Coke Studio’s Murir Tin: Testament to working class (men’s) struggles

Season 2 of Coke Studio Bangla opened with an innovative, colourful, and vibrant song: Murir Tin. It's a phenomenal creation for so many different reasons. It challenges our educated, elite obsession with "standardised Bangla" (promito Bangla), which has long been considered an indicator of socio-economic-cultural capital. Any deviation from the standardised Bangla or any regional accent has often been deemed "unacceptable" and "inappropriate." As someone whose parents migrated from Rangpur to Dhaka and who grew up in in the capital, I never learnt how to speak the Rangpur dialect. My father has a strong regional accent. While growing up, I was taught to believe that my dad's accent was not cool and the right way to speak was in my "standardised" Bangla that I learnt in school and from watching mostly BTV. As an adult, I now lament the loss of a part of my Rangpur heritage. Murir Tin blew my mind when I saw these young men writing songs and singing in their own regional dialects. They nurtured their heritage and made a conscious effort to circulate it.

Bangla music is increasingly getting more and more transnational. Murir Tin is a creative fusion of local tunes and American bluegrass and rap music. Bluegrass music originated from the struggles of white working-class communities living in the Appalachian region of the US during and after the Great Depression in the 1940s. Bluegrass composers and listeners come from both conservative, old, white communities and progressive, young, diverse communities. The progressive turn in bluegrass music incorporated stronger themes around working-class concerns and criticism of powerful institutions (Harvard Political Review, 2020). Whereas most of the bluegrass musicians and listeners are white, rap – which is a part of the larger hip-hop culture in the US – originated in African-American and Afro-Caribbean as well as in some Latinx communities struggling with drug and gang-related violence in the 1960s and 1970s. With the advancement of globalisation, hip-hop culture has gone global and been localised to regional socio-economic-political struggles. Central to global rap music has historically been amplifying concerns of marginalised and minoritised communities (Young, 2016).

It is not surprising that a song like Murir Tin that borrows inspiration and style from two prominent global working-class-focused musical genres would highlight class struggles. Murir Tin talks about old, broken, crowded local buses and deplorable public transportation in general, the unbearable traffic that kills hours after hours, roads filled with potholes and defects, fighting over getting a seat especially for female passengers, as well as the daily struggles of workers in the transportation system. As Shayan Chowdhury Arnob rightly points out, "The traffic is so stressful that humour is the only tool to cope with the stress."

Since 2018, Bangladesh has observed a series of road safety protests led mainly by students and the youth. The protests called for attention to our failing road and transportation system, crashes, and fatalities that take away thousands of precious lives every year. Therefore, the song Murir Tin is not just a testament to the historical clunky local buses roaming the streets in the 1980s. The public transportation system in Dhaka started with Murir Tin (literal meaning: "a can of puffed rice") buses. After World War II, the leftover army trucks were sold in auctions at a lower price to wealthy, local business owners. The business owners covered the wooden structure of these trucks with tin and converted them into local buses. These buses were satirically called "murir tin" because of the rattling noise they made and the way they packed passengers to an extreme – just like a can full of puffed rice. As years passed, any bus that was old and crowded got the tag "murir tin" by the common public. The song Murir Tin moved the nation not just because it brought forward a historical tradition and nostalgia. So many people were able to personally relate to the song because it is a testament to the continuing struggles of working-class people with public transportation.

Nevertheless, Murir Tin specifically covered working-class men's experience. Almost all the characters featured in the "Murir Tin | Behind the Magic" video were men – except the Harmonica player and three backing vocalists. The lyrics were also composed by men based on their personal experiences, as mentioned in several interviews. Therefore, it's not surprising that Murin Tin talked about women's experience only in terms of "ladies' seats" being occupied by men. A 2022 survey found that 87 percent of women faced some form of harassment, including sexual abuse, in public transport at least once, and 36 percent experienced sexual harassment regularly in public transport.

It is not surprising that a song like Murir Tin that borrows inspiration and style from two prominent global working-class-focused musical genres would highlight class struggles. Murir Tin talks about old, broken, crowded local buses and deplorable public transportation in general, the unbearable traffic that kills hours after hours, roads filled with potholes and defects, fighting over getting a seat especially for female passengers, as well as the daily struggles of workers in the transportation system. As Shayan Chowdhury Arnob rightly points out, "The traffic is so stressful that humour is the only tool to cope with the stress."

Violence against women in public transport is not just a Bangladeshi problem. The 2012 Delhi gang rape in a bus and the feminist protests around the incident brought forward how unsafe public transport and public spaces have always been for women – something that was largely invisible in Murir Tin.

The Coke Studio Bangla's YouTube channel describes the murir tin bus as a "melting pot where the cultures and the people of Bangladesh come and go. Amid a crowd of common people, there lies #RealMagic." It further says that Murir Tin is a unifying space for the people of Bangladesh where all share the same experience in terms of "the journeys we take, the people we meet, the situations we encounter." Is women's experience of sexual harassment in a murir tin shared by men? Do men encounter the situations women face in public transport?

As a middle-class woman who occasionally used local buses in Dhaka, my experience was not as joyful and vibrant as the vibe the Murir Tin composition shared on stage. I did not have to rely on local buses all the time because of my class privilege. However, on some occasions, when I had to take local buses, the first thing I had to consider was how to save my body from unwanted touches, which meant trying to secure one of the very limited number of seats assigned for women, or trying to shield my body with my purse or backpack, or riding the bus with a group of friends who kept an eye on each other and protected each other if needed. Sitting in the last row and writing a song ("pisur sidut boi ene lehir ei gaan") would have been the last thing on my mind while riding a murir tin.

Both bluegrass and rap have a male-dominated historical tradition. During bluegrass festivals, male musicians used to play tunes while their wives watched them from the sidelines. The bluegrass lyrics traditionally had a "Madonna-whore" complex that idealised mothers and maternal figures and justified violence against women committing adultery and/or anything that went against the norm of being a "good woman" (Levine, 2020). Later, some prominent women singers challenged the glass ceiling of bluegrass, and aspired to occupy the stage as bluegrass musicians.

Similarly, the rap industry has been historically male-dominated. Even though it brought forward class struggles, it primarily focused on men's struggles and involved hypersexualisation of and violence against women. Hypermasculinity, and often toxic masculinity, have been integral to being a male rapper. Many Black hip-hop feminists and singers have been trying to address this disparity and find a way to engage hip-hop sensibility with intersectional struggles.

I was not surprised to see that Murin Tin – a composition inspired by bluegrass and rap music tradition – glamorised the hypermasculine performance of male rappers or ignored women's everyday struggles in public transport. However, the larger problem lies in the fact that major music roles in the industry – songwriting and production, in particular – are mostly occupied by men. The corporatisation of the local music industry has made it extremely difficult to bring radical changes within the existing structure that has already been profitable for music producers and their sponsors.

Nafisa Tanjeem is associate professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University in the US.