The Dilliwala, diasporic Punjabi
By
Jaskiran Kapoor
Rabbi Shergill
Rabbi Shergill
Churning & Unravelling
Guru Harkrishan Public School in New Delhi was the school all well-to-do Sikhs sent their kids to in the 1980s and ‘90s. This was a space where one would fit into the ideal Sikh posh identity. Theirs. as Rabbi points out, was very coarse. ‘My father wore kurta pajama, did not tie his beard, spoke only Punjabi, and felt we were upstarts, on the fringes. But later, it’s because of my parents’ literary status, we had strong roots,’ he shares.
‘I grew up in a Punjabi city, a Mughal city, an old city, with so much history, art and culture,’ Rabbi adds. Delhi was a place of immigration, churning, it was a life like any other life, good and bad, till 1984 happened. This was when riots broke out post the assassination of India’s then prime minister Indira Gandhi, and the subsequent storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest of the holy shrines for the Sikhs.
It is a period he remembers vividly, when Sikhs were attacked, beaten, left for dead. His father was at Gurdwara Sis Ganj Sahib in Old Delhi, and survived an attack, while his sister was at work. ‘We had washed our hair and were sitting in the verandah and suddenly there was stone pelting by the neighbours,’ he narrates. They ran inside, and were locked up on the second floor of the house. Their tenant on the first floor was bullied by the rioters to vacate the place as they wanted to set the house on fire. The Shergill family escaped with the help of their tenant to another neighbourhood where they stayed with another Sikh family…what followed was two days of terror and fear. ‘My mother’s driver, his father was burnt alive in front of him…and he saw a dog pick the burnt hand and run away. It was the colonies, the low-income areas that came under heavy, vicious attack. It was akin to hell, holocaust, Partition, a tumultuous time in Sikh history, one of those things we went through. Post 1984, I really don’t know whether life changed or moved on…people just picked up where they left …that’s also the true nature of the Sikhs…they pick up where they leave from, they get up when they fall, they bounce back, they carry on.’ Truly resilient.
School resumed, and Punjabi as a language to converse in took seed. ‘There was a period dedicated to Punjabi language, and as an active choice, we friends would speak only in Punjabi amongst ourselves and ended up showing our identity. Call it political consciousness or a sense of identity, we decided to speak Punjabi from there on, post 1984. It struck lifelong relations, a grid of friendship was formed with Amarjit Singh Bahl, Arvinder Anand, and my namesake, Gurpreet Singh Sangha.’
This was the time when the musical bug bit Rabbi. Tripat Kaur, the music teacher at his school took a shine to him and enrolled him in music class. She was the first real patron of his music. ‘We would practise during the break, there were shabads or sacred songs in the music room, and I hated it. I wanted to be a pilot, a fighter pilot like that Shashi Kapoor film.’
But post ‘84, something changed, and Rabbi feels only a psychologist would be able to figure it out. There was a deep desire to not be defeated by the suggestions of the city. With the recent ‘84 beating, an immense shoring up of esteem was necessary, and Rabbi felt the need to assert himself. ‘I went in the opposite direction: rock ‘n roll, complete abandon, formed a band, my father, his pocket was mine ─ car, petrol, room with AC, drinking, partying, trays of food coming up, I led a very privileged life,’ Rabbi admits in all honesty. Now this could go two ways: either forget who you are or hold on to where you come from. Around this time his paternal grandmother, Basant Kaur, moved in with them. ‘She is the single biggest influence in my life. She had immense finesse, authority and coarseness too. She could cuss the pants off anyone! Every word, consonance she uttered was a pearl to die for. She would call me Bohar, the great tree, because of its strength and longevity and its prized value in Punjabi culture. Punjabis have a great sense of history. They want things to last, deep rooted, like the tree itself.’
One of his biggest joys was to watch his father and grandmother talk in chaste Punjabi. It was mind-boggling to witness the existence of another language in such robustness. ‘I did not want to be the guy whose dialect stops with my father and grandmother, but I fear the dialect, my virasat, will probably die with me or my generation. Even in my village that purity of the language is missing. The weed of Sanskritised Hindi is creeping in now,’ says Rabbi whose music and poetry is, in a way, an act of preservation of a language, of a people and their culture.
The Wander Years
The year was 1988; the fortieth anniversary of Amnesty International. A rock concert was held in Delhi with legends like Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman, Sting and Youssou N’Dour. In almost all of his interactions and interviews, Rabbi declares this moment in time as the turning point in his life ─ the moment he realised the sheer power of music, its impact and reach. ‘When Bruce Springsteen got on that stage and sang Born in the U.S.A, I watched a forty thousand-strong crowd tune in, sway in unison, awestruck.’ A fifteen-year-old Rabbi in that instant became a rock ‘n’ roll convert. Music was the journey he wanted to embark upon. And it began with Rabbi teaching himself to play the guitar.
The teen years had set in, and before he knew, a boy of seventeen-eighteen got the keys to his freedom ─ a KB100, Kawasaki Bajaj. He could go anywhere, anytime, especially the hills. The adventure began, and continues even today, his love for riding up the mountains on his RE Interceptor 650.
Those were the ‘wander years’, he shared in an interview once. The period in Khalsa College, Delhi. ‘My college years were spent mostly solo. It was not a time of great happiness. I was lonely, all school friends had gone their way, there was a great dispersal of sorts. By the time I was seventeen, my sisters were married off, and this was the time I needed them the most. I was young, nerdy, horrible with women…I was lost for about two years, most of the guys went to IIM, big colleges.’
The first year of college was very hard. He had taken up Electronics (Hons), and had ‘zero capacity for it’.
‘I flunked the first year, shifted to BA in the second year, met Saurabh Shukla (now a television anchor) and struck up a great friendship, and in the third year formed the band Kaffir.’ Over those years, music gave Rabbi a voice, and the guitar became a medium to reach out, break the ice. He wore his hair long like a rockstar, idolised Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Jimmy Page, Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler, String. He pursued MA Philosophy and later his MBA from FORE School of Management. ‘I went to two PG schools and crashed out! I didn’t do anything, would be in my room with my guitar and had a long row with my parents.’
It was during college, 1993-4, that he joined Times FM as a production assistant and learnt the ropes about music and jingles. ‘And I guess that’s the time I decided music it is, as a career, or something I want to explore and be associated with. I wanted to be a musician, it came naturally, everything else seemed forced.’
A loan from his father financed a massive gear-purchase from Singapore and a self-employed Rabbi started producing jingles. A good friend in an advertising agency would send work his way, and Rabbi created jingles for Hero Honda, Maruti Suzuki, Nova ghee, fans, incense sticks and so on. While his influences were hardcore hard rock, he wanted to be taken seriously as a lyricist and a poet.
Needless to say, his parents didn’t take very kindly to his choice of career. They hated the idea; theirs was an academically driven family, all his sisters were brilliant and post graduates ─ that was the minimum qualification of the household.
The teens rolled into twenties. ‘I lived the rock ‘n’ roll life, guitar, bike, fans, tours, parties, long hair, jamming, crash pads. Life in the mid-twenties was good, riding on the music wave.’
An avid reader, those were the years he immersed himself in reading everything ‘music’. Rabbi would pore over magazines like Guitar World, vociferously. It was a gateway into the mind of an artist; it taught him about his/her art, journey, philosophy, how to think in the musical sense. ‘It was mature, in-depth content that gave me perspective. I might have been an immature person behaviorally, but mentally, this intense reading rendered a maturity. It shaped me and my outlook. Although I had no game in my twenties. Love was a horrible disaster, unrequited, one sided, mostly taking place in my head. I actually feel I pissed my twenties away and have a whole bunch of regrets; where was the iPhone when you needed one! But one thing is certain: All that reading, I know what constitutes a good song and music,’ he says.
The learnings continued and the spirit to excel, to carry, to think he owes to sports and sports psychology, to sportspersons, men and women of high calibre. ‘I read about their journeys, their success, the Australian team for instance, Steve Waugh, Ricky Ponting, Matthew Hayden, and Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid…how they achieved and visualised success, and manifested it.’
Rabbi also exposed himself to other art forms, to explore which allows complete freedom, and knew he was a rock ‘n’ roller.
