The song beneath my feet
By Adil Jussawalla

THERE’s this song "We Built This City On Rock ‘n’ Roll". It’s by a group called Starship. I was watching a video of the song, which must have been recorded in the ‘80s since it’s part of The Best ‘80s Party Album, when I wondered: What did we build this city on, this city being Bombay before it became Mumbai? Who are "we"? How much of the city did "we build, and how much some others?

This isn’t going to be an us and them piece, us the elite versus them the others. But can any of us say with confidence that we built this city on a local musical phase, which is what, in an American context, rock ‘n’ roll was and is? Starship are so confident, so affirmative that the video shows Abraham Lincoln rise from his chair at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, fist the air and briefly join the band with "We built this city on rock ‘n’ roll".

What the music video says is that rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay and it’s matter of national pride. Can we say this of any of the music Bombay produced or, if we go by the words of the song, which produced Bombay?

"Of course", Mustapha my postmodern, pop-focused friend will say, "of course. Don’t you hear Hindi film music? If you don’t hear it, haven’t you at least heard of it" They built this city on Hindi film songs. I build my thesis on that thesis."

That thesis has a certain refrain which begins to sound monotonous coming, as it does, from so many people, not just Mustapha.

Just before the postmodern thesiswallas found in Hindi cinema a semiotic mix of bioscopic ticks (not my words, nor theirs; I would say they discovered "an itchy feeling in the past’s eight-anna stalls") we had Farrukh Dhondy and Salman Rushdie almost simultaneously singing mere joote hai japani long idealized as the Bombay song, representing much of what Bombay is.

Then there’s Yeh hai Bombay Meri jaan, again sung in chorus and ad nauseam by Dhondy, Rushdie and others I need not mention since they find vile delight in squeezing my cheeks between their fingers as they sing that line making sucking noises when they call me meri jaan.

And now we have this by Amrit Gangar. In the catalogue of an exhibition of photographs which feature a city bridge. His look at the photographs end with the bridge singing:

"mera naam chin chin chun baba chin chin chun, raat chandni main aur tu, hello mister how do you do?"

The bridge is Calcutta’s Howrah Bridge, like nothing there is in Mumbai. But the song is pure Bombay (not Mumbai), pure bambaiya Hindi.

Dear Amrit, dear Farrukh, dear Salman, I was going to say you’ve gone soft in the head, you’ve been watching too many movies. But I won’t. Let’s assume that we built this city, Bombay, on Hindi (actually Hindustani) film songs, can we add no other words to that song?

No, say Mustapha and his pop-focused friends even as they set about trying to break down the idea of high culture with great vehemence. Hindi film songs are pop. Installations are pop even if they don’t sing in Hindi. But popular poetry written in English poem in India is either good or bad. For the pop focused critic it exists in a field of high culture, the highest possible culture, and it must be judged by the criteria that culture demands. High seriousness, High art, No city was built on that lot.

Wrong, my friends. My city is built not only on Hindi film songs but on the songs Nissim Ezekiel wrote for his nephew Nandu Bhende (recorded and marketed long ago), on the garbled English of childhood’s street singers (you are my shame-shame, they seemed to sing, not You are my sunshine, true for them but how I wish they hadn’t got it wrong) and on the English poems of an India-born Tibetan which I’ve just heard. Accessible poems which may become popular, I have no means of knowing. Popular, not bad.

It’s a mix, like rock’ ‘n’ roll which awoke America in the 50s with its combination of country music, rhythm and blues and the thumps and riffs of Dixieland.

Come to think of it, looked at this way, someone, not me, built Bombay too on rock ‘n’ roll — its own hot-and-cold mix. Come to think of it, I might even learn to turn this fact into a song of national pride. But how far will that song take me? — Associated News Features