WAYLAND, Massachusetts: Artwork from the Punjab state of India decorates the Ray family home. A Johann Sebastian Bach statue sits on a piano. But in the basement — cluttered with wires, old concert fliers and drawings — 25-year-old Arjun Ray is fighting distortion from his electric guitar.

For this son of Indian immigrants, trained in classical violin and raised on traditional Punjab music, getting his three Pakistani-American band mates in sync is the goal on this cold New England evening. Their band, The Kominas, is trying to record a punk-rock version of the classic Bollywood song, “Choli Ke Peeche”.

“Yeah,” said Shahjehan Khan, 26, one of the band’s guitarists, “there are a lot of contradictions going on here.” Deep in the woods of this colonial town boils a kind of revolutionary movement. From the basement of this middle-class home tucked in the woods west of Boston, The Kominas have helped launched a small, but growing, South Asian and Middle Eastern punk rock movement that is attracting children of Muslim and Hindu immigrants and drawing scorn from some traditional families, according to whom music is forbidden. The movement, an anti-establishment subculture borne of conservative communities, is the subject of two new films and a hot topic on social-networking sites.

“This is one way to deal with my identity as an Arab-American,” said Marwan Kamel, the 24-year-old lead guitarist in Chicago-based Al-Thawra. “With this music, I can express this confusion.” The movement’s birth is often credited to the novel “The Taqwacore,” by Michael Muhammad Knight, a Rochester, NY-raised writer who converted to Islam.

Knight coined the book’s title from the Arabic word “Taqwa,” which means piety or God-fearing, and the word hardcore. The 2003 book portrayed an imagined world of living-on-the-edge punk rockers and influenced real-life South Asians to form their own bands.

South Asian and Middle Eastern punk bands soon were popping up across America and communicating with each other via MySpace. At the time of book’s release, Basim Usmani and Khan already were experimenting with punk and building the foundation for The Kominas, which loosely means “scoundrels” in various South Asian languages. When Usmani, now 26, came across the book, he was writing songs and sporting a mohawk — just like the punk rocker on the novel’s cover.

Usmani contacted Knight, who agreed to buy a bus on eBay for $2,000 to help launch the nation’s first “Muslim punk rock tour” in 2007. Kamel, the son of a Syrian father and Polish mother, bought a one-way ticket to Boston to join the tour, and Canadian drag-queen singer Sena Hussain met up with them along the way.

Meanwhile, Al-Thawra sings about political events in the Middle East with songs like “Gaza: Choking on the Smoke of Dreams.” Their music is closer to heavy metal. Other bands include the Washington, D.C.-based Sarmust and the Texas group Vote Hezbollah. Like most punk groups, bands produce their own albums and sell them at shows and online.

Most band members hold fulltime jobs, so tours are sporadic. Usmani works full-time at a call center and writes occasionally for the Guardian newspaper in England. Ray is a medical researcher at Harvard.

The bands have noticed Latino punks getting into their music. Al-Thawra recently picked up a guitarist from Mexico City named Mario Salazar. The cover of Al-Thawra’s next album will feature the image of the US-Mexico border fused with Israel’s West Bank separation barrier.

Alan Waters, an anthropology professor at University of Massachusetts-Boston, said it should come as no surprise that young Muslim and Hindu immigrants are expressing themselves through rock or that their music would strike a chord with other “disenfranchized” populations in the US, such as Latinos and other children of recent immigrants.

The Kominas, who sing mostly in English, now are trying to break the image they are just a “Muslim band,” especially since one of their founders, Ray, is Hindu. On their next album, Ray said the band will have songs in Hindi. Ray’s father, Rahul, said he supports his son’s artistic efforts, even if he doesn’t fully understand the music. “It’s just very hard to make a living through music,” said Ray, who is a cancer researcher at Boston University. “But they are getting attention for some reason.” Usmani said he grew up as a “nonreligious” Muslim-American so his journey into punk caused few problems, although he admits his family doesn’t like the drinking and smoking that pervade the music scene. Khan and Kominas drummer Imran Malik, 25, also said they aren’t as observant as their families might like.

Usmani said despite their obvious ironic messages, he fears that his band and others like it will keep getting “stupid questions” about subjects like Sept. 11.

For example, Usami said a reporter once questioned him on how he felt about some Muslims being terrorists. He responded by asking her how she, as a white person, felt about the African slave trade.