From Carlton Kitto to Rock Machine: Indian indie musicians have been making music and whining forever

By Lalitha Suhasini

Mumbai-born novelist Rohinton Mistry had a cover band and an album deal with Polydor, a leading music label in India in the 1970s. Booker-winning author Salman Rushdie, also born in Mumbai, was part of what may have been India’s first rap battle held in the 1960s.

OK, so the Rushdie bit is pure fiction, inspired by how he took to Canadian rap star Drake’s hit songs, reading them out aloud recently and making them his own. But Mistry does in fact have a music album to his name. It’s titled In The Mist. It’s all true.

Mistry’s is one of the delightful stories you learn of in Standing By, a documentary that spotlights all forms of “Western music”, including jazz, rock and pop. Directed by Mumbai-based music journalist and founder/editor of the website NH7.in, Arjun S Ravi, Standing By goes as far back as the 1930s, when Indians who wanted to listen to jazz or rock n roll turned to Radio Ceylon or to relatives traveling abroad and begged them to bring back vinyl records. “My context is largely restricted to the last two decades, so there were a lot of surprises for me while making this film,” said Ravi.

To be released as a six-part series online on Red Bull India’s YouTube channel and standingby.in , the documentary has been in the making for almost two years now. Says Ravi, “I remember having this discussion with Sam (Samira Kanwar, video film maker and founder of Babblefish Productions and Ravi’s wife) in 2008 about making a documentary on the history of rock music. It was more specific to rock music and a Wikipedia-esque effort that people could contribute to it.”

The director’s first list of musicians, music entrepreneurs and journalists to be interviewed for Standing By added up to 500 names. “We finally stopped at 120,” he said.

Shooting in Kolkata was a revelatory experience for Ravi. “I knew bands such as Cactus, Fossils and Chandrabindu by name, but I had no idea about the back story of Bangla rock," said the 31-year-old journalist turned filmmaker. “It had become bigger than the film music scene and these bands have seen rock and roll stardom at a greater level than most of our indie bands that came out at that time.”

In Kolkata, Ravi also met legendary guitarist Carlton Kitto, who has taught a generation of artists such as Amyt Dutta from Skinny Alley, and performed with American jazz legends like Sonny Rollins and Duke Ellington. Dutta in turn taught pop rock singer and songwriter Nischay Parekh from the current crop of musicians, who was also interviewed for Standing By. “Just to see these timelines flowing across decades making these tenuous, oftentimes really strange, connections was most exciting for me,” said Ravi.

The other insight that Standing By provides is that some things don’t change in the music industry, it seems. “Being a musician has never been easy,” said Ravi. “Also, musicians complain a lot across eras. So this whining about the scene and the lack of venues has been going on forever.”

The title of Ravi’s documentary is from a song by Mumbai pop rock band Zero, one of Ravi’s all-time favourite, Indian bands. However, this is not to suggest that the film is about passive bystanders. Ravi himself is an example of the kind of dynamism that has made the India’s indie music scene so vibrant, despite all the obstacles in its way. At 19, Ravi began working at Just Another Magazine, to review gigs and write about the music scene in the country. He would then go on to set up his hugely appreciated music blog, which enthusiastically kept tabs on Indian indie music and provided readers with news from the musical arena and gig reviews.

Ravi made this documentary in the hope that it would inspire at least a few of those who watched it to attended a gig. Now that it’s less than a week away from being released into the world wild, sorry, wide web, Ravi is keeping his expectations low. “Even if the guy Google searches Rock Machine, the job’s done.”

Standing By releases on October 13th 2015, on standingby.in and on Red Bull India’s YouTube channel.

Lalitha Suhasini is an independent music journalist from Mumbai and the former editor of Rolling Stone India.