Bangla Rock: exploring the counterculture and dissidence in post-colonial Bengali popular music
Journal Title: International Journal of Pedagogy, Innovation and New Technologies - Year 2017, Vol 4, Issue 2
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to explore the politics and the poetics of vernacular music in modern Bengal. Drawn from extensive and in-depth research into the current “scene” (as popularly referred to in the musician and music lover circles), this paper delves into the living histories of musical and linguistic revolutions in a part of India where the vernacular literature has been historically rich, and vastly influenced by the post-colonial heritage. The popular music that grew from these political and cultural foundations reflected its own pathos, and consecutively inspired its own form of oral tradition. The linguistic and musical inspirations for Bangla Rock and the eventual establishment of this genre in a rigidly curated culture is not only a remarkable anthropological case study, but also crucial in creating discourse on the impact of this music in the creation of oral histories. This paper will discuss both the musical and the lyrical journey of Bengali counterculture in music, thus in turn exploring the scope of Bangla – as in the colloquial for Bengali, and Rock – the Western musical expression which began during the 50’s and the 60’s (also populist and political in its roots). The inception of this particular political populist narrative driven through songs and music, is rooted in the Civil Rights movement, and comparisons can be drawn in the ‘soul’ of the movements, though removed both geographically and by time. Thus this paper engages with the poetics of Bangla Rock, to understand the marginal political voices surfacing through alternative means of expression.
Authors and Affiliations
Kamalini Mukherjee
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP270089
- DOI 10.5604/01.3001.0011.5843
- Views 84
- Downloads 0
Economic education of senior high school students with visual impairment in special schools
The article highlights the actuality of the process of economic education of students with visual impairment in special schools. The state of the research of this issue is analyzed by various domestic scientists, includi...
Teaching quantitative research methods: the employability factor
Various initiatives have been launched to encourage sociology students studying in the UK to engage more with quantitative research methods (for example: Dale et al., 2008; Adney and Carey, 2009; Falkingham et al., 2009)...
Emerging Trend in Entrepreneurial Education
This paper explores development of entrepreneurial education as fundamental to building progressive economies, the impact of social capital and how knowledge will be delivered to encourage cognition and behavioral develo...
Communicating between the hearing and the deaf. In the search for innovative solutions
Democratization of social life in Poland after political transformation of 1989 meant that people with disabilities, including the deaf began to participate in social life actively and demand the ability to use full righ...
Music education for social change in the United States: towards artistic citizenship through Little Kids Rock
Public education in the United States is often woefully under-funded, especially in the arts, despite a federal mandate to provide music education for all. Where music programs exist in US schools, they tend to focus on...