Meet A.R. Rahman, Musical Messenger By Amitabh Pal on Nov 26, 2013 This article originally appeared in The Progressives August 2013 edition. To get more great content like this, subscribe today and get a free calendar as a gift. ------ A R. Rahman is best known to Americans—if he is known at all—for his Slumdog Millionaire score. But he is a demigod in his native India, and throughout South Asia, the Middle East, and wherever the Indian diaspora exists. It’s hard to believe that the diminutive man sitting before me playing with his smartphone is Rahman, but here he is, unassuming and polite. A modest façade for a man who has changed the sound of modern Indian music. I am with Rahman in his home just outside Beverly Hills. Rahman has bought a two-story house in L.A. because he is so much in demand in the American movie industry. The main floor is a recording studio filled with dazzlingly modern equipment. The upper floor is Rahman’s living space. We chat amiably in his courtyard about the origins of his passion for music. He says his family heritage determined his professional choice. “My father was a very famous arranger/composer,” says Rahman. “He got ill and died of cancer at the young age of forty-three. My mother actually saw my future more accurately than me. I was more interested in science and other things. But she felt that we had all this equipment and access, and learning that would be a better thing than doing something that was not in the family.” Even as a child, Rahman felt the transformative power of music. “When I started composing music at the age of eight or nine, it liberated me,” he says. “Wow! I thought, what a great thing this is. You’re in the best profession in the world.” For a while, Rahman was an assistant and instrumentalist for other composers. He started out himself by creating ad jingles. A course in his hometown administered by a Cambridge college gave him a tutorial in Western classical music. In the early 1990s, he was approached by a South Indian filmmaker, Mani Ratnam, to compose for the movie Roja. The movie and the album created such a storm that both were dubbed into several languages. Fans across India had copies of Rahman’s debut often in more than one of these languages. There was no looking back. In the twenty years since, Rahman has sold more than 100 million albums and has won pretty much every creative Indian award possible, frequently many times over. Rahman’s music is a unique blend. “Western classical, Indian classical, reggae, hip-hop, rap, rock, pop, blues, jazz, opera, Sufi, folk, African beats, Arabian sounds—there is nothing Rahman has not dared to meld together,” writes Tehelka, an Indian publication. “No texture of sound he has not strained to perfect.” A profound influence on Rahman’s music has been the Sufism he practices. One of Rahman’s most famous songs, “Khwaja Mere Khwaja” (O Saint, My Saint!), was actually written by his Sufi teacher for a biopic of the remarkably broadminded Mughal Emperor Akbar. Even Rahman’s more typical numbers have his lyricists using Muslim religious imagery. In “Chaiyya Chaiyya,” a conventional Bollywood dance song so irresistible that Spike Lee used it over both the opening and closing credits of Inside Man, the male protagonist sings: My companion is like a Muslim priest She is my song, my declaration of faith My song, my declaration of faith. Rahman does not write the lyrics to his songs, but instead creates a synergy where non-Muslim lyricists plunge into the same world as his own. “I have enjoyed a Sufistic vibe with Rahman with songs such as ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya,’ ” Gulzar, the veteran lyricist who shared an Oscar with Rahman for “Jai Ho” in Slumdog, told a magazine. This is a testament to the syncretic nature of the Indian film industry, where Rahman, his lyricist, the singer, and the main actor can sometimes each be of one of the four major faiths of the region. “That’s what India is about,” Rahman tells me. “It’s so free, it’s amazing. They let you be in your own space; they love you for what you are.” At the same time, Indian Muslim celebrities have to sometimes tread cautiously. Other Muslim luminaries (such as Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan) have drawn a backlash for complaining about the special scrutiny they’re subjected to. Rahman himself ran into hot water some years ago when there were false reports that he was funding Muslim extremists. Almost as if to prove his patriotism, Rahman did an album in 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence, which had as its centerpiece a modern rendition in his own voice of India’s national song. But ’97 was, of course, the fiftieth anniversary of India’s neighbor to the northwest, too, and Rahman used that to travel to Pakistan and work with the late, great Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to craft a beautiful song, “Gurus of Peace,” sung by Khan, Rahman, and a chorus of children wishing for an end to suffering on both sides of the border. “There’s a line in the song: ‘Our hearts are the same,’ ” says Rahman, stressing its importance. Another famous Rahman composition is the theme for the film Bombay, which deals with a Hindu-Muslim marriage against a backdrop of religious strife. The tune is based on the same Indian classical raga (melodic structure) as Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite hymn. “It made a musical statement about nonviolence,” Rahman told a biographer. Before Slumdog, Rahman had dabbled in the United States by collaborating with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Broadway. But Slumdog and Danny Boyle got him going in another direction. “Whenever you work with people with different sensibilities, you learn something new that you’ve been missing before,” Rahman says. The success of Slumdog catapulted Rahman to global fame, as it won him two Oscars, two Grammys, and a Golden Globe. He began to get offers on “mainstream films that are not connected to India or have the tag ‘India’ on them, such as People Like Us and Couples Retreat,” says Rahman. “I can call anybody or work with anybody. When he was alive, Michael Jackson and I met for hours. I was in the new ‘We Are the World.’ So, I have all this access now.” Access, certainly. He gets invited to the White House for dinner with President Obama. He chills with Mick Jagger on Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen’s yacht and makes him sing songs with titles in Sanskrit. His prominence hasn’t stopped Rahman from being hassled by U.S. immigration, though. He says that until a couple of years ago he was routinely stopped while entering the United States because, apparently, his visa lacked a middle name. That seems to have all been cleared up now, but even then it didn’t bother him because he used to take the lull in his schedule as an opportunity to meditate, he says. Rahman’s spiritual quest began with a personal crisis. The death of Rahman’s father left his family bereft. Rahman started a long journey that first saw him leave the religion of his birth, Hinduism, for atheism. Then, under the influence of a preacher, he embraced the Sufi Islam that he currently practices. “We met this teacher who was very kind,” Rahman explains. “My mother got in first. I never believed in all that. But then what happened was that at a particular point in my life, I had to change and discover myself more. I started getting spiritual energy from Sufis. It’s like a love letter. When you write a love letter to someone, you get a letter back—a kindness. And you start falling in love even more.” “Nobody told me that this is good, and you go follow that,” he adds. “But I felt like this is leading me somewhere, and let’s see what the journey is. It took me to a very nice place.” As he said from the Oscar podium: “I had the choice of hate and love, and I chose love.” Rahman is aware of the negative image of Islam among some people, and talks about the subject cautiously. “For my family and me, it’s been a very personal experience,” he says. “And then you discover the whole world of what’s happening outside—the history and everything, which is the baggage of political conflicts.” He disputes the charge that Islam, by its very nature, is a violent religion. “Every entity carries the luggage of the followers, and the followers are sometimes not what the real essence is,” he says. “I discovered and felt the true essence. No bearded man came to me, put a gun to my head, and said, ‘Follow this. Follow that.’ ” The attacks of 9/11 had a big impact on him. “September 11 happened, and then I felt I had a greater role,” he says. “Because if people like me—musicians and artists—keep going, we bring hope to normal people who don’t want to be typecast. We bring hope to a normal person who says to his family, ‘We don’t want to harm anybody. We want to give.’ My music sends the message that the best way to make the world a better place is by giving, which is healing.” The Muslim community has a special opportunity here, he says. “Why don’t we start things for humanity?” asks Rahman. “Start the greatest educational institutions, the greatest hospitals. We’ve been singled out as engaging in only certain kinds of activities, which are committed by a very, very small percentage. So the other percentage has to rise up with generosity and kindness and prove itself to the world, which is what God wants.” In keeping with that philosophy, Rahman has started an organization called the A. R. Rahman Foundation to help needy kids. He gets free food distributed to the poor every Friday in his hometown. He has contributed his work to various causes such as the fight against tuberculosis and the 2004 tsunami victims. And he has started a music school to help gifted children, many from modest backgrounds, which he talks about enthusiastically. “The students are up there talent-wise, and once they finish their courses, some of my friends out here appreciate their talent,” he says. “It was just the training they had previously missed.” Rahman is confident that through his music, he can bring all of us together. “Love can transcend all these segmental issues,” he once said. “You need to find a larger perspective which bridges all these worlds—West and East, Muslim and non-Muslim, or whatever else divides us.” A. R. Rahman has been working at that with a whole lot of success his entire creative life. ------ Amitabh Pal, the managing editor of The Progressive and co-editor of the Progressive Media Project, is the author of “ ‘Islam’ Means Peace: Understanding the Muslim Principle of Nonviolence Today” (Praeger).
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