WHEN THE MUSIC’S OVER…
You’re as likely to have a DJ at your wedding as you are to have an asli wedding band, and this is not music to the ears of Kabirpur’s villagers. This village in Uttar Pradesh is also called Band Baja Gaon. Almost every household here is engaged in the brass band business. Elders say the tradition goes back about 200 years, to the era of the nawabs. There are 90 bands based in Kabirpur; the highest tally for any village in the state, they add. In a village of just 2,500 people, that’s about 1200 musicians.
“Our day starts with music and ends with it. It’s what made our village famous,” says bandmaster Gurucharan Sahu, 58.
Bahadur Ali, 52, owner of Mastana Band, adds that people from Unnao, Kanpur, Barabanki, Faizabad, Hardoi and Sitapur would come here to join the business.
Now, changing wedding trends are threatening this way of life. Traditional songs are not in demand. “People want soulful numbers. They want instrumental and soothing music, which our self-trained musicians can’t play,” says Sahu.
A UP government order on noise pollution issued in January feels like a final blow. It outlawed the conical speakers mounted on trolleys that have been the pride of Kabirpur.
“Their sound would travel almost a kilometre,” Sahu says wistfully.
Cities such as Delhi and Agra have also banned the movement of band trolleys on traffic-prone routes and issued strict norms for wedding processions.
“Our village has 90 trolleys. We can’t sleep at night thinking of what will happen,” says Ali.
BACKWARDS / FORWARDS
Initially, Kabirpur used to have ‘sada bands’, made up of a small group of musicians, on foot, playing a handful of instruments. By the 1920s, the brass bands with speakers and trolleys came into vogue.
“Bands are not traditionally part of Indian culture,” says Roshan Taqi, a historian and author of several books on Awadh’s culture and heritage. “They were introduced by the British and some nawabs and kings who admired the British and their way of life began to form Indian versions of their bands.”
After Independence, these musicians returned home to their villages and found takers for band-baja in the community , Taqi adds.
The practice of hiring bands for Indian weddings had already taken hold in the previous century, along with many other customs associated with Western weddings, such as printing invitation cards. And so the wedding bands became a status symbol and thrived.
“I still remember the times as recent as 2005 when commoners, bureaucrats and government people would queue at Kabirpur to hire a band for wedding functions, and they were ready to pay hefty sums,” says Master Parmanand, 55, owner of Rangeela Band.
Until 2009, booking a trolley used to cost around ₹25,000 to ₹35,000. “Now, you can get one for just ₹6,000. By the end of a wedding or function, each person earns barely a few hundred rupees,” says Munna Lal, 50, bandmaster of Afsana Band.
Beneath the angst over the fading of the music, is a larger concern that they are being left behind in other ways.
There has been little development here. The village has no secondary school; the nearest hospitals and colleges are in Lucknow, about 25 km away. Though the village is on the bustling Sultanpur Road, it has few roads of its own.
“Ours is one of the most backward villages” says Master Parmanand. “Many governments have come and gone but nothing in the village has changed. We don’t want this life for our children, so we don’t try to stop them when they go to cities far away to live and work.”