The interview which appears below, was originally published on Outlook in November 2002. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
For a driven man, Allah Rakha Rahman seems surprisingly restful. He looks, with his long tousled hair, his large, still eyes and hands and lips that move with the economy of the devout who keep the roza, more like a budding young pir with a cellphone than one of the world’s top-selling musicians.
At 36, he has overtaken the likes of Madonna and Britney Spears, won over Andrew Lloyd Webber, and worked with Michael Jackson and Jennifer Lopez. He has not slept in three days, he announces cheerfully as he opens the door to his hotel room, having just returned from a concert for President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. Rahman is keeping a foot firmly in Indian films while the other treads cautiously in Broadway and Hollywood, taking “the cream of this, and the cream of that”.
When the president asked him to compose the music for his poem, The Song of Youth, to be played for him at Vigyan Bhavan on Children’s Day, Rahman could hardly turn it down, even though he’s flooded with work. “It was given just five days before and we had to work very hard to get something out.”
For Rahman, “working very hard” means staying up beyond the 18-hour schedule he normally keeps in his Chennai studio “where there are four-five different things happening at the same time—the strings thing happening upstairs, the voice thing downstairs, then lyrics moving in another room”. No sooner is the score ready for one film, “the next director is ready for his background score.
Then, after that, the songs are needed. After that, something else…” The hard work isn’t writing the music—that’s always been a song for Rahman since his first albums, Deen Isai Malai and Set Me Free, when he was just 21. “In 30 minutes I can come up with 6-7 tunes.” The hard part is executing it—”administration, instruments, getting the right voice..it takes time”. It can be a headache as well. “Sometimes the director may say, these are good tunes but we don’t need this, we want this. That’s when you get into trouble.
Because they have a fixation for something, and you’ve got to deliver that.” Working on Bombay Dreams, in comparison, was a breeze. “Basically what we’d do is take the lyrics Tom Max gave me, tune something and play it to Andrew, and then he’d react to it. We had some 6-7 sittings like that, and each time we’d do 4-5 tunes…and the core of the Bombay So impressed was Webber by Rahman’s score that he wants him to write an opera now . “I don’t even know how to spell opera, but he thinks I can do it.”
Rahman may be a high school dropout, but he took to the demands of London studios like a pro. “They do things more systematically there,” he says, “kind of accumulate everything and then do it.” The experience has changed him, of course. On the streets of London he’s now being recognised, his tracks are playing everywhere, in Buddha bars and on FM radio stations in France and Australia.
The offers have been pouring in, but he is toying with only one: a world film, a musical—”I’ll know the title and so on by February”. More important, Rahman is now able to choose the kind of films at home “that gives me satisfaction and pushes you to the limit” and turn down those which he considers “waste” work. “I am beginning to do things in a very bigger way,” he says simply.
On the other hand, he is wary of getting too caught up with the West. “I don’t want to go where I get caught under somebody’s dictatorship or someone else’s studio which tells me what to do.” Ever since he set up his own studio, Panchathan Record Inn, right next to his Chennai home 13 years ago, Rahman has had a freedom that is rare for music composers.
Acknowledged as India’s best-equipped and state-of-the-art sound and recording studio, Panchathan is as desi as they come.”If I want to hear the flute part of my composition, I call my flute player, Navin, and then he comes and plays something, and that’s part of the interaction. If I want the guitar, somebody comes in, and so the writing process is very dependent on the players also.
Not like over there, me alone sitting by my computer. Everything there is so expensive, and if you want to try out something you have to get it passed by so many people. Spontaneity is more over here.” There is another, a much more personal reason why Rahman likes to live in Chennai: his two little girls. “If this is my studio,” he says jabbing at the sofa with a long forefinger twice on the same spot, “this is my home. Just 30 seconds away. If I get blocked or whatever, I can come back home and spend time with my children. Go back. There is no travelling time.”
There was a time four years ago, when the older child, still a toddler, hid firmly behind her mother whenever Rahman approached her, unimpressed by either his fame or his pleas. No longer. “We are very close. She is now getting interested in singing. In fact, she wanted to sing for the president’s concert, but we didn’t let her.”
There is a rule in the Rahman household: they may live next door to his studio, but he never brings his work home. “We don’t want any suggestions from within the family,” he explains, “only objective opinions.” For the past two years, therefore, Rahman has kept one foot firmly in Indian films while the other toed cautiously on Broadway or Hollywood. “This way I have a choice—I can take the cream of that and the cream of this.”
It has its perils though, as Rahman is discovering. To be a composer in the West “you have to be based there. If I am based in London I would be getting much more work than I’d be getting if I based myself in Madras. Unless you are very important, they don’t chase you.” A piquant situation for a composer who has India’s top film directors and music companies lining up at his door with bagfuls of lucre, amounting, some say, to several crores a project.
As he points out, “what we have going there is because of this. The whole charm of that is because of what I have been doing here for 10 years.” And what we have going there, according to Rahman, is big. “Hindi film music has become quite the in thing now over there. There are so many Bollywood bars around; with projections of Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya singing and dancing. Films like Lagaan and Monsoon Wedding doing very well on the international circuit has just added to the charm.”
In a way, although Rahman is too modest to boast, he is the Ravi Shankar of our times. “Two-three decades back, it was the music of people like Ravi Shankar, Zakir Hussain and L. Shankar that was popular in the West. They had ragas and complex rhythms. But I think what’s happening now is that mainstream commercial music is getting very popular—bhangra and Hindi film music.”
Curious, isn’t it, that a music that borrowed so heavily from western pop is now being exported back to them? “They are even sharper than us,” he says”. We may have borrowed certain things, but there are a whole lot of elements in the music.” Rahman should know: in his early days, he worked not only with the likes of classical Indian musicians like Ustad Zakir Hussain and K. Vaidyanathan, but local rock bands as well.
But still, according to him, Indian music has a long way to go. “We ought to push ourselves a little more, to go further—in sound, in production and in professionalism. You don’t want to be inferior to anybody in the world, see? If you have to do something, you have to be better than them. Otherwise, don’t do it. If you have to do it, you have to go further than what’s already been there.” This may sound like something any ambitious young man on the make would say, but Rahman insists he never plans for tomorrow.”
I feel every day and every moment is given by God. Nobody knows whether I’ll be there tomorrow or next year, so better not have ideas about it.” God, in fact, keeps cropping up in Rahman’s conversation as naturally as if he were a close family friend.
Or like his father, a music composer who died when Rahman was only 11, leaving the little boy to shoulder the family’s many responsibilities, including earning a living and getting his two sisters married. His father’s death led to another major change in his life: he converted to Islam, a faith he has steadily adhered to, saying his namaaz five times a day on a prayer mat that he spreads out in hotel rooms across the world.
His religion, he says, makes him a free man. “It helps me to take success and failure in an equal manner, rather than by jumping with joy or brooding.” So where does his maniacal drive come from if all he ever wants to do is, as he puts it, “chill out, just hang around, do nothing, listen to my favourite music—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, the Carpenters, Carnatic, rock and fusion”. It’s not about him, he explains, it’s the work. It comes and “sits on my head”. “It’s a cycle, see? Something comes out well, there is another something waiting.
You want to say, ‘I don’t want anything, I want peace’, but life hooks you up and once you take it, you don’t want to mess it up. You want to save yourself from humiliation and you push yourself hard.”
