The use of DJs in Hindu religious or Hindutva political processions, playing in full volume outside mosques, has of late become a cause for communal tensions, the most recent case being the violence in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich in October.
In the last few years, this omnipresent music has pushed the sonic limits of India’s already saturated soundscape.
It is difficult to miss the music. The catchy beats and high-pitched music almost drown the lyrics till you actually hear them. And once you do, the lyrics are often difficult to forget as many of the songs are steeped in anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Whether you call it Saffron Pop, Hindutva Pop or H-Pop, it has become integral to the Hindu Right’s cultural, social, and political mobilisation.
While the use of DJs is a new phenomenon, the interplay of music, processions and violence has a very long history, with recorded incidents going back to the 19th century. The recent book by Kunal Purohit (2024) has brought this subject to the fore while there are earlier work exists such as stories by Quratulain Rehbar (2022), Mahtab Alam (2010), DW and The Quint (2019).
In this article, I will be looking at how music and processions have been central to the history of communal hate in India. Basically, what was ‘H-Pop’ before it became ‘H-Pop’?
Music and the Hindu Right
Music is not just one of the mediums employed by the Hindu right, it has been central to the Hindu Right’s procession politics from its early days.
It is not just a case of the Hindu Right shelving traditional methods and adopting pop culture to catch up with Gen-Z to propagate their message. The Hindu Right may be culturally conservative, but they have been the quickest ones to use technology and popular culture to further their agenda and chart new territories, geographically as well as demographically. It has thrived in every medium, be it print, television, cassette, video or digital media.
However, all this is beyond the scope of this article. Here, I will just focus on the primacy of music as a marker of difference and its weaponisation in invoking latent Islamophobia and at times as a catalyst to instigate violence.
The identity and social markers, many of which were mostly cultural/regional, took on religious fervour, with music playing an important role. But how does music come to play such a significant role?
If we look at the reported cases of communal violence, some of their earliest instances have been recorded in the 1850s. Around that time, a Bombay Court outlined conditions under which Hindu processional music could be played in front of the mosque. This is what the court said:
The right of praying in their mosque must be secured to the Muhammadans so long as their prayers are not a nuisance to others, and the Hindus may be allowed to accompany their processions with music so long as their music is not a nuisance to others; but whenever it becomes a nuisance, it ought, the Judges think, to be prohibited.
For the government, whether in colonial or independent India, it was mostly dealt with as a law and order matter, where individual police persons could act according to their biases. Since the police officers were mostly caste Hindus, their own political biases led to inaction against the case of violation. Even today, the demography of our police forces in terms of caste, gender, and religion determines the nature of policing that inherently works against women, minorities, and marginalised castes.
It is noteworthy to remember that in 1893, when Tilak started Ganesh Chaturthi with quasi-religious-nationalist purposes, the lyrics of songs had communal undertones, such as “What boon has Allah conferred upon you, that you have become Mussalmans today? Do not be friendly to a religion which is alien; do not give up your religion and be fallen.”
Another song says, “Disturbances have taken place in several places, and Hindus have been beaten. Let all of us with one accord exert ourselves to demand justice”.
What we know today as H-Pop or Saffron Pop has its seeds in these 19th-century compositions.
These claims of communal violence were also captured by the budding print media of the time. Thus, these localised disparate events soon came to be seen as an all-India phenomenon. This process led to a consolidation of religious identity, surpassing the regional, linguistic, and caste identity to the extent that, in times of mobilisation, religious identity started taking primacy.
Later instances such as Calcutta (1924), Nagpur (1926), Surat (1927), and numerous others have shown how music in religious processions is linked to communal violence.
For instance in 1924, the Arya Samaj Procession reached Dinu Chamrawalla's mosque in Calcutta when the muezzin was about to commence the azan. The police compelled all the drummers, except one, to stop their music. It was this single drummer who provoked the attack from the mosque, which led to the gory events. Three similar events happened in front of the Pabna’s Khalifapatti mosque.
Every passing year, one incident of violence or the other adds a few bricks to the wall that divides our society. Sonic dominance through H-pop music is a project underway for over a century, but the contemporary digital technology and political environment mark its coming of age.
The H-Pop Boom
The rise of social media as a part of organised political campaigning and mobilisation has accelerated this process. With the monetisation and influencer culture, the translation of digital into the real world through live, paid performance has also attracted many older devotional singers towards this music.
(Watch this video by The Quint on how H-Pop has become a lucrative industry)
With the current political environment, there are a great deal of incentives for content creators, interest groups, and audiences to come up with such songs. With the expansion of localised religious events such as Ganesh Chaturthi, Kanwar Yatra, and many pilgrimages across regions, this network is highly integrated and dense. Music works as an electrifier in this network. In these congregational spaces, music at times divides and instigates, instead of spreading devotion, equality, and unity. The acts may reflect the Hindu Right’s real or perceived assertion of sovereignty over the sonic territory. It is meant to make Hindus experience Hindu Rashtra and express domination over Muslims, at least in terms of soundscape.
The communal conflict comes down to a competition between the right of Hindus to celebrate their festivals with loud music and the right of Muslims to pray in peace. The contesting groups are never equal, and this is further worsened by the manner in which state or para-state institutions choose to side with one over the other.
The question is not of general civil disturbance but of the respective religious practices. A call by a human being on a regular loudspeaker lasting for a few minutes a few times a day cannot be equated with multiple drums, loudspeakers, and DJs. The point is not to ban or oppose either. But not to encroach on the religious practices of others. The front of the mosque is not necessarily a site of Hindu religiosity through the blaring music that we see on many occasions, notwithstanding the lyrics. There are numerous examples where people across faiths cooperate and organize.
With many regional and localised festivals now becoming a national, pan-Hindu phenomenon, the frequency and scale of processions have increased exponentially and so has the deployment of loud music. Naturally, the instances of violence are also bound to increase.
During my fieldwork in Rajasthan’s Bikaner, I asked a resident about why youth participate in such processions. The resident, who is associated with caste organisations, said, “We engage students in education, young people in sports, and workers with some unions, though very little, there is still a big part of our young caste brethren, who is there and active, and visible. How do we engage with them? They love DJs, Selfies, and high-beat music in a procession, just give them that. Many of us don’t like it, but this kind of procession brings people together”.
Asserting one’s identity or attacking the other, with catchy beats and loud tunes in the background, connects with people at a deep, visceral level and gives them a sense of being part of something much larger.
(The author is a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, working at the intersection of popular religion and music in India.)