GUEST COLUMN

Art is unsuitable as means to survive

Rabbi SHERGILL Singer and musician

WHILE growing up, I often felt small, insignificant and an outsider. I wanted to transcend all that. I didn’t want to accept a lifetime of ‘ordinariness’. I was forever looking for a way out and on September 30, 1988 Bruce Springsteen showed it to me and thousands of other Delhiites. Now that I’d had a peek into the other world, nothing was going to come between my deliverance and me. As for the big placard of ‘Sufi Singer’ that is constantly hung around my neck, let me state that in my first album there are eight tracks of utterly un-Sufi content and there’s just one out and out Sufi song there. The constant reiteration of this moniker by the media creates a false perception on the part of those who come to my concerts or reach out to my music by other means.

    Art, I feel, is inherently unsuitable to being a stable means of survival and I’ve experienced that first hand. We should be dependent on nature and all should have an equal access to its fruits. Only then can art really be just be itself and not become a means of expressing one neurosis or the other of a dysfunctional society. It can also then be more spontaneous. I mean one shouldn’t have to go serve a master for 15 years to ‘know’ music. All this stress on specialisation, a studied artistic expression, I feel, kills the human spirit. I think the river sings, the breeze sings, February mornings sing. All this classicity, tonality, pedagogy and ‘music’ have killed sound. And silence.

    I try not to think in terms of career and productivity. That way I feel I am counting the grains of sand on a beach and not enjoying being on the beach. But yes, I’ve known anxiety; it’s just that now I know it’s a consequence of our conditioning and not a cosmic default. So as long as young people are told they have to ‘become’ something, play this game of collecting points for 40 years and exchange them for a 3BHK house in the suburbs later, they will feel anxious. When time — an abstract notion — is presented as an ever decreasing resource, life will be filled with anxiety. I sometimes feel that the question — whether artists have to struggle? — is problematic in itself. Heck! Everyone struggles. Question is why modern living is such a struggle? It’s the latter that needs answering.

    Increasingly, now music and art are being sponsored and patronised by capital. But capital is not people and when capital must extend its graces, it’s a sure sign that people have retracted theirs. Such patronisation also creates a dependency. Besides, it goads the artists and musicians to align their art in line with the tastes of the patrons. So ultimately art becomes a commodity, to be sold, traded and exchanged for a decent life. In any case capital rescuing art is ironic in itself in that it is the chain reaction triggered by capital that kills it in the first place.

    Also I am not a great believer in nurturing or tutoring people to express themselves. That I believe is merely reinforcing hegemony of existing forms. Should art have priority over form or vice versa? Forms come out of our existing patterns of thought — our reality. To me, it seems that newer forms will continually appear as and when new realities emerge. Now the question is — who should have control over changing our reality — unmanipulated human will or capital? ■