MAKING ROCK A HARD PLACE
Releasing in theatres on March 5, Rockumentary makes the storied history of rock music in India seem wholly banal
The story of how rock music made its way into India and how it spread is a fascinating one. The arc could take in the arrival of jazz and other popular western music in the 1920s and ’30s, American musicians here during World War 2, then the trickling in of all kinds of foreign music as the music directors of the ’50s and early ’60s Hindi films sponge up and repurpose everything from Russian folk music to American rock and roll. The narrative could then continue with how these prerock microbes—of rhythm n’ blues, of rock n’ roll, of what would later become known as funk—had already seeded themselves here, well before The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, Hendrix et al made landfall in the mid-’60s.
At that time, India was a roiling mishmash of popular musics from Hindi films, regional films and Hindustani and Carnatic classical. Adding to this, between the mid-’60s and mid-’70s, an increasing number of ‘westernised’ urban youngsters got turned on to the phenomenon that is rock. Then, for puritanical rock-heads, life became complicated with the tsunami of disco music hitting by the mid-’70s. Disco colonised, and then assimilated with, popular Indian music in a way that rock never could. Nevertheless, rock survived and continued to mutate in the sub-continent over the next 40 years with startling results.
A non-fiction film about this then would have to ask serious questions about what the music meant to privileged city youngsters. It would have to look at the common urge to just reproduce the music and the rarer impulses to make original music within the form. It would need to savour the music and yet be able to step back and examine the ever-shifting hold rock has on so many of us. Sadly, Abhimanyu Kukreja’s Rockumentary doesn’t manage to do any of these things.
From the beginning, it seems as though Kukreja is in a hurry. The pre-war and wartime histories are quickly referred to with the most obvious, cliche bits of archive footage (a problem that runs through the film). The possibly interesting story of Louiz Banks’ father coming to Calcutta from Kathmandu is never fully explored and then we are in this kind of hollow narrative of “a seven-year journey to trace the roots of rock”. For a film trying to be a firstperson road movie of discovery, no great revelations emerge as the voice-over continues to spout banalities.
We are subjected to a list of bands Kukreja mentions at high speed, like he is ticking off names on a piece of paper. Every now and then you get an “interview” with a figure from “that time” but these also merely re-state the most obvious points. One major problem is with how the music is used through the film. Not once do we get a full passage of recorded or live performance; the tracks are used as muzak. In fact, the most valuable thing about this exercise is the mini-textbook it provides on how not to make a documentary.
At the beginning of this ordeal he has set up for us, Kukreja asks an epically trite question: “How did rock get in the country?” Unfortunately, there is no crack in the relentless self-regard through which the music can get in. ■