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Garma
Garam More
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Art & Craft |
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Interview
of Gurdas Mann 'I don't need six movie stars, hundred musicians, another hundred dancing girls in varying stages of undress'Mann drew record crowds at Wembley last month and his new movie,
Do you think you were ahead of your times? Otherwise, how would you explain the huge gap between your first album in 1982 and the bhangra pop revolution that is now sweeping the discotheques worldwide? In a sense you are right. I came early. But if you look at the way my songs have done over the years, their popularity, their sales, their audiences, you will realise that the excitement always existed. My songs may not have been exactly setting the discos on fire but wherever you went in Punjab people were singing them. The villages, the small towns, everywhere. It was a change from the usual double entendres, the smut that was popular before. I brought decent lyrics into fashion. The poems of serious poets like Shiv Kumar Batalvi were sung for the first time and people liked it. In the way they like Jagjit Singh. But you are not as conservative as Jagjit Singh? You prance around the stage and dance and sing? Yes, but tradition still breathes in my music. I do not use half naked girls as props. I do not lip sync on stage. I do not do minus one track; I always sing live. I have no dancers. I am alone on stage and I hold my audience, I interact with them all the time. That is the soul of my music. Interaction. Live interaction with a live audience. It always works. I had eight shows last month in the UK -- in Glasgow, Leicester, Birmingham, Manchester, etcetera -- and each one was chock full. Including Wembley. I did not need an entourage of six movie stars, hundred musicians, another hundred dancing girls in varying stages of undress. I sang alone, all by myself and the audience listened. The entire stadium was full. That is my reward. Folk? Not bhangra pop? Not bhangra rap? It is difficult to make a difference between one form of popular music and the other. All I can say was that the entire stadium was dancing with me at the end of it. You know where my real tradition comes from? Sufi. Sufi music has inspired me always and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is the composer I admire the most. The great love stories of Punjab have been my inspiration, my theme. Well, you have just acted in a love story which has turned out to be blockbuster. Where did you find the story of Shahid-e-Mohabbat Buta Singh? In Dominique Lapierre's book, Freedom at Midnight. It was a two or three page story there, from which we developed the screenplay. Whose idea was it? My wife produced the film and my friend Manoj Punj directed it. The story was very simple. It was about this old World War II veteran, who was unmarried and had saved some money to find himself a wife. It was Partition times and riots were raging all over and he rescues this abducted girl from Pakistan, from a village called Birki, and in the process falls in love with her. To rescue her, he gives away all his savings to the abductors, to pay them off. The love between this man and the young abducted girl grows. Finally, they marry and settle down. They have a child.
When Buta Singh returns home, he goes mad seeing her gone. He follows her across the border and eventually reaches her village, where he finds that they have married her off to a relative. He protests, is arrested by the police and brought to court, where he tells his story to the judge. Meanwhile, the law is changed under public pressure and the new law gives an option to the abducted woman, after a month in isolation, to decide where she wants to go. Back home or to the person who has abducted her. So Zenab now gets a choice. But, alas for Buta Singh, she buckles under the pressure and refuses to recognise him as her husband. The judge, a compassionate man, does not punish Buta Singh. Instead, he lets him off, to go back home across the border and start life afresh. Buta Singh goes back but only to kill himself, leaving behind his sad tale on a sheet of paper. When people read about his plight, they want to take his body back to Birki so that he can be put to rest there. The villagers of Birki resist and you have a riot instead. It is a very brief, very slight story in the book. We built on it while writing the screenplay.
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He has no sexy dancers pirouetting on the
stage with him. He sticks to serious poetry for his lyrics. He is much,
much older than the rest and yet Gurdas Mann
draws huge crowds and remains the top star of Punjabi folk in the era
of bhangra rap.