Tushar Adhav and politics of the dance floor

There's a 1983 song by English new wave band Re-Flex that keeps popping up in my mind every time I find myself on an Indian club floor.

- BHANUJ KAPPAL

As I watch a homogenous blob of India's upper-class elite dance their way to abandon, it's hard not to sing along to John Baxter's Bowie-esque croon. "The politics of dancing," his lingering phantom sings in my head. "The politics of, ooh, feeling good.The politics of dancing, and of the dance floor, have shaped Tushar Adhav's work for years, informing how the Mumbai-based producer, DJ and emcee—who performs under the monikers BamBoy and Kaali Duniya—approaches his craft. Growing up as a working-class Dalit kid in Mumbai's Lalbaug, he was initiated into dance music through Mumbai's Ganpati roadshows and street parties, where DJs play Marathi folk songs and Bollywood remixes on massive jury-rigged sound systems at window-rattling volumes. It's a thrilling, wildly inventive, and wholly indigenous dance music scene, but one that exists in a parallel universe to the fancy nightclubs of Mumbai's Bandra and Lower Parel. Roadshow DJs would never be allowed to grace the decks here. The working-class dancers would be immediately turned away by hulking bouncers. Physically, these two scenes may exist just a few streets from each other. Socially, they may as well be on another planet.

Adhav, who apprenticed as a sound-boy at roadshows in his early teens, playing warm-up music for the “actual DJ”, has spent much of his adult life trying to change that, and bring down the firewalls between the club and the street. As a member of socially conscious rap crew Swadesi, he started out making experimental hip-hop, before shifting focus to bass music and UK grime, finding inspiration in the anti-colonial and anti-racist roots of dub music and the collectivist values of sound system culture.