Dear Reader,
Kunal Purohit’s book, H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, and its thoughtful review by Palash Mehrotra in Frontline made me look up some of the H-pop singers and their songs on Youtube. Expectedly, the experience was ghastly. The videos are shoddy, the rhythms are nightmarish, and the visuals are sickening. But the lyrics take the cake. Hateful, abusive, sometimes downright violent, most of them cannot be reproduced here. A recently released, relatively tame, song by one of the “stars”, Prem Krishnvanshi, is still mortifying in its hero worship, “Modi ki andhi, ab ur jayege Gandhi sab” (In the Modi whirlwind, all the Gandhis will be blown away).
While spectacle, of which music is a part, has always been a means of propaganda, the level of crudeness in these songs is astounding. I have watched pro-Trinamool Congress music videos by one its poster boys, Madan Mitra: while being cringe, they are comic too because of the way Mitra preens and pouts in praise of himself and the TMC leader. The virulence of H-pop is missing.
Ditto for one of the rare publicity songs by the Left. Three years ago, the CPI(M) in Bengal had turned a then viral song, “Tumpa sona” (dear Tumpa), into a theme song for one of its rallies in Kolkata. If it accused the BJP and the TMC of being in cahoots, it wasn’t obscene. The refrain merely invited Tumpa to attend the rally with her boyfriend and string red flags at the grounds. Although directed at the masses, it was tastefully done as compared to H-pop, suggesting that propaganda songs need not necessarily be vulgar.
But then, politics itself is arguably a dirty business. As George Orwell pointed out with his usual acuity, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Orwell’s spot-on assessment of the political mind is one of the reasons why he continues to be read, as Abhinav Chakraborty says in his meticulous review of a sequel to Animal Farm, Adam Biles’ Beasts of England.
In India, since the law-enforcers are often puppets in the hands of the political class, police procedurals have a sense of unreality. I cannot imagine someone like Detective Inspector Adam Dalgliesh functioning among the ranks of Indian police. Vikram Chandra created a plausible Inspector Sartaj Singh fighting the Mumbai dons in Sacred Games, but most thriller writers haven’t been as successful. K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj acknowledges the potentials of Anita Nair’s police detective, Inspector Gowda, in his review of Hot Stage, but adds that his talent remains under-utilised in the novel.
Meanwhile, the sumptuously produced two volumes of The Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction, edited by Tarun K. Saint, have landed on my desk. I will take a deep dive into them to see if I can find an Indian Dalgliesh. Will keep you posted.
Yours in hope,
Anusua Mukherjee
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