The steady, full-throated flow gathers an edge as the beat quickens. “Rohit, Jisha, Muthu, Delta,” the rapper belts out, as he starts to names Dalits whose deaths have made headlines. “Laxmanpur, Bathani Tola, Karamchedu, Tsunduru,” he intones, now listing places. In the background, years flash by, depicting a timeline of atrocities on Dalits across the country.

The chorus line of Sumit Samos’s latest track Ladai Seekh Le (learn how to fight) is an unflinching remembrance of the atrocities on the community in recent years. In a particularly trenchant moment, he raps, “Aadhi raat aazaadi teri/ Chappar phookti bastiyon mein (Your midnight freedom/ burns and destructs our slums).”

The song stares down the glory of Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech, which promised that “at the stroke of the midnight hour”, India would awaken to “life and freedom”. In the 71 years since then, voices have often been raised against unfulfilled promises. In addition to marching feet and chanting voices, unfiltered rage and demands for a better future, resistance has another ally — rhythm.

As a medium of dissent, music evolves and shape-shifts to suit causes and audiences. It seeks to erode complacency in the listener, and hopes to bring about change.

If music troupes once performed in villages and towns, singing of farmers and workers, the platform today is the social media — and the themes vary from Dalit issues and health to environment and corporate accountability.

In January this year, the Tamil song Chennai Poromboke Paadal went viral. Sung by Carnatic musician TM Krishna, who stood against a fly-ash pond, the song was part of a wider campaign started by Chennai-based environmentalist Nityanand Jayaraman and the Vettiver Collective, a human rights and environmental issues group, for conserving wetlands in Ennore.

“A song is not about passing on information. It also needs to add an emotional layer to that information,” says Kaber Vasuki, a musician and lyricist who penned the words of Poromboke . The song, he adds, sought to highlight the fact that the commons were being abused and underline what was happening in Ennore. “In this respect, I think the song was successful,” he says.

Krishna featured in another music video released by the Vettiver Collective this July. Kodaikanal Still Won’t is the second instalment in a campaign seeking to hold corporate giant Unilever accountable for mercury contamination in Kodaikanal. The first Kodaikanal Won’t video was released in 2015, featuring a catchy refrain by popular rapper Sofia Thenmozhi Ashraf. Both videos underscore the lack of corporate accountability and the high health costs of inaction, with Krishna and Ashraf chanting in the latest video: “Clean up right/ Clean this site/ Treat us like/ we were white.”

The pan-geographic appeal of dissent music is evident in the case of Samos’s anti-caste rap. A 23-year-old student at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) who introduces himself in his video as “Dalit boy representing counterculture”, Samos began rapping in 2016, the year that opened with the death of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student at the University of Hyderabad. A month later, JNU was thrown into turmoil, with the arrest of students’ union leader Kanhaiya Kumar on the charge of sedition.

“It was an important realisation for me — knowing that I could use rap as a medium to blend my lived experience, my exposure to anti-caste literature, and what I aim to do through my activism,” Samos says. The rapper, who was on his way back home to Delhi from a Dalit rights protection rally in Bengaluru, stresses that he was received there with warmth and recognition for his music. “ Ladai Seekh Le has reached a lot of people. Many of them came forward to tell me that they watched the video and loved it, even though they don’t understand Hindi,” he says.

The 2016 developments in JNU also inspired Chandigarh-based artist Dub Sharma, whose popular track Aazadi mixes Kanhaiya Kumar’s sloganeering with an overlay of slick Punjabi vocals. The song is interspersed with then HRD minister Smriti Irani’s dramatic voice, saying, “What is this depraved mentality? I have no answers for it!”

Protest music is not always entertaining. The official video song from the 2017 documentary on manual scavenging, Kakkoos , is an indictment of public apathy which encourages the regressive practice. Set against visuals of excreta-filled toilets and images of corpses of manual scavengers, the singer asks, “Are we here to die?”

In a similar vein, the lead song in the 2015 film Court features a memorable song by the protagonist Narayan Kamble, a social activist and protest singer accused of abetting the suicide of a manual scavenger. Vira Sathidar, who plays Kamble, has impressive vocals and an engaging manner. In the film, he and his troupe sing to a scattered crowd, and offer a summary of what eventually happened to a dream of freedom at midnight: “Scam sham/ huge malls/ great fall/ malady and gluttony”.

Rihan Najib

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