The Night Chongtham Vikram's Guitar Went Silent

New Delhi/Imphal: I remember Vikram with a guitar in his hands. Not a photograph. Not a stage introduction. Not the name of a celebrated guitarist being announced over a microphone. Just Vikram with his guitar.

I had met him only once. But I had heard him play several times, especially with Eastern Dark, and there was something about his guitar that stayed with me. He did not seem to wrestle with the instrument. The notes came as though they already knew where they wanted to go. And there was that other thing I remember. His smile.

Image: Chongtham Vikram Singh & his guitar

He was friendly in the uncomplicated way some people are. No airs. No distance. No need to announce his talent. You could speak to him and feel that you had known him longer than you actually had. That is how I remember Chongtham Vikram. It is difficult now to imagine him in the final moments of his life.

On the night of September 7, in Kilokari, southeast Delhi, Vikram reportedly went downstairs from the apartment where he lived to ask a group of young men drinking late into the night to keep the noise down.

He was unwell and his son, Yaiphaba, was preparing for an important examination.

Image: Chongtham Vikram Singh with his Son Yaiphaba and wife Joshna

It was, by all appearances, a small matter. A request for quiet. The sort of request that should end with a shrug, perhaps a muttered apology, and everyone returning to their night. Instead, according to the preliminary police inquiry, Vikram was allegedly beaten repeatedly.

His son rushed him to Holy Family Hospital. He did not survive.

A guitarist went downstairs looking for silence. The city returned him to his family in silence.

Vikram was 54. For almost twenty years, Delhi had been his home. He had gone there from Manipur because music in his homeland could not yet offer a musician a sustainable professional life.

He stayed. He worked. He played. He taught music to the generation X of India. He built a life.

Image: Chongtham VIkram SIngh with his characteristic smile

That life had begun much earlier, in a house where music was not an occupation but almost a language. Vikram was the eldest son of Chongtham Kamala, one of the most celebrated voices in Manipur, a singer often spoken of as the state's Lata Mangeshkar.

As a child, with his mother associated with All India Radio, Imphal, Vikram appeared on children's programmes, playing the accordion while his younger brother accompanied him on percussion.

His first lessons were in Hindustani classical music. Then came the Western Classical notations. In Kolkata, he trained in Western classical guitar.

Perhaps that was where the musician he would become began to take shape: one foot in the classical traditions of India, the other in the electric possibilities of the West. He would spend the rest of his life refusing to choose between them.

Image: Chongtham Vikram SIngh is his sublime self with guitar

In the mid-1980s, when rock music in Manipur was still young and often regarded as an unruly intrusion into the state's musical culture, Vikram and four other teenagers from Thangmeiband formed a band. They called it Ultra Vires.

Thamoi, the band's frontman and Vikram's locality mate, remembers that Vikram came up with the name. The others questioned it because it sounded like “ultra virus”.

Vikram had an explanation. Ultra vires, he told them, meant something beyond what was controllable. It was the kind of name a young musician could give to a band in a place where rock itself was still trying to break free.

There were others making that journey too. The Magnetoz, The Tracks. Cannibals. Hell Angels. Phoenix.

And there was GM Hall—the Gandhi Memorial Hall in the heart of Imphal—where a generation of young people discovered that guitars could say things words could not. Vikram was part of that generation.

Image: From the Album of Ultra Vires. Chogthan Vikram Singh is in middle

Vivek Sarma, the lead guitarist of Phoenix, later Phynyx, remembers him as a highly polished guitarist with an extraordinary tone and sense of rhythm. But when Sarma remembers Vikram, the first words are not about technique. He remembers him as harmless. Always smiling. Peace-loving. Passionate about music.

After Ultra Vires disbanded towards the end of the 1980s, Vikram played with Phoenix before becoming the lead guitarist of Eastern Dark. And Eastern Dark was important.

It was among the first Manipuri rock bands to sing entirely in Manipuri, taking the language of home into a musical form that had been considered foreign. The electric guitar was no longer merely an imported instrument. In Vikram's hands, it began speaking Manipuri.

Perhaps this is what those who knew him want people to remember most. Vikram was never merely a rock guitarist.

Image: Always in his elements when he is performing with his guitar

Nicky Chandam, photographer and theatre practitioner, worked with him in several productions. She knew him not only as a musician but as family, a brother-in-law. She remembers watching him move between musical worlds.

She saw him work with Mame Khan in folk fusion. She worked with him in experimental theatre. In 2019, he performed in her directorial showcase at the National School of Drama, in a production centred on the farmers' protest. He later joined her in a protest against the felling of trees in R.K. Puram.

“He was a very gentle soul who loved music,” Chandam recalls. She remembers sitting beside him while he played. He could keep playing. Endlessly. “He could sit in silence with his music.”

There is a strange cruelty in that memory now. The musician who could find peace in silence died after going downstairs to ask for it.

Image: Candlelight vigil demanding Justice for Chongtham VIkram Singh at Western Kangla Gate

Manipur gave Vikram his musical roots. But it could not give him a livelihood. So, like countless young people before and after him, he left.

Mumbai was his first destination. He worked on studio sessions and collaborated with established musicians, including Sonu Nigam and Kailash Kher. Then came Delhi.

Here he became associated with Fubar Ghetto, a band formed in 2010 that drew upon jazz, blues, classic rock and Indian classical music. For nearly two decades, the capital became the backdrop to his life. Perhaps that is why his death feels particularly unsettling. Delhi was not a temporary stopover for Vikram. It was home. His son was studying there. His work was there. His friends were there. His music was there.

And yet, on a September night, a small dispute over noise ended with him lying injured beneath the apartment he called home.

Image: Lokesh the Frontman of Eastern Dark lights a candle for Vikram and prays for his soul

Police have arrested seven men and apprehended a juvenile in connection with the killing. The accused have been identified as delivery executives and workers at different dhabas and food stalls. A murder case has been registered and the investigation is continuing.

The investigation must establish exactly what happened. Who struck Vikram. How the confrontation escalated. What led to his death. And why a simple disagreement became fatal.

But in Manipur, grief is already turning into another question. One that has been asked before. And before that. And before that.

The North East Students Society, Delhi University, has described Vikram's death as a “senseless act of violence” and called for a swift and thorough investigation.

Lokesh, frontman of Eastern Dark, is more direct. “There has been a massive outpouring of condolences and condemnation,” he says. “But this is not enough.”

Image: Candlelight vigil demanding Justice for Chongtham VIkram Singh at Western Kangla Gate

For him, Vikram's killing cannot simply be folded into the statistics of another murder. “We're not being treated as human beings in northern India. This particular attitude should stop.” His words are angry. They should be.Because beneath the anger is grief.

A musician whom he describes as a noble soul, a fine gentleman, a world-class musician, is dead. And Lokesh asks what can sound like an unbearable question: How does a musician who spent his life creating beauty end up dying at the hands of men who, in his words, were “street thugs”?

Nicky Chandam does not want Vikram's death to become another occasion for political speeches. She wants answers.

She points back to the Bezbaruah Committee, formed after the 2014 killing of Arunachal Pradesh student Nido Tania in Delhi to examine the problems faced by people from the Northeast. More than a decade later, she asks: “What happened to the Bezbaruah Committee's report of 2014? What happened to all the policies?”

It is a question worth asking without partisan banners. Because the issue is older than one government. Older than one political party. Older even than Vikram's Delhi years.

For many north easterners living in India's major cities, there remains an uneasy knowledge that the way they look, speak, dress or sound can make them visible in ways they do not choose.

That visibility can become curiosity. Curiosity can become ridicule. Ridicule can become harassment. And sometimes, as the Northeast has learned too many times, harassment can become violence.

Whether racism played a role in Vikram's killing must be established by the investigation. It should not be assumed before the facts are known. But neither should the larger question be buried simply because this particular case began with an argument over noise.

There is something else that makes Vikram's death so difficult to accept. Almost every recollection of him circles back to the same qualities. Gentle. Soft-spoken. Smiling.Easy going. Peace-loving.

Image: Participants with placards in the Candlelight vigil demanding Justice for Chongtham VIkram Singh

Nanao, his friend from the Ultra Vires days, remembers someone who could simply walk into a home and belong there. Chandam remembers a man who believed in unity and diversity. Sarma remembers the smiling guitarist. Lokesh remembers the gentleman. I remember the guitar. Perhaps these fragments are all we have now. A few chords. A few songs. A few evenings. A smile. A man sitting quietly with his guitar. And a family waiting for him to come back upstairs.

On September 8, the Thangmeiband United Club organised a candlelight vigil at Kangla Western Gate in Imphal. There would have been people there who knew Vikram before Delhi. People who knew him when he was simply a young guitarist from Thangmeiband. People who remember Ultra Vires. People who remember the first excitement of Manipuri rock. People who heard Eastern Dark when its guitars carried political satire and social commentary in their own language.

Perhaps some remembered the boy who played accordion on All India Radio. Perhaps some remembered the man who left home because he wanted to make music for a living. And perhaps some, like me, remembered only the brief encounter and the sound of his guitar.

That is the strange thing about musicians. They leave pieces of themselves in places they never know. A note. A riff. A melody. A memory of an evening.

Vikram spent his life crossing musical boundaries—Hindustani classical music, Western classical guitar, rock, folk fusion, theatre.

He believed in diversity. He believed in unity. He believed in peace. He made a living bringing different sounds together. Then, one night, he went downstairs because the world around him was too loud. And violence took away his voice.

The courts will decide who is responsible for his death. The police must establish the facts. The government must answer the questions being raised. But there is another responsibility that belongs to all of us. We must refuse to allow Vikram's death to become another passing headline.

Because if a man can spend twenty years in a city, contribute his art to it, raise his family there, make friends there, and still die in circumstances that leave an entire community asking whether people like him are safe there, then something is profoundly unfinished.

Vikram once made a guitar speak. Now that guitar is silent. But perhaps silence is not what his death should leave behind.

Perhaps it should leave a sound loud enough to be heard—from Kilokari to Imphal, from Delhi to every city where someone from the Northeast is trying to make a life. A demand for dignity. A demand for safety. A demand to belong without fear.

And, above all, a demand that no one should have to go downstairs simply to ask for some quiet—and never return home.

Sunzu Bachaspatimayum is a journalist, filmmaker and cultural institution-builder working at the intersection of cinema, heritage and society, committed to telling Manipur’s stories with integrity.

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