Various Artists – Simla Beat '70 and '71

Last week, I spoke about the world’s first ever well-travelled genre of music – psychedelic rock – and its Cambodian iteration. This week, my travels have brought me to two compilations from India – Simla Beat ‘70 and Simla Beat ‘71 – and a book chronicling India’s early psych-rock scene and the Simla Beat competitions whose 1970 and 1971 winners feature on those two LPs – India Psychedelic: the Story of a Rocking Generation by Sidharth Bhatia. I soon realised just how true my initial assessment on the global footprint of psychedelic rock was, when, after a few minutes spent listening to I’m So Glad by Mumbai’s Velvette Fogg, I discovered a 2016 boxset of 20 volumes by the garage rock record label, Pebbles, which compiled psych-rock singles from countries ranging from India to Bolivia, and whose eighth volume consists of the Simla Beat ‘71 tracks re-arranged (plus one additional Ilaiyaraja track).

When I read India Psychedelic, I imagine long-haired uncles and short-haired aunties smoking ITC Simla brand cigarettes on the bewildered streets of Matunga. In many of my pieces, I brand myself a member of the post-liberalisation generation of India: one of hundreds of millions who grew up in a country that had, as a consequence of the Balance of Payments Crisis of 1991, been forced to open itself up to the world. A country that has since been in the process of giving up the idea of wholesale state ownership of the means of production, of industry, and of culture. Mine was a post-Doordarshan, pre-Netflix India: one because of which nineties kids memes make a similar amount of sense to me as they do to many nineties kids around the world, but with added Indian references. It’s easy to forget that pre-liberalisation Indians did not live in that world. That in the sixties and seventies, as the west saw a broad cultural revolution, India saw three wars, a famine, and a temporary dissolution of its young democracy. Through all this, the idealism of Nehruvian India gave way to a stark realisation of the country’s myriad challenges, especially its widespread poverty and corruption. It was a time of widespread pessimism about the country’s future. 

Against this backdrop, that a local psych-rock scene could even exist is a miracle. With All India Radio all but banning all popular music (including film music) as being too low-brow for public consumption, and virtually all other forms of entertainment being entirely out of reach (there was no TV outside of influential households in the capital until the seventies, and the ordinary Indian could not afford records or record players), popular music trends only filtered in through the AM bands of transistor radios. From the early fifties, all the way through to the eighties, Radio Ceylon was a huge hit among young Indians: Binaca Geetmala was born, Ameen Sayani became a household name, and for an hour a day, Greg Roskowski presented the Binaca Hit Parade, which introduced millions of Indians to western music’s latest hits. As with everywhere else in the world, Indians belonging to the upper-middle-class and above were taken by storm by the sound of the Beatles, and set about forming bands that made music that sounded nothing like the music of their parents (i.e. Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole). 

But in order to do so, they had to encounter another major facet of a country with wild shortcomings in its economic policies and strict governmental control. Musical instruments weren’t readily available, and getting one’s hands on one of those rare guitars or drums meant paying a luxury tax, making them prohibitively expensive. As a consequence, most equipment was patched together by hand in garages and balconies. PA systems became amplifiers, police drums became drum kits, and scrap wood became bass guitars. In all the time I’ve spoken about DIY music in the past – like when I spoke about punk music – I always held an America-centric view of the term; the stuff that was being done oneself was touring, distribution, marketing, not the making of the actual instruments, not the laying of the actual bedrock of a scene. Indian rock bands of that era were truly DIY pioneers. Their homemade guitars rang through radio pickups and Ahuja and monitors brought in from dissolved political rallies. This excerpt from India Psychedelic is a perfect example of the difficulties a band had to go through to even make music in the first place.

Ellis Nathan, who had started the Mystiks with his friends, says the group got a lot of offers to play in private parties, though equipment was hard to come by. ‘We used to get a huge police drum, made of leather, which had to be heated to keep it taut because it used to sag in the humidity. We were so broke that we had to take our drums set by handcart from my house in Byculla to auditoriums as far as in Pedder Road.’

Bhatia, Sidharth. India Psychedelic: The Story of Rocking Generation (p. 43). HarperCollins Publishers India. Kindle Edition. 

Given all this context, the idea that a battle of the bands competition like Simla Beat even existed, with bands coming to Shanmukhananda Hall from Bombay, Madras, Delhi, Calcutta, Shillong, Bangalore et al is proof of three things. One, that where there are teenagers, there will be idealism and a blind desire to break the mould. Two, that those who braved all these odds to form rock bands are indeed worthy of respect (even despite their relative privilege) from the current crop of Indians such as myself who can buy Les Pauls off of Amazon. And three, that my initial assessment was more true than I had initially thought: psych rock really transcended cultures. It really travelled. And it really inspired people from all over the world to make music, despite great personal cost, because they felt they had something to say, and through rock, they could say it.