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Paul Purgas
Spools out … Paul Purgas listens back to some of the tapes he found. Photograph: Image provided by Paul Purgas
Spools out … Paul Purgas listens back to some of the tapes he found. Photograph: Image provided by Paul Purgas

'I found the roots of electronic music in a cupboard!': the tale of India's lost techno pioneers

This article is more than 3 years old

In the 1960s, a group of Indian students accidentally invented minimal techno – and hoped their synths could cure disease. A new documentary unearths their story

In 2016, the British artist and musician Paul Purgas had his curiosity ignited: he had read that the electronic musician David Tudor, a close collaborator of John Cage, took a Moog synthesiser to the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India, in 1969. This struck Purgas as odd. The machines were very new then; bulky, breakable, and a nightmare to transport. India also had no history of electronic music, to his knowledge, before Charanjit Singh’s Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, which was released in 1982 to little fanfare but proclaimed a proto-acid house classic on its reissue in 2009.

The article he was reading showed the Moog now, ant-infested and weathered, rescued by an old student. Fired up, Purgas booked a trip to find it. He accidentally uncovered something bigger: a cache of long-forgotten recordings that had not been touched for nearly five decades. It led him to a fascinating story that he explores in a new BBC Radio 3 documentary, Electronic India. “I basically found the roots of Indian electronic music in a box in a library cupboard,” he laughs. “Tracks with titles like Space Liner 2001, and others that sounded like minimal techno two decades too early. I just couldn’t believe it.”

Purgas made his first trip to Ahmedabad in 2017; it is a dusty, busy city that is rapidly changing. “It was where Gandhi founded his first ashram, and it also became a testing ground for new ideas, post-independence,” Purgas explains. “It had lots of beautiful modernist buildings, but some of them are now in disrepair. It’s like a past dream of the new India.”

Tape and voiceover work at the NID sound studio. Photograph: National Institute of Design-Archive, Ahmedabad

Central to this dream were a famous family of radical intellectuals, the Sarabhais, who helped set up the NID. They schooled their children in methods inspired by Montessori and the Bauhaus, and moved in international circles with architects and designers such as Mies van der Rohe, Charles Eames and Le Corbusier (who designed their house for them in the first few years after India’s independence). Their musician daughter Gita was a huge influence on Cage, introducing him to Indian classical music, philosophy and the concept of silence when they met in the US in the 1940s. As part of an international programme jointly funded by the US’s Ford Foundation and the Indian government, she also brought Tudor to the NID for four months in 1969 to set up a sound studio; he shipped out the Moog in wooden boxes from New York.

Despite Tudor’s brief time there, the Moog was used by students up until 1973, as Purgas discovered when he found a handwritten note in a yellowing notebook mentioning the existence of tapes in the NID library. He located them quickly, long-untouched and perfectly preserved, their titles and five composers neatly annotated on their sleeves.

Purgas tried to play them straight away, but got an electric shock from the institute’s reel-to-reel player before he started. “It was a wake-up call. I had point zero for electronic music for India in my hands and I didn’t know the first thing about tape conservation.” And so he flew home, trained himself up, and smuggled a reel-to-reel player in his hand luggage on his return. Listening to the recordings chronologically, he was astonished: approximations of Indian classical music gave way to compositions with names such as Birds or Bubbles that were communicating natural environments through synthesised sound. “Then they got more experimental and free-spirited, as if the Moog was helping them decouple from the country’s traditions. They became connected to ideas of the techno-imaginary, and new futures.”

Paul Purgas with some of tapes salvaged from the institute.

Tracks in this vein included SC Sharma’s Dance Music from 1972, which with its propulsive rhythm and eerie melody sounded like an Aphex Twin track from the mid-1990s. Or the 30-minute Space Liner 2001, made by the only one of the composers who was still alive, the now 70-year-old Jinraj Joshipura. Purgas tracked him down to Puerto Rico; the moment they first spoke is captured in the documentary.

Purgas discovered an affinity with Joshipura’s story immediately: they had both been architecture students who had abandoned their interests in electronic sound, in different decades, because their families did not approve. Purgas had returned to it later; Joshipura hadn’t until now. “My family thought it had no career potential,” Joshipura says today, with a sad smile, over Zoom. This was despite Tudor helping his student secure a fully funded Rockefeller scholarship to study in the US.

Joshipura went on to have a fascinating career nevertheless, encompassing pioneering work in renewable energy, software development and architecture all over the world. But he still palpably sparkles when he describes his first encounter with the Moog. “We didn’t have a TV in the house at the time. I did all my work with pencils and paper. Then suddenly, through one door, I was transported from my very mundane reality to this futuristic world of exotic electronics.”

There was no collaborative electronic scene at the institute, he explains, as the complex nature of the Moog meant that each student composed separately. He also recalls that reconnecting the many analogue leads that made up each patch every time he was booked in for a slot would take a long time. Joshipura would work from 8pm to 11pm every day, one-to-one with Tudor, then sketch out his pattern of analogue cables with coloured pencils, so he could remember what he had done.

Space Liner 2001 came about because he was a big fan of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I love Strauss’s Blue Danube on the soundtrack, but I knew songs like that didn’t play in space. As the synthesiser was so outside any other experience I’d had, I was thinking more about creating music that feels outside anything, that stands outside history.” Indeed, the track sounds like a curio from the era of Spacelab, the moody, spacious Kraftwerk track released nine years later. The Moog was a liberating instrument in this sense, offering a 19-year-old Indian student the same chance as Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider to make music free of any national or historical context, to define new ways forward.

Jinraj D Joshipura in 1969. Photograph: Image provided by Jinraj D Joshipura

Joshipura also got fascinated in the Moog’s potential to do revolutionary things. As a young student, he had grand plans to synthesise sounds in the body in association with oscilloscopes, to advance medicine; to help recognise patterns in animal speech, which could help to translate them; and also for synthesised sounds to help submarines communicate underwater. “That last idea shows I was a big fan of James Bond as a teenager,” he laughs. Nevertheless, these novel ideas are what secured him the scholarship he did not take up. “Multi-disciplinary work is still not valued in that way,” he says, mournfully.

Joshipura did sense that synthesisers would revolutionise music back then, although he admits he didn’t foresee their miniaturisation. After our call, he sends me a sketch from 1972 of how he thought instruments would plug into a massive Moog. He has followed electronic music throughout the decades, and particularly likes the French producer M83. “Being contacted by Paul has also fired me to develop my ideas at last,” he says, excitedly. “But I’d have to work with a progressive institute, so that other people can continue my work. We can’t have what happened in the NID happening again, with everything just being packed away and forgotten.”

Purgas sadly never found the Moog. Dhun Karkaria, the former student who saved it, died while the documentary was being made. What Purgas did find, however, meant so much more. “To find the joy of pure experimentation in sound stretching east as well as west, that far back in time … giving India a voice in the international conversation about electronic music, and realising that story’s not over yet. It means everything.”

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