‘A distant echo attracts me, fragrance of life beyond’: growing up a metalhead in India

Abstract

The paper is an account of growing up a metalhead in a suburb of a city in south Gujarat and then in Kolkata. The paper situates the author’s experience of growing up in a suburb of a non-metropolitan city in India as a metalhead and eventually moving to metropolitan spaces to access spaces of music consumption. The paper travels across the cities of Surat, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai and Bengaluru to narrate the heavy metal scene that was present at the turn of the noughties, from 2006 to 2013. The paper also dwells on the role of the personal computer, pirate consumption, class, geographies of live music, fuzzy contours of ‘western music’, and the peculiarity of heavy metal in Kolkata.