Thank you for the music

Every band has a sound that discerning music lovers often pin down to a single word: rock, pop, jazz — something that sits neatly in a genre. But anybody who has listened to Indian Ocean knows their music may be easy to recognise but almost impossible to locate or define. Maybe if one takes a fistful of rich dark earth, a drop of the last winter rain, a log of fire burning in an old woodcutter’s home, and slosh it with blood, sweat and tears of the country’s civilisational soul, it would go some way in describing their music.For Indian Ocean’s music is primeval, eclectic, elemental.
Now, the story of the Delhi-based band’s birth, its making and shaping has been put together by writer-director Jaideep Varma in a 115-minute documentary titled, Leaving Home — the Life and Music of Indian Ocean. And fittingly, for the first time in India, the ‘rockumentary’ is being screened in six cities across the country: Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Pune, Hyderabad and Indore. New York, too, could be on the list in future.
Their music is spectacularly accessible, utterly contemporary and yet far-removed from the mainstream. Indian Ocean’s music is what makes me proudest to be an Indian today. By making this film, I just wanted to transmit that feeling to the audience,” says Varma, 42, a former adman who has also directed the under-feted feature, Hulla (2008).
The film’s shooting started in June 2006. Four members of the production team travelling to Delhi had a narrow escape on July 11, the day a series of bomb blasts rocked local trains. “Barely 30 minutes before the explosions, our train left the Mumbai Central station,” says Varma.
Over several months, the team filmed a messy 197 hours of footage. But what emerges after the humongous task of editing is an intimate portrait of a four-member band. We get a close-up view of their formation in 1990, changes in the line-up — did you know they had an attractive female keyboard player Sawan Dutta? — early struggles, the emotional lows caused by rejection from music companies and their unwavering self-belief in their own music.
We also see the band’s vocalist and tabla player Asheem Chakravarty talking about his unhappy childhood — one of the movie’s most poignant moments. Tragically, Asheem died of cardiac arrest in December 2009. “He saw the film before that and loved it. Among the band members, he believed most in the film,” says Varma.
The movie also brings Indrajit Dutta, a guitarist who was part of the initial line-up, to play with the band. Dutta’s one-day reunion with Susmit and Asheem, where the former talks about his lingering regret at leaving the group and his desire to turn the clock back, provides for some of the film’s most moving moments. It’s indeed eerie that Dutta also died in a traffic accident last year. He never saw the film.
The songs, many played especially for the film at the band’s practice haunt, a 100-year-old bungalow on Khajoor Road in Delhi’s Karol Bagh area, elevate the mood. As the four musicians (guitar Susmit Sen, tabla and vocals Asheem, bass guitar Rahul Ram and drums Amit Kilam) work on tracks like Village Damsel, Desert Rain, Ma Rewa and Kandisa, one senses communion. “Bringing out the chemistry of the four musicians as four characters talking to each other through music was a real challenge. That’s what we achieved on the editing table,” says Sumit Kilam, who assisted both as director and editor on the project.
In a country where dozens of features die in the cans, a documentary getting a decent theatrical release is nothing less than a miracle. Ashish Saxena, CEO, Big Cinema explains why. “The audience is maturing and evolving. We are trying to offer as much variety to them as possible,” he says. For Varma, the film is a litmus test for Indian Ocean fans. “I want to see how much they love their work,” he says. Those who do, may not be disappointed. Only watching Asheem lay bare his heart may cloud your eyes