Muslim culture is usually represented in some typical ways: either in terms of religious zeal, especially when it is poorer communities
Illustration/Uday Mohite
Come Ramzan and public start contemplating food walks and Eid invites. Me, I look forward to Ramzan humour. Memes about sehri, date-puns (“Roze ko jisse todteuse kehte khajoor/jisko dekhke public sar todti use kehteArjun Kapoor’), and the tashan of darzis.The delights of Dakkhani are key here. There was Danish Sait’s series of Pyari Bakri versus Gopal the Goat. Now, I have been following @cutiesaad18, a little boy from Bangalore. His reels about parents involved in Ramzan shopping and Iftar preparations are redolent with Dakkani sarcasm, replete with ‘thoo’s, dark looks and muhavras (dil deewana gurde hoshiyaar) and dalindar baataan all tastier than mirchi ka salan.
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But these have taken a back seat thanks to an online explosion of what we can only call Roza pop: These devotional songs extol the grace of roza, the beatitude of God and of course, the joys of iftar, but always set to popular Bollywood tunes of songs whose original lyrics are far from halal. Indeed many are originally item numbers.
“Mominon suno rozay rakho” is set to Himmesh Reshamiya’s “O meri, meri zohra jabeen” from the film Phir Hera Pheri. The words to Jalebi Bai have become “Bazaar se ammi meri ftari hai layi-jalebi layi, jalebi layi”. “Ramzan aya hai Salma chachi” is set to the tune of “Chandi ki dal pe sone ka mor”, a song about Dahi handi, not without double meanings.
Bhajans set to Bollywood tunes—“Shiv ke photo ko seene se aaj, chipka lo raji fevicol se”—have been around a while. Perhaps, we are just used to them. These songs still manage to astound and confound each hilarious time.
Muslim culture is usually represented in some typical ways: either in terms of religious zeal, especially when it is poorer communities. Or with the chilman-daman vibe of what my friend Aneela calls the Good Earth Muslim, a heritage-grade vibe of heirloom recipes and ghararas and Urdufied andaz, which is essentially aristocratic or elite culture.
These songs with their speed and inherently polyglot nature make religion more relatable and everyday of course. They also disrupt two things that control contemporary culture. One is religion, which the world increasingly santises and weaponizes, creating ever more separations in search of mythical purity or “original-ity”, narrowing how people can relate to gods, holy books and their inner life. The other is global capitalism with its religion of copyright control—where culture, which is shaped by centuries of people and communities’ energies is repackaged as original corporate-owned creativity, branding all who play with it for love and fun, copyright violators. This has played no small part in sanitising Bollywood whose vibrancy was rooted in borrowing from everyday culture, including religious and folk music.
Things like these Roza Pop songs with their cheerful miscegenation, cheeky innocence and non “classiness” violate all these orthodoxies, not for the permissible liberal piety of resistance as the holy definition of politics, but for the everyday joy of living and self-expression.
This happens through their doubling effect. No matter what the new lyrics say, the original lyrics and their associated images, revolve in your mind. You are both devout and lout at the same time so to speak, bowing but also dancing, in a culture where the sacred and profane, the serious and jovial, have always existed cheek by jowl, where it is possible to embrace one thing without abjuring another.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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