Film Screening | Standing By : The Untold Chapters of India’s Music History | Sat, 13 Jun | Method Kala Ghoda

Venue: Method Kala Ghoda

Date: Saturday, 13th June

Time: 6:30 PM 
 

Born of love and fury in equal measure, Standing By is the document that shouldn't have had to exist but absolutely had to. Across six episodes and 120 interviews in five cities, Standing By attempts to trace a century's worth of music that Bollywood and the gatekeepers of cultural memory had collectively decided didn't happen. Beat groups in Bombay, jazz in Calcutta plus a whole improbable lineage of people who kept playing music that nobody was paying them to play, in a country that wasn't built to receive it.

Crucially, what the series understood, and what most writing about Indian indie still doesn't, is that the story of Indian indie isn't a story about heroes or winners. It's about persistence in the face of structural indifference: venues that didn't exist, labels that didn't care, and audiences that had to be built from scratch by people who couldn’t picture what those audiences looked like. That's not a music story. That’s a political story told through music.

Arjun S. Ravi, the writer of Standing By, had spent the decade before writing about independent music in India when writing about it felt like shouting into a void. If this archive weren't built, there’d be no archive at alland the history of independent music in India would have evaporated. We're glad it didn't.