Rabbi’s Bulla and Jugni, and the postmodern condition

Rabbi’s Bulla and Jugni, and the postmodern condition[1]
Amrita Singh

In an interview[2] in The Hindu, Rabbi Shergill quite candidly expressed the job of artists like him to understand art within the fabric of social reality, and amid chaos, the constructive role they have to play. His music expresses just that: a thinking youth, a thinking India. His music does not seem very unusual for the times. The kind of fusion of sounds and genres does seem to be the vogue for an age that lives on rock, bhangra or popular film music. However, the blend of rock, folk and traditional Sufi music, coupled with a combination of blazing Western-style guitar and philosophical, spiritual lyrics sung in Punjabi, do make for a unique listening experience. The multicultural experience that is generated through his music comes out of the openings that a ‘postmodern’ world offers. So we witness a shrinking of the world, with cultures, attitudes, thoughts and people coming closer. No longer is one form of authority, or one form of tradition or even one form of aesthetic privileged. There is a healthy in-distinction between “high” and “low” forms of culture. It is a world where everyone can speak, and anybody’s story is as true as anybody else’s. An exhilarating time to be living in, to be artistic in?
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Hence, at least in majoritarian India, the resulting condition is a postmodernist parody; some sort of a post- postmodernism, of greater fragmentation and questioning, resulting in chaos. The grand narratives have not necessarily collapsed. Religion still continues to be a strong determining force. People have surely been able to come together but it remains to be seen whether a collective sense of humanitarian responsibility can be generated. And somewhere Rabbi's is the classic story of struggle: of perseverance over rejection, of talent and passion over mediocrity and status quo, of sensitivity and inclusion over myopia and conformity. It is a great example of how music can transcend religious and cultural differences and transport you beyond the shimmer of surfaces[5]. He struggles with these irresolvable problematics, and to close listeners the complex is hard to overlook.


Notes

1.This term has been borrowed from Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Bennington and Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

2. Refered to from the online edition of The Hindu newspaper, dated January 23rd, 2006. Interviewed by Mandira Nayar. http://www.thehindu.com/2006/01/23/stories/2006012305110200.htm

3. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. London and Sydney, 1985.

4. In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin uses a Paul Klee painting, Angelus Novus, as his point of departure for thesis number nine. “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

5. http://www.mtvdesi.com/video/