There is a history of independent India waiting to be written — a history examined through the evolution, if that’s the correct word, of the horns on motor vehicles. I was born a full 13 years after Independence, so I have no memory of what honking was like in the early days. For this, someone of my generation is forced to look at films, mostly commercial fiction films, from Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. People far more erudite than myself about the Indian bioscope will come up with many examples but I can only think of sequences of empty or slightly crowded roads and the meek mewing of the motor gaadis as the hero or the comedian drove the vehicle, often hitting the horn in tune and beat with a song. Whether in Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi or Ajantrik, car audiology had a certain civility, a contained ‘peep-peep’ that sound-stamped the time almost as much as the voices of the mellifluous K.L. Saigal or Mukesh. The shouted tunes of Mohammed Rafi would come after this and the growl of foreign sports cars would match the funk base of R.D. Burman tunes even later.
From the Amby to autos
Growing up in the ’60s, car horns held a particular fascination for the brat sector in an Indian child’s brain. The Ambassador had a thin metal ring, only a little smaller than the large steering wheel, and the thing magically responded with a shrill noise no matter where you pressed it. The Fiat was different — the horn was a small plastic pie at the centre of the steering and the peeenp it produced was less shrill but no less insistent than the Amby horn, a bit like a high-voiced Bombay denizen whose complaint might get through to a policeman over the Amby horn equivalent screaming of a Bengali or a Bihari. I don’t really remember the horn on the Standard Herald but I imagine it was snobbish and ineffective and wannabe sporty, a bit like the car itself. Truck and bus horns had a different sound but I’m hard put to place them in my memory. In smaller towns such as Ahmedabad, a kid could get a huge kick out of the rubber bulb trumpets perched on the side of the autorickshaw driver’s cockpit. These horns created a bhawnpoo-bhawnpoo sound which had a base element, both aurally and morally. Drivers could caress the rounded rubber ball and create meendhs, glissandos with different meanings, for instance when insulting someone they were overtaking or showing loutish, lecherous ‘appreciation’ for a pretty woman on the sidewalk. As kids, blissfully ignorant of these sound signifiers, we would love to squeeze the rubber bulbs to reproduce cacophonous postprandial wind passings of both upper and lower varieties.
At some point in our history, a horn rupture took place in our cities and villages. Like frogs frolicking in water with imperceptibly increasing temperature, we allowed ourselves to be boiled in an aural inferno. The number of vehicles grew, the tonality of the horns mutated, and suddenly we found ourselves in a seemingly irreversible sound hell. Someone allowed the trucks and buses to install these ghastly amplified klaxons, while motorcyclists started affixing car horns on bikes to scare the cars they were ambushing from behind. At some point, police cars, politicians’ escort vehicles and ambulances adorned themselves with the sirens — different sounding contraptions in different towns — and the party began in earnest.
Turning horn deaf
For decades, Indians learning to drive had been taught to use the horn as a blunt instrument of defence-assault, as a sound cosh to remove obstacles in the way of whatever they were driving, whether the obstacle was soft, as in pedestrian, or a wheeled object from lower down the vehicular food chain, as in a bicycle. There was also the edict, quite sensible for a period, that you should hit the horn while approaching any crossing to warn and ward off any other vehicle that might hit you at a right angle.
All this became nonsensical with the advent of air-conditioned cars equipped with sound systems. The windows went up, the music systems came on, as did the mobile phones later, and suddenly you couldn’t hear anyone else’s horn or even your own as you pumped it to blast sound out into the deaf and uncaring traffic. Only vehicles without air-conditioning and the poor pedestrians and people who lived by the side of the roads could hear the horns. The air-conditioned vehicles’ honking now adds to the general enervation and traffic fury and achieves nothing useful whatsoever. When in a taxi I often ask the driver: “I’ve been driving for 40 years and not once has a car moved aside when I’ve honked from behind. Has your experience been different?” The answer, invariably, is: “No, you’re right, but what to do, it’s a habit now and I can’t stop. Everyone does it and so do I.”
Horns are only one component of the horrendous sound pollution we have created around ourselves, but trying to cut them down would be a good place to start when attempting to dismantle the aural prison we’ve constructed for ourselves.