‘Artistes are the moral compass of their times’: Rabbi Shergill

I believe that art is the best way of negotiating the conscious and the unconscious. Art is not born in a vacuum. I was born at a certain time in history, with a collective set of values that existed before I arrived here. They have shaped me. It’s my job to channelise it in a direction which I feel is right. An artiste can’t have an impact unless he wins the hearts and minds of people. At the same time, it’s a delicate dance between trying to shape what’s happening around me and how that is shaping me. I try to keep my faculties as unencumbered as possible, meet smart people, and move ahead.

Your work borrows from prose and poetry from Punjab, including trailblazers such as Baba Farid, Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah. But a lot of contemporary Punjabi music is rooted in misogyny, violence and caste entitlement. What do you feel about it?

The one thing that changed during colonisation was language and with that pretty much everything changed. Before that, the daftari zubaan was Persian, the language of the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The British changed the language to Urdu for administrative ease and, in 1947, it changed again. Such crazy jolts to the system can be fatal. The lazy argument is that all languages change, but holding on to a language is also holding on to a world view, a consciousness, which is also an active act. With Baba Farid, I felt a resonance. Punjab will have to create that resonance. We need to connect Punjabi low culture with high culture, that’s the only hope. You will have to start with language to lay claim to being a great civilisation. There is an unbridled masculinity running riot. There is a saying: Show me the music your youth is singing and I’ll show you where the country is going. I heard a song where a guy was telling the girl that you better put your faith in the village boys because we’ll not run away, we’ll fight. This is troublesome.

You have said in the past that your job as an artiste is to be politically critical. You joined the farmer’s protests, wrote a song about Bilkis Bano. What is an artiste’s relationship with the politics of the day?

Artistes are the moral compass of their times. Their chief function is to negotiate the power between the haves and have nots. Escape cannot be the only mode in which art lives. Politics, right now, is the elephant in the room — nearly 80 per cent of water is sucked out from Punjab’s ground; we are addicted to the MSP (minimum support price) for rice; there’s an immigration crisis and an explosion of energy where you see gangs in their 20s looking for fights. Punjab has become a place where you have to negotiate your peace.

Has this churn led to magnifying the Khalistan issue?

The recent situation feels like some agency is at play. There is something really strange and contrived. It seems like someone somewhere wasn’t happy with Punjab’s non-violent struggle for what’s right. Fundamentalism has been used as an ace previously, and the same script was followed this time. Nationalism is not an Indian phenomenon, it doesn’t come naturally to us. It’s a Western import. We have a bi-regional consciousnesses. We were a tapestry of different ways and variants of each other in a loose framework. We cannot have one culture; we are not Germany. How many people have to die before we realise that an entire country cannot be given one culture’s image. The concept of Punjabiyat is inclusive and allows others to express themselves. I don’t think anybody in Punjab harbours nationalistic fantasies.

Your father was an Oriental scholar, your mother a writer and college principal. Your elder sister Gagan Gill is a well-known poet. What was the kind of music and poetry heard at home?

My father was a farmer and a scholar but he didn’t have much of an ear for music. My mother had her kirtaniyas, but it was my elder sister who was a connoisseur. She listened to Begum Akhtar, Kumar Gandharva, Chopin, and Jimi Hendrix, and all of that made an impression on me. When I went to a public school in Delhi, Western music was aspirational. With English, you could leapfrog certain social stratas. At the same time, I shared my room with my grandmother, who seemed like a 15th-century woman in terms of her attitude, her language. I imbibed a pure Punjabi Majhi dialect from her — an illiterate woman whose diction came with not a consonant out of place. That was my big learning. Then, I attended a Bruce Springsteen concert in 1988 and a cocky kid came out as a teenager with a purpose. All the pretence of being Western was gone.

How did the events of 1984 impact a young Sikh boy trying to figure out his culture, its literature and stories?

In some ways, I am a child of 1984. My father was beaten up and left for dead near Sis Ganj Sahib in Delhi. My wife calls it PTSD but it’s a crazy feeling when you feel that your parents can’t protect you. I feel if you don’t take care of the past, the shot fired is going to turn into a cannon ball in the future. We have never really addressed what troubles the Punjabi soul. Forget 1984, look at Partition. All of it has made me look inward and search for answers in the writings of greats such as Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Mohan Singh and others.