Within earshot

There are five mosques around my house. It will surprise Pakistani readers but it is only the rare neighbourhood in urban India where one cannot hear the azaan. I cannot remember ever having lived out of earshot of some mosque or the other, including during my time working in Ahmedabad, which is an otherwise segregated city.

I’ve only seen a couple of the mosques around my home in Bangalore, but I know there are five because of the loudspeakers they use to call for prayer. First three go off more or less together, then a fourth and, 15 or so minutes later, the fifth.

Perhaps, it has to do with sects.

Just after the Fajr namaaz call around 5.15am or so every morning, military music strikes up. We share a wall with the 106^th infantry battalion and so this music often interrupts my hangovers. Apparently, the thing that soldiers seem to like to march to (or are forced to march to) is “Saare jahan se achcha”.

This is the nationalist poem, original title ‘Tarana-e-Hindi’ that Allama Iqbal wrote before his more radical phase. The drums are muffled, not amplified, and the tune is played through brass, not incompetently.



During the Eids, a festival, and during Ramazan, the mosques all have special services and these are also broadcast loudly. They have no music, of course, and it all ends most of the time before dusk, again with the exception of call to prayer for Isha, which sound out after 7pm.

Hindu festivals are celebrated, not with talk or lecture, but with music. This is sometimes of the devotional sort, though it is not easy for me to tell because there are many languages involved in my neighbourhood. But most of it is film music with heavy rhythm arrangements that south Indians prefer and north Indians find irritating. And all of it is loud. This music continues into the night and often it is 11 before there is quiet — till dawn, that is, when everything begins again — mosque, military, and then music.

This is Christmas season and I was taken aback to hear loud Tamilian music on the 25^th, though I shouldn’t have been, given the pattern of conversions in India.

In Bombay, where I lived most of my life, the midnight mass was something that I anticipated. It came from the church, St Andrew’s, which was next door and because Christian choirs are trained, the quality of the music was high. And it was live and not a recording from a film. When a court banned all loudspeakers after 10pm a few years ago, the mass was forcibly brought forward a couple of hours.

I thought this was an injustice because it denied Christians the release of the moment. It was only once a year and that should have been considered by courts going after something else. There is also the fact that their mass was much less intrusive than the cacophony that religion otherwise brings in India. There was also, of course, the fact that I prefer the Western canon of religious music.

Anyway, I understand the government managed to get a few days of exemption for some religious things, and now it seems as if more or less everything is back to abnormal. India is becoming noisier by the decade as technology becomes affordable and accessible. Festivals and other religious and community occasions are increasingly imposed on all those within earshot. And more people are forced into participating in this through the loudspeaker. I don’t think this a pleasant experience and is going to get worse.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 29^th, 2013.

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