A Samman for Rahman - Rediff

A Samman (Honour) for Rahman - Rediff

A R Rahman was waiting backstage and appeared sweet, modest and patient as he chatted with the stagehands around him. He was to be honoured shortly and both of us had been told by the organisers to wait behind the screen as they got things ready.

I looked around at the frenzied preparations. A group of wildly enthusiastic students were getting ready in the wings in various costumes to do their version of Chaiyya Chaiyya. Many were Indian looking, but some were obviously American, others we were told were Pakistani or Sri Lankan, and some were Chinese or Korean. They couldn't hide their nervous anticipation even as they got ready tugging at their salwars and stealing glances at Rahman standing serenely on one side.

Rahman being honoured or eulogised is frequent, I suppose. But this was at Stanford University, one of the most prestigious and affluent universities in the world, with only a small sprinkling of Indian-American students, not with a preponderance of them. It is just too expensive, I gather.

Stanford is known for excellence in engineering, sciences and design, but it was the humanities and the music department that had come together on this occasion to organise a South Asia music festival. In a stroke of genius they had made honouring A R Rahman a part of their programme. This had ensured an overflowing auditorium, oodles of excitement and an electric atmosphere in the auditorium.

[...]

We had a typically American academic introduction to Rahman's music. A brilliant young American researcher Natalie Sarrazin, whose deconstruction of the elements of Bollywood was revelatory, launched into a dissection of the elements of Rahman's music and how he had changed the standard idiom of the Hindi film music.

She showed with video clips, how prior to AR of the 1990s, the predominant sound in Bollywood was that of film orchestra, treated by the listener as a background sound that was easily dismissed. The listener's focus was on the flowing melody and text.

Rahman changed the sound, utilising new musical idioms that can be understood by Westerners and Indians alike, she said. The changes included disregarding old musical codes, layering instruments one at a time and using an almost minimalist approach to placing each sound thoughtfully and deliberately on a blank canvas.

Example: Before the advent of Rahman it took a hundred violin plaintive strings to show the impending romance; a whole huge orchestra swept up emotions. Rahman had changed that. He had made street sounds respectable, made you listen to a single beat say the rice husk being pounded, to natural sounds of daily implements and so on.

Natalie illustrated all this with bits and pieces from movies old and new and it was like a university class with a difference: familiar images from Raj Kapoor to Anil Kapoor and tunes from Taal Se Taal Mila were the subject of the discourse.