian and Australian musicians I covered did the same thing! (Why? Because gloabalization is a thing.)

This began to make me more aware of who the artists I listened to were; who, in the years before the internet when we actually had to scrabble around for LPs, then cassettes, and CDs and so on, it was possible/impossible to find and why; why the music industry deemed an American accent most bankable, and how this was not, contrary to what I had unthinkingly taken for granted, a priori. What has followed is years of – as the tallest Gujarati to have ever lived undertook before me – a visceral, almost painful reflexivity and exercise in parsing my (sung) accent each time I open my mouth: whose voice is this that emerges? Why does it enunciate as it does? Does it differ from the voice that takes ‘parole’ when I write my own music, as I do with my other band, Time|Wise? Gandhi stripped his accent bare later in his life, but that was Gandhi. Can I? Need I?

 

So what, really, does it mean to play to and in this city? To me, it has meant many things, some beautiful and some fairly painful. Each time someone walks up to me after a performance, I brace myself for the now familiar question: ‘Where are you from?’ When I respond in chaste Gujarati that I’m from Ahmedabad, most people persist, in English, ‘But you don’t sound like you’re from here!’ And we’re back at square one. What does it mean to ‘sound like’ one is from Ahmedabad? I genuinely haven’t the foggiest notion. This becomes even more prominent when, with Time|Wise, we play at jazz clubs in Delhi or Mumbai. We’re introduced with something approaching disbelief as a jazz band from Ahmedabad; as if such a thing were a novelty, if not an impossibility. It is partially in response to this incredulity I encounter the face of repeatedly that this piece was born.

And there’s also the usual menace that comes with being a female musician: the lechery, the unsolicited attention incumbent on the fact that one has placed oneself in the public sphere by choosing to ‘perform’, the attempts to shoot (sometimes covertly but increasingly, pretty blatantly) videos of ‘us’ as we play, the odd occasion when someone attempts to take inappropriate pictures/videos up my legs,⁵ painful, even though it is not unusual.

 

But this has also meant that I have had the privilege of introducing audiences to artists, ideas, and genres little heard outside certain tiny circles in Ahmedabad (and no, these aren’t circles limited to or configured exclusively along caste/class/gender/socio-economic axes; definitely material for another story, another time). This brings me an almost unreasonable amount of joy, and reminds me why I continue to try and serenade my city. In addition, there’s also the ‘legacy’ aspect: how many people get to experience the sheer giddying joy that comes from being able to say that your father is also your drummer, and that when you get to harmonize with him, the world sounds like a slightly more bearable place? I do, and I recommend it highly. Music is a language we call our own, and I am immeasurably grateful for this opportunity to communicate with my father, my ‘self’, my city, and the kind audiences who keep coming around to hear us do our thing.

When I started writing this piece, I wondered if it would be possible to make it through an article on Ahmedabad and music while staying studiously away from mentioning the elephant in the room that is Saptak. I now have my answer. This grand old institution, with its music school and two-week long annual festival which is a celebration of Indian classical music (Hindustani and Carnatic, although it is definitely skewed towards the former) is as far as most people’s imagination goes when it comes to combining the semantic spheres ‘Ahmedabad’ and ‘music’. It is a huge part of Ahmedabad’s sound-scape, and my effort remains merely to prise this idea, this category, open, not contest it by setting up false binaries between classical canons and the music/s of the here and now.

 

And in the end, the beginning. Ma (Nilu Siganporia) has a story to tell about when I started school. She says that she was summoned by my nursery teacher with the plaint that I was a loner, unable to interact with my peers. She cajoled the answer to this riddle out of me one evening, and alleges I said I did not talk to anyone because I had nothing to talk to them about: none of my classmates knew who Michael Jackson was (in my defence, I was in the throes of my heady ‘Thriller’ phase just then). This might sound funny, but in hindsight, I suspect it actually sums up my life in Ahmedabad pretty darn well: it reminds me why I felt the need to learn the myriad Hindi film songs I did as a young primary schooler (to play antakshari with my school-rickshaw mates, of course) and why I dance my nights away to garbas each Navratri, only to drive home grooving to McCartney & Wings or Fleetwood Mac or Joni Mitchell. Because they are both performances of identity: one, for the city. One for myself.

Eclectic? Yes; who said anything about being consistent? I’ll admit readily that this is a near-schizophrenic existence sometimes; an uphill battle to find common ground – something that has come glaringly into view in this increasingly stratified and divided city I call home. But we world our locales in our own image, even as they make us more of who we are, and I find that this Ahmedabad, of our peculiar making, is the one that sounds most like ‘home’ to me. It is the one I fight each day to keep alive, and for what its worth, it nourishes me – mind, body and soul – in return.

 

Footnotes:

1. Naresh Fernandes, Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The History of Jazz in India. Roli Books, New Delhi, 2012.

2. Sidharth Bhatia, India Psychedelic: The Story of a Rocking Generation. Harper Collins India, New Delhi, 2014.

3. ‘Unearthing Five Lost Gems from Psychedelic India’, NPR, 18 October 2010. Last Accessed on 30 April 2018: https://www. npr.org/2011/02/02/130588826/unearthing-five-lost-gems-from-psychedelic-india

4. Anthony Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987.

5. You can read more about this torrid incident here. Trigger warning: foul language, because this incident upset me a great deal: http://peacehappening.blogspot.in/2011/08/i-told-you-so.html