For something as loud and blaring as an outfit comprising anything from six to 30 players of brass and woodwind instruments, dressed in elaborate faux-military costumes, recreating Hindi dance numbers on the fringes of a traffic jam, the sound of the wedding band – the band-baaja of a million Indian celebrations – leaves a strangely dream-like echo in your mind.

Trying to trace the tradition back to its source yields a complex mix of beginnings. Some of it is as native as it is possible for anything in India to be. As far back as 1666, as Gregory Booth writes in his definitive account of Indian wedding bands, Brass Baja (Oxford University Press, 2006) a record of the baaraat at the wedding of the Governor of Surat’s daughter lists ‘the military standards...two hundred or more flambeaus, followed by a similar number of men and women…next the musicians: trumpeters and public dancing women, carried on palanquins, singing and playing cymbals, and finally the groom and his friends on horseback.’ And yet, much of the 20th century’s baaja culture owed its aesthetic and sensibilities – to say nothing of the instruments – to British-occupied India’s military bands, and their dropouts. While the shehnai and its accompaniments have remained an integral part of the private spaces of ceremonies, whether in mandaps or reception halls, the baaraat band, by definition, plays; becomes; is the essence of street music. And its practitioners in Mumbai most memorably settled around the bylanes of Pydhonie, picking up on the sounds of the docks, and the cast-offs of naval regimental bands making their home with their fellow immigrants who baked the distinctively colonial Surat-style version of the Dutch biscuit, the shortbread cookie, the ‘bread made with six things’ – the nankhatai. The bands have since flowered, in their trademark red surcoats and glittering epaulettes, all over the country, and in Pydhonie today one can still find storied old outfits like the A Noor Mohammed Band, begun in 1840 by a zari trader from Surat, and the Bombay Native Band, a 161-year-old outfit begun by bandleader Ali Baksh from Punjab.

The song, however, does not remain the same. All-day song-and-dance affairs are gone; so is a strain of public life that meant that entire neighbourhoods not only tolerated but participated in the sprawling, noisy revelry of the grand processions. There are laws to constrain the sound and fury of spontaneous dance parties on the streets now – traffic and watchful cops and noise pollution to think of. As sangeets shift into nightclubs and receptions acquire the frills and polish of televisable events, the baaraat band becomes a tie to the traditional past. But the subtle cultural shifts aligning classiness with quiet elegance can only go so far. If I were worrying about the erosion of Indian culture, I’d definitely contest the gathering notion that it’s not quite done to work your way through the latest Bollywood Top 10, mixing it up with old Bhagwan-era classics (Bholi surat dil ke khote, a song that no one in my generation would know if it weren’t for baaraats), while dressed in your spangled, shiny best, and completely uncaring of who’s watching. Isn’t that an inextricable part of our ‘we are like that only’ identity?

Last year’s most famous brass band, the Patna ke Presleys (in reality, Chandigarh’s Harish Band, fronted by Dev D film-maker Anurag Kashyap’s assistants) brayed Tauba tera jalwa, tauba tera pyaar like a corrosive, seductive bacchanal in our ears. For a tradition that specialises in making every piece of music it plays a piece of simple, raucous, unfettered joy, I wonder how long it will be before nankhatai bands succeed in taking the honeyed sting out of Emosonal Atyachaar. I fondly hope we’ll have a chance to know as we trot out in our silks and diamonds and stop some traffic in wedding seasons to come.

FOLLOWING THE BEAT

Currently hip, or a relic of an outmoded style of celebration?

1992 A London outfit formed to perform with Jabalpur’s Shyam Brass Band becomes the now-famous Bollywood Brass Band, whose sound melds New Orleans jazz and bhangra rhythms with film hits and Punjabi folk music.

2007 Designer Narendra Kumar Ahmed opens one of his bridal wear shows with a brass band playing the eternal Meri pyaari beheniya banegi dulhaniya...as John Abraham and Bipasha Basu walk the ramp.

2008 At the Mumbai International Festival, Scotland’s Ronak Baja, an Edinburgh brass band whose music incorporates Scottish bagpipes and European marching band influences, performs at the Gateway of India in collaboration with local musicians like Gino Banks and Ryan Sadri – talk about double diaspora!

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