The interview which appears below was originally published in Nasreen Munni Kabir's book, A.R. Rahman: The Spirit of Music. ©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.
NMK: I read on the Net that you had in fact gone to see Qadri Saaheb again in 1986 because your sister was very ill. Is that right?
ARR: That’s nonsense. My sister was fine. Sometimes half-truths pass off for what really happens.
When we met Qadri Saaheb again, he gave us a great sense of peace. He was a very wise man. I wanted a very personal music room in my new home in Kodambakkam, so we built a music studio in the backyard of our house and called it “Panchathan Record Inn.” This was in 1989. Qadri Saaheb gave the studio its name, laid the first stone, and offered prayers. About a year later, Qadri Saaheb sadly passed away.
1989 was a turning point in my life. I had my studio at last. The only problem was that the room was an empty shell. I would sit in it and look around the empty space and wonder if I could ever afford to buy any equipment to fill it. My mother came to my rescue. She sold the gold jewelry that she had kept for the marriage of my two younger sisters. She had bought the jewelry with the money that she somehow saved up over the years. Yet she sold it all for me. With that money, I bought my first Fostex 16-track mixer/recorder.
In those days, film music in Chennai was recorded on a single mono track and here I had 16 tracks. All those years of struggle, humiliation, being ordered around by other people, seeing worry on the faces of my family, remembering the feeling of being overwhelmed by an inferiority complex, the lack of self-esteem, and even at times, fighting suicidal thoughts—all that seemed to fade away. Sitting in the music studio that night, and staring at my new recorder, I felt like a king. The new me was born and the future seemed glorious.
NMK: It may sound trite to say that some of the pain you must have experienced comes through your melancholic melodies. After what you have just said, thank goodness the future was indeed glorious.
Did Qadri Saaheb tell you what lay ahead for you?
ARR: He predicted many things about my future. I didn’t take them seriously at the time. And then his words came true and when good things started to happen, it wasn’t a complete surprise, but felt almost like a déjà vu.
I live from day-to-day now. I believe that everything will be taken care of. It gives me a sense of stability instead of my feeling that I need to act or react to everything around me.
NMK: Were you conscious of the fact that changing your faith might affect your relations with people?
ARR: My family had started working by then and we weren’t dependent on anyone. No one around us really cared—we were musicians and that allowed us greater social freedom. [laughs]
I believe there are only two kinds of people in the world—those who love and those who are cruel. People who love transform their anger into forgiveness and the cruel change anger into a tool that creates disasters.
The important thing for me is that I learned about equality and the oneness of God. Whether you are a winner or loser, king or slave, short or tall, rich or poor, sinner or saint, ugly or beautiful—regardless of what color you are, God showers unlimited love and mercy on us if we choose to receive it. It’s because of our inability, our blindness in seeing the unknown that we lose faith.
In the 1990s, my friend Sarangan introduced me to the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and I discovered qawalis. They had a great effect on me.
NMK: When Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan passed away on 11 August 1997, Alexandra A. Seno of Asiaweek wrote: “For 25 years, his mystical songs transfixed millions. He performed qawali, which means wise or philosophical utterance, as nobody else of his generation did. His vocal range, talents for improvisation, and sheer intensity were unsurpassed.”
The American singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley cited him as a major influence, saying: “He’s my Elvis.” Nusrat Saaheb really made a deep impact in the West.
ARR: You know I personally saw him performing at a concert in Radio City Hall, New York in 1996. The hall was packed to capacity and over six thousand people, all made up of white and black Americans, were swaying to the sounds of Nusrat Saaheb’s “Allah Hoo.”
NMK: He was a great singer to whom faith was all-important. What does faith mean to you?
ARR: It’s a state of mind. I realize today that the very notion of faith is the important thing. What is faith? It can be faith in God, love, people, and goodness. Faith is far more complex than understanding things in black-and-white terms. There are many things we fail to understand. Having faith is complex and I don’t think we have the adequate language or words to describe it. Words themselves can cloud the power of understanding.
NMK: Is there a state of being that you would ideally like to attain?
ARR: The Bowl of Saki has a commentary by Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. It was this wise saint who spread the Sufi tradition in the West. It describes a state that one can aspire to, even if difficult to attain: “As life unfolds itself to man, the first lesson it teaches is humility; the first thing that comes to man’s vision is his own limitedness. The vaster God appears to him, the smaller he finds himself.
This goes on and on until the moment comes when he loses himself in the vision of God. In terms of the Sufis, this is called fana, and it is this process that was taught by Christ under the name of self-denial. Often, man interprets this teaching wrongly and considers renunciation as self-denial. He thinks that the teaching is to renounce all that is in the world. But although that is a way and an important step, which leads to true self-denial, the self-denial meant is the losing one’s self in God.”
