Some Notes on Listening to Land of Gold

This summer, we are dealing with the fear of a disease that travels with moving people. Apart from the virus, the things that are spreading are destitution and poverty, hunger, and insecurity. When closing down borders and restrictions on every kind of movement are the only measures that governments could espouse to prevent the spread of the pandemic, we know who is going to suffer the most and pay the price in years to come. It is the same vast oppressed sections of society, dispossessed and disinherited, working class of migrants, refugees – those who are displaced or would be in coming time due to the crisis ensuing in the wake of Covid-19.

In essence, the preventive regime for Covid-19 – which might be a useful measure to restrict the spread of disease – is also control over and regulation of bodies and the democratic freedoms of the people by the-power-that-be everywhere. To address the terrible reality of the pandemic, while at the same to think beyond this control, is to think about the acts that liberate and facilitate the movements – movement of people, of bodies, of imaginations, of thoughts.

It is in this backdrop that Anoushka Shankar’s Land of Gold (2016)makes its resonance felt. Released during the height of what we know as the ‘refugee crisis’, this album is a music’s stance  on tracing and reconfiguring the rights and freedoms of movement of people within and beyond national boundaries.

Of its eleven songs three are vocal pieces sung by different artists and the rest are instrumental. Released by the Deutsche Grammophone (Berlin), it is a collaboration of mainly three artists – shehnai artist from Delhi Sanjeev Shankar, Austrian percussionist Manu Delago, and Shankar herself. Vocalists include British singer of Sri Lankan origin M.I.A, German Turkish singer Lev Alenz, and British actress and pro-Palestine activist Venessa Redgrave.

The reason why this album makes its presence felt in the situation emerging out of Covid-19 is that it reasserts and repositions the right and freedom of movement as essential elements of our time. These songs are political intervention in the situation and discourse around the restrictions on the movement. It is important to note that despite focusing on the question of migration and displacement, they are neither nostalgic renditions of home, nor celebration of the destinations (we know about them: detention centers, camps, streets, factories, slums). What they celebrate, and argue in favor of, is the freedom that has been struggled for and earned, freedom to move without being stopped, without being hindered by check posts:

When I see that border I gon’ cross the line
When I see that dream I gon’ make it mine
We go we go take off take off
Go hit the sea hit the sea like
Noah’s ark illegal (Shankar 2016: track 3)

Modern aspirations are democratic aspirations to be able to move – in thought, in imagination, in social, in the world. The relation between democracy and movement promises such subversion that almost all the major regulations adopted by modern states are efforts to regulate and control the movement, and thus to violently break the connection between the two. Not only it jeopardizes the prospects of democratic rights which are the premise of modern democracies, it also turns the universalist dream that is the foundational promise of modern society into a nightmare. Restrictions on democratic movements of people are in essence a contention to the universal promises of modernity, and are prophesies of what Alain Badiou calls ‘universal horror’ that becomes trues if one ‘abdicates universality’ (Badiou 2009:181). In a sense, the crisis of the modern world consists in this breach between the people, their movements and democracy.

Therefore, it is not a coincidence that the desire of the universal, that was proclaimed by the French Revolution and enforced by the Industrial Revolution, is the very phenomenon that created the conditions of being uprooted from home. Colonial occupations and imperialist wars, corporate plunder of resources and communitarian violence, expansion of market and production  drove out innumerable people from their homes. In different conditions, the decision to immigrate can be a chosen one too. Whether forced or chosen, John Berger classifies emigration as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’ (Berger 1992).

As a quintessential element of the modern life, emigration is an experience shared by majority of population of the world. One would expect that this shared experience might bring people closer to each other, however, the current global economic and political establishments will not have them forming solidarities; they uproot the people from their lands and then make it impossible for them to go and settle anywhere. Not only does this provide the production machine with cheap labour, it also provides a floating population against which the nationalistic anxieties could be mapped and satisfied. This can be seen happening in the refugee situation emerged due to the wars in central Asia and North Africa. The people migrating from the conflict zones are welcomed nowhere in the Europe, which is one of the main players in those wars, but have been detained and deported in camps across the continent where they work to survive without any security, without any dignified work conditions and equality of payments (Arbogast 2016:53). Furthermore, these refugee communities are the primary targets of the right-wing elements and political parties in Europe through which the question of European culture and identities are being discussed (see, for example, Mishra 2020).

The counterpoint to such anxieties can be illustrated by the polyphonic sound of the music, which is, according to de Groot, ‘the simultaneous unfolding of two or more voices, each with its own identity yet each also with a “responsibility” for the other(s), as well as for the ensemble of voices’ (2010:211).

When we listen to songs of Land of Gold we witness how this democratic movement of polyphonic rhythms is realized. The sounds of the music do not provide any scope for a single instrument to dominate. Coming from different cultural traditions, the instruments used in this work form a cohesive and consistent music where they enrich each other. Despite Shankar being a sitarist and the lead creator, her sitar does not dominate the soundscape, it embraces the sounds of percussion and shehnai. It is not even hegemonic, for here it is part of an ensemble. And by doing so it forms a moving multitude of emotions that it is trying to invoke – it becomes angry, on other times it is full of joy, it runs ahead, falls behind, cries, laughs.

This intervention in music, and collaboration, is also an embodiment of certain movements in music culture. Shankar comes from Hindustani Music, that is itself a convergence of Indian classical and Iranian/Mughal music cultures. She weaves her Hindustani training with her interests in Flamenco, and acoustics with electronic, and creates a music that is concerned less with anxieties of categorization and geographical identities than with the set of energies it constructs. To create this album, she collaborated with artists coming from different music cultures with their own specific genres and styles. However, by working together, they created something new which is difficult to put into a single category, while at the same time they retained their individual identities too.

These kinds of cultural conversations are hated by purists who would want to keep different cultures apart, neatly divided and separated. Such purists range from political fanatics like those who attacked Carnatic singer OS Arun in 2018 for trying to sing Christian hymns in Carnatic (see Tilak 2018), to ones who think that crossover music dilutes the purity and authenticity of work (see Gautam 2017). With such a stance towards music cultures, this fact is ignored that the cultures always tend to converse and evolve. In that sense cultures are never settled, they are always on the move, like immigrants, reaching to each other, like the people who cannot survive without coming together. Can we imagine, for example, modern theatre practices in India without a varying degree of influences from Parsi theatre, Stanislawski’s method acting, Brechtian “distanciation” effects and other such conventions? Same is true for any cultural activity like the language, cinema, music, literature, and dance.

The very experience of being emigrated that characterizes our time, as described by Berger above, is considered meticulously in the songs of Land of Gold  – the experience of being deprived of one’s own home, and finding a possibility to resist this deprivation. In the opening song ‘Boat to Nowhere’, artists construct the sad solitude of the displaced moving through dangerous waters. They try to map their precariousness and their vulnerability, but it is also a song where this solitude gets dissolved and becomes a part of the multitude, seeking the ways forward in an anticipated companionship, and perhaps, arrivals.

Emigration produces movement and involves two sites – the site of loss and the site of friction. Movement belongs to this second one. The site of destination always remains implicit in the movement, but that is a promise – a dream that can also turn into a nightmare.

The site of loss is often the home, that meeting point of two essential elements of life, as Berger explains (1992). Home is the point in the world from where all journeys begin and end, and also a point that connects the living human beings to their ancestors, their past and their history. Home is what makes life a reality, everything beyond it is part of unreal. Now with the displacement and emigration, when modern life has dismantled this meeting point that used to give life its meaning and made home the center of the world for every human life, the only possible site of strength for those who are displaced could have been the site of destination. But as we know, deprived of the freedom of choice and lacking the legal and political rights over the site of destination, the displaced mass of people has only one site left with them. It is the site of movement, which is also the site of friction.

Shankar makes this friction so tactile and unambiguous that sometimes what we hear are the rhythms of assembly and demands, of dances and chase. It is so embodied, as in ‘Crossing the Rubicon’, that it feels like a strife of cinematic scale between those who wield power and those who embody the strength, those who control the movements, and those whose life depends on it. These songs, that are combined with longings and love, anxiety and hope, challenges and assurances, despair and defiance, reaffirms what Arundhati Roy says about the political battles, that they cannot be waged from the position of weakness, they are always fought from the point of strength. ‘It’s outdoors, in the fields, the mountains, the river valleys, the city streets, and university campuses of this country. That’s where negotiations must be held. That’s where the battle must be waged,’ says Roy (2019:306). Today, for all the communities that are forced to be displaced and deprived, the only hope they can have is provided by this site of friction where the movement is happening. It is the space where they are in position of strength because it is the space that makes them visible.

How does the movement involve the friction and can become an act of strength could be seen in the recent exodus of migrant workers in India. During the Covid-19 lockdown, workers from urban parts of the country began returning to their homes. This actually turned into a tragedy, when hundreds of people died on their way, literally killed by inhuman and undignified life situations prevailing in the country. But mere act of coming on the streets together caused the discomfort among political establishment. Not only did it leave the political system perplexed – a system that prefers to organize the social division on religious lines – and changed the political discourse for a moment, it also anguished the complicit middle class that live on their labor, but do not want to recognize them even as living human beings. Their movement made them visible, and hence became a reminder of their possible strength of which they have been denied. If they can make themselves so palpably visible, and provide undeniable evidence of their role and significance in social life, they can also gain their strength and would then be able to determine the terms of encounter with the power, from the position of strength. This is an exact antithesis of what ‘empire of camps’ wants to actualise, to deny them this strength it forces them to remain invisible.

The anti-labor, anti-immigrant regime, the ‘empire of camps’, as Nicholas Mirzoeff (2005:143) defines today’s model of social order, functions on the basis of invisibilization of the ‘unwanted’ – those who are marked unnecessary. They are not unnecessary as a workforce, but as a part of social life. So, they are ‘detained and deported’ in the faraway detention camps that make them socially invisible and powerless as a workforce. Often, they do not have the ‘right to have rights’, as Hannah Arendt (1976:298) would say.

But the detention centers are not the only structures that are deployed for this purpose. There are other structures that regulate and make this workforce, or other such ‘unwanted’ sections of the society, invisible: physical structures like walls, legal entities like immigration checkpoints, ideological exercises like dominant public discourses also fulfil the same purpose.

There are certain moments in Land of Gold when one feels these structures are being contested, without saying a word. Songs like ‘Dissolving Boundaries’, ‘Last Chance’ and ‘Reunion’ reiterate the belief in a time when people will come out in streets and break these walls, check points, and discourses. They make you believe that for every wall, there is a spade in waiting for a hand.

In this sense Shankar’s music in this album also addresses the concerns of Edward Said, who, as we see below, was a little critical and apprehensive about the lack of ‘authority’ in instrumental music, because to him, lacking the support of words, such music becomes silent and loses authority. For him, and rightly so, silence was unacceptable from the point of view of the oppressed, and deprived of authority a music makes the position of the oppressed weak. While the music, he believed, must stand with and be part of resistance of the oppressed, ‘a very important part of the practice of music is that music, in some profound way, is perhaps the final resistance to the acculturation and commodification of everything’ (Said and Barenboim 2002:168).

‘In its instrumental form’, as Edward Said writes, ‘music is a silent art; it does not speak the denotative language of words, and its mysteriousness is deepened by the fact that it appears to be saying something’ (Said 2001:519). If ‘denotative language’ could give the music an authority, Shankar’s music uses ‘denotative sounds’, such as musical sounds of waves, police petrol sirens, and walking feet of a multitude. Instead of concerning itself with authority of spoken words, which are anyway part of the work, the music in the album concerns itself with the strength of moving and dancing feet – with which it seeks to defy and challenge the restrictive authorities of legal, financial and political barriers. Not only does it not offer any mystery, but also is like an open and clearly worked out thought – it argues, quotes, fights, cries, mourns, and occasionally celebrates.

It is a music that takes side, as Shankar says, it is their ‘protest album’ (Rai 2018).  While by ‘protest album’ Shankar meant the protest they registered with their music in the crisis situation, it can also very well mean with the expectations on how classical, and instrumental, music could function in a politically charged situation. This album inspires, it electrifies the listener to be part of a sensible multiple and be investigative. It appeals to understand and to oppose what is unjust and oppressive. And it is not alone in the world of music, it is part of a large repertoire from which it takes inspiration and enriches it in turn. In this sense, this album embodies an approximation of which Said has said, ‘There is no sound, no articulation that is adequate to what injustice and power inflict on the poor, the disadvantaged, and the disinherited. But there are approximations to it, not representations of it, which have the effect of punctuating discourse with disenchantment and demystifications. To have that opportunity is at least something’ (Said 2001:526).

Land of Gold is part of those opportunities.  Today when there are substantial apprehensions about the restrictions on movements and deeper surveillance on our every step to become normalized in future, this album is an argument – articulate and committed – that tries to convince the necessity to occupy the site of strength in order to make politics possible and the freedom tangible:

And you’re not so privileged
You are a child of fire and water
The strength to be the storm
And to carry it is within you
So storm, she says
And I will carry your every drop (Shankar 2016:track 7)

Go. Listen to it. Get your spade.