ROCKUMENTARIES ARE SUPPOSED TO BE HIGH-VOLTAGE, adjectivally extreme affairs—frenetic, strobic, obstreperous, atavistic. Rockers are expected to direct rudeness at everyone, including the film production team. The mad, hothouse, caterwauling ambience is everything.
So when you start to film and record a quartet that takes its best behaviour onstage, a band treating it as a more or less inert performance space (despite the occasional, palliative smoke and fog and luridly-coloured kliegs), that has no behavioural wickedness on show, no snorting or mainlining or dropping; a band partial to—by today’s standards, antediluvian—melodic counterpoints, and that has released just 19 songs in two whole decades and five albums, you might begin to suspect that you’ve landed in a creative dead zone inhabited by yourself and your love of the odd thing out.
And you might well have, had these four musicians not been that phenomenon known as Indian Ocean, critically and commercially India’s most successful band to date. To alt-rock and fusion fans in India—and many abroad—Susmit ‘Rana’ Sen (lead guitar), Amit Kilam (drums, percussion, a plethora of odd instruments), Rahul Ram (bass guitar, vocals) and the recently deceased Asheem Chakravarty (tabla, percussion, vocals) are familiar faces. The sound of Indian Ocean is an intimate one, even if hard to pin a beribboned genre on. It’s a band that sells, for the most part, by its path-breaking music. Sen hates the appellation ‘fusion’ but has yet to be satisfied with any other word. Two decades ago, the fledgling band and I spent a fruitless day trying to coax a descriptive neologism from our PR-deficient brains. I’d suggested ‘elemental,’ they’d considerately agreed, and by the following day they had, prudently, ditched it. In the intervening years, they haven’t found the need to classify their music. The four are also known by their neighbourly, colloquially civil, middle-classy accessibility; the trappings of even accepted immoderations of success, if any, aren’t visible.
Jaideep Varma, as close to being a groupie as possible of a group without groupies, began filming and recording his biography of Indian Ocean in 2003, two years after first meeting them. Leaving Home—The Life & Music of Indian Ocean is a 114-minute canticle, culled from 197 hours shot and recorded over four years, during which the cost went from 1.2 million to 5.5 million rupees. Given that the final cut is an examination, not a critique, there must have been a mountain of curly film shavings left on the editing room floor.
The film was released in April on ten screens in Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Pune. Odeon Theatre in Delhi premiered it in the wrong aspect ratio—a problem that takes 30 seconds to resolve—amputating the supers and subtitles, without which the film was stripped of the band’s history. Then, Odeon shut for repairs five days into the first week and never re-screened the film. The film scraped through into its second week in Mumbai; it got unceremoniously pulled in Hyderabad. Its sole distributor didn’t advertise it. The only marketing it got was through a viral campaign by online fans, just a handful of whom eventually saw the film. In short, the country’s first biographical film on an Indian band—the mother of Indian bands—an invaluably archival bit of reel, sank and took the marker buoy down with it.
Everyone knows that Indian Ocean is, if not the mother, the big daddy of Indian bands, with a critical contribution of form and substance that is as expansive as it is inimitable. This much is inarguable—so it is a bit indulgent of Varma to have prefaced the film with a slew of high-profile back-cover blurb specialists handing out pat encomiums to the band.
Usually, punctuations in your run-of-the-mill rockumentary are in the shape of an interrobang, a question mark and exclamation in one head-thumping symbol: these punctuations comprise doped, barely coherent confessions from band members to a camera they assume is sympathetic; group quarrels that come and go like ghostly, abrasive sand twisters; high-angle-of-attack posing for the camera, tongues stuck out like the Rolling Stones logo.
But in Leaving Home, the punctuations are those of close family—mother, father, wife, kid/s—detailing what it is that has brought each of the four players to this pass. Susmit and his preternatural doggedness and belief in the music that he and Asheem, the founders of the band, were making; Amit and his dispossession from his heritage in Kashmir; Rahul and his impeccable mix of high education and grassroots work; Asheem and his unhappy childhood. Of the four, Asheem—taken recently by a heart attack and whose loss now has the band in a crisis—wears his emotions like an epaulette.
The rest of the footage would be of unfathomable value to the diehard fan but wouldn’t quite work towards seducing the unconverted—and it clearly wasn’t meant to. The music is shot and recorded in only three entirely typical but vastly varied environments of little visual appeal—at a single stage concert, with all the glycol and the lights and the shot silk outfits; outside the band’s scarred, century-old studio building in west-central Delhi; and inside the studio, the quartet jamming and scatting with a strangely structured incaution prior to slinging plaster of Paris on the wireframe of a song.
All five albums are represented in the film: Indian Ocean (1993), Desert Rain (1997), Kandisa (2000), Jhini (2004) and Black Friday (2004), the film track from which the song ‘Bandeh’ was hauled by its unwilling scruff to the top of the pop charts. The band members don’t say it—they wouldn’t say it—but doing the music for a Bollywood film couldn’t but have left a taste of ashes. That black hole of egalitarian aridity sucks up all the talent in India and spits out stars.
Strange paradox, but while ‘Bandeh’ made the band instantly recognisable even on those palsied dance floors that set their pace to banal remixes, it is ‘Kandisa,’ from the album of the same name, that remains their most popular song. The two songs are poles apart: Rahul Ram learnt the lyrics and music to ‘Kandisa’ from a soused chemistry professor teaching up in the mountains, and says that the words are in Aramaic (but their provenance is unknown); the lyrics for ‘Bandeh’ were written by Piyush Mishra and are impetuous but deathly anodyne, in the way that only Bollywood lyrics can be.
It’s been a long road to Black Friday from Desert Rain, which was the kind of unlikely creative break in the clouds that bands would barter their tenebrous souls for. At a charity concert in New Delhi, Indian Ocean went onstage after seven hours of waiting in the wings. They taped their music on a digital audiotape recorder that happened to be lying around; the recording turned out to be so high-fidelity that they excitedly carted it to a slew of music companies. Until then, no Indian band had had the temerity to try and hock a live album; on the orders of the habitually indolent music companies, all they did were covers. The music companies turned down Indian Ocean, so the band released Desert Rain on its own. The album went on to hit no. 2 on the iTunes UK world music charts in 2006.
It’s been an even longer road from the release of the first album, Indian Ocean, when Susmit played an acoustic guitar with the brio of a John McLaughlin on speed. His graduation to an electric guitar ran parallel to a levelling of the playing field within the band. Today, there is a certain collegiality to the vetting of all compositions: Susmit’s guitar is one among four instruments. “We aren’t the best guitarists or the best drummers or the best singers,” says Amit Kilam in the film. “But when we get together, we gel and make great music.” The value of this admission lies both in its ingenuousness and its capacity for rendering older fans disconsolate: Susmit was the best acoustic guitarist in the country—and hopefully still is: technically conservative, he has stayed with pulling the strings and refuses to employ the staples of the electric guitar—pedals, tremolo, reverb. ‘Going to ITO,’ ‘Euphoria’ and ‘Melancholic Ecstasy’ remain evergreen, and possibly unsurpassable in the band’s canon.
This creative equality has its upside, though. Both in the studio and onstage, there’s none of that rasp that indicates, in other bands, a sharp, often necessary, friction between the players. It’s even clearer in the film that all the songs the four play, every time they play them, are thrappy with improvisations and parallax. Nothing is locked in place, but there is never any confusion about who’s going where with what.
The problem is that three locations and a smattering of talking heads don’t often make for deep insight or even riveting candour. The bedrock of rockumentaries is fly-on-the-wall footage of musicians interacting, for better or for worse, with scant awareness of the camera. Indian Ocean’s footage is unfailingly polite, even deferential, and partly helps to defeat the purpose of such a film. Another bit of defeat is the paucity of outtakes from other, signal performances—Susmit, Amit and Rahul with violinist L Subramaniam; American folk singer Pete Seeger and Asheem rapping together; the band jamming with Japanese trumpeter Terumasa Hino; and Rahul and Amit at a percussion concert with ghatam virtuoso Vikku Vinayakram. In this sense, and this alone, the film is an aperitif.
As ever, the most poignant moments in the film are not those of accomplishments but of dreams abandoned halfway, or even an inch into their unfurling. The very first demo, taped in a single day in a ramshackle studio, was 45 minutes long and had seven songs on it. (That’s where I first heard it, on an anonymous plastic cassette, its black casing scratched with dust, and thought, “This is good shit, man.”) The bassist was Indrajit Dutta, who left soon after, ignoring entreaties from Susmit and Asheem. Married and ‘with responsibilities,’ he became a government architect. In the film, Indrajit visits the studio and picks up Susmit’s electric guitar, promising to play only for ten minutes; he plays for two hours. Despite the iffy soundtrack at this point, there is no escaping the fact that this man, rueful, nostalgic, ejected by choice from his own dreamscape, is a bass guitarist par excellence. Susmit listens to a riff and enthuses that it could form the foundation for a melody. Indrajit dithers, unsure of his own flair. It’s heartbreaking. The subtitles say that Indrajit died in a road accident not long after.
Amit Kilam, the youngest player and the most eclectically talented of the lot (he makes a single-string instrument called the gabdubi gabble in throaty voices), confesses—in what seems to be an oft-repeated confession—that he is a “guitarist by nature and drummer by profession.” So, he plays the guitar for the camera, but it catches more than he or the lens meant it to—a flapping of the fingers, jerked suddenly off the fretboard. His fingertips don’t have the necessary calluses; they hurt. He’s a good drummer who has adapted the linear frogmarch of the drums to the ebb and flow of Asheem’s classical tabla—but this isn’t who he wants to be.
It’s in these moments of loss and acceptance that the film finally comes into its own.