Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Barely a week after President Xi Jinping ‘secured’ a third, five-year term in office, his Communist Party of China (CPC) is facing the music, literally, from an unlikely Indian source: a 1982 song of the maverick composer Bappi Lahiri (1952-2022) who passed away in February this year.
Lahiri, well-known for his signature multi-layered gold chains, rings, and goggles he donned everywhere, shone as a successor to the music legend Rahul Dev Burman in the 1980s, and his foot-tapping music, mainly in the Mithun Chakraborty-starrer discotheque films, transcended borders.
In one of these films, “Disco Dancer” (1982), Lahiri composed a cult song that has, after 40 years, got yet another life in faraway China. The Chinese people, unable to register their protests against the Communist regime’s brutal suppression of the recurring Covid-19 across the country, have found a novel way to release their pent-up feelings in Lahiri’s chartbuster song, Jimmi, Jimmi, Jimmi, Aaja, Aaja, Aaja. Singer Parvati Khan made it immortal.
In Mandarin, the phrase Jie mi translates into ‘Give me rice’!
This year, the frustrated Chinese people, who have money but not enough food grain, discovered in this song a unique tool for protest. On Douyin, known as TikTok outside China, their uploaded videos, showing empty vessels amid the rendition of “Jie mi, Jie mi” in Mandarin, became instantly viral. It became their way to communicate with the outside world for the first time after China’s Zero Covid policy cut them off from the rest of the world for months, leaving millions hungry and helpless.
The movie’s release in 1982 made Mithun Chakraborty an overnight sensation across India and established his cult in several countries in and around central and southeast Asia. After Raj Kapoor, Mithun became highly popular in Russia, where over 120 million tickets of “Disco Dancer” were reportedly sold, primarily because of its exciting dance numbers.
According to media reports, the then Soviet Union imported over 200 Indian movies between 1954 and 1991, of which “Disco Dancer” emerged as the highest-grossing film earning 60 million roubles at the box office.
The romantic song got a fresh lease on life in 1998 when the Russian band Ruki Vverh remixed it. It was later used in a Russian reality show by DJ Slon and Angel-A and subsequently released on different covers.
In 2016, DJ KSHMR played the song to a packed house at one of the biggest music festivals in the world, Sunburn. Off and on, the song reappeared in many other films and TV shows.
Only last month, several videos emerged from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where people were seen grooving to the peppy dance number at a dinner night, the media reported.
Posting a video of another song at a previous SCO Summit in Tashkent, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar tweeted, “Another reminder from SCO Tashkent why Central Asia is our extended neighborhood.”
When London’s World Book of Records honored the song in 2018, Lahiri said, “It has been one long journey with innumerable accolades over nearly five decades and over 600 films. But there is something special about ‘Jimmy Jimmy’. It always has followers in every part of the globe. Such adulation brings tears to my eyes. It is the love of my fans that keeps me going.”
Lahiri passed away because of Covid-related complications early this year. But “Jimmy” remains a part of folklore in many of the globe.
But even Lahiri would not have imagined this love song would become a protest anthem in China!