Abstract
Hip hop and Rap has been available to various musical cultures all over the world inspiring the imagination of youth and politicizing them along the process. The release of a series of YouTube videos in India particularly in Kerala represents distinct response to the Rap music culture. In distinct yet interlocked ways these videos signal a changing musical culture in Kerala, one that is enabled by new networks and a rapidly changing techno social soundscape and its accompanying listening practices and music culture. This article is an attempt to map and analyze these practices through the video texts of some of these hip hop videos, websites and interviews with the artists and key actors. It analyzes the post globalization musical cultures in Kerala, mapping its techno-social and aesthetic practices and how they bear upon listening practices. It also maps the meaning of rap and hip hop in the Indian sub continent and its relationship to power and hegemony in the musical soundscape of Kerala. The article tries to theorize the emergence of a rap music video culture in Kerala and the Internet publics through the debates on public sphere and how they are caught up with questions of historical memory and identity.
Introduction
During the last few decades and especially since the early 1990s the music industry in India witnessed two major shifts. They are, firstly, the coming of television and secondly, the advent of digital technology. The entry of satellite television consequent upon the ‘opening up of the sky’ and liberalization of the economy—conquered and took over the thematic terrains hitherto occupied by cinema, and more importantly, brought entertainment home through DVDs and MP3 players.
This period has been viewed as marked by the emergence of modern technology, greater incentives for private corporate sector, entry of foreign investors, and highlighting the inefficiency of the public sector as the solution to the poverty and stagnation (Chatterjee 2002). This economic and discursive rise of the youth can be seen as linked to a desire for a technological modernity. If the 1980s were characterized by consumer durables and electronic goods, post liberalization period marks itself as moving through dynamic nodes of technology like the public telephone booths, Internet cafes etc. This ensemble of technology and its spread emerged in simultaneity with a social imagination of the ‘global nation’ (Menon & Nigam 2007). While the cassette culture spearheaded the music revolution (Manuel 1990) the spatial and technological dynamics of it is yet to be fully analyzed. The regional geography of the travel of blank tapes and cassette shells which becomes part of the traffic of electronic goods has been mostly focused in East Asian cities like Singapore and Hong Kong (Sundaram 2010). An equivalent geography of such traffic for the Kerala region has to be drawn along many middle eastern cities like Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dabi, Muscat, Doha and Riyadh along with Singapore and Hong Kong. For some Indians within the middle classes; particularly the upper-middle classes, globalization translated into new spaces for consumption. Often termed ‘consumer revolution’, this have been identified by many as embodied in certain objects and spaces namely the car, cell phone, computer and pubs, discotheques and game parlours. The new consuming public had access to heterogeneous electronic content in their home as well. The bourgeoning scholarship on the home as a site of leisure and consumption practices links this to post globalization technology networks (Friedberg 1994; Klinger 2006).
The proliferation of these new technologies and multimedia ranging from DVDs to iPods invites our attention to the intersection of technology and economics in everyday life (Kellner 2009). This material proliferation of objects in India could be seen as constitutive of the middle-class household that has become a node in the circuit of globalization. These electronic gadgets are in some ways objects that are also symbolic of consumption by a younger generation of Malayalees.
Television immediately gained popularity and began to spin visual narratives that addressed the family audience, which in turn, changed the audience base of cinema and the theatre halls. In response to this, the thematic and treatment patterns of mainstream music industry too calibrated itself. With the coming of the digital, and the inexorable shift from the analog technologies to the digital, all the domains of music industry—production, distribution, exhibition and reception—underwent revolutionary transformation. Music CDs became available in easily replicable and exchangeable formats which created new audiences for listening across a variety of media platforms including MP3 players, IPods and mobile platforms. Responding to the iniquitousness and mobility of music listening practices, the video and music industry in Kerala also responded to specific local and regional musical contexts in the form of musical albums and remix songs. In Kerala, given its semi urban nature, which has been created by its specific development experience, the mobile nature of these technologies has spread evenly 1 (Mani 2012).
Sundaram’s conceptualization of the proliferation of technology and its movement in urban India and different classes as a ‘recycled modernity’ and ‘pirated modernity’ (Sundaram 2010) are useful to be considered here. Scholarship in this area (Liang 2005) describes pirate modernity as a condition wherein the migrants to the city, the working classes are able to use technology in non-legal ways to be able to survive in the city and attempt to escape otherwise totalizing narratives about them. In a revealing phrase Vasudevan has chosen to call such movement of technology, a ‘globalization from below’ (Vasudevan 2010), indicating that one’s socioeconomic location did determine to a large degree, which processes of globalization one participated in. Sreekumar expands this over the larger geographies of techno cultures over Asia to interestingly argue that these proliferation and use are not just limited to marking their presence in cities but also forces us to think of these identities as techno social identities, whose characteristics can be found in the uniqueness of modernity in Asian Societies and the quest for, ‘… pursuing parallels paths to technological regimes, while denouncing the sequencing logic of western rationality and modernization theory; a political project that has charted its course in search of an alternative modernity’ (Sreekumar 2012, p. 21).
In order to relocate this debate to the Kerala context, we need to acknowledge the socio economic specificities of Kerala’s technology proliferation; the urban-rural divide as a historically vexed concept and the telecommunications use across urban rural divide as seen to be in the decline (Mani 2012), wherein we can see the techno culture acquiring new configurations. The landscape of Kerala has been marked by widespread use of mobile technologies, by laboring classes and the youth of different classes, like the collective use of Kerala fishers’ collective use of mobile technologies for ‘culturally enhancing and ecologically oriented ways that improve their working and living conditions’ (Sreekumar, 2011 p. 172).
The pirated CDs of a variety of musical genres including that of Rap, World Music, Blues, European art house cinema among others created a dynamic local media market in the last decade some of which has been destroyed in the State Governments raids against illegal CD/VCD market as well as catastrophic events like the Beemapalli incident. 2 The music market thus gets characterized by an unprecedented presence and availability of large number of musical genres from all over the world. This phenomenon is often described as ‘cool’ and the consumption of such music as bound to a discourse of taste making among the youth and marking these imagined age groups through musical consumption. Lukose in her work on the youth culture in Kerala uses the theoretical framework of consumer citizenship to ‘explore the crucial role of consumption in the self fashioning of young people as part and parcel of the negotiations of public life (Lukose 2009, p. 9). Following the Argentinian anthropologist Canclini’s work (Canclini 1995), Lukose has argued that cultural citizenship displaces traditional language of politics, democracy and citizenship to be replaced by a reworked citizenship under conditions of globalization (Lukose 2009).
In the context of studying the consumption practices among an erstwhile untouchable class in the early days of globalization in Kerala, anthropologists have noted how lower caste youth emulate ‘hyper fashion’, ‘reminiscent of the vanguard roles of the working class, particularly the Black working class, in British fashion, popular music, and “street style”’ (Osella & Osella 1999, p. 995).
Hip hop and Rap has travelled outside their American location and spread to a vast geography over the last century. Rap’s potential to move beyond the African American moorings and attract global youth affiliations has been well documented (Fernandes 2011; Mitchell 2002). As discussed above rap and hip hop was brought to the musical landscape through cinema, global television and particularly MTV. Television also widely popularized hip hop fashion and commodities. Rap, disco, reggae, remix and other musical forms such as hip hop became part of a cluster of nomadic musical forms in the age of transnational movement of music. This travel of rap and hip hop have been theorized as simultaneously vernacular and mass culture by scholars, chiefly because of its embedded nature in African American culture while being mobile and adaptable(Whiteley et al. 2004). Its corporatized and mass cultural form is also seen as removed from the experience of ethnic minority and racialized poverty but alluring to other identities and marginalized experiences. In an invigorating analysis of global hip hop Fernandes writes, ‘Hip hop has been highly popular not just in Asia but also among Asian immigrant youth in western nations such as Canada, Australia, Britain and the United States’ (Fernandes 2011, p. 13). Fernandes maps the internal tensions and uneasy place occupied by Asians and other racial groups in the shifting global hip hop nation. As recounted by her, the post 9/11 global politics of terror engenders new global politics of solidarity through performance and activism in locations as diverse as Caribbean islands, Japan, Germany and Palestine and mobilizing the arsenal and language of protest groups as ethnically diverse as black activists from New Orleans to apartheid wall in Palestine to US militarization in US Mexico border (Ibid 2011). In the context of the rise of militant religion as a source of hip hop music as in the case of South Asian Muslim rappers in Britain like Kaliphz and Fundamental, Fernandes notes: ‘At a time when Islam has replaced black power as the enemy within, it is not surprising that it has reemerged as a possible axis of solidarity among global hip hop’ (Fernandes 2011, p. 21). What is outlined here by Fernandes further gets complex and caught up with questions of ethnicity and migration as in the case of Turkish—German rap movement described as ‘Oriental Hip hop’ that emerged as an oppositional subculture (Ickstadt 1999).
The refashioning characterized by the presence of reggae, rap and hip hop fashion used in popular Tamil and Malayalam film music has been mapped as circulating ‘furiously, copied and recopied’ (Osella & Osella 1999, p. 98). Some of the most popular songs of the period by musician A.R. Rahman seems to have been inspired by hip hop music, matched by hip hop fashion in order to resignify the Dalit body in cinematic imagination (Niranjana & Dhareswar 1996).
The unprecedented popularity of hip hop fashion in Kerala is evident in some 50 odd Facebook pages dedicated to hip hop fashion in the state of Kerala including the remote hill districts of Wayanad, Idukki etc. These pages usually feature photographs of young boys and men in hip hop style with descriptions and options to like, share and comment. The Facebook page ‘Hiphoppers in Kerala’ (though removed from Facebook now, the quote seem to be widely reproduced in other Facebook pages) for example featured quotes like the one cited here, often in Gothic script.
ƒαѕнισηιѕтнєѕ¢ιєη¢єσƒ αρρєαяαη¢є, αη∂
ιтιηѕριяєѕσηєωιтнтнє ∂єѕιяєтσѕєєm яαтнєятнαη тσвє.(Trendz Of Kodungalloor n.d.)
The desire to be seen and cited is derived through a variety of mixing of different elements characteristic to hip hop fashion globally. This involves mixing of diverse elements like artifacts, wearing hair, beard and moustache, couture clothes, sports apparel etc. This mixing of elements is often described as a style based on referentiality and reflexivity, thrives on appropriation and redefinition, which is the essence of mixing. Mixing has been analyzed as the ‘musical technique that lies at the root of the cultural movement’ (Fleetwood 2011, p. 153).
While the hip hop fashion in the Kerala context is not seen to have specific connections with the underground hip hop musical culture in Kerala, it can be safely assumed that they are derived through a circuit of hip hop listening, sharing and fashion. While the global hip hop fashion is estimated to be a $2 billion a year industry, with some important brands reaping $300 million annual business, the Kerala fashion scene is not subjected to any serious enquiry (Kitwana 2005.). The presence of baggie jeans, caps, accessories and objects in the market and advertisements featuring youth models in hip hop fashion clearly signal towards a consciously hip hop fashion among the youth.
The musical culture of hip hop is mainly enabled through the arrival of digital network in the past decade. The digitization of media platforms has opened up new avenues for content creation and distribution. Developments in technology and in media practices, programmes and applications have had a profound impact on the way both media and content is consumed. With advancement in new media forms, corporate establishments have found ways of channeling similar content to bigger audiences (Jenkins 2006). The coming together of various technological forms, both old and new as well and new consumption practices signals the onset of a new culture—convergence culture, a paradigm that takes into consideration the implications of technological change, globalization and consumption patterns.
The Internet as a site is critical to negotiate here because it brings together two kinds of practices to hip hop and rap—the commercial album placed on it as well as the practice of viral circulation through social media. This makes at least the Malayalam hip hop scene entirely a digital phenomenon: one that is produced, circulated and listened to in digital platforms.
Rap in Indian Musical Culture
Rap in the larger musical culture in Hindi and other regional contexts has not been subjected to extensive inquiries except for controversial events like Honey Singh videos in Punjabi and influences on Hindi film music. Vebhuti Duggal, in her study of Hindi film song remixes has gestured towards the important role played by rap in the musical imagination of Hindi cinema states:
The political potency of rap is blunted in its inclusion in the form of Hindi film song remixes whereas early singers such as Apache Indian, Baba Sehgal and Stylebhai incorporated political satire and political commentary into their early work. Both Apache Indian, (within Birmingham) and Stylebhai had been influenced by black musical styles and patterns, and usually were discussed, as being aligned, experientially, with people of Black ethnicity. During the 1990s, rap as a musical genre also seems to be on the verge of becoming an important presence and style in India and the Bombay film industry, but it never does become a phenomenon. A few songs that are rap-driven, ‘Amma Dekh’, ‘Stop That’, ‘Meri Marzi’ etc. are all very popular yet the form never succeeded as a whole (Duggal 2011, p. 62).
The form however has succeeded in finding its way into regional music cultures, as in the case of Punjabi Hip hop, through singers like Mika and Honey Singh. Recently, the Punjabi hip hop singer Honey Singh has been in news for his recklessly masculine songs. Honey Singh’s style of singing is observed as, ‘… unique in the way it works in Punjabi and yet, his music arrangement and styling attracts the cosmopolitan in us’ (Sarcar 2012). Singh in this case has been read as a particularly potent cultural artifact in contemporary Punjab, in the cross roads of migration, transnational capital and globalization and their inextricable links to culture as Sarcar argues:
What makes Honey Singh particularly evocative is the added mix of what all is in danger with these reckless women: the soil, the land and the pride of being rooted. I place him as an artifact that fits within a contemporary cultural economy—one that wants to foster a sexually disciplined cadre of youth who will learn to abstain from the pleasures of a market economy, even as it builds that market. The insistence on the brown skin, therefore serves to remind you of all that has to be recovered from the plague of the fetishisms of the West. There is an aggression in his songs which borders on anger even as he flaunts his cosmopolitanism. He teaches you, in short, how to be an International Villager (Ibid 2012).
On the other hand the Kashmir hip hop artist Haze Kay, raps in solidarity with issues ranging from state repression in Kashmir to the rape case that rocked India’s national capital in December 2012 poses a radically different context of the suturing of hip hop to regional contexts. Rap has been popularized in Hindi through singers like Devang Patel and Bali Brahmabhatt (Duggal 2011). In the context of Asian immigrant rap in United States, scholarly literature evinces a minority rap and hip hop culture that proclaims affinities to Black and Latino communities (Nair & Balaji 2008; Sharma 2010).
The shifting nature and contours of the techno-social, industrial and musical economy of the period shows how the changing listening practices of the period as well as cultural expectations of technology created space for various musical genres to settle itself may be thought of as representing an altered musical imagination. I have tried to map some of the processes, discourses, objects and practices that altered the imagination so as to be able to accept musical forms like rap and hip hop. This auditory culture may perhaps be suggestive to us of a new, emergent modernity which is deeply implicated within the global.
The relationship between hip hop and technological proliferation is important since the Internet is pervasive through personal computers, cell phones and cyber cafes in all parts of the new Kerala landscape. The importance of the Internet is not only that when one go looking for the hip hop, the first search point is the Internet but, the only space in which the Malayalam hip hop exists as both genre and practice is the Internet. Websites such as YouTube, torrent host sites and Facebook pages have become a host for this form. Interestingly, it is this mode of technology that allows us access to oppositional videos without any official or governmental barriers of censorship (beeping out of the powerful critic of the nation state by the rapper in Native Bapa for example) or copyright often to be reported by users. This site thus contains the video-text outside certain images and texts that may otherwise surround it and adds certain other texts to it. The first search on YouTube for ‘Native Bapa’ gives me a list of about 30 videos, and an estimate of 200,000 hits. In YouTube, the fans, the collectors, the ones generating the archive are responsible for uploading the videos on this site. And here one would find not just the original video, but also the news and debates around the video. Invariably, the videos of the original would exist as ‘video responses’ to it. The Internet thus becomes an important point to begin the complex task of researching reception, especially when considering the reception of cultural artifacts.
This variety becomes more exaggerated than the video-recorder Canclini (1995) highlighted as ‘reorder[ing] a series of traditional or modern oppositions: between the national and the foreign, leisure and work, news and entertainment, politics and fiction’ (Ibid 1995, p. 225). These videos that are put together online constitute then a fragmentary world which contains image, music and text. This fragmentary world is one wherein individual playlists put together, are often the threads that are followed to explore the web-site. Links and threads prompt us to jump from one playlist to another, one webpage to another, perhaps only further proving Canclini’s argument about the videocassette recorder. Canclini believes that with the arrival of videocassette recorders it becomes possible to form a personal collection which may combine film, sports, the news and a family wedding. He suggests such collections as an instance of what he refers to as ‘decollecting’ and YouTube becomes an example of this. We can see that YouTube along with blogs, social media and online archives become a part of new reproduction devices that Canclini mentions (Ibid 1995). The fact that YouTube can embed within itself, various videos and links in a networked way, enables it to become more varied than a public library.
Hip Hop and Cultural Citizenship in Kerala
‘Rest in Peace’ is the first hip hop video by a Kerala band. Produced by ‘Street Academics’, a Calicut based underground hip hop band released in August 2011 on You Tube, ‘Rest in Peace’ was not highly received, as shown by less number of hits; about 14,792 for the original upload and another 500 through video sharing (Ernesto 2011). ‘Street Academics’’ Facebook Homepage describes thus: ‘Street Academics is a surrealist movement to resurrect the artistic culture of hip hop, by uniting every hip hop artists in Kerala, India,the mother of cultures. She is resurrecting the ancient street culture in these decades’ (Street Academic n.d).
Describing hip hop as an intelligent movement it further elaborates what hip hop does in cultural terms ‘Hip Hop showcases the peaks of human capacity through its various elements:-Knowledge, Graffiti, MC-ing, BreakDancing, DJing, BeatBoxing. It also represents a lifestyle, blended in a society:-Entrepreneurship, Language, Fashion’ (Ibid n.d).
Created by a group of young men, from different parts of Kerala, who met on Internet discussion groups and social media like Orkut, they started working together in 2011. Rapper Haris whose rap nick name is The Maapla, in a telephonic interview tells me that he wanted to retain the community identity in its original and authentic local dialect eschewing names that mask his religious identity (Haris Saleem, Personal Communication, 19 April 2013). Similarly other rappers in the group Amjad Nadeem, lyricist and vocalist calls himself ‘Azura’, the demonic form in Hindu mythology, so does Abhimanyu Raman (Earth grime), Lordson Manickaraj (Emcee Theory) and Pranav C.H. (Hadyz) along with R.J.V. Ernesto, who forms the group. Their videos were directed by Sai Giridhar and photographed by Amruth Madhusudanan. The second hip hop video by Street Academics, ‘Vandi Puncture’ was uploaded on YouTube on 24th May 2012 and has received by and large 95,000 hits including all the video shares on YouTube (Giridhar 2012). Created as a bilingual video, in English and Malayalam, the Malayalam lyrics are of a ‘mock’ or ‘junk’ quality. The video in fact opens in English, which is almost stopped by another character in the frame asking in Malayalam, whether it will hurt them to rap in Malayalam. The rapper then starts rapping in Malayalam, ‘Kaalathu Pallichilachu, hip hop in porvilikettuthudangi’ (The lizard’s chirped in the morning, The battle call of hip hop has begun) literally knots together the superstitious belief that chirping of lizard as you speak testifies its truth value or is almost prophetic- with the arrival of hip hop in Kerala. The song proceeds to mix words that sound similar but have no correlation in meaning, Biryani, Sulaimani, Akashvani and moves back to the terrain of proverbs, folklore, food, poetry tradition and contemporary objects whipping out a mélange of disconnected themes and words, yet making immense meaning out of their juxtaposition. When MC Azura starts rapping, Erisseri, Pulisseri, Thoran, Moru, Sambar, Achar … listing the traditional accompaniments for the main course of rice, the Maapla intervenes by saying ‘Pinnentha new trend’ (what is the new trend) to which he replies, ‘Avial’ which is a popular Kerala dish but also a renowned alternative rock band from Kerala 3 (Giridhar 2012).This could be very well seen as a comment on the mainstream music culture as traditional and the new Malayalam rap, which produce Malayalam alternate music. Through this they locate their identity as Malayalam speaking youth while signaling towards various influences of other identities in circulation and try to refashion the musical identity in significant ways.
Much of the work of the underground band so far is not a direct political commentary, but critical of mainstream art and music practice in Kerala. Their subsequent productions are tenuous attempts to locate themselves in the global map of urban youth subculture and be at home by reinvigorating Malayalam language. They are equally proclaiming the hip hop artist as a continuum in a long tradition of European as well as other music cultures. The song Aathmasphere in their online portal is a reflection on the epistemology of their music.
Through this kind of self referential singing and syntactic and phonological intermixing of Malayalam and English all through their lyrics they make significant interventions in the socio linguistics of language. The attempt to refashion the identity of the Rap artist or even claim the identity of an artist; particularly in the context of mainstream music culture in Kerala where these forms are often considered as ‘noise’, proceeds along the line of cultural mixing, through a series of references to Mozart and hip hop vocabulary. In the context of bilingual Japanese Rap, scholars have suggested that this refashioning occurs through a semiotic reconstruction of both language and performance (Manabe 2006; Pennycook 2003). In their January 30th 2013 YouTube release ‘Trapped in Rhymes’, the band again creates a whole universe of hip hop life conversing with criticisms and self appraisal and maps the epistemology of their hip hop practice (Giridhar 2013).
Aathmasphere: Street Academics
Text of the Rap Video: Trapped in Rhymes
English, is used for formal and informal communication in Kerala, but has complicated relations with the speaker’s identity. Like everywhere else in India, English marks the speaker as modern, urban and sometimes ‘living outside’ Kerala. This forms part of the repertoire of Television programmes, FM Radio Shows and musical albums where these identities are represented. The ‘urban youth Malayalam’ is often portrayed in them are denigrated as ‘Manglish’, a mix of English and Malayalam. Interestingly enough the Malayalam in the videos features various dialects of Malayalam language juxtaposed with English.
Street Academics’ bilingual lyricism opens up questions of expressivity, identity and language that global hip hop culture gives rise to. Discussing the shortcomings of World English as a limited paradigm in understanding rap lyricism in Japan, Pennycook writes:
This is also not to deny that the world English paradigm has been extremely important and successful in helping our thinking on sociolinguistics of the global spread of English; by looking at the development of multilingualism, by questioning the status of errors and divergent language forms, and by focusing on issues of native speaker norms and bilingual creativity. It indeed had done a great deal for our thinking about norms and standards in different Englishes. But at the same time, it has tended to operate with a limited and limiting conceptualization of globalization, national standards, culture and identity. (Pennycook 2003, p. 517)
While firmly located within global popular music flows, Street Academics affirms the place of Malayalam rap in the Kerala context through colloquial dialects of Malayalam and a lyrical dexterity in both languages.
Native Bapa and the Political Artifice
The music video ‘Native Bapa’ by the musical movement Mappila Lahala is on the other hand a political address and is hardly about the rap artist as an individual. Envisaged as a multiple genre musical movement and not particularly a musical band, Mappila Lahala’s first music video ‘Native Bapa’ combines and renders a specifically local prose dialect into rap lyricism. It mobilizes diverse set of signs, practices and musical genres to reconfigure modes of address to both state terror and civil societal complacence. The video is directed by Muhsin Parari and performed by the Street Academics band rapper Haris Saleem alias Maapla, film actor Mamu Koya and graffiti by R.J.V. Ernesto of Street Academics.
To make fuller sense of the video it is imperative to trace the genealogy of cultural representations of Muslim social life in Malayalam high and popular culture alike and the historical as well as contemporary constructions of the Muslim identity in Malabar. The name of the movement Mappila Lahala also needs to be contextualized. The name clearly ushers in a set of questions related to historiography around the historical events of 1921 in British Malabar. The historical event is referred to as Mappila Riots in the colonial government records and by historians and is to be later named as Mappila Rebellion by Nationalist historians and leaders alike; thus distinguishing and distancing it from possible descriptions like ‘ Revolution’ and in the process limiting the meanings of it. The Revolt has been studied variously since then producing a rich body of work leading to fresh reappraisals in historiography (Ansari 2003; Ansari 2008; Arnold 1982; Dale 1975; Hardgrave 1977; Panikkar 1989; Wood 1976).
Both a protest against the British Rule and uppercaste feudalism, the peasant revolt in fact later was recognized as a movement for Independence by the Government of Kerala. Nationalist leaders like Annie Beasant, C. Sankaran Nair and K.P. Kesava Menon criticized the Rebellion (Panikkar 1989) and literary representations by prominent writers constructed the rebellion as a lawless Mappila land of looting and killing, where women were subjected to several indignities. This discourse of colonial writings and literary representations that constructs the Malabar Muslim as ‘fanatic’, ‘barbaric’ and ‘ignorant’ has permeated all spheres of social life giving birth to stereotypes in everyday life and commonsense (Ansari 2003). The socio-economic progress and political mobilization in the Malabar Muslim community has not completely demolished these stereotypes. In a recent paper on the status of Malabar Muslims, Punathil says:
Overall, the journey of Mappila Muslims from the colonial history to the present is a journey from a clearly subaltern position to that of a more powerful community, experiencing considerable educational and economic progress and political empowerment. Although the Muslims of Malabar are no more a subaltern community and show a unique history of social development compared to their counterparts elsewhere in the country, stereotypes and stigmas surrounding their religious identity continue to persist in the public sphere even today, often in new forms. While such experiences have much in common with many Islamic communities in India and elsewhere in the new global political circumstances, it does not astonish that sometimes such situations also invoke the local collective memory of Mappilas, which often takes them back to the colonial history of subordination and struggle. (Punathil 2013, p. 16)
The musical movement envisaged by Mappila Lahala employs the term ‘Mappila Lahala’ in its polysemy as an event whose vortex throws up several concepts, stereotypes and ideas which are still in circulation, on which the video attempts a semiotic reconstruction. By reverting to the term ‘Lahala’, which in colonial history and administrative records was denigrated to the status of riots, the video also attempts reclamation of history and lay claims to contested issues of historiography. The title of the video ‘Native Bapa’ is also seen to be resonating with Black histories of literary and cultural production. The title Native Bapa, it has been observed to have its intellectual lineage in the African American author Richard Wright’s the ‘Native Son’ 4 (Dalit Camera 2013). As in Wrights’ sympathetic approach to the protagonists’ crime and his accusation about the systematic creations of criminals out of the African Americans by the system, Parari’s video weaves the nexus of lies, misrepresentations and maneuvers of the world that constructs the ‘Muslim Terrorist’ and the ‘Muslim’ as ‘Terrorist’. The borrowing’s from African American history can be supplemented with pertinent narratives of histories of loss in the context of the dark years of India’s Emergency, as in the case of the missing student Rajanof the Regional Engineering College, Calicut whose father Prof. T.V. Eachara Varier’s search and life long struggle for his missing son has been narrated through the trope of Pathos in Malayalam newspapers, left and human rights discourse and cinematic imagination. 5 The search for a son by a Father also raises some questions related to gender politics of the video in the context of a community of Muslim women in their own right and as grieving mothers, daughters, wives and sisters.
Taking as its premise the 2008 ‘encounter killing’ of Four Kerala Muslim Youths in Kupwara, Jammu & Kashmir, the video begins as a conversation opener. One of the youths from Kannur, the northern district of Kerala, whose mother disowned her son by saying that she does not want to set eyes upon his dead body as he is a traitor drew enormous media attention. 6 Layered with historical material the video is a temporal movement between the rebellious Muslim past signified in the very title of the musical movement, nationalist past of the Muslim community, the nationwide crisis of secularism and state terror that stereotypes the Muslim community. In this sense, Mappila Lahala moves out of the realm of music into diverse forms of political speech and articulation. More than any other popular cultural form rap and hip hop aesthetic can be seen as offering the possibilities of mixing and create an interplay between music, rhythm, lyrics and language.
Text of the Rap ‘Native Bapa’
At the heart of the video are some of the political debates that involve the community. The repeated tagging of the lead character of the video as a ‘reluctant secularist’ pries a set of questions around the crisis of secularism signposted by many scholars (Bhargava 1998; Jaffrelot 2009; Needham & Rajan 2007) and reassessment of the place of religion in Public life. These cularization theses that modernity has led to the substitution of religious traditions with rationalism, scientism and individualism, have been the source of wide ranging critical enquiries in the latter half of twentieth century. The central argument of the thesis is that public life has secularized and that which is religious has been privatized (Kurtz 1995). In multi-religious societies, simultaneous strands of secular forces and religious revivalism competes and a singular trend towards secularization has been debatable in recent years. The acknowledgement of the intersection of the sacred and secular in modernity has lead to an understanding of how the geographies of religion have emerged in each of these contexts. This body of work has emerged mostly in the interstices of disciplines like Philosophy, Art History, Anthropology, Sociology and Media Studies. The crisis of secularism in the subcontinent was most strongly signaled by the rise of Hindutva forces and catastrophic events like the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the Gujarat Pogrom (Basu 1993; Hansen 1999; Jaffrelot 2009; Rajagopal 2001).
The video problematizes the coerced entry of Indian Muslims into the Secular Subject position and the simultaneous unavailability of such a position for them. Secularism as a dominant nationalist trope has positioned itself against Religious minorities, by masking its easy availability to mainstream religious communities. The Muslim community has been more than once pitched as ‘fanatics’ and anti-secular/anti-national as in the case of the Uniform Civil Code debate (Menon & Nigam 2007).
The Father, the lead character of the music video, played by Mamu Koya, brings in many inter-textual references. A mainstream Malayalam film actor, etching mostly comic roles, Mamu Koya’s humour can be seen many a times drawn from his Calicut Muslim dialect. The links between humour, vulgarity and dialect has been established in the context of Malayalam cinema (Venkiteswaran 2012) and thus in Malayalam popular culture. In the hierarchical order of dialects in Malayalam mainstream cinema, except for the upper caste language of certain regions, the rest are often rendered exotic and funny. It is this order that the video upstages with a rhythmic rap rendition of the same dialect by Mamu Koya (Muhsin Parari, Personal Communication 3 March 2013). The contentious politics of coercing a religious citizen into the ‘virtuous’ secular citizen is publicly articulated through a series of malleable senses like humour, satire, sarcasm and pathos. The sharpness and the play with stereotypes and at times the ironic distance that the video displays is probably characteristic of bilingual rap elsewhere, like in the Turkish German context as shown by scholars (Ickstadt 1999).
The visual iconography of the video draws from rap culture in general through the performativity of the rappers, graffiti spread over the urban landscape of the post colonial town of Calicut. All through the video, the rapper ironically deploys the term ‘bomb’ with characteristic intonation in Malayalam that connotes disbelief. The disbelief can be seen as associated with the narratives of terrorism that is often propagated through the media in which often common place objects and things; things of everyday use gets imbued with meanings and are rendered suspicious. In the lyrics of the video the father recollects all the objects associated with his lost son nostalgically and gestures to how they are suddenly made part of a signage of terrorist activity by the state agencies. In another sequence, the father narrates the transformation of the towel that he gave the son, spontaneously thinking of the cold weather outside to a towel with a secret code of the terrorist outfit. By weaving a palimpsest of such objects, words, graffiti and the urban landscape the video is able to pronounce the web of discourses that pronounces every Muslim as a potential terrorist. The music while inspired by the rap genre also has an interesting mix of melody. The video in its oratorical style revives the memory of the term rebellion and rebel, explaining its true meaning and distinguishing the rebels’ loyalty to religion and distances itself from terrorism that jeopardizes the sense of community.
Rap Music Videos and Public Sphere
The YouTube launch of ‘Native Bapa’ provides an important opportunity to understand the video sharing site as an alternative public forum and the affective politics that this video text sets in motion. It is also imperative to assess YouTube as a digital collection, archives and library to undertake this project. It is important to note that part of the collection that is made on YouTube, for instance, is as a result of the memories of the people putting it together. This choice of YouTube for a launch is perhaps most appropriate for publics of this nature.
According to Habermas the public sphere facilitates rational discourse on public affairs directed toward the common good and (supposedly) operates autonomously from the state and/or the economy. Habermas critiqued the modern public sphere as a realm completely dominated by corporate forces with advertising and public relations as its core objectives that use the public sphere as a vehicle for capitalist hegemony and ideological reproduction (Habermas 1991). Habermas’ conception of the public sphere excludes simple expression of opinions about public affairs by individuals or a public consisting of unorganized assembly of individuals since he argues that a reasoning public is the prerequisite to a public sphere (Habermas 1973) and places the rational critical debate at the heart of the functioning of the public sphere. The contemporary public sphere according to him then, has been so molded by corporate forces that it has compromised the sphere into becoming merely a mediator between society and state (Ibid 1973).
An important critique to the Habermasian Public Sphere is Fraser’s concept of the counter-publics (Fraser 1992). Unlike the elite bourgeoisie monopoly that is implicit in Habermas’s public sphere implicit in Habermas’s public sphere, Fraser imagines the formation of Counter Publics in a post-industrial model with the acknowledgement of co-existing public spheres or alternative public spheres that generate discourse. These multiple public spheres and their varied ideological standpoints exist in order to give voice to collective identities of diverse interest groups in opposition to the exclusivist tendencies that Habermasian public sphere exude (Ibid 1992).
The conception of public sphere as a discursive arena allows one to accommodate plurality and multiplicity of publics where the public sphere is conceived as a fluid structure, changing in response to the influences of politics and public policy and almost always being constituted by conflict, which in turn shapes social relations through cultural or ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics. Fraser’s proposition of multiple subaltern counter-publics contextualizes these multiplicities of publics as, ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ (Ibid 1992, p. 123).
These counter publics challenge and ideologically compete with the bourgeois public sphere in consonance to form what Negt and Kluge has termed as oppositional public spheres (Negt & Kluge 1992). While they point to an overtly proletariat character of these oppositional public spheres, one can map these spheres as overlapping, heterogeneous constitutions as well as ones which hold semblance of a collective identity such as those formed on the basis of caste, gender and/or race. The development of multiple oppositional or alternative public spheres together constitutes a fragmented public sphere akin to the postmodern structure which serves to break the monopoly of hegemonic forces and offers the prospect of having diverse voices in the course of generating public discourse (Ibid 1992).
The concept of oppositional subcultures can be read as a subset of the greater debate of counter publics, rap generally has been studied as subculture and some of the recent literature on Internet subcultures elucidate them as alternative cultures and as practices to the dominant culture of the established society, which are self constructed either within or against the governing culture from which they are born with characteristic features such as associations with emergent youth culture and occasionally politically resistant and activist temperaments (Kahn & Kellner 2005).
It is worth exploring at this point the critical purchase of the term subculture to understand rap in the Kerala context. A term that has been long in use to research Youth, Style, Deviance and Popular Culture, subculture was initially used by the Chicago School to refer to urban gangs and subsequently in British Sociology to research delinquent behavior (Dvarionaite 2007). The most influential body of work on subculture has been what is referred to as the new subculture theory developed by scholars at the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Culture (Ibid 2007). 7 The most important in this corpus has been the work of Hebdige (Hebdige 1979) where he extended semiotics and struggles of meaning making and Phil Cohen’s Ethnographic techniques to understand urban youth cultures and their deviance through behavioral style, dress, musical codes, etc. Hebdige did not see subculture as sheer resistance but as contested sites of hegemony and meaning making (Ibid 1979).
The use of the term subculture has been challenged in the contemporary context where it is argued that under post modern conditions musical cultures are fragmented and no longer part of sub cultures and have moved to neo-tribes and scenes (Tanner et al. 2009).It is worth exploring the different inflections of broad range of positions between individualism and collectivity in Street Academics and the collective identity as the sole source of articulation in Mappila Lahala. While Street Academics is formed through social media networks (Haris Saleem, Personal Communication 19 April 2013), making them more available to the description of Neo Tribes and Scenes, Mappila Lahala has its roots in older socialites like film clubs and political organizations like the Students Islamic Organization and Solidarity Youth Movement as their context (Muhsin Parari, Personal Communication 3 March 2013.)
Derrida and Lyotard argue against Habermas’ overemphasis on rational accord as a precondition for a public sphere. While Derrida’s de-constructivist approach premises on an ‘undecidability as the necessary constant in any form of public deliberation’ (Derrida 1997). Lyotard argues that anarchy, individuality and disagreement as fundamental to the genuine experience of democratic emancipation (Lyotard 1984).
Charles Hirschkind in his work on the Islamic Cassette sermons analyses then as Islamic Counter Publics, an emergent arena of Islamic deliberative practice that, while articulated with the discourses and practices of national political life, remains structured by goals and histories not easily accommodated within the space of the nation (Hirschkind 2001). He also cautions us that:
This arena should not be understood in terms of an abandonment of politics but, rather, as an attempt to establish the conditions for the practice of a particular kind of politics. Indeed, insomuch as the moral discourse that constitutes this domain is directed at the remaking of the practices and institutions of collective life in Egypt, it is fundamentally political. (Hirschkind 2001, p. 5)
The You Tube archive is within the public domain, accessible to all and narrates tales of various genres. Public, free and openness to share are the characteristics of this digitally enabled public sphere and archive. Many of the comments to the ‘Native Bapa’ video also leads to rich discussions about the social history of Muslims in Malabar to music, lyrics and contemporary questions around Religion and Secularism. It helps us to think about the Internet as a site where perhaps the ‘horizon of experience’ (Hansen 1995), may be examined and not the rational articulation alone. The horizon of experience, here, is the manner in which people have been able to bring to bear upon the video text, differing conceptions of music, society and history. One can also see the registering of a personal history amidst the various other histories that come along with YouTube video texts.
The circulation of these videos on YouTube or indeed websites like Facebook on the Internet, functions in similar ways. On these websites we may note a greater emphasis on the relationship between fans and the music. Interestingly, it is through the Internet, that these videos are produced in the local market, but are circulated in transnational spaces for viewing and comments by diasporic Malayalee viewers. The simultaneous presence of sonic, graphic and written text relocates the Internet user within the domain of the public sphere, open to the possibilities of alternative domains of the public. It is these new collectivities that are created, in the form of a different public sphere, which is sharply driven by speed and technology, which creates a space where people are able to articulate social concerns and tastes, access them legally and non-legally and forge new modes of communication. The Internet as can be seen from the discussion above, through its form, provides the space for a new publicto come into being. In this way, the Internet seems to be able to encode experiences indifferent ways, allowing for itself to become an archive and a public sphere that has a wider range of access.
Conclusion
Rap music and Hip hop culture has been part of a global music landscape capturing the imagination of youth. Rap has been theorized as vernacular culture, oppositional cultural politics and sub culture in various national contexts of music culture. (Whiteley et al. 2004; Fernandes 2011). In the Indian context rap music and hip hop style has been theorized as providing the semiotic template of a ‘hyper fashion’ (Osella & Osella 1999) and providing the visual iconography for a resignification of lower caste bodies (Niranjana & Dhareswar 1996). The Indian context also poses the commercialized rap style, often shorn off its politics and is an exacting mix of reckless masculinity, misogyny and regressive argument about return to the roots through female body (Duggal 2011; Sarcar 2012). Through the analysis of recent Hip Hop music videos from Kerala I argue that these videos can generally be seen as posing questions about language and mainstream musical culture in the Kerala context while providing a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Kerala landscape. ‘Native Bapa’, in its direct manner of speaking and oratorical style of address mobilizes a range of local language use, experiences and memory specific to the community to cut through the detritus of political artifice. I argue that these music articulations enabled by new media technologies and platforms like You Tube can be seen as laying claims to history, retrieve historical memory and intervene in contemporary politics. We can further argue that the Internet circulation of these videos help new kind of publics come into being around these video texts and in certain specific contexts like ‘Native Bapa’ mobilize a shared affective politics, memory and identity through political speech and dexterous and lyrical language.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am deeply indebted to T.T. Sreekumar, J. Devika and K.N. Sunandan for their valuable comments on an earlier draft. Thanks are also due to the pertinent comments of the anonymous referee which helped me rework the article. I extend my gratitude to Darshana Sreedharan for her invaluable support during fieldwork, without which I wouldn’t have been able to do this article. I am grateful to Muhsin Parari and Haris Saleem for sparing their valuable time for insightful interviews on their work.