People of Mandal block were surprised when they heard of a couple from Ahmedabad. It was May 2005 and this block in Bhilwara district of Rajasthan was witnessing communal riots for two months. Houses were burnt, shops ransacked and leaders from the two communities continued to spew venom. In such a charged atmosphere, what were the husband and wife going to do, singing songs of communal harmony?

Though Vinay Mahajan, 47, and Charul Bharwada, 42, often known only collectively as Vinay-Charul, were coming on the invitation of the local Eid-Diwali samiti, some people did not want them there and went from house to house telling people the programme was cancelled.

Even the administration, which had failed to contain the violence, cranked up and appealed to the samiti to postpone the performance. The district collector himself asked the organisers to reconsider the plan, as the situation was quite volatile.

At six in the evening, an hour before the performance, the samiti started erecting the stage at the busiest intersection of Mandal town. By seven, the couple, armed with a dafli and ghungharu, began with a song titled Mandir-Masjid.

As they rendered their self-composed lyrics in their haunting voices, ‘Mandir, masjid, girjaghar ne/Baant diya bhagwan ko/Dharti baanti/Sagar banta/Mat banto insaan ko..”, crowds began to gather. (Temples, mosques, churches have divided the Gods/Divided the earth/Divided the seas/Please don’t divide people.)

Their number swelled from a few hundreds to thousands by late evening. Was it the words that made them ponder their collective deeds or the singing, with a ring of concern and appeal, that soothed the ravaged hearts? 

“People were so touched by the songs that many of them started singing along with us. We were surprised to see many of them in tears,” Vinay recalled.

As the evening came to an emotional end, some people came up to Vinay-Charul, confessed their involvement in the riots and wanted to atone. Some sarpanches invited the couple to perform in their riot-hit villages.

“We have performed in similar, vicious settings, especially after the Gujarat violence of 2002, but we had not expected this ‘truth-and-reconciliation’ moment ever,” Vinay said.

Weren’t they afraid, especially after the campaign against their performance? “There was some tension and we did discuss it, but there was no going back,” Charul added.

Their songs of harmony worked wonders and the area has not reported violence again.

For Vinay-Charul, such wonders are becoming commonplace: what happened in Mandal was repeated in a village in Mehsana district of north Gujarat after the 2002 riots. It was their soulful songs that brought about a change of heart among village elders who wanted minority families evicted.

It is precisely such moving reactions from their audiences from across the country that have kept the couple going after they quit their cushy professional jobs.

Chanting a new path

Vinay, an Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) graduate, worked with a multinational and Charul, an architect, was a consultant with an architectural firm before they formed Loknaad in 1992. Since then, the couple has performed in every part of the country and created several songs, some of which have become anthems for campaigners working on issues such as the right to information (“Janane ka haq”), unemployment (“Haathon ko kaam”), militancy (“Beta jaldi ghar aana”) and communalism (“Mandir-masjid...”, “Insaan hain hum”).

Born in Gurudaspur in Punjab, Vinay studied engineering at the Punjab Agricultural University, Jalandhar, applied for the IIMs and got through to the top one. But he had not planned what followed, he said. “While I didn’t know what I would do with my life, I was sure I would not be a 9-to-5 man,” he said in his mild-mannered way with a disarming smile.

Though he had been writing lyrics since college days, he had never seriously thought about making it his career. “I used to write poems and sing gazals in college but never took it seriously,” he said.

What added social-political sensitivity to his creativity was the communal violence of Ahmedabad in 1985, the year he joined the IIM. The wanton death and destruction that he witnessed in the city led him to write his first song, “Mandir-Masjid...”, which went on to become one of his most successful songs. It remains highly popular among activists.

It was a terrible moment in my life. Coming from a border area in Gurudaspur in Punjab, where Muslims live harmoniously along with Hindus, the blood thirst of the same communities against each other shook me up,” he said.

He penned that song and sang to his friends and activists, but full-fledged performances had to wait till he met Charul in the scenic IIM-A campus in 1987. They got married in 1989 and the couple started singing in more formal settings.

Unlike Vinay, Charul finds it difficult to pinpoint a particular moment in her life that turned her into a singer activist. “It wasn’t like I met Vinay one day and decided to leave my job and turn into an activist,” she said. The change came more gradually for her.

As a student of architecture in Mumbai, she had a keen interest in appropriate technology for which she often traveled to many states. During one of her visits to remote villages in Chhattisgarh, she witnessed from up close rural India and problems faced by its poor inhabitants. “The difficult life of villagers and tribals made me think hard on what I wanted to do in life.”

Meanwhile, the meeting with Vinay happened, following which they kept in touch. During their frequent interactions, they realised their sensitivities were similar and both wanted to utilise their skills toward some sort of social work.

“We were sure of aligning our talent for broader social issues,” recalled Vinay.

Moreover, it helped matters that Charul too had a good voice. “Everyone in my family has had some background in music and people said I could sing well,” she said.

After their marriage, the couple chose Ahmedabad to settle down. “One of us had to know the local language for our kind of work and since Charul belonged to the city and I too had spent a few years here, it was an easy choice,” said Vinay.

Initially, both of them carried on with their respective jobs in the corporate world.

In the day time, they would go to their respective jobs and in evenings it would be Vinay on dafli, Charul playing ghungharu, and both singing songs of their own. However, soon they realised there was a glitch: the kind of work they wanted to do needed more time.

“Moreover, there was sometimes a conflict of interest. We were penning songs for the Narmada movement even as I was working on a project for a five-star hotel. The two cannot go together,” Charul said.

Vinay added: “We were not sure where to begin so we started taking up research study projects in Gujarat to know the state better and familiarise ourselves with the real, ground issues. So that’s how we waded into the social issues of Gujarat, whether it was water scarcity in Kutch, livelihood of the pastoral community, tribal areas or salt workers.”

Wanting to know more about the people and the issues they face, Vinay once set off on a 500-km cycle tour of Saurashtra. As they began traveling, they gradually got a hang of a plethora of problems. Meantime, their conviction in composing and singing also grew.

They were also inspired by a variety of performances in Ahmedabad including some by the Jana Natya Mandli, modern folk singers from Kolkata, poets with a social conscience and the Punjab Lok Sabhayacharak Manch led by Gursharan Singh.

Words – with faces behind them

“We zeroed in on songs as a medium primarily because we wanted to communicate whatever we understood from our field visits,” Charul said.

“For example, take this report,” Vinay said, pointing to a fat volume on the condition of salt workers that was lying on his desk in his office in Vastrapur. “Only a few people will bother to read it. It is technical. And, moreover, people in villagers don’t read such reports.” So, it made sense to translate their research in a few easy-to-understand, rhyming lines, which can be sung to people.

And the rapport they established with farmers and fishermen, forest dwellers and tribals through their travels ensured that they found the right words for their songs, words that went straight to the heart of the common man.

“All those friends that we have made in our field study form part of our lyrics. So when we sing the songs we are not singing abstract lines, there are faces behind them. Kama Bai Rabari, from Saurashtra, Sawabhai from Kutch. Their faces come to you, so you know these problems are not abstract. It’s not a poet or a singer singing. It’s the feeling, knowledge, learning of a researcher who is singing about his friends. He is not singing about a community somewhere,” Vinay said.

Having said that, the creative process takes its own time. “The ideas for the song come easily, but it takes weeks and months to thrash out the wordings,” Vinay said. “While we both brainstorm on the lyrics, the tunes are exclusively Vinay’s,” Charul added.

The lyrics of “Mare gam naave pani (There’s no water in my village)”, one of their popular songs on water scarcity in Kutch, came primarily from Vinay’s cycle trek in Saurashtra.  Vinay originally wrote the song in Hindi, but it was the Gujarati version (penned by Charul) that became a hit. “We have never sung the Hindi version,” Charul said. Written in 1993, it continues to find an immediate connect in large parts of drought-prone Kutch and Saurashtra.

“Lashon ka bazaar (The market of corpses)”, a powerful song on the politics of compensation doles meted out to victims of natural disasters, was written after they visited Kandla following the devastating cyclone in 1998. “Thousands who had died could have been saved had the state reacted fast,” recalled Charul. As the government announced a compensation of Rs 1 lakh for victims, there was a maddening clamour for the booty.

“Whoever found a body would come up to claim the compensation; it seemed as if there was a market of corpses,” said Charul. The scene was so revolting that the lyrics came automatically: “Yeh lashon ka bazar hai kyon/In lashon par takrar hai kyon/Yahan jine ka koi mol nahin/ Mar jane ka ek lakh kyon?” (Why this bazar of the corpses/Why this squabbling over them/Where there’s no value for life/Why is a corpse worth Rs 1 lakh?)

After “Mandir masjid...”, they returned to the theme of communal strife in 1998 when they wrote “Insaan hain hum”. The song on identity politics found its resonance in the aftermath of the 2002 riots.

An audio CD, titled “Insaan Hain Hum: Lakeeron Se Banti Insaaniyat Ke Naam” and containing their several offerings on the theme, was released after the riots with an appeal to say no to violence and hatred within and across the borders. It came with posters, stickers and a two-hour ‘Insaan Hain Hum’ performance module.

The bouquet of songs has also been performed on stage more than 150 times across the country. The organisers and audiences include schools, colleges, institutions, citizens’ forums, professionals’ bodies, executives, business people and rights organisations.

Anthem of RTI campaigners

Their biggest hit and a song that made them a household name came in 2004. Titled ‘janane ka haque’, it became the theme song for the Right to Information Act that came into force in 2005. “Since many people associated with the RTI campaign knew us and our work, they wanted us to write a song for the RTI Act,” Vinay said.

They composed the lyrics and sang it live at a national convention for RTI in Delhi in 2004. The song has been translated into 13 languages and NCERT wants to include it in its syllabus. The song is also popular in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It is a minor hit on YouTube too.

What makes their songs so appealing to the audience is their ability to communicate through the language people understand and their conscious effort to avoid being judgmental. “We never try to act as arbiters, and present the issue threadbare, leaving the audience to decide what is wrong and what is right,” Vinay explained.

Sagar Rabari, secretary of the Gujarat Lok Samiti who has known the couple for many years, said it is the right mix of dil and dimag  (thought and emotion) in their lyrics that move those listening to them. “I have heard them sing and the impact of their songs is powerful and instant. They are impressive,” he said.

Harinesh Pandya who heads Janpath, an organisation working on a number of social issues including RTI said the couple are the ‘darlings’ of RTI activists. “We could not have imagined the kind of impact their song ‘Janane ka haque’ has had on the right to information campaign. Their lyrics so beautifully delineate the expectations we have from the law. It has rightly become the theme song of the RTI activists,” he said.

So how do they feel when their songs move people and work wonders? “It’s difficult to describe that actually,” Charul said. “Obviously there is a sense of satisfaction, but more than that, it’s the realisation that there is a possibility of change that makes us happy,” she added.

To which, Vinay added: “The possibility of such change of heart eggs us on and motivates us to keep composing and singing wherever and whenever we can.”

This first appeared in June 16-30 issue of the Governance Now magazine (Vol. 01, Issue 10).