The rock guitarist whose killing shocked India's north-east

The rock guitarist whose killing shocked India's north-east

A well-known Manipuri musician, Singh was killed in Delhi last week

When Chongtham Vikram Singh at last returned home to India’s north-eastern state of Manipur, his old friend Dhiren Sadokpam went to the airport to meet him.

It was not the reunion he had pictured. Vikram came back in the cargo hold, sealed inside a steel container.

Three days earlier, the 54-year-old musician had been beaten to death outside his home in south-east Delhi.

“Nobody seemed to have the strength to speak,” Sadokpam told the BBC. “What could be said?”

Much of Vikram’s life had been spent on the move with his guitars, taking his music from small venues in Manipur’s capital, Imphal, to jazz clubs, classrooms and concert halls in Delhi.

Police and his family say he went downstairs late on Sunday night after a group of men were shouting and drinking outside his apartment block. When he protested about the noise, the men allegedly attacked him.

His wife, Joshna Chongtham, said Vikram went back upstairs but was followed and assaulted outside the family’s apartment.

A few hours later, after he complained of breathlessness, his 20-year-old son took him to hospital. He died there early the next morning.

Seven men and one juvenile have been arrested in connection with his killing. Police say they are still examining the circumstances of the attack.

His death has triggered an outpouring of grief and anger, and revived concerns about discrimination faced by people from India’s north-east in Delhi, where community members have long reported racial abuse, harassment and violence.

Police say they have so far found no evidence of a racial motive. But north-eastern groups have staged protests and called for an impartial investigation.

The case has also focused attention on Vikram himself - a familiar name in Manipur’s music world who, over four decades of performing and teaching, built a wide circle of students, friends and admirers.

At a press conference two days after his death, his wife Joshna said: “We are not seeking revenge. We are seeking justice. He had a name, a family and a life that mattered.”

For most of his 54 years, that life centred on music.

Vikram grew up surrounded by it. His mother, Chongtham Kamala, was a celebrated singer who sang in Matamgi Manipur, the first feature film made in the Manipuri language.

As a boy, he accompanied her to All India Radio for recordings. Before long, he auditioned there himself and became a child artist, playing the accordion.

There is an old black-and-white photograph from those years. In it, Vikram kneels stiffly in front of a microphone with an accordion resting across his lap. Next to him, another boy sits behind a pair of drums. Both wear the solemn expressions of children told that a photograph is being taken.

The boy with the accordion would soon discover guitars - first Hawaiian and Spanish, then electric - and somewhere along the way, he acquired thick black glasses and a splendid moustache.

By the mid-1980s, Imphal had become an unlikely centre for rock music. The sound reached there mainly on cassette tapes, carrying hard rock and heavy metal played thousands of miles away.

Young men formed bands and packed into local halls, making do with whatever they could find - modest sound systems, locally built amplifiers, guitars turned up as loud as possible. They listened, copied and experimented.

At the time, Vikram was studying at Don Bosco School and still playing accordion and Hawaiian guitar. Years later, he recalled how he and his friends would ask the priests for permission to leave school to watch a local band perform.

“Those were sweet and innocent days that actually inspired me to go for rock,” he recalled in a

Soon, watching was not enough. Vikram picked up the electric guitar and began performing in bands himself - first Ultra Vires, then Phoenix and Eastern Dark - becoming part of the generation that gave Imphal’s emerging rock scene its own voice.

It was around this period, in 1987, that Dhiren Sadokpam first met him.

They were leaving Imphal to study in Shillong, and Sadokpam remembers them waiting at a temporary interstate bus terminal with backpacks, steel luggage boxes and bedding for the long trip.

Vikram was youthful and full of energy, he recalls, but mostly kept to himself.

“He would spend long hours in his room, mastering each and every composition that came his way,” Sadokpam said.

With each band, Vikram’s playing developed. Ultra Vires became a space for experimentation. Phoenix, which went on to become one of the defining bands of Manipur’s early rock scene, brought greater precision and a loyal following that lasted long after its peak.

By the time he joined Eastern Dark, Sadokpam remembers the quiet young man disappearing into the instrument, making its six strings “cry and sing”.

In the early 1990s, he spent two years in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he met musicians at the Calcutta School of Music, a century-old institution with a strong Western classical tradition, and became more deeply drawn to jazz and classical music. His own playing began to span styles, from rock and blues to jazz and fusion.

By the 2000s, Vikram had moved to Delhi, where he built a life around performing and teaching music.

In 2010, he reconnected with an old musician friend and formed Fubar Ghetto. The band played jazz, blues, rock and fusion, with improvisation at its core. Their first show was a charity concert near the Yamuna river.

From there, they moved through Delhi’s live-music circuit: universities, clubs and cultural festivals, the National School of Drama and, on one occasion, the Czech Embassy.

Vikram never became a major star. Instead, he earned the quieter respect of a working musician - among the people he played with, the students he taught and the musicians he supported along the way.

Since his killing, many of those people have remembered a man who was gentle, generous and largely uninterested in recognition.

Former student guitarist Sachidananda Angom remembered him as “always kind, helpful” and someone who “could really light up a room”.

Sadokpam is careful not to exaggerate their friendship.

They met as young men in 1987, lost contact for two decades and found each other again in middle age. In the years between, Sadokpam followed Vikram’s musical journey from afar, as both a fan and a friend.

They last met in Delhi in 2019, when Vikram invited him home for dinner.

“Vikram picked up his guitar and played and spoke excitedly about his students,” he recalled.

When it was time to go, Vikram asked him to come again soon. Sadokpam said he promised he would.

“I never made it back.”