The Dilliwala, diasporic Punjabi
By
Jaskiran Kapoor
Rabbi Shergill
Rabbi Shergill
The Sound of Music
When not producing jingles, Rabbi was writing poetry, lyrics to his own music. Form and language are two different things. His instrumentalism might have been rock, but his words were in the language he loves ─ Punjabi. And while Bulla ki Jana was the first song that made the world sit up and acknowledge him, he had sung Kujh Rukh Mainu Putt Lagde by Shiv Kumar Batalvi first.
Jawahar Wattal, the Quincy Jones of the music industry was impressed with his demo. He pitched Rabbi to Sony and asked him to make more demos. ‘I made one and it was very well received. I bagged a contract with Magnasound Records. But I screwed up at the Magnasound party, spoke out of turn, and Wattal got me a deal with Sony.’ Rabbi went to Mumbai, but after a fallout with Wattal, K.J. Singh stepped in. ‘I found a stellar producer in him and he still watches over me like an elder brother, like a true mentor. In the industry we are, one needs an excellent producer to keep things in check, and keep your standard up and consistent.’ Rabbi made another demo, Bulla and it got great reviews, traction and interest. Everyone wanted it. He had contract offers from five labels, from RPG to Times. But destiny had other plans. Budget constraints, other issues made way for Minty Tejpal, brother and business partner at Tehelka magazine. They hit off, a contract was signed and work on the first album began. ‘The year was 1999. Tehelka broke a crazy corruption story, (Operation) West End, threatening a huge Army scandal. All hell broke loose. Amidst that mayhem, my album got delayed by five years.’
Tehelka ran out of money. Rabbi’s album was left hanging.
The next five years simply stood still for Rabbi. His father’s sudden demise in 1999 saw him flit between Delhi and Mumbai, tying up loose ends, being there for his mother, and writing more songs. It was a frustrating, challenging time. The delay of five years triggered an anxiety, he felt stuck, not moving anywhere. ‘My father’s loss was a tragedy that impacted me the most. He was seventy when he passed. He went away under great stress, because of the land situation in our village. My uncles and his sons started interfering, meddling with the contracting process, and he had to go constantly up and down, and that stress consumed him. He had a massive heart attack and passed away in the village. Going to the village and getting him back home from there was traumatic. My heritage ─ these people were responsible for it and I developed a bittersweet relationship with it all. I feel this is where Punjab is cursed, this attachment to the land. People who are so close to it end up in self-loathing at a pathological level, which I think of what Punjab is ─ a tornado of self-loathing. Everyone in Punjab is in a state of crisis, of self-loathing. There are great positives and great negatives, and it offers a great insight ─ quite a bit of that reflects in my song Totia Manmotia ─ a blatant critique of my village, from my first album.’
For Rabbi, music is the moral compass of the times, one that shakes things up, like the Sixties in the West. Music, he adds, has to constantly weigh what’s happening; ‘it’s physiotherapy of the times, spot the trauma and release it.’
Rabbi’s music is also his identity, which he wears with pride. Singing in English would be a disservice to his own language. A proud Sikh, he says ‘this is who I am. I have grown up on Gurbani, Kirtan, on a heavy diet of poets like Batalvi, Kabir, Gyani Gyan Singh…Sikh literature. My avatar as a turbaned Sikh is me, and I won’t change a thing about it.’
The Breakthrough
The year 2004 was defining. Rabbi’s demo found its way to Anand Surapur of Phat Phish records, who instantly signed him on. Rabbi’s de-glamourised image, his down-to-earth persona, his content rich lyrics and music that struck all the right chords drew Surapur instinctively and instantly to him. Rock-infused Punjabi worded music from a turbaned Sardar was something he could not ignore.
Phat Phish records was on board, and Rabbi was a phenomenal hit. While relief came in the form of the album’s success, a lot of healing and love came in the form of Camilla. The year 2004 was rewarding because he got married that year. ‘My wife, Camilla and I have been together since. She had come to Mumbai from Italy, and took up the same flat I had rented. She was in the other part as a paying guest. I still remember her initial days, when she came here, lost, clueless where to go, or eat. I was passing by and that’s how it all started. I took her out, she realised ‘I was the one’. I think love happens at the end of a relationship. It’s an achievement, not a switch that goes on. Life, experiences, the feeling that someone is there with you, as a witness to your life is love. You grow up together and so does love.’
When Camilla met Rabbi he had no reason to settle down. He was finally in Mumbai, a fantastic city to be in. He had a superb gang, a super label he was working with, every night was a party.
It was a rock ‘n’ roll life and he surrendered to it. ‘I’ve had a few epic loves. They were what ifs, and it lends that romanticism, not collapsed into reality, and you can project it the way you want it. That which is not yours is the sweetest, isn’t it. But Camilla’s presence changed the definition of love.’ Camilla showers unconditional love, day in and day out. ‘We have grown up together. She is very hardworking, a spiritual person while I am an overgrown toddler. She is a homemaker, a qualified lactation expert, in the middle of launching her career as a writer, she is penning a fiction novel and I feel it’s a masterpiece. My mother who passed away in 2017 was very happy with Camilla.’ The love for the hills, hiking, fitness is something both Rabbi and Camilla share.
According to him, Punjabis are more or less like Italians. ‘Italians are very hardworking. They are very warm, friendly, family-oriented, have lovely food and I find Italy a beautiful country. It’s the only place where I don’t find anything out of proportion. My father-in-law cycles, my mother-in-law is an avid hiker and can hike for seven hours straight! Italy is a fit country, and I feel a balanced place holds great insight.’
As a Punjabi, he sees great parallels: how Italians maintain and preserve their history and culture, how they keep in shape. ‘I’ve learnt how to keep myself fit from them, to lead the good life and not destroy myself in the process.’
Together, they have two children: their daughter is seventeen and son, fourteen. ‘Let’s leave the names out,’ says Rabbi, whose daughter takes after him. He can see her interest in music, she sings, plays the guitar and paints. ‘She has a long way to go, but I am particular about passing on Punjab and Punjabi to them.’
Then and Now
A pioneer of Punjabi rock, Rabbi’s style and form of music didn’t exactly fit in any traditional bracket. It was the scholar and Sufi singer, Madan Gopal Singh who coined the rather avant garde term for him, ‘the urban balladeer’. But through conversations, knowing him, his mind, his influences and experiences, Rabbi doesn’t need to be slotted or compartmentalised or stamped under any label. Like his music, his ideas, his words, his thought-process is free and fluid. To me, he comes across as a preservationist, as a seeker, as a thought-provoker, as a poet of the new age, as a bridge between the two Punjabs: of yesterday and the one we inhabit.
His first album, Rabbi, was an instant success. Bulla ki Jana was the most played non-film song of 2005 in India. His second album released in 2008, Avengi Ja Nahin carried the same passionate, stylistically layered current. His explorations reshaped his music in his third album titled III. Tracks like Ganga were political, environmental and urged women to keep alive the rebel in them, while Cabaret Weimar with traces of Punjabi hip-hop borrowed its title from a fantastic period in Germany’s history, the Weimar period of the 1920s that saw an explosion of music, science, art and literature. It features true blue rap artist J Nu and he travelled to the USA in July 2011 to work with award-winning mix engineer Gustavo Celis. III also took him to Punjabi’s troubled poet, the late Lal Singh Dil, and the track Tun Milen – The Ghost of LSD was born. If Par Parosani speaks of an encounter with God, Raj Singh is about death, farmers’ suicide, while Bilquis is written from the perspective of four activists: Gujarat riots gangrape victim Bilquis Yakub Rasool, highway inspector Satyendra Dubey, human rights activist Navleen Kumar who was stabbed to death, and Shanmughan Manjunath who was killed for sealing a corrupt petrol station. Rabbi not only moved the country with his song, but sent a message to Bilquis through the song Bilquis to come to Punjab, where ‘the Sardars will project her’. He does regret not composing anything during the Farmers Protest that took place in India in 2020-1 against three Farm Acts. Like his words, his music videos are rooted, natural, and zoom in on life as it is.
Poets like Varis Shah, whom Rabbi calls the Shakespeare of India, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Baba Bulleh Shah, Sheikh Farid feature in his works. He revisited Lal Singh Dil in 2019, purely because ‘he was the poem and the poem was him’.
‘Having or choosing someone as a favourite poet is an unconscious process. You don’t expect to fall in love till you read and realise it’s the authentic embodiment of their thought. I deeply like the works of Harbhajan Singh, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Sultan Bahu, Lal Singh Dil because their poems are an abstract representation of who they themselves are.’
Films like Jab Tak Hai Jaan, Delhi Heights and Raanjhanaa came in between too, and working with Oscar-winning music composer A.R. Rahman was an unforgettable experience. ‘The process of production of music is fairly the same in a studio, the mechanics do not change. Working with Rahman was like working with anyone, but it’s the conversations with him that were insightful. He has a tremendous spiritual inner momentum and I vibe well with people like that.’
Rabbi confesses he is someone who looks for real conversations, real people. ‘I want to know what you are truly thinking and feeling, and if I have to, I will ask penetrative questions and get to the heart of things.’ Perhaps his search for authenticity keeps him grounded. Glamour doesn’t faze him. He lives comfortably in his skin, searching, seeking. His mother would be anxious, like all mothers, about his future, would he succeed. ‘Life moves me, music should not happen in a vacuum, or out of the need to glorify yourself. For me, it’s important to talk about stuff around me. Also, this is something personal too ─ my religion as a Sikh emphasises again and again on simplicity, humility, it’s a constant reminder. I read the scripture like poetry and find these instances in repetition. My father too was a hopelessly simple man.’
