This may be pure conjecture, but judging by Beware Dogs, Spandan Banerjee’s new documentary on Indian Ocean, the house in which the band rehearses seems as much as a part of the songwriting team as the four musicians. ‘Beware Dogs’ are the first two words you see on a weather-beaten metal plate as you enter 16/330 on Khajoor Road in Delhi. The band uses this ramshackle mansion as a rehearsal space and as Banerjee traces the birth of a song in the space of one day, every dilapidated corner and each crumbling wall of the house seems to add a hoary other-worldliness to the music the band produces. “I really liked this place where the band jammed and it has so much character to it. It’s a pre-Partition house in Delhi and I found out later that the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz would frequently attend poetry sessions in the house before Partition,” Banerjee says.
As Rahul Ram, Amit Kilam, Asheem Chakravarthy and Susmit Sen explore version after version of the song they will eventually compose, the house provides a context to the lyrics – the rhythm of life ruptures the soul/images disperse, desires dissolve/the past falsified, the present unreal. As the band understands it, the song or a part of the song will go into Arindam Mitra’s film Shoonya (which was an official selection at the Rotterdam Film Festival last year) and the musicians have little to work with by way of context. “When we were first asked to compose music for the film, we had no idea what the movie was going to be about. I mean, what do you compose for a movie [with a name] that literally means ‘nothingness?’ Everything we thought of seemed inappropriate,” the singer and percussionist Asheem Chakravarthy tells the camera. “Then, I heard [the bassist] Rahul [Ram] play something and I thought that could work, so I began to hum along. We hadn’t yet written lyrics at the time, but an idea was beginning to take shape. So, I sang for a bit and we decided to take it to a higher scale,” he tells Banerjee.
Though the song that eventually emerges is unlike any of the versions the band sings through the day, the filmmaker, in following the course of the band’s creative workings, offers a fascinating sneak peak into the mind of Indian Ocean and the breadth of talent the band possesses – in the course of a day, they do a bhajan-tinged version, a (brilliant) Kumar Sanu take and a folk-driven variant; all of which stand their ground as album-ready singles.
Though Beware Dogs, which travelled to the Rotterdam Film Festival in January, appears to be created specifically for an audience largely unfamiliar with Indian Ocean – a cinematic back-of-the-book blurb to introduce the band to the festival, Banerjee says he didn’t go about making a who-when-where-what-why film. “My attempt was to make a film on Indian Ocean and their music. I also think it’s important for me to rework the established forms of documentary, which is what I have done in showing ‘moments,’ ” he says.
Jaideep V.G. (Posted: 2008-03-01)
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