All the murderous rage about a linguistic curiosity

From Tanglish to bhangra and R&B, this song has transcended boundaries of linguistics, rhythm and emotion

BY MAHESH RADHAkRISHNAN

I’m one of those second generation migrants who, faced with the pressures of maintaining cultural continuity, grew up more traditionallyoriented in some ways than my relatives in the mother country. I hover between this conservatism and a radicalism which completely rejects convention. Hence, my music taste spans from deeply conservative, classical (or folk) traditional styles to wildly alternative innovations on the fringe. One of the fallouts of this is that I never actively listened to a lot of Indian popular music except at weddings, as it was not traditional enough or alternative enough for me.

At the end of 2011, my brother’s family returned from a trip to India and one of the first things he asked me was, “Have you heard the Kolaveri song?” I hadn’t, and educated myself with YouTube clips of the song, including a chipmunk version.

I wasn’t that impressed by the song. My first reaction was that it perpetuated the racially discriminatory obsession with fair skin so prevalent in India through focusing on a ‘girl with white skin’ with a ‘black’ heart as the object of love. The idea that white skin is the epitome of beauty and a black heart is a bad thing, and the kind of overt colourising of good and bad was a bit too overt for my liking. I may be accused of reading too much into a nonsense song, but these questions need to be asked. The sheer popularity and populism of a song which did not, to my mind, have much to it, also annoyed me. Ok, just another blip on the Indian pop timeline, or so I thought.

Then, a couple of months later, I picked up a copy of Indian Link from the local spice store and saw a headline about a Kolaveri Di flash mob on the cover. In mild shock, I brought it home and soon my wife and I were on YouTube enjoying the Pitt St display - well done, people! But after checking out flash mobs in Auckland, Chennai, USA, Canada and Holland, we discovered that there were versions of the song spanning different languages including Punjabi, French, Sinhala, Italian, English (as opposed to the original ‘Tanglish’). Some of these were superimposed over the original music and others were musically reshaped into bhangra or R&B rearrangements. The linguistic and stylistic diversity of these different versions of the song motivated me to give the song a second chance, after I got over the slight embarrassment that it would take such a self-evident nonsense song (or self-proclaimed ‘flop song’) to place Tamil Nadu and the Tamil language so prominently on the world stage.

The original song uses mostly English words within a simplified Tamil syntax and case endings called ‘Tanglish’ (for the record, I’m not a big fan of this term as it could be used for any mixture of English with a language beginning with ‘T’ such as Telugu, Tullu, Thai, Turkish or Tagalog).

The lines are very simple and formulaic so it doesn’t take much to understand the song if you can understand English and have some awareness of Indian pronunciation.

India has a rich history of poetry and song that mixes and moves between different languages - in south India this is called manipravālam. ‘Mani’ is Tamil for ‘ruby’ and ‘pravāla’ is Sanskrit for ‘coral’, depicting the high aesthetic regard given to such poetry. The word manipravālam is also used in contemporary Tamil to refer to code-switching or the mixing of languages in conversation, which is very common across India and the world over. The interspersion of English words into Tamil conversation is deeply entrenched, particularly in Chennai where loan words which end in consonants are often followed by the vowel u, making them fit into South Indian pronunciation. This feature is called vowel epenthesis and occurs even in Tamil where words such as pal (tooth), sol (speak), man (dirt) and ūr (country) become pallu, sollu, mannu and ūru in the spoken Tamil of various parts of Tamil Nadu. This same change occurs to English words which end on consonants like girl (girl-u), skin (skin-u) etc. And it only happens in the South, highlighting the regional flavour of the language of the song.

The other language versions of Kolaveri are equally interesting. Amongst my favourites is one of the Sinhala versions (of at least three!) called Metre song which appears to be about some misadventure involving a taxi or auto-rickshaw metre. While I expect a degree of ridiculousness from the clip and the insobriety of the singers’ voices, I am intrigued as to how it’s all lyrically strung together. The English R&B version of How could you do this to me by the UK-based Tamil background singer Arjun is also interesting, because it draws on the catchiness of the tune and restyles it with an R&B touch.

Arjun’s version coolifies the lyrics, replacing the ‘Tanglish’ ‘flop song’ vibe with something more in keeping with an R&B song (to make the point, his YouTube clip begins with a disclaimer: I don’t usually do this type of song...). Then there’s the Punjabi bhangra version which is lots of fun too. The different versions show how the sentiment of being struck down by love in the Tamil word kolaveri (literally ‘murderous rage’) is variously adapted and reinterpreted.

While many of the versions and flash mobs have come from the Indian diaspora living abroad, the flash mob held in Holland by the Gyas Groningen rowing team breaks that mould, enacted by non-Indian looking performers. The whole performance confounds several preconceived ideas (well, at least mine) about music, identity and language, and so is worth checking out. It looks like the performers are taking the song way too seriously and parodying it at the same time. Whatever it is, a lot of thought has gone into it and clearly the ‘Tanglish’ is accessible enough to make the dramatisations hilarious. When my brother’s family visited us in Canberra over Easter, this time it was us showing them Kolaveri clips and the Dutch version had us all in stitches.

Thanks to the Sydney flash mob, I revisited this nonsense song and took the time to see it through fresh lens, enjoying its different manifestations. Ok, it is quite catchy and I admit that it often gets played in our house (in one or more of its different versions) between our varied appetite of classical and folk, traditional and hybrid, sacred and silly music. The linguistic and cultural aspects of the manifestations of the song continue to intrigue me, and may do so for a while yet. I’ve now discovered that there is a Kolaveripedia which is documenting the global spread of Kolaveri across India and the world, including an ISKCON version with the “Hare Krishna” mantra. While its status as a ‘Tamil’ song may be debatable, Kolaveri is definitely the product of a Tamil language setting, and it has been embraced across India and the world like dosai. This fills me with a mixed sense of pride and embarrassment (about Kolaveri, not dosai!), but that’s popular culture for you. The other interesting fallout has been a debate it has inspired about the integrity of language manifest in a ‘Jaffna’ version of the song in prosaic Tamil asking (the authors and fans) why ‘my Tamil language’ has been subject to a murderous rage (en Tamizh mozhi mēl unakkēn inda kolaveri dā). And with a foot in traditional revivalism and another in unbridled hybridity, I find myself appreciating the creative expression on both sides of the debate, and hopping on the Kolaveri bandwagon.

While many of the versions and flash mobs have come from the Indian diaspora living abroad, the flash mob held in Holland by the Gyas Groningen rowing team breaks that mould, enacted by non-Indian looking performers.