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God of scoreLast Updated: August 13. 2009 12:36PM UAE / August 13. 2009 8:36AM
GMTJai ho! Rahman holds his Slumdog Millionare Oscars (Best Score and Best
Original Song) at a post-award party in Los Angeles this February. Mario
Anzuoni / ReutersIn less than 20 years, AR Rahman has come to dominate Indian
popular music by breaking all of its borders. S Subramanian reads a new
biography of Bollywood’s great assimilator.
AR Rahman: The Musical Storm
Kamini Mathai
Penguin India
Dh38
The Indian composer AR Rahman, recent winner of a pair of Academy Awards for
his jaunty songs in Slumdog Millionaire, has over the years demonstrated a keen
talent for reaching new, rapidly appreciative audiences. This talent is
typically discussed in reference to his work outside India, which began early
this century when he collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the saccharine
West End confection Bombay Dreams, pairing reworked versions of some of his
most outstanding songs from the 1990s with some of his worst original music.
Since then, his work has featured on Broadway and in Chinese and Hollywood
films. All this, particularly the Slumdog Oscars, has made Rahman the first
Indian composer to find substantial audiences beyond the already large world of
his country’s film industry.
But Rahman’s first, more impressive feat of border-crossing occurred much
earlier, when he became the first Indian composer with a pan-Indian audience.
So often is Bollywood used as a symbol of the entire Indian film industry that
it is easy to overlook the country’s diversity of other regional cinema.
Outside Mumbai, other sizeable film industries operate like self-contained
planets, producing movies in the languages of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam
and Bengali. The borders between the four south Indian cinemas are, for actors,
directors and composers, particularly fluid; the border between south Indian
cinema and Hindi cinema has, because of deeper linguistic differences,
traditionally been far less permeable.
Even music, that much-vaunted universal language, sat for long in decidedly
regional compartments. The music of the Bollywood and Tamil film industries may
have shared roots in the Indian seven-note scale, for instance, but they long
ago developed into entirely different sensibilities. In their default modes,
they leaned in different directions: Bollywood toward plaintive romantic or
existential ballads; Tamil music toward raga-based classical or rhythm-heavy
indigenous folk. They used different instruments: the harmonium would have
sounded as odd in Tamil music as the veena in Bollywood. The gulf separating
these genres was a wide one, spanned only by the occasional work of the
occasional composer. Perhaps work on the bridge that now connects them had
tentatively begun in the years before Rahman, but only after he brought power
cranes to the job, completed its construction, and made a few sorties back and
forth did other composers feel consistently
comfortable doing the same.
Rahman’s debut soundtrack, Roja, released in 1992, provides a classic example
of how his music functions. A song will start simply, with a spare melody and
vocals with power but no apparent ambition to blow the listener away. Within
seconds, that all changes. The melody might enter a dense burst of
orchestration, or yield to a solo by an unexpected instrument, or somehow
reveal itself to be based on a highly classical raga. The vocals might shift
colour, from modest to epic, or from normal singing to Rahman’s own
free-spirited yodels, or from pristine enunciation to humming. The rhythm can
come out of wood blocks, or steel drums, or something that sounds distinctly
like a brass pot being hit with a bunched fist. Mixed together, this reminds
you of reggae one minute, Tamil folk the next, then electronica, then south
Indian classical – all together in one alluring whole.
Nearly 20 years after that debut, Rahman’s music still sparks interesting
(albeit well-worn) debates among music-lovers. What exactly is Rahman’s genius?
Does it lie in his arrangements, his meticulous layering of sounds and voices
as if they were sheets of phyllo? Or in his generous accommodation of styles,
or in his industrious production of catchy hooks? In other words: is he
“simply” a technically savvy producer of commercial music? Or do arrangement,
stylistic flexibility and hook-production fall legitimately under the rubric of
musical artistry, and is Rahman exactly what his legions of devoted fans say he
is: a straight-up compositional genius?
Kamini Mathai’s AR Rahman: The Musical Storm refuses to engage Rahman’s
influence or the music that underpins it, which makes this first attempt at a
biography of the composer a tepid one. This is partly the subject’s own fault.
For no discernible reason, Rahman is famously inaccessible; when he is finally
pinned down to an appointment, he is roughly as forthcoming about his life and
work as a captured spy under interrogation. (There are rules for contacting
Rahman, as Mathai, a Chennai-based journalist, quickly discovered: “Do not call
him, let him call you. Only SMS or mail, don’t call. So mail and SMS I did.
Over and over again.” Nine months later, Rahman called her – for a five-second
conversation.) This cult of deep secrecy infects everybody around Rahman, as
often happens with men who are the absolute fulcrum of their industry: the
creator, preserver and destroyer of employment. Many of Mathai’s sources,
anonymous and otherwise, are
thus short on details and opinions.
This is, it should be pointed out, of a piece with nearly all biographical
projects in India. A majority of the illuminating biographies being written
here are of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru – both long removed from this
world, their archives and letters bared for an unusual level of inspection and
criticism. For most other lives in the public sphere, there are only
hagiographies. Authorised biographies are practically dictated by their
subjects; unauthorised biographies are platitudinous, scurrilous, or (as in
this case) simply boring. “We don’t preserve our historical records (the reason
why so many histories are littered with errors), we don’t want to reveal
failure, want to avoid controversy,” the historian Ramachandra Guha once said
about the yawning lack of good biographies in India. To this could be added a
reluctance to understand how a personal portrait, warts and all, can lend
context to one’s work. It is not so much that
few Indian authors are adept at biography; rather, few Indian subjects are
adept at being biographed.
But with The Musical Storm, Mathai is hardly blameless, especially since the
first significant chapter of the book, on Rahman’s boyhood, is so promising and
generous with detail. Rahman was born Dileep Kumar in 1967, the second of four
children and the only son of Kasturi and RK Sekhar. Sekhar, a workaholic
musician, dominated the studio recordings of the south Indian film industry,
serving as the music director’s assistant (arranging and conducting rehearsals,
notating music, hiring instrumentalists) on multiple films at the same time.
“He never refused work,” Mathai writes. “He would work himself from 7am to
midnight, seven days a week, sometimes sleeping just two hours a day. He knew
more hours of work meant more money.” Dileep was nine years old when his father
died of a stomach cancer that had been ignored for many months – to this day,
the family, Rahman included, suspects black magic.
Like a pellet of potent dye, his father’s demise would colour everything that
followed in Dileep’s life. Dileep found his calling in his father’s field,
mastering Sekhar’s favourite instrument, the keyboard. The family switched
faiths (and therefore names) in the late 1980s, because his mother had found
spiritual consolation with a Sufi healer when she was combing the city for
Sekhar’s cure. When Dileep first paddled into composing, creating advertising
jingles, he made sure to bring with him his father’s acute business sense.
(Roja was composed almost against his better judgement: “With every jingle I
was making Rs15,000, so 25,000 for an entire movie was monetarily not worth
it,” Rahman says. “But I knew it was not the same... I knew this was worth the
sacrifice.”) From the start, he decided to credit everyone who worked for him –
his instrumentalists, his backup singers, his sound engineers – a practice
without precedent in
Indian film music. “Perhaps,” Matthai conjectures, “this was because Rahman
felt his father never got his due and neither did he, when he was playing for
and ghost-composing for directors.”
Roja was released in 1992; by 1995, Rahman was a star, and by 2000, he was a
phenomenon. (It is worth remembering, that in India, popular music is actually
film music.) He worked with the leading film directors in India, all of whom
were willing to troop down to Chennai, wait patiently for him in his studio’s
anterooms, and pay him enormous amounts for the privilege. Rahman put out three
or four ridiculously successful albums a year, each selling hundreds of
thousands of copies, each producing at least two genre-defying songs that
fattened the airwaves for weeks on end. In 2000 alone, Rahman’s music
accompanied six films, three of which – Alai Payuthey, Kandukondain
Kandukondain and Rhythm, all Tamil – count not only among his best work ever,
but also among his most popular. Just recently, a Bengali friend told me that
she can still sing the classically-inflected title song of Alai Payuthey
despite not knowing the meaning of a single world of the
lyrics. It is the sort of anecdote that is exchanged often in discussions
about Rahman.
Mathai trudges this spectacular arc with slender imagination; at some point,
The Musical Storm becomes just a plodding series of quotes, in either indirect
or guarded direct speech. (Over three whole pages, for instance, we are
force-fed minor variations of the same platitude: “For Rahman there is nothing
but God and music,” as one director puts it.) There is no observation or native
analysis – no attempt, as the prolific biographer David McCullough once
suggested, to just “look at your fish”, to absorb and internalise and then make
conclusions. Worse still, for a composer’s biography, there is far too little
about Rahman’s music or its context.
One glaring example of this deficiency is Mathai’s failure to distinguish
Rahman’s music from that of Ilayaraja, the regnant south Indian composer of the
1980s. Working across the four south Indian States, Ilayaraja established a
definitive sound over literally hundreds of films, a sound that every film
director wanted and that every south Indian music director aimed to replicate.
Its techniques relied upon the Western orchestral model, but its soul was
deeply south Indian, oscillating between the region’s folk and classical
identities – which is why many Tamil cinema purists still plump for Ilayaraja,
but also why his forays into Bollywood were so circumscribed.
It was Ilayaraja’s mould – lush, orchestral, created in performance – that
Rahman broke with his electronic sounds, relative minimalism, emphasised solos
and computer-aided assemblies. After Roja, Rahman’s sound caught on so fast,
and so powerfully, that Ilayaraja lost his dominance over big-banner films
within a couple of years and never regained it. Rahman, meanwhile, moved from
strength to assimilative strength. When he began scoring for Hindi films, he
learnt to set Sufi poetry to music, as in Chaiya Chaiya, a song of unalloyed
yearning from the movie Dil Se. When his horizons broadened beyond India, he
began to experiment with rap, hip-hop and techno; Fanaa, a 2003 song set in a
nightclub, was a capsule of electronic dance punctuated by sudden knots of
Indian classical progressions. Again and again, Rahman gets inside a style of
music, examines its machinery, then brings away the important cogs and wheels
to use in his own compositions.
Rahman is 42 now, and he has years of composing still to come. Immediately
after Slumdog Millionare, rumours swirled that he had been swamped with more
Hollywood offers; others claimed that he was planning to stick to film in
India. Rahman himself has, characteristically, said little of value about his
future moves. There will doubtless be more biographies; an authorised one,
structured as a series of conversations between Rahman and the author Nasreen
Muni Kabir, was announced soon after the Academy Awards. But there is already
an alternate biography, one far more eloquent than Rahman, residing in his
works – in the evolutions of mood and style from year to year and album to
album, and in the varying textures he has added to one of the most influential
canons of music in India.
S Subramanian, a regular contributor to The Review, is a journalist based in
New Delhi.
