Music maestro A.R. Rahman turns 59 on January 6.
In Rahman’s music, genres blend and boundaries blur to become one in symphony.
The spiritual principles of Sufism have often guided both his process and his music.
In the early 1990s, when India was at the cusp of liberalisation, Hindi film music was about to enter a phase that would go on to alter its landscape. At the heart of this shift was a young man brewing his talents in the thriving music scene of Chennai. Allah Rakha Rahman (A.S. Dileep before his conversion to Islam) was composing advertisement jingles before his debut film Roja (1992), which would go on to create a new language for Hindi film music, as well as his own career. Rahman has often talked about the eclectic music he was exposed to in his younger days, which ranged from Western classical, jazz, pop, rock ‘n’ roll, to Hindustani classical. It is this exposure that has always translated to the music he has produced. Before Rahman, R.D. Burman was the music director who was most credited for mobilising global sounds to create a unique language for Hindi film music. Incidentally, Rahman’s debut came towards the fag end of Burman’s career (the film he worked on before his death, 1942 A Love Story, released two years after Roja). It is, then, perhaps fitting to say that the void left by Burman’s madness was filled in by Rahman’s magic.
“Magic” is a term often used in popular discourses to talk about Rahman’s music. “Magic,” also the name of a band he was a part of during his Chennai days, is often used to describe things and feelings that elude us. One does not know how or why something makes one feel or see certain things, but they just do. It is perhaps this defining quality of Rahman’s music that makes its association with magic so seamless. In Rahman’s music, genres blend and boundaries blur to become one in symphony. Becoming one with a power that is above us—a central idea of Sufism—has often guided both his process and his music. He has often talked about how he does not force himself to create music; it comes to him, like a divine intervention—often in the middle of nowhere, in his dream, out of thin air. It is perhaps impossible to talk about the sublime nature of his music and what it means to his fans and listeners, without talking about this idea of spiritualism and the influence of Sufism in his work. But just like there’s method to madness, there’s method to his magic as well. It is this method that he ought to be credited with, while talking about his contribution to Indian music.
Just like what Burman was doing in the 1970s, Rahman was not just mobilising music from different parts of the world, but was also bringing in global music production techniques and values. This meant that he brought in with him digital technologies that were hitherto not commonly used in the Indian film industries. If fusion has been the heart of his music-making, technology has been the wind beneath its magic wings. He brought in the MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) keyboard from his earlier films like Roja and Rangeela. Since his early days, he has used the synthesiser and digital tools to create music and effects that would have earlier required large ensembles, as well as created multi-layer arrangements. His creative blending of traditional instruments such as violin and tabla with electronic sounds rendered a new texture to Hindi film music, which resulted in it finding popularity amongst western music fans as well as the diaspora. Rahman’s music was making noise at the diaspora at the same time that the likes of Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar were reaching out to them through their films. The KM Music Conservatory, started by him in 2008, is an extension of his work of integrating the use of technology in sound and music production.
His experiments with technology have continued well into his later and present years. In the last decade, he has experimented with the Haken Continuum keyboard (a music performance controller and synthesizer) and Intel’s Curie-based technology, which he famously used at the Consumer Electronic Show in 2016, to create music just out of his hand gestures. His dabbling with technology, however, has never taken him away from the people who make music. His regular efforts to preserve the live orchestra through his music school, as well as his collaborations with the Berklee College of Music, Chennai Strings and the Czech Film Orchestra, are testament to it.
Hailing from Chennai, Rahman was not familiar with Hindi or Urdu. This often meant that the music was composed while not keeping the lyrics in mind, or a definite sense of a mukhda (beginning of a song) and antara (body of a song). In fact, a lot of his compositions were initially created for Tamil songs, especially on films where he has collaborated with Mani Ratnam. Lyricists like Gulzar and Prasoon Joshi have pointed out in interviews about the freedom this free-flowing structure gave them to experiment with lyrics. It is perhaps this ambiguity of language that has made even unfamiliar languages have brilliant lives in Rahman’s music. In Guru (2007), he collaborated with Egyptian singer Maryem Tollar to create the iconic song “Mayya Mayya,” whose inspiration came from him hearing a man repeating “maya maya,” which means water in Arabic, on his Hajj pilgrimage. In 2006, he made an Arabic chorus play with youthful Hindi lyrics for the song “Khalbali” in Rang De Basanti (2006). Examples abound of him fusing different languages together, be it Malayalam in “Jiya Jale” from Dil Se (1998), Telugu in “Chinnamma Chilakamma” from Meenaxi (2004), or Arabic in “Kun Faya Kun” from Rockstar (2011). A lot of these are played in the form of chorus ensembles, for which he collaborates with people from different parts of the country and the world. In his recent outing with Imtiaz Ali, he repurposed Amar Singh Chamkila’s rawness and folk music, to blend it with contemporary Punjabi beats.
Rahmaniac, a website run by A.R. Rahman’s fans, is a living archive of his work, concerts, interviews and everything else there possibly is to know about him. The name, formed by joining the terms “Rahman” and “maniac,” are suggestive of a fandom where one submits oneself to the object of fandom. It is this sense of absolute surrender his music often begets that forms the heart of his music and what perhaps should be the heart of anything that celebrates him. He has made music surrender to and embrace languages, people and technologies that have come its way, without taking into account borders and boundaries—something for which Hindi film music is heavily indebted to him. In a world increasingly defined by boundaries and in an industry painfully moving towards narratives that criminalise imagined “others,” it might just do us some good, to sometimes submit ourselves to things and feelings that are not supposed to make sense, but only feel like magic. Till we have Rahman, we are good.
Rini Dasgupta is a Ph.D scholar of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She works on the relationship between labour and technology in popular Hindi cinema.
