Shillong and Bob Dylan are almost synonymous. You have to visit Shillong to see that. I discovered Dylan's music while doing my first year of junior college (Pre-University Science 1977-79) at St Edmunds College Shillong. In 1976 I  saw his picture for the first time. It was in The Best of Life which was on display at the State Central Library. "Do you mean to say that all these people have paid money and come here just  to see me look neat and clean?" or words to that effect were attributed to this rather scruffy looking icon of protest music.I loved it. There was also a picture of Joan Baez in a khadi kurta. The Mexican singer looked like an Indian.  For a teenager like me who had grown up in the rather stiff and propah atmosphere of the Indian Army where most officers had an obssesive compulsive disorder about looking neat and clean the philosophy of the sixties made a lot of sense. I still remember with horror the haircuts I had to take every alternate Sunday. Come to think of it Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and most of the anti-establishment rock musicians were from the generation which was born as World War II was raging across the world or as it was coming to an end. This was the generation which grew up with Mc Carthyism, which saw senseless military action in Vietnam and which sought nirvana in LSD, TM, long hair, Eastern philosophy, the sitar music of Ravi Shankar and faded jeans. No wonder that a secret KGB report is alleged to have blamed the Beatles for the refusal of Soviet youth to subscribe to communist ideology and for the eventual break up of the Soviet Union.

In May 1978 I remember  going to a swimming pool in the Laban area of Shillong with my friends Rahul, Alok (was Alok there that day? Must ask him) and the Chishi brothers who belonged to the Sema tribe and had come to Shillong from Mukokchung in Nagaland to complete their junior college. I did not enter the water as I did not have swimming trunks, it was too cold and I did not know how to swim (still don't). While they were swimming  I sat and listened to the music blaring away on the loudspeakers. Each and every number was by Bob Dylan. In all probability it was May 24 1978,  Dylan's birthday. I had heard Dylan's numbers on record players but hearing him being performed in a public place was something new and thrilling. It showed that people appreciated good music.

A couple of months later we were lucky enough to be among the first to get a copy of the cassette of his latest album Street Legalfrom a friend.I think it was Mohan Rao who got it for us to listen.Many of our classmates couldn't believe it. Till they borrowed the cassette and heard it. I think we memorised each and every number in that album. One of the numbers (Is your love in vain?) started  with these words "Do you love me or are you just extending good will?"  That album along with Hair, Woodstock, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road were our religious texts.

I remember a fete which was conducted on the football ground of Laban in December 1978 by a Mizo friend and his gang of friends. Late at night after all the stalls were closed Eddie Rynjah and his band would start playing and the audience would start freaking out. When it became too cold we lit a bonfire. When we ran out of firewood somebody broke a few old benches. Eddie would accept requests for songs from the audience. When Rahul requested him to sing any number from Street Legal, Eddie paused, consulted his band members and apologised for not knowing any number from that album. We were embarassed. It was obvious that the LP record hadn't reached Shillong. What we had heard must have been a pirated cassette. So we asked him to sing All Along the Watchtower. He gave a beautiful rendition of that number. While editing this blog I did a google search to do a spell check on Eddie's name and the first website I get tells me that my spelling is right. It also tells me that Eddie is no more and that he and Lou Majaw had started the Dylan birthday celebrations in 1972 at the Assam Club.

It all seems so odd now. A small town in a distant corner of India where each and every item came by truck from Guwahati more than a hundred kms. away. A town which was part of the area where one of the few matrilineal tribes in the world, the Khasis, lived. A town which was the capital of a state where unemployment was rife (still is). But a town which was beautiful, had lots of energy and joie de vivre. A town which was full of educated, westernised people. Where the first language was English.  Where Bruce Lee was like a god. Because, for the tribals,  he was one of us  when one saw the mongoloid non-mongoloid divide.Where one even saw a fair amount of Christian evangelism. The rebellion among  the young to this evangelism  was also sourced from the West thanks to the sixties counter-culture.  No wonder Dylan was like a god there. And in case a rock fan committed the cardinal sin of  listening to Abba or the Carpenters he  was supposed to say things like "Oh, this album belongs to my younger sister." And remain a closet fan till he left Shillong or all his life if he didn't leave. (Ditto for females). I wonder whether any Dylan fans in Shillong listen to the Bengali Baul singers Dylan admires a lot. Shillong sees Dylan and only Dylan. Nothing more, nothing less.

Old, second hand Levis and Wranglers would cost around four hundred rupees in the flea market near Bara Bazar. And it was de rigueur for anyone who wanted to be counted as a hep guy to have a pair. Four hundred rupees was a huge amount in those days. It was equal to the rent which my father paid for the beautiful house named Nongbet Cottage in the Nongrim Hills area of Shillong where we lived. And he was shocked when I told him what many youngsters were spending. Peer pressure can make a teenager go to any extent.  "Second hand jeans? No way. And for four hundred rupees? Are you mad?" Ah well, fathers are born to be cruel! So I managed with Indian jeans. Ironically in today's age most top brands use Indian denim. In those days anyone wearing faded jeans was making a statement. Nowadays jeans are accepted. They do not shock anymore. Teenagers still try their best and they do succeed in disturbing their elders who have forgotten what they put their parents through.  Almost all the tribal students studying in Shillong wore jeans, leather jackets (as the first comment on this blog reminded me),  clodhoppers and used beautiful shawls. Shillong has always been extremely fashion conscious. In the early nineties I met an Assamese singer named Shehnaaz (Queen) Hazarika at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. While comparing notes it turned out that Queen was a contemporary and she had completed the two years of her junior college at Lady Keane College Shillong. "What a fantastic dress sense the people there had, is it not?" I remember her asking me. Dressing well was like a ritual in Shillong, the town which had no summer. Only rains and cold weather. But Shillong also accepted those who wore the same pair of jeans for the entire month - provided one changed one's shirt every Sunday.

Luckily for me the seventies were the days when the Assam Rifles, the oldest para-military force in India, did not have housing facilities for the Army officers who were sent on deputation by the Ministry of Defence. So instead of living in the well structured, clean and sterile cantonment we lived in the beautiful civilian area of town. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I was able to interact with people in the manner I wanted without giving panic attacks to over zealous regimental guards.

We left Shillong a year later, in June 1979. The Indian Army had decided that my father should shift to Mhow and so we packed our trunks and left with our dog and flower pots. I had wanted to stay back in Shillong. I wanted to  stay put at one place. Shillong was the town in which  I would have been born, when my parents were here on an earlier posting, but for the fact that my mother had decided to go back to our ancestral village in Kerala for the delivery. My father refused to let me stay on. Shillong would be too far from the place where he would be posted. And he could sense the Assam agitation coming. He wanted me to be near him. Maybe, like most Indian parents,  he was worried that I may marry outside my community. He was also worried that Shillong would make me too westernised. In the Indian Army  those who are totally westernised are not liked and those who aren't westernised at all are also disliked. One has to have just the right balance. And it should preferably be a British form of westernisation, not an American one. Can be excruciatingly painful for youngsters with a bohemian outlook towards life. Thanks to the internet, satellite television and globalisation things have changed. But, to put it mildly,  an outsider would still find it quaint.  

So we reached Mhow. I loved Mhow where I had spent some earlier years of my childhood, but it lacked the fire of Shillong. I was back to a British atmosphere. A lifestyle which the British had themselves discarded. A mixture of R.K. Narayan and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Paul Scott with the latter two dominating.  The teenager in me hated this rather stiff atmosphere. And, horror of horrors,  there was no Dylan or Lennon-McCartney. But we had Boney M and Cliff Richards!!! I managed to record a Dylan cassette from the collection of a music loving captain (A rarity in those days). I do remember seeing a copy of Dylan's Tarantula  in an Indore bookshop. The book of 'nonsense verse', as a classmate described it. 'Dylan's assault on traditional prose narrative forms' as a reviewer in Amazon.com described it. But somebody else bought it before I could. I could have got it for two rupees. But I delayed it. Things changed after I started working. One was able to network with the world outside. One met people whose knowledge of rock music was greater, especially the Mumbai-Pune-Bangalore types. But I preferred the Shillong-Guwahati-Aizawl-Kohima-Calcutta type. The years I spent in Mhow as a college student were certainly painful. I was forced to be in a world I had said goodbye to long ago.

Many years later I read an essay by Anjum Hasan in Outlook. It was titled Shillong, Bob Dylan and Cowboy Boots  and had won the third prize in the Outlook-Picador non fiction competition 2001. In this essay she wrote about Shillong, Dylan, Majaw and Dylan's birthday celebrations.  It was then that I came to know about the birthday celebrations of Dylan. Of late there are press reports every year of Shillong celebrating on May 24. I think it was Anjum's essay which first alerted India to this event in India's musical scene. This year I happened to see a newsarticle in The Times of India. Almost all Dylan fans in India now know that Lou Majaw and Eddie Rynjah had started celebrating Dylan's birthday since 1972. This year he and his rock band performed at the State Central Library Auditorium. The same auditorium where I had attended my first rock concert in 1976 (thanks to my classmate Arindam Mukherjee) and had heard a girl singing Joan Baez's Song of Bangladesh. This, just a few months after we had shifted from a small town in Rajasthan. A place where I couldn't even get english comics or novels to read. Some others who performed on May 24 this year included the English musician Liz Cotton, Nondon Bagchi, Arjun Sen and Lew Hilt and the father-son duo of Anjan and Neel Dutt from Kolkata. Part of the money from this year's proceeds will go towards forming the Shillong Music Association. The major part of the proceeds will go towards funding Maitrigram, the village for AIDS orphans on the lines of the SOS villages. The celebrations this year were also supposed to include the screening of a forty minute film on Majaw made by Shivajee Ashim Sen, a product of the Indian Institute of Mass Communications, New Delhi who spent his childhood in Shillong.

So let us see how it goes next year. And the year after that. Family commitments (my father's illness) prevent me from travelling, but maybe some time in the future I will be able to make it to Shillong on May 24 and hear Lou Majaw and his band singing one of Dylan's numbers. I will tell Lou that I had heard Eddie Rynjah in 1978. That would most certainly be a nice nostalgia trip for me. Though I must admit that all the media reports must have made the participants extremely self-conscious and now that they know that the gaze of the world is upon them I wonder how much of the original charm and innocence remain. What was at one time described by critics as something childish and as something irrelevant to the country we live in has now been institutionalised. Many of those who will visit Shillong now will be of the been-there-done-that-got the-T-Shirt type. Many of them will rush into Shillong and rush out. Not staying back for an extra minute to savour the real flavour of this beautiful town. But for Dylan lovers in the North-East the celebrations in Shillong on May 24 will remain an annual event, a pilgrimage, which must not be missed.

                                                         ****************************
Close