The Age of Kali (22 page)

Up to this time, Doordashan, India’s antiquated state-run television network, had always broadcast a regular weekly music show,
but
Chitrahar
(‘Garland of Pictures’) was entirely devoted to songs lifted from the stream of musicals produced by the prolific Bombay film industry; before 1991 home-grown Indian rock music had never been broadcast on the Indian mass media. Star TV changed all this; suddenly videos from Indian bands were being shown on an international channel alongside acts like U2, Bon Jovi and Whitney Houston. Baba Sehgal appeared on the scene in 1992, and was immediately taken up by Star. Within a matter of months he had become India’s first serious rock star, transmitted daily in to the homes of forty-five million people across Asia, from Turkey to Japan, from the Gulf to Indonesia.

To an outsider, Sehgal seems a most improbable proposition: a devout Sikh from the conservative northern city of Lucknow, he nonetheless specialises in cross-dressing: on the cover of his last album,
I’m Also Madonna
, he appears in a red wig, lavender-coloured mini-skirt and fishnet stockings. His music is pretty forgettable and his lyrics sometimes derivative: an Indianised version of Vanilla Ice’s song ‘Ice, Ice Baby’ became his first hit as
‘Tanda Tanda Pani’
(‘Cold, Cold Water’). But if Baba is unlikely to appeal to anyone outside South Asia – and he will certainly never do for Our Price what Vikram Seth did for Waterstone’s – thanks to Star TV he is still an astonishing commercial phenomenon. Baba can turn up at any provincial town in India and play to audiences of tens of thousands. The crowds will range from urban yuppies in baseball caps to elderly village illiterates in turbans.

More to the point, Baba’s last cassette sold close to half a million copies, a serious sale by any international standards. And this, quite clearly, is only the beginning. India alone has a potential market of nine hundred million people, and Star is broadcast to thirty-seven other Asian countries: the biggest, most under-exploited and potentially the richest market in the world – in total over three billion people, two thirds of the globe’s population.

Magnasound, Baba’s record company, say they are not surprised at these developments, and that they have been waiting for something like them to happen for years: ‘This is just the tip of the
iceberg,’ says Atul Churamani, Magnasound’s director. ‘Baba’s only the pioneer. Thanks to MTV, every Asian country has acts whose sales are growing exponentially. If we go the way of Japan, Taiwan or Indonesia, and continue to grow at the current rate, in ten years we should be selling at least five million copies of each of Baba’s albums.’

This is less far-fetched than it sounds. Although India has never before had any sort of serious market for rock music, there has always been a vast and firmly established market for Hindi film songs. These are often performed by fairly anonymous playback singers and mimed on-screen by the actors. Yet if many of the singers are virtually unknown, some of them nevertheless have a claim to be among the most commercially successful recording artists anywhere in the world.

According to the
Guinness Book of Records
the biggest-selling album of all time is
Thriller
by Michael Jackson, with total sales of around forty million. But Jackson’s pre-eminence is disputed by Magnasound, who claim that a cassette of Hindi film songs entitled
Saajan
has topped the sixty million mark. The only catch (at least as far as the
Guinness Book of Records
and
Saajan
’s producers are concerned) is that at least half the copies sold were pirates. But Magnasound now seems to think they have the piracy problem under control, and believe that they are sitting on a goldmine: working on India’s established film-music base, they hope they could soon be outselling every rock-music market in the world except America.

All this, of course, has completely transformed Baba Sehgal’s life. By tapping in to the established film-music market, Baba not only became the first Indian rock musician to sell large numbers of cassettes to a public used to buying film songs, he also became the first rock singer ever to become a star in his own right: previously, celebrity status in India had been reserved exclusively for actors, holy men and cricketers.

And there can be no doubt as to the intensity with which Baba is worshipped by Indians of all ages and backgrounds. My
parsimonious elderly Delhi landlady nearly went as far as reducing my rent when I told her Baba had granted me an audience; and while walking with Baba in to a Bombay hotel I found myself in danger of being pawed to death by a crowd of voracious Indian Lolitas rushing forward to embrace their hero.

As I drove with Baba to the stadium on the night of his big concert, Bombay seemed transformed. By day the city is tatty and dirty: all stained blocks and flaking tenements. But at night it looks wonderful: the blackness blots out the litter, the beggars and the peeling paint. The glittering lights of the tower-blocks and the flashing neon signs are reflected across the bay. For a moment the city could pass for Manhattan or Hong Kong, and you realise why it acts as a beacon to millions of ambitious hopefuls across the subcontinent.

It was six o’clock, and at the stadium a series of miracles had been performed since the disasters of the previous day. The promoter’s cheque had still not been honoured, but somehow the demolished half of the stage had resurrected itself, and the man from the record company was now supervising the fine points of the lighting system; carpets were being unrolled on to the stage, and cryptic messages echoed across the arena.

‘Chicoo! More monitor!’

‘The cables! Chandra Kant! The cables!’

At strategic points in front of the backstage doors, burly men with walkie-talkies were keeping back sari-clad autograph hunters. Inside, roadies were putting the finishing touches to the preparations. Near the stage entrance, Zubin the choreographer was holding a last-minute rehearsal. He was now dressed in knee-high leather boots and a leotard; gloss glistened from his lips as he took his troupe through their motions.

‘Oh, I’m so
nervous
Baba,’ he said as we came in. ‘So’s Jasmine, aren’t you, darling?’

Jasmine nodded. The other dancers giggled nervously.

‘Now, let’s go through it one more time. Space out, Correta! Your panties are showing, darling. Put them away. Shobha! Don’t spread your legs so wide. OK: 1–2–3–4! In to splitting position. Beverly, you’re centre. 5–6–7–8! Split! Correta, I said put them away.’

Outside the arena, long queues had formed; inside, the ranks of seats were gradually filling up. It seemed an astonishingly diverse audience – until you realised that most of the elderly matrons and their safari-suited husbands were only there to chaperone their starstruck teenage children: neat schoolgirls in flowery
salwar kameez
and well-scrubbed teenage boys in Hawaiian T-shirts.

When the stadium was full, Baba went off to be made up. As he left, the curtain rose on the supporting act: a middle-aged nightclub crooner called Sharon Prabhakar, veteran of a thousand Indian hotel lobbies. Sharon performed cover versions of a medley of Western elevator classics until, in the middle of her act, the dry-ice machine span out of control and covered the stage with a fog as thick as a Scotch mist. Sharon totally disappeared from view, but it did not make much difference. The crowd had already lost interest. Before long a chant got up: ‘Ba-ba! Ba-ba! Ba-ba!’ Sharon came off, scowling; the crowd began to stamp their feet. Someone turned off the dry-ice machine. After keeping them waiting for five minutes until the fog had drifted offstage, Baba pulled on his hood.

He signalled to Zubin and his troupe; together they all raced onstage.

Baba Sehgal’s sound is a strange mixture of Hindi film songs – screeching violins and high-pitched female vocals – spiced up with the odd riff of cyber-sitar, then speeded up and cross-fertilised with eighties synthesiser rhythms borrowed from American rap. The end result is not dissimilar to Bhangra, the British-Asian dance version of traditional Punjabi devotional music which became popular in Birmingham clubs in the late eighties. But the real distinguishing mark of Baba’s music is less the sounds than the words, which are often quite witty.

His whole act is tongue in cheek, and many of his songs send up India’s general lack of street credibility. One is built around a series of telephone cross-connections, a daily occurrence for anyone who has to use India’s antediluvian phone network. A couple reminiscing about their night out together (‘Hi, baby – I hope you enjoyed last night.’ ‘Yeah, it was fantastic.’) get cross-connected to the Bombay stock market, and then to a bootlegger trying to flog Scotch whisky. Another song, Baba’s current hit, is about his supposed closeness to Madonna (who, of course, he has never met or spoken to) and the daily calls they are supposed to make to each other. A long rap dialogue takes place, with Baba speaking Madonna’s part in a falsetto:

And so on. It’s good stuff, and it certainly goes down very well in India, giving Baba full opportunity to don his favoured drag outfits. Moreover, Star TV seems to like it, and it makes a refreshing change from the stream of grim Chinese heavy metal bands which fill most of the airtime on the Far Eastern slots of Asian MTV.

After its success with Baba’s videos, Magnasound now plans to launch a series of model-actressy-type Asian babes on to the MTV playlist in the hope of creating an Asian Maria Carey or Whitney Houston. Both the leading contenders for this role, Jasmine Barucha and Shweta Shetty, look a lot better on video than they sound on cassette, though this being Asia, the amount of flesh and innuendo that they are allowed to deploy in order to sell themselves is well above the Western modesty line. Admittedly, Jasmine’s last video featured her in a big brass bed with black satin sheets, but she appeared fully clothed (in a kind of Victorian lace bodice, for some reason). Nevertheless, both Shweta and Jasmine told me that they are planning to slowly disrobe, video by video, as their careers develop.

‘An Indian Madonna would never go down here yet,’ said Shweta. ‘People just wouldn’t accept it: they’re too conservative. They think it’s OK for foreigners to show their cleavage, but they would be shocked if I did it.’

So what does she plan to do?

‘I’ve got to be careful – gradually removing one strap, then another, then a little less skirt: you know, do it gradually.’