“I don’t want to be labelled as a political artist,” Aamir Aziz says. “Political art should just be called art, or all art should be called political.”

For the Delhi-based poet-actor-singer-songwriter known for his song-poems that speak of hope, dreams, and justice in the darkest of times, the question of what kind of artist he is has become almost as important as the work itself. Aziz has spent much of his creative life moving between forms. Yet public conversations about his work have often attempted to place him within clearly defined boxes: “political”, “Muslim”, “protest poet”. He understands why people tend to reach for those labels, especially when his work is explicitly concerned with injustice, violence, and political repression. But he is increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that the politics of his work should become its defining characteristic.

For Aziz, being described first as a protest poet risks making the political exceptional — as though political art becomes relevant only during periods of crisis and then recedes into the background when the immediate crisis has passed. He would rather his songs exist alongside love songs, poetry, and everything else that makes up the cultural life of a society.

“These songs are just as important as love songs and should be with people all the time,” he says. “As we listen to love songs, we should listen to Mahmoud Darwish.”

This desire to be understood first as an artist also shapes how Aziz describes his own practice. He began in theatre, as part of a college theatre group in Delhi, and describes performance as the beginning of “whatever I am as an artist.” For him, theatre was never simply about acting. It involved making plays, writing songs, and responding to the social and political world around him. Music and poetry eventually became equally important parts of that practice.

“I make music; I write poems; I’ve been performing; I’ve been acting. I do all of this,” Aziz says. This insistence on multiplicity is partly a response to the pressure to define an artist through a single identity, he says. “Who are you? You must give one name,” he says. “You are that — one name, one gender.”

But Aziz sees the boundaries between disciplines beginning to loosen, particularly among younger artists who move freely between music, acting, directing, writing, and other forms of creative expression. “Most of the artists I’m meeting from the next generation are multidisciplinary,” he says. “No one is saying, ‘I only do this.’”

This is not simply a matter of artistic experimentation. Aziz believes this is also about taking those different forms seriously. He wants to be able to work across disciplines without each medium becoming a qualification or explanation for the others. He points to his work on Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy, where he cameoed, co-composed, and wrote tracks like ‘Dede Tarqeeb’ and ‘Ae Zindagi’.

“I’m trying to do whatever I like and whatever I’ve been doing for some time,” he says, “and I’m trying to do it as seriously and professionally as possible.”

Singing Through the Suffocation

'Dopeher Blues', Aziz’s new song and music video, arrives seven years after 'Achhe Din Blues', the 2019 song that arguably first placed him in the public eye. He describes the new song as a sequel that emerged from years of watching the same old problems persist, mutate, and, in some cases, worsen.

“I felt a dire need at that point because of the silence and political suffocation everyone was feeling,” Aziz says. “That became the reason I had to put this song out or make it in the first place.”

The language of suffocation comes back throughout the song. What began as a response to feeling unable to speak or think freely became, over time, an attempt to answer that condition through art.

“That suffocation has grown. Helplessness has grown,” he says. “All of that combined into this song.”

For Aziz, the metaphor has a simple resolution. “I think the answer to suffocation should be a breath,” he says. “Suffocation should be responded to by a breath, by a full breath.” But the difficulty, he adds, is precisely that a full breath has become difficult to take; there is little room to say what one feels or think what one wants to think.

The song emerges from this long accumulation of lived experiences and observations. For Aziz, farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra, forced disappearances in Kashmir, unemployment, honour killings, censorship, Manipur, and Palestine all exist within the same sociopolitical and, therefore, emotional landscape. Still, he is careful to distinguish between witnessing suffering and claiming it as personal experience. He has never been to Palestine, he says, and does not claim intimate knowledge of the lives of Kashmiri half-widows. Instead, he focuses on the persistence of these histories and how easily people disappear from public attention.

“People are disappearing one by one. No news is made, and these people disappear. They are forgotten; issues move forward,” he says. “We shouldn’t look at it as a list. We should see them as people in a struggle.”

This sense of continuity is central to Dopeher Blues. Aziz resists the idea that the song’s subjects are suddenly relevant because they have entered the news cycle. Palestine, for instance, is not a newly emerging concern. “People think that Palestine is a matter of today, after the last war began (in 2023),” he says. “But it’s not like that.” Having previously written about Zionist political violence in the early 1900s, I have to agree with him.

The song’s politics, then, are less about identifying a single moment of crisis than about insisting on the persistence of crises that are too easily forgotten. “There is hate now,” Aziz says, describing what he sees as a significant change. “Any victim, any long-term victim, will talk about his, her or their suffering, and it will be met with hate.”

The music video translates these ideas into deliberately stark visual metaphors. Directed by Faraz Ali, the video’s central image is a game of musical chairs played by figures in uniform overalls and balloon masks, turning competition for the chair into a surreal representation of contemporary life.

“It’s the same thing we’re trying to communicate through the video, but there are different metaphors,” Aziz says. “There is a chair; there is a fight for chairs.”

The fact that the chair came from a friend and happened to be the same ubiquitous wooden chair found in government offices, schools, and homes only reinforced its metaphorical potential. The chair is particularly significant because of its ordinariness. Rather than using an ornate throne, the video uses the familiar wooden chair found across Indian homes and institutions — a stark metaphor for Indian bureaucracy. The ordinary kursi becomes a stand-in for power itself: something familiar, constantly contested, and available in different forms.

“It’s a very Indian chair; you can find it anywhere,” Aziz says. “That’s why we chose it.”

The video also draws from a global visual vocabulary. When I ask him about similarities between Dopeher Blues and Childish Gambino’s 'This Is America', Aziz does not deny the influence. “Who can really ignore This Is America?” he says. The film’s abandoned industrial setting and layered critique of contemporary society were among the visual references and influences that ultimately shaped the music video, although Aziz stops short of describing This Is America as a direct template. Dopeher Blues is something new and rooted in the Indian experience — a result of Aziz and Ali’s collaboration.

“There Is Anger, But There Is Always Hope”

The final moments of Dopeher Blues turns away from the immediate present and towards those who will inherit it. Aziz invokes his imagined daughter and the next generation, asking what remains to be said when the problems being described existed long before he was born.

His answer is deliberately open-ended. The song concludes with an acknowledgement of “the songs that I know, those songs that I do not know” — an acknowledgement that there are histories he has encountered, histories he has not, and histories that are still being written.

“I have high hopes for the coming generation, for our generation and for our predecessors,” he says. “That in time, they will choose the side of justice, equality, and humanity.”

It is an optimistic statement, but not an uncomplicated one. Aziz does not pretend that hope is permanent. The years between Achhe Din Blues and Dopeher Blues included a period when he stopped releasing music videos and focused on other parts of his life, even as he continued to write.

“I have been constantly writing,” he says. “There is not a moment that I have stopped writing.”

An artist does not cease to work simply because the work is no longer visible, viral, or circulating publicly. And political art, he argues, should not be remembered only when the political conditions that make it relevant become especially acute.

The thread connecting Achhe Din Blues and Dopeher Blues is the persistence of the creative act. Aziz may resist being called a political poet, but he does not resist the responsibility of responding to the political world around him. If anything, he sees those two positions as compatible: the artist does not have to surrender his identity as an artist to make politically engaged work. For him, the task is to keep making, even when the circumstances make that difficult — to keep writing when there is no video, no audience, and no guarantee that anyone is listening.

“Someone who has to think, who wants to think, will find a way to think,” Aziz says. “You have to find a way.”

Follow @aamir.aziz.3785 on Instagram.

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