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. 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 Parel, 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 soundboy 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.
In recent years, Adhav’s alchemical amalgamations of grime and hip-hop (as BamBoy) and dubstep (as Kaali Duniya) with Marathi folk melodies, Adivasi rhythms and vocal samples of Dalit poetry and anti-caste polemics have made him a well-known figure in Mumbai’s underground music scene and beyond.
He’s soundtracked art films (Bombay Tilts Down by Mumbai transmedia studio CAMP) and anti-caste operas. His 2023 Boiler Room roadshow set—which followed a 30-minute hip-hop and grime show with Swadesi—has racked up over 3.6 million views on YouTube. He’s earned a coveted residency at global online radio platform NTS, performed alongside legends like Mala and Killa P, and taken his music to the UK at London’s Dialled In festival.
But success hasn’t blunted Adhav’s political edge or commitment to his community—just look at Low End Therapy, the show he and his crewmates in Swadesi put on every few months at AntiSocial in Mumbai, where bouncers are explicitly instructed to let everyone in, regardless of appearance.
Nor has success made him immune to the barbs and indignities that come with being a Dalit in an elite savarna space—the rich kids claiming caste doesn’t exist, the social cliques that gatekeep access to club and festival slots, the bouncers at clubs who think he’s a “food delivery” guy.
On his debut album BABYLON’S CAMP, he channels all that anger, frustration and sociopolitical idealism into 10 tracks of cavernous bass, chest-rattling sub-frequencies, and mutinous rhythm. The music here is sinister and subterranean. Its sepulchral textures and menacing rhythms invoke the spectres of caste and class that still haunt our social and political lives.
Opener Gatekeeper Assassinator layers vocal samples from an interview with Jamaican reggae artist Peter Tosh (“my search teaches me to kill death, to frustrate frustration… to assassinate the assassinator”) over brooding sub-bass and a synth lead so malevolent that it will have you constantly looking over your shoulder. Burn the Gates’ dubstep-metal riff and lurching, predatory rhythms are a direct challenge to the Indian electronica scene’s tastemakers—Adhav’s gravelly, distorted voice declaring “kill the gatekeepers” like a divine directive from a subaltern deity.
The off-kilter grooves of Not Allowed and discombobulating bass of Savarna Play. Savarna Dance are layered with vocal samples that mock and subvert the caste-blindness of many “apolitical” scenesters, so ensconced in their privilege that they cannot see the injustice and iniquity right in front of their eyes.
Tokenism ups the tempo, smothering its bass and drums in frantic flurries of chopped-up synths, as Adhav meditates on the ways in which marginalised identities and artists are used and commodified by the music industry. On the closing title track, he ties all these different strands together into a critique of Babylon (the ideological and material system that enables caste and class oppression).
BABYLON’S CAMP is an angry, occasionally intimidating listen, but it’s also buoyed by Adhav’s belief that music can offer an antidote to these wounds, that the dance floor can help us bridge these divisions. Just maybe not the dance floor as it exists today. It’s a particularly resonant message at a time when global dance music grapples with the social and economic realities within which it exists with renewed vigour.
Many artists are boycotting Spotify for their CEO Daniel Ek’s links to the Israeli military force and arms companies. Artists have also pulled out from Boiler Room—one of the biggest brands in underground music—due to the parent company’s investments in Israel. The politics of dancing are once again front and centre. BABYLON’S CAMP is a thrilling, sonically ambitious and tensely atmospheric album. But perhaps most importantly, it’s an invitation for Indian musicians and club-goers to join in that conversation.
Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.