‘The world must change’: Indian protest poet Aamir Aziz on coping with atrocity through art

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‘The world must change’: Indian protest poet Aamir Aziz on coping with atrocity through art GlobeArts

Watching Waters read his poem, Aziz felt a numbness of sorts. Growing up in Patna, his introduction to Western music, when he was in his 20s, was through the trifecta of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. However, his co-passenger in the car speeding to the airport had no idea who Waters was, so there was no one to share the moment with.

“Besides, it was a stressful time. There was communal violence going on in [New] Delhi. I really couldn’t figure out how to react. I still don’t know how I should react,” said Aziz, 30, in a phone conversation from his home in New Delhi. Protest poetry and performances have been a recurring feature of India’s student-led demonstrations opposing a new citizenship law. From the #OccupyGateway movement in Mumbai to assemblies in Bengaluru and Kolkata and the ongoing female-led sit-in in New Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood, public spaces have become open-air arenas for artistic expressions of dissent.

A musical late-bloomer, Aziz started writing protest songs as a way of dealing with the atrocities he’d seen around him. He hadn’t even seen a guitar up close until he arrived in New Delhi in 2006 to study civil engineering at Jamia Millia Islamia university, where he saw a friend of a friend playing one at a school get-together. He scrimped and saved from the monthly allowance his family sent him and the money he earned teaching to buy the cheapest guitar he could find.

A friend taught him a few chords, and he picked up the rest from YouTube tutorials and watching videos of Dylan, Jim Morrison and Pete Seeger. He was also influenced by the works of renowned Indian poets and lyricists such as Sahir Ludhianvi., which invokes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s erstwhile election promise of better days, was inspired by the 2016 lynching deaths of two men in the state of Jharkhand. They were cattle traders, killed by a vigilante group claiming to protect cows.

 

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