Silence of unmusical lambs: A short history of honking in India as Centre mulls new vehicle horns

That India is a horny country is well known. Our horniness knows no bounds when on the road. Now, Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari has proposed to bring in a law, which promises to curb this innate horniness. We are used to ministers saying that Mumbai can be turned into Shanghai in ten years and so on. This new law promises to turn Horn Kong—as India is called now—into the Hong Kong of the subcontinent overnight. If one asks drivers, they will defend themselves saying that in our part of the world, the self-tooting horn has a life, and a mind, of its own. The automobile does its own autonomous thing. The driver might be idling at a traffic signal, and suddenly the horn goes off like the alarm of a faulty clock. Alternatively, the driver will say in his defense, that honking is the result of involuntary reflex action, where the hand moves of its own accord, like Peter Seller’s hand in Dr Strangelove. Either way, what cannot be denied is that we are a nation of consummate honkers. Indian honking culture is fundamentally different from British honking culture. Several tomes and treatises have been written on the subject. As sociologist Louis Dumont, author of that famous book on caste, Homo hierarchichus, pointed out in the sequel, the world is divided into two kinds of society: Homo honkichus and Homo non-honkichus, with India belonging to the former category. In England, if someone honks at you, there is an amount of public shaming going on. You must have done something horribly wrong, like stepping on the zebra crossing when the pedestrian light was red. Honking is used to express displeasure. Over in America, collective honking is used as a form of protest, to express one’s support for a cause, like ‘Free XYZ’. In India, honking has a different role and purpose. Sometimes, we honk to say hello. That’s honking as a form of warm harmless greeting. At other times, we honk to communicate: “Watch out, I’m coming!”. We honk at corners to warn the driver on the other side of the blind turn about our existence. Otherwise, he will come at full throttle, there will be a head-on collision and both parties will accuse the other of not honking. Then there is the phenomenon of carefree honking or honking for pleasure, where an individual is observed driving down an empty road honking to his heart’s content, for no good reason. Finally, there is the phenomenon of honking in traffic jams or in heavy traffic. Underlying this is the superstitious belief that honking—the long arm of the honk, so to speak—actually has the power to lift one’s vehicle and deposit it further ahead in the queue. The guy behind you will honk out of habit, fully knowing that there are twenty cars ahead of you, with no room for manoeuvre. At traffic lights, everyone starts honking as soon as the lights turn green as if those in front are visually challenged and haven’t noticed the changes in colour on the signal post. Something similar is observed on flights where everyone is standing and crowding around the door, even as the flight is landing. We are a nation in a hurry. Gadkari wants to change all this. Mind you, he doesn’t want us to stop honking. The underlying presumption is both pragmatic and pessimistic. He knows that people will not stop honking and that all the ‘No Honking’ laws and campaigns have failed in practice. It’s like the failed war on drugs. People will smoke cannabis, so might as well legalise it. It will give people better choices and provide revenue to the government. The minister has proposed that only the sounds of Indian instruments be used as a horn. The instrument one chooses will be a reflection of one’s identity, just like the car one drives. Sirens used by the police and ambulances will be replaced with pleasant tunes like the All India Radio jingle. To this, one might add the melancholic Doordarshan jingle from the 1970s. Among the instruments suggested are the flute, table, violin, sitar, mouth organ and harmonium. It must be specified that the violin sound will not be a concerto, which would count as Western, but of the Carnatic classical variety. There is some controversy if the mouth organ really counts as Indian, or if we have appropriated it, like carrom. Meanwhile, fusion bands have welcomed the proposal. It comes as a shot in the arm for groups like the Indian Ocean and Swarathma who now will not have to travel to Berlin for live shows. If every traffic island is a venue, Ibiza is damned. Punk rockers, rappers and jazz trios though have lodged a strong protest and expressed reservations. It’s not clear yet what the length of a honk will be. A honk, mind you, is over in the blink of an eye. In the new scenario, will it just be a fleeting second of a table beat or the quick plucking of a sitar string? What if someone opts for a John McLaughlin-type sound, a hybrid of a guitar and sitar. Will this person then be challaned? And how will we detect such subtle breaches of the law? To understand the proposed post-modern honk, we need to go back to the past and understand its evolutionary history. In the 1980s, there was a trend of installing an automated voice message, which when reversing, would break into a repetitive monotone: ‘Attention please, this car is backing out.’ The problem was that this toy would misfire, often in the middle of the night, waking up the entire neighbourhood. We would all gather around the offending car, with the embarrassed owner trying all sorts of tricks to make the voice shut the duck up. It obstinately wouldn’t. These midnight misfirings had the air of an impromptu colony carnival. Then came the age of the motorcycle honking toy. A biker would suddenly overtake one from behind, making one jump out of one’s skin. The honk was usually the sound of a wailing baby, a barking dog, an elephant in heat, or a howling banshee. We should not also forget the pioneering role of the humble doorbell in India’s aural revolution. This went from a staid ‘ding dong’ and the grating buzz to playing the Gayatri mantra in its entirety. And no one can forget the truck horn, the precursor to the IPL bugle. While we are at it, I’d like Gadkari to consider introducing the sounds of Indian birds. We have plenty to choose from: From the screeching of parakeets and the train rattle of peacocks, to the vanished chirping of sparrows. Imagine you are driving and someone overtakes you going ‘cheep, cheep’. You’ll feel like you’re flying in the blue yonder. We could also consider the sounds of the brain-fever bird at the height of summer and the racket of crickets in the monsoon. In a traffic jam, the sound of the koel going cuckoo would be ideal. I’d like to end with a suggestion which harks back to the past, to simpler times. It might be the easiest to implement. With car companies fleeing India faster than a go-kart on a go-kart track, we might not want to burden Mercedez with the responsibilities of Spotify. I say we bring back the good old ‘bhopu’. The ‘bhopu’ was made of rubber, the poor man’s saxophone. It was used in BEST buses, in autorickshaws and Premier Padmini taxis, sticking out like Van Gogh’s remaining ear from the driver’s side of the vehicle. Or better still, bring back the ‘cycle ki ghanti’. That gentle trilling will calm frayed nerves better than a mechanical orchestra on the streets. The writer is the author of ‘The Butterfly Generation’ and the editor of ‘House Spirit: Drinking in India’. Views expressed are personal.​