The Dilliwala, diasporic Punjabi
By
Jaskiran Kapoor
Rabbi Shergill
Rabbi Shergill
Whispers of The Strings: Rabbi Shergill’s Lyrical Odyssey.
Do we really have to do this?
At first, there were signs of hesitation to indulge in a conversation of which he was the subject. When one has been written, interviewed, and talked about over and over again, the idea of striking up yet another ‘up close and personal’ tête-à-tête can seem somewhat jaded, and honestly, tiresome. Will this take long? he asks. Some time, yes, we equip ourselves with tools of extraction, to delve deeper, peel away a couple more layers, and discover the man behind the music, refreshingly well in tune with the self. For us, it was one of those rare opportunities that provides a window, albeit a small one, into the life of an icon.
Rabbi Shergill has rightly earned this coveted status.
It is a breezy, with-a-chance of a light drizzle morning in Kasauli in the mountainous northern state of Himachal Pradesh. This is where Rabbi drives up from Delhi over the weekends to trek, to breathe, to create. He is sitting on a no-fuss sofa, his back to a bare wall and a large window to his left, painting a refreshing green picture of the hillside. We connect. There is a beat. And the conversation develops a rhythm of its own, flowing from the early years, memories of his parents, his sisters, ‘Dilli’, the trauma of 1984 (the carnage after Operation Blue Star), the angst and anxiety preceding the release of his first album, unrequited love to receiving love, we walk with him down the memory lane of his life.
The Early Years
It is intriguing when Rabbi says ‘my parents were immigrants from Punjab in Delhi’. This element of migration carries its own burden, its own history, and in the case of Rabbi’s parents, a rich heritage and the move to the big city with the will to create a new future. His family’s roots, though, run deep ─ twelve generations of Nambardars (village revenue head), in Chak Mishri Khan, a village in Amritsar district. It is the very same village where the first printing press of the iconic magazine of Punjabi literature, Preet Lari, was set up by its founder, Gurbaksh Singh.
‘My father, Jagir Singh was a farmer and scholar from Sattovali Gali in Punjab. He was a very well-read man, trained in oriental manner, and knew Farsi, Urdu, Punjabi, Sanskrit…He was a genius, a man of letters and difficult to impress, while my mother, Mohinder Kaur Gill was a force of nature. Her family hailed from Multan, Mandi Burevala in Pakistan, and were devout followers of Sant Isher Singh of Nanaksar. My mother’s family moved to Jalandhar two years before Partition (in 1947) and escaped its goriness,’ recalls Rabbi.
An intrepid young man who loved his adventures, Jagir Singh fell in love with Mohinder Kaur. He was a Sikh and she, a Chauhan. An alliance between the two communities was not unheard of. ‘But theirs was a love story not an easy one as the family legend goes,’ tells Rabbi. They got married, and moved to Delhi, like all Punjabis there in the 1950s, to start anew in a big city that was more welcoming and accommodating.
With four elder sisters, Rabbi was the ‘son his father loved and favoured the most’. ‘Having said that, ours was a very impartial household. The five women would have none of the partiality associated with pampering a Punjabi boy, especially my eldest sister, who was very strict, a gravitational force that wielded immense power. She ran the show tighter than a ship.’
Rabbi’s eldest sister, Gagan Gill, is one of the country’s foremost and highly celebrated Hindi poets, and he believes one can impress this aesthete only with Dostoevsky, or works of literature, art, music, culture. His mother too was highly accomplished. Rabbi labels her as the ‘hero of his life’ who wanted him to succeed in the ‘industrialised world’. In addition to having five kids, he adds, she entered formal education in Delhi, did her MA and Ph.D by the time he was born. She penned 125 books, 7 to 8 volumes of poetry. His mother, Mohinder Kaur taught at Mata Sundri College from where she eventually retired as principal. While two of his other sisters, Mohini and Kawal are teachers by profession, Manjot is a software engineer.
Born Gurpreet Singh Gill, he prefers to stick to Rabbi Shergill. The name has a snap to it, and in the creative field, a stronger recall value, says Rabbi. He is the Dilliwala, the city dweller, who grew up in the presence of brilliant minds, amongst a rich repertoire of art and culture, under the umbrella of aesthetics in the family. ‘In the happy memories, constant laughter, mirth and joy of my nankas (maternal side), and the crabby, sarcastic, fighting dadkas (paternal side),’ he adds. The push and pull of all these elements, the passive literary influences, Punjabi as his language of expression, shaped him.
‘My family was a well-read family: poets, writers, thinkers, rich in culture, history ─ they had set a bar I needed to go beyond. My sister is the foremost poet of Hindi literature. My mother, a principal and poet, an ambitious woman who maximised her talent and really excelled at it. My father was a true genius. I grew up in the shadow/company of really smart people, and I wanted to earn the respect of the people I respected the most. I needed to do better, come out on top and so segued into what I am today. My privilege was to be around high aesthetics. It’s a huge thing if you ever want to do anything in the arts.’
