Stereos on, boots open: Our first taste of western music in 70s Madras was courtesy the Anglo-Indian community

‘Popular radio programme ‘Listeners’ Choice’ must have been the first attempt on our part to westernise ourselves’ 

If you were from Madras of a particular time, of a certain age, and belonged to a specific socio-economic background, your introduction to western music  had to be through the prism of the Anglo-Indian. 

I speak of children belonging to middle-class households of the mid-70s, from families that didn’t own turntables, and for whose desperate, impressionable ears, radio was the sole supplier of music from both within and beyond the borders.

The western pop music primer of the 70s was  Listeners’ Choice, a popular radio programme broadcast on Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. And the maximum requests came from young Anglo-Indian men and women. 

While one would assume that the 70s belonged to Deep Purple, The Stones, Bob Dylan, The Doors and the timeless strains of the freshly dismantled Beatles, thanks to the impassioned and persistent postcards, written in convent-perfected cursive no doubt, of the Cedrics, Sharons, Evitas and Winstons of St. Thomas Mount, Perambur and Arakkonam, our earliest musical influences from Western shores were Carole King, Daliah Lavi, Wanda Jackson, Nana Mouskouri, Tom Jones, Neil Diamond, Tony Orlando and Dawn, The Partridge Family, CCR, The New Seekers, Sonny & Cher, and the most inevitable of them all, The Osmonds: Donny, Marie and syrupy little Jimmy (with his bathetic  Mother of Mine), working as a tag team. With the venerable Jim Reeves making appearances every now and then. And above all, the two Anglo-Indian boys from Madras and Lucknow who’d made good, Messrs Engelbert Humperdinck and Cliff Richard.

“Our favourite compere was the smooth as silk, warm as milk Rupert Benjamin. When he spoke, it felt like he was speaking directly to the Devulapalli progeny”

Listeners’ Choice and pop music, when I think about it now, must have been the first attempt on the part of my sisters and myself to ‘Westernise’ ourselves. It appeared like music would do what films and books couldn’t fully do. Father and grandfather were evidence. Both of them read English literature, though very different kinds, and were keen aficionados of Hollywood fare. Yet both of them remained stubbornly, quintessentially Telugu.  Thaatha wore a  lalchi and  pancha and wrote exclusively in Telugu. Dad did wear trousers and a shirt, tucking the tails in and putting on shoes on occasion mainly to impress us, but was still unapologetically Golt. Music, an uninterrupted diet of what the Anglo-Indians prescribed, we possibly thought, would be the X factor that would cleanse us of our hitherto annoyingly ineradicable Goltihood, and turn us into cool Westerners like our cousins from two streets away.

Our favourite radio compere was the smooth as silk, warm as milk Rupert Benjamin. When he spoke, it felt like he was speaking directly to the Devulapalli progeny. Our biweekly radio experience, huddled around grandfather’s refurbished  Bush from the 50s, instantly went up a notch when it was presented by Rupert.