The Age of Kali

by William Dalrymple

  To an outsider, Sehgal seems a most improbable proposition: a devout Sikh from the conservative northern city of Lucknow, he nonetheless specialises in cross-dressing: on the cover of his last album, I’m Also Madonna, he appears in a red wig, lavender-coloured mini-skirt and fishnet stockings. His music is pretty forgettable and his lyrics sometimes derivative: an Indianised version of Vanilla Ice’s song ‘Ice, Ice Baby’ became his first hit as ‘Tanda Tanda Pani’ (‘Cold, Cold Water’). But if Baba is unlikely to appeal to anyone outside South Asia – and he will certainly never do for Our Price what Vikram Seth did for Waterstone’s – thanks to Star TV he is still an astonishing commercial phenomenon. Baba can turn up at any provincial town in India and play to audiences of tens of thousands. The crowds will range from urban yuppies in baseball caps to elderly village illiterates in turbans.

  More to the point, Baba’s last cassette sold close to half a million copies, a serious sale by any international standards. And this, quite clearly, is only the beginning. India alone has a potential market of nine hundred million people, and Star is broadcast to thirty-seven other Asian countries: the biggest, most under-exploited and potentially the richest market in the world – in total over three billion people, two thirds of the globe’s population.

  Magnasound, Baba’s record company, say they are not surprised at these developments, and that they have been waiting for something like them to happen for years: ‘This is just the tip of the iceberg,’ says Atul Churamani, Magnasound’s director. ‘Baba’s only the pioneer. Thanks to MTV, every Asian country has acts whose sales are growing exponentially. If we go the way of Japan, Taiwan or Indonesia, and continue to grow at the current rate, in ten years we should be selling at least five million copies of each of Baba’s albums.’

  This is less far-fetched than it sounds. Although India has never before had any sort of serious market for rock music, there has always been a vast and firmly established market for Hindi film songs. These are often performed by fairly anonymous playback singers and mimed on-screen by the actors. Yet if many of the singers are virtually unknown, some of them nevertheless have a claim to be among the most commercially successful recording artists anywhere in the world.

  According to the Guinness Book of Records the biggest-selling album of all time is Thriller by Michael Jackson, with total sales of around forty million. But Jackson’s pre-eminence is disputed by Magnasound, who claim that a cassette of Hindi film songs entitled Saajan has topped the sixty million mark. The only catch (at least as far as the Guinness Book of Records and Saajan’s producers are concerned) is that at least half the copies sold were pirates. But Magnasound now seems to think they have the piracy problem under control, and believe that they are sitting on a goldmine: working on India’s established film-music base, they hope they could soon be outselling every rock-music market in the world except America.

  All this, of course, has completely transformed Baba Sehgal’s life. By tapping in to the established film-music market, Baba not only became the first Indian rock musician to sell large numbers of cassettes to a public used to buying film songs, he also became the first rock singer ever to become a star in his own right: previously, celebrity status in India had been reserved exclusively for actors, holy men and cricketers.

  And there can be no doubt as to the intensity with which Baba is worshipped by Indians of all ages and backgrounds. My parsimonious elderly Delhi landlady nearly went as far as reducing my rent when I told her Baba had granted me an audience; and while walking with Baba in to a Bombay hotel I found myself in danger of being pawed to death by a crowd of voracious Indian Lolitas rushing forward to embrace their hero.

  As I drove with Baba to the stadium on the night of his big concert, Bombay seemed transformed. By day the city is tatty and dirty: all stained blocks and flaking tenements. But at night it looks wonderful: the blackness blots out the litter, the beggars and the peeling paint. The glittering lights of the tower-blocks and the flashing neon signs are reflected across the bay. For a moment the city could pass for Manhattan or Hong Kong, and you realise why it acts as a beacon to millions of ambitious hopefuls across the subcontinent.

  It was six o’clock, and at the stadium a series of miracles had been performed since the disasters of the previous day. The promoter’s cheque had still not been honoured, but somehow the demolished half of the stage had resurrected itself, and the man from the record company was now supervising the fine points of the lighting system; carpets were being unrolled on to the stage, and cryptic messages echoed across the arena.

  ‘Chicoo! More monitor!’

  ‘The cables! Chandra Kant! The cables!’

  At strategic points in front of the backstage doors, burly men with walkie-talkies were keeping back sari-clad autograph hunters. Inside, roadies were putting the finishing touches to the preparations. Near the stage entrance, Zubin the choreographer was holding a last-minute rehearsal. He was now dressed in knee-high leather boots and a leotard; gloss glistened from his lips as he took his troupe through their motions.

  ‘Oh, I’m so nervous Baba,’ he said as we came in. ‘So’s Jasmine, aren’t you, darling?’

  Jasmine nodded. The other dancers giggled nervously.

  ‘Now, let’s go through it one more time. Space out, Correta! Your panties are showing, darling. Put them away. Shobha! Don’t spread your legs so wide. OK: 1–2–3–4! In to splitting position. Beverly, you’re centre. 5–6–7–8! Split! Correta, I said put them away.’

  Outside the arena, long queues had formed; inside, the ranks of seats were gradually filling up. It seemed an astonishingly diverse audience – until you realised that most of the elderly matrons and their safari-suited husbands were only there to chaperone their starstruck teenage children: neat schoolgirls in flowery salwar kameez and well-scrubbed teenage boys in Hawaiian T-shirts.

  When the stadium was full, Baba went off to be made up. As he left, the curtain rose on the supporting act: a middle-aged nightclub crooner called Sharon Prabhakar, veteran of a thousand Indian hotel lobbies. Sharon performed cover versions of a medley of Western elevator classics until, in the middle of her act, the dry-ice machine span out of control and covered the stage with a fog as thick as a Scotch mist. Sharon totally disappeared from view, but it did not make much difference. The crowd had already lost interest. Before long a chant got up: ‘Ba-ba! Ba-ba! Ba-ba!’ Sharon came off, scowling; the crowd began to stamp their feet. Someone turned off the dry-ice machine. After keeping them waiting for five minutes until the fog had drifted offstage, Baba pulled on his hood.

  He signalled to Zubin and his troupe; together they all raced onstage.

  Baba Sehgal’s sound is a strange mixture of Hindi film songs – screeching violins and high-pitched female vocals – spiced up with the odd riff of cyber-sitar, then speeded up and cross-fertilised with eighties synthesiser rhythms borrowed from American rap. The end result is not dissimilar to Bhangra, the British-Asian dance version of traditional Punjabi devotional music which became popular in Birmingham clubs in the late eighties. But the real distinguishing mark of Baba’s music is less the sounds than the words, which are often quite witty.

  His whole act is tongue in cheek, and many of his songs send up India’s general lack of street credibility. One is built around a series of telephone cross-connections, a daily occurrence for anyone who has to use India’s antediluvian phone network. A couple reminiscing about their night out together (‘Hi, baby – I hope you enjoyed last night.’ ‘Yeah, it was fantastic.’) get cross-connected to the Bombay stock market, and then to a bootlegger trying to flog Scotch whisky. Another song, Baba’s current hit, is about his supposed closeness to Madonna (who, of course, he has never met or spoken to) and the daily calls they are supposed to make to each other. A long rap dialogue takes place, with Baba speaking Madonna’s part in a falsetto:

  Madonna is a very good friend of mine,

  Madonna the Hollywood Star,

  Baba the Bollywood Star �
�

  Madonna: Can I speak to Baba please?

  Baba: Ya. Speaking.

  Madonna: This is Madonna here.

  Baba: Hi, Madonna. How are you?

  Madonna: I’m fine. Hows you?

  Baba: OK, baby. Listen, Madonna. Why don’t you come over and see my Discoland show in Bombay tomorrow?

  Madonna: No, sorry Baba. Tomorrow I have a show in Titira. Can’t make it, man. Hey Baba, has my book been released in India yet?

  Baba: Hey, don’t talk about it. It’s been banned.

  Madonna: What about my new cassette, Erotica?

  Baba: It’s superb. In India it’s released by the same record company that does my stuff.

  Madonna: We have so many things in common, Baba.

  And so on. It’s good stuff, and it certainly goes down very well in India, giving Baba full opportunity to don his favoured drag outfits. Moreover, Star TV seems to like it, and it makes a refreshing change from the stream of grim Chinese heavy metal bands which fill most of the airtime on the Far Eastern slots of Asian MTV.

  After its success with Baba’s videos, Magnasound now plans to launch a series of model-actressy-type Asian babes on to the MTV playlist in the hope of creating an Asian Maria Carey or Whitney Houston. Both the leading contenders for this role, Jasmine Barucha and Shweta Shetty, look a lot better on video than they sound on cassette, though this being Asia, the amount of flesh and innuendo that they are allowed to deploy in order to sell themselves is well above the Western modesty line. Admittedly, Jasmine’s last video featured her in a big brass bed with black satin sheets, but she appeared fully clothed (in a kind of Victorian lace bodice, for some reason). Nevertheless, both Shweta and Jasmine told me that they are planning to slowly disrobe, video by video, as their careers develop.

  ‘An Indian Madonna would never go down here yet,’ said Shweta. ‘People just wouldn’t accept it: they’re too conservative. They think it’s OK for foreigners to show their cleavage, but they would be shocked if I did it.’

  So what does she plan to do?

  ‘I’ve got to be careful – gradually removing one strap, then another, then a little less skirt: you know, do it gradually.’

  Everything in Bombay at the moment sounds so upbeat and so hopeful that it is sometimes difficult to remember quite how fragile the current boom could be. This came home to me very forcefully on the morning after the concert, when I chatted to Baba as he drove from dancing practice for his forthcoming Bollywood musical to a meeting at Magnasound.

  He described his childhood in Lucknow, his period at college in the Himalayan hill station of Nainital, and his time as an assistant engineer with Delhi Electricity. We chatted on, and he told me about his strong religious beliefs, which he says underpin everything he does.

  ‘So why did you shave off your beard then?’ I asked. Religious Sikhs normally look on razors with about the same enthusiasm as Iranian ayatollahs or Greek Orthodox monks.

  ‘It was in 1984,’ replied Baba, ‘during the anti-Sikh riots that followed Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. I was terrified for my parents in Lucknow, so I tried to get a train down there so that I could look after them. On the station the train I meant to board didn’t stop; as it passed slowly through the station I saw a mob on board dragging down a Sikh, cutting his beard off, beating him up, then throwing him off the train. So I stayed in Nainital and put myself under house arrest. Every day I would get threatening phone calls: “Sardarji: tomorrow at nine I am going to come and kill you” – that sort of thing. I had premonitions that I would be killed, but it never happened. Eventually one of my Hindu friends took me to the foothills below Nainital. There he made me go to a barber’s shop. I came back a mona – a shaved Sikh. Before, I was proud of my thick growth and my turban. Later all the other Sikhs called me a coward.’

  ‘Not the sort of thing Western rock stars often have to go through,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ agreed Baba. ‘It’s still a little different in India.’

  BOMBAY, 1992

  Question: How do you outrage nine hundred million Indians without leaving your desk?

  Answer: Write two filthy-dirty semi-autobiographical airport-slush novelettes, and set the action in Bombay.

  This is the story of Shobha Dé, a clever Indian lady who looks good, lives well and writes dirty. For these unforgivable crimes her books have been panned by the reviewers and her lifestyle vilified in a couple of hundred different Indian papers. The headline writers (who are fond of alliteration) have described her as the Maharani of Malice, the Empress of Erotica and the Princess of Pulp. She gets sackfuls of hate mail; she has even received death threats.

  Sticks and stones may break her bones, but bad publicity has left her laughing all the way to the bank. Shobha Dé has garnered some of the most spectacularly bad reviews ever written in India – ‘the language smacks of the gutter in its putrid contents’; ‘Amoral … she betrays her own sex’; ‘distasteful’; ‘downright muck’ – but at the end of it she has become by many leagues the country’s best-selling writer, moving more books than any Indian writer since Independence (she’s also a top seller in Romania, to the delighted bafflement of her Delhi publishers). And her books are avidly read. On the plane to Bombay, both my neighbours had devoured her complete oeuvre.

  ‘This is very dirty lady,’ said Mr Sanjay Aggarwal, the nice fertiliser executive sitting on my left. ‘Her books are full of wicked and filthy thoughts.’

  ‘I am reading everything she is writing,’ said Mr Satish Lal, who makes carbuncle grinders in Bangalore. ‘In one book I am counting seventy-three copulations. I am shocked only. Really – her head is full of perversions.’

  Shobha takes her vocation seriously. Turning herself in to the Jackie Collins of India has not been easy: her notoriety is the product of hard work. Born Anuradha Rajadhyaksha, daughter of a Brahmin district judge from small-town middle India, she has spent forty-three years becoming Shobha Dé, the rich and fashionably unfashionable pulp novelist from metropolitan Bombay.

  She kicked off as an exceptionally beautiful model, at a time when joining a modelling agency in India was considered about as respectable as joining a brothel. Then, at the height of her modelling success, she suddenly threw the whole thing in and became a glamour journalist. When Nari Hira launched Stardust, India’s first film-gossip magazine, in the early 1970s, he made Shobha the editor. She was just twenty-three. Under her direction, the venture was an incredible success. In a matter of months Stardust had six million readers and was India’s third-biggest magazine. Within a year it was the largest-selling film magazine in the world.

  The reason for the success of Stardust was simple: it had a gossip column that became essential reading for India’s numberless filmgoers. ‘Nita’s Natter’ – as the column was called – was written by Shobha, and it did what no one had ever dared to do before: gave uncensored accounts of the affairs and debauches of Bollywood, the Bombay film world. Its style was almost a parody of Glenda Slagg in Private Eye, full of three-word sentences punctuated by an equal number of exclamation marks: ‘Rekha left Pram’s party in a hurry!! Was she missing someone???’ ‘Ajit Singh was seen playing in the surf at Juhu with an ultra-mod model in the wee hours of the morning! Afterwards rumour has it that they went back to a wayside inn for kebabs and … some red hot pickle!!!’

  For all its sledgehammer subtlety, ‘Nita’s Natter’ made Shobha the hottest journalistic property in Bombay. ‘It was the bitchiest column I’ve ever read,’ remembers Nari Hira. ‘It was wonderful. She ran down everyone she met, literally everyone: she made fun of socialites, mocked film stars, broke up marriages. That sort of thing had never been done here before. It is still not done.’

  The column may have made Shobha’s name, but it won her few friends. The success of her novelettes did not improve things. The books were full of easily identifiable Bombay society characters, and those portrayed in them were furious; those left out even more so. Yet her enemies could only sit and watch whil
e Shobha’s Glenda Slag prose was moulded in to a series of massive bestsellers.

  At the same time, in a country where divorce and extra-marital relations are frowned upon, in quick succession Shobha ditched her first husband, publicly took a French lover, then left him and married another man – who just happened to be a shipping magnate. To go with her millionaire husband she has diligently collected all the other trappings of the super-rich pulp-novelist: the white Mercedes and the vintage Jaguar; the penthouse suite and the hideaway retreat; the private launch and the attentive, liveried servants. You name it, if Jackie Collins has it, Shoba Dé has two.

  Part fantasy lifted from a second-rate American soap opera, part marketing exercise by a clever publisher, part the deliberate creation of a very ambitious woman, Shobha Dé is a calculated construct living on the very boundary of plausibility. Spend a week with her, meet her friends, ride in her cars and go to her parties – at the end of it you are still left with a lurking suspicion that you have stumbled on to some sort of film set peopled with actors speaking lines from a Jilly Cooper script. Back in your hotel room you look through your notes and ask yourself yet again: Is this woman for real?

  ‘Put it this way,’ she says knowingly: ‘I seem to be stuck with an image, and the smart thing to do is to flog it …’

  The voice on the phone is difficult to place, a silky-smooth mid-Atlantic drawl with only the faintest hint of Indian intonation.