From sitting on dharnas to staging provocative street plays or going on hunger strikes, protests aren’t really taken seriously by authorities, believes Rahul Rajkhowa. So, Rahul chose his own tool of protest — the sound of music. As part of a “final blow against all the oppressions that were imposed upon students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU),” the 22-year-old created a rap song addressing JNU Vice Chancellor and condemned his decision of 80 percent seat cut in M.Phil and PhD admissions for 2017-18, and the VC’s failure to take any productive action to find Najeeb Ahmed, who has been missing from JNU campus for almost 200 days now. We speak to him and other youngsters, who are speaking their minds and voicing their protest using mediums like rap songs and slam poetry.
“I have always been passionate about music and wanted to raise issues of concern through music. Historically speaking, in the 70s and 80s, a lot of awareness was raised through black people’s music. Eminem became popular because he rapped about family issues and how his father used to sexually abuse him. I believe that people understand social issues better through the power of music, because even if there are a thousand articles circulating online about gender issues, safety of women, etc., no one is reading them. Music’s audio-visual features generate a lot of interest and is far more influential than a regular Facebook status,” says Rahul.
The fact that Rahul, who was looking forward to apply for a course on East Asian Studies for his M.Phil, won’t be able to do so because there are only two seats for the course, motivated him to write a rap song. “Music has always been a medium of expression and somewhere down the line, we lost that idea. Through my video, people are becoming aware about the current situation in JNU and are sharing the video to spread the word about it. People may or may not like a video but it’s a unique way to address social concerns,” adds Rahul.
Like Rahul, many young artistes in the country are using their creativity to voice their opinion more emphatically. Sonal Sharma, a Delhi University student, was supposed to take part in a college-level poetry competition and while going through the rules of the competition, she read that no inappropriate words should be used in the poems. The 19-year-old was puzzled as she felt the word “immoral” is subjective and open to interpretation. She finally penned a poem on how the word “sex” is not an inappropriate word for the competition. Later, the poem went viral on social media.
She says, “My generation is aware, opinionated and wants to express. And spoken word performances, be it rap or poetry, has an element of urgency. They basically call for immediate attention unlike a blog or a long post that demands more time from the reader. And also such stories are so powerfully expressed because they mostly come from personal experiences.”
Jyotika Pruthi, a professor at a Gurgaon-based university, is also known for her slam poetry performances. Though one of her poems praising the Delhi Metro went viral and is one of her popular poems, she also belongs to the group of performers who create creative content on issues that irk them. “I recently got married and after that, most people kept telling me that now ‘I can’t be a free bird’. It sort of irritated me. So, at a poetry event, I read a poem on how all this is just mere perception and nothing more than that, and I posted that video,” she says.
About the trend of using songs and poems to voice dissent, she adds, “It is handy because you can’t sit down and reason with everyone. So a performance becomes a tool to express what you want without offending individuals. Now there are portals that pick up such content and immediately make them viral. Also cafes keep hosting open mics. The digital space today is accessed by people from all walks of life and from different age groups and so the message spreads fast and wide.”
