The eclectic dervish: Madan Gopal on life, sufism and performing in India

You grew up barely a street away from the holy precincts of the Golden Temple. Did that spiritually influence you?
Amritsar in those days was quite different. Our house was between the Golden Temple and the Jalianwala Baug. I remember waking up to the devotional strains of the gurbaani at 4.30am in the two months I spent there every vacation. Our Delhi home was more eclectic in its sense of music. My father who had migrated during Partition was still hooked to the kind of music that Radio Lahore had to offer. We often went off to Dalhousie, which was then still part of Punjab. The spill-over music which from the colonial period dramas being screened in the movie theatres there too left a lasting impact.

Your father was a renowned poet Harbhajan Singh. Did his work leave an early impression on you?
My father taught at the university and was a known Punjabi poet. But he had an equal interest in Urdu, Persian and Sanskrit. I remember how some of the biggest names from the world of theatre, music and literature would gather at our house. My mother would have to keep plying them with a steady supply of pakodas and chai.
I’d often hide behind curtains trying to make out what they were saying. Once I caught them discussing Plato and was left quite confounded. At that age the only Plato I knew was a fountain pen brand then available at stationery shops (guffaws).

Madan Gopal

Char Yaar refers to both the Rashidun - The Righteous four Caliphs of Sunni Islam who established the Rashidun Caliphate, after the death of Mohammed and the great pioneers of the 13th century Chisti and Suhrawardiyya Sufi movements. How did your band come to be named?
While the reasons you mention began to be bandied because of the genre we represent, my idea then was just to keep it simple. We were four artistes and that was that. It was both playful and democratic. There is also the concept of the Chaar Dhaam which is part of the collective psyche of this country.

Initially, your band’s repertoire included Baba Farid, Rumi and Khwaja Ghulam Farid. How did the experiments like including Rumi, John Lennon, Kabir and Bulle Shah in the same song begin?
You know Sufi music is about jireh lagana (tying knots). When we were in college, the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and Pablo Neruda were big. At Char Yaar, we often just extend and tie knots cross culturally with music and composers. We like it and so does the audience and we keep going. In fact these experiments helped us in creating collaborations with world-renowned All Star Bang on a Can of New York; the neo-Jazz vocalist Theo Bleckmann; David Hykes’ Harmonic Choir or more recently with recording 15 Kabir tracks at Woodstock.
Why haven’t you done an album?
Because that’s just not us. We are not an Indian Ocean. If we have recorded music, we will want to keep it free-to-download.
 

Char Yaar

Composer, singer, actor, screenwriter, film-theorist, editor and professor of English. You seem to wear a lot of hats with elan. Any you personally prefer?
I don’t know whether my random dabbling allows me to be called all that. I am only a cultural traveller with a deep interest in music.

What do you make of those interspersing songs with Allah-Allah, Maula-Maula randomly calling themselves and their music Sufi?
(laughs) It’s quite sad. Sufism is far more deeper than that. One can only hope that what is good and authentic will survive in the long run. We are in a terrible place, a territory of default sounds now. As the Sufi genre gets aggressively appropriated by inhabitants of lifestyle pages who sing Sufi anywhere for a price, this violates the Sufi spirit. Sufism has not only been a music of love and protest but also an expression of harmony and peaceful coexistence.

Even when we do a Coke Studio in India, apart from rare exceptions, it ends up creating only one kind of sound. We don’t have the political compulsions that led to creation of Coke Studio, Pakistan. Socio-political conditions were such that the cultural space had been reduced to a blackhole. The hunger to reclaim that space — using music for defiance is what makes Coke Studio recordings from Karachi so special.

(Char Yaar will perform at Banyan Tree’s Khusrau-Kabir concert at Nehru Centre on June 27th at 7pm)