You were doing good till this, after this you were personification of a an औसत (average) desi critic – the kind who indulgences in unnecessary hyperbole. (I am kidding)

Rabbi Shergill has done well for himself – he is good musician – a very clever musician. His talent lies in interesting arrangements – I hope he is able to manage his ambition and survive. I like Rabbi.

I like his version of ‘Challa’ ( I love Inayat Ali’s original version).

In terms of his use of sound, Rabbi is miles ahead of any of his contemporaries. I do not need to go here into technical details but Rabbi is a thinking, reflective musician and not just any Tom Dick and Harry. My critique of him is happening, accordingly, in an altogether different register of debate. Barring, of course, the communal and jingoistic overtones of Pagrhi Sambhal Jatta where he does come across as somewhat of a rigid Sikh.

1. My name Bilqis Yakub Rasool
2. By me was made just one mistake (although bhool is less a mistake than an error of judgement)
3. That when they were looking for Ram
4. Then I (happened) be standing on the way

(Rabbi’s translation being:

My name is Bilqis Yakub Rasool I committed just one mistake That I stood in their way When they were looking for Ram)

The first line is without the verb ‘to be’ and is therefore intended as a mere statistical detail, objectively rendered.

The second line picks up a near reluctant subjective mode of narration. It is important to note that the ‘mistake’ is made in the passive voice and is therefore imbued with not a little bit of tragic irony. This, dare I say, is very different from Rabbi’s own translation which is ‘I commited just one mistake’ where the volitive act is differently placed.

The translation of the last two lines amplify this point further:

Rabbi’s translation is :

‘That I stood in their way When they were looking for Ram’

‘Standing in someone’s way’ is not the same thing as ‘happened to be standing on the way’. The difference is as stark as that between ‘volition’ and ‘chance’. Nowhere in the line “To Maen kharhi thi rah mein’ is the fact of standing in THEIR way evident. In fact the trauma of Bilqis is doubly tragic precisely because she just happened to be passing by the way where the murderous mob was butchering the Muslims in well thought out macabre move supported by the state. She wasn’t – couldn’t have been – in any conceivable way ‘standing in THEIR way.

One doesn’t quite understand who Bilqis is; where she was going; under what circumstance she met the people looking for Ram; in addition to asking her a question, what else did they do to her! Does it have anything to do with the rape, arson , looting and pogrom of Muslims un leashed by the Hindu right after Godhara? The song tells you absolutely nothing. If you chose to be moved by the song, it is either because you liked the song as a song that felt likeable or because you already had enough information about Bilqis. The same is true of Rabbi’s reference to Satyandranath Dube and Manjunath. A non-initiate is unlikely to know why there is a bullet in the heart of Satyendranath and the place where it happened or why the corpse of conscience is lying in the middle of the road at Lakhimpur Kherhi. The only exception is the reference to Ms Navleen Kumar whose murder we are informed by the lyric has something to do with her resistance to the villages being looted by the open market; to the forcible acquisition of land and the eventual dislodgement of the people to ‘hell’.

This brings me to the next point – one of confusing the logical types of the 4 tragic cases the song, Bilqis, takes up. Whereas Bilqis’s tragedy is purely non-volitive, Satyendra Dube’s act of ‘blowing the whistle’ is quite clearly an act of quasi- political volition. Manjunath, on the other hand, is merely executing his duty as an officer of the Oil Company for which he worked – (this, incidentally, does not make his death any less grim or disturbing). Ms Navleen Kumar’s is the only one which is properly in the domain of political activism as a deeply felt existential anxiety.

The song, as such, serves a very limited, albeit welcome, purpose.

the song is not f**king angry enough. If you are a little sleepy, that can pass for a romantic ballad. i mean, WTF. Get angry dude. Feel the pain. Express it. Don’t be detached.

The thing is if you don’t know who Bilqees is – and a bulk of educated Indian youth do not – you are unlikely ever to know what happened to Bilqees. The song as you know quotes Sahir Ludhianvi’s ‘Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par Wo Kahan Hain’ from Guru Dutt directed classic “Pyaasa” (1957). Whereas Sahir’s references were unambiguous and direct, Rabbi’s references are unclear. Not just Bilqees, even references to Satyendra Dube, Manjunath and Navleen are hanging tenuously in the thin air.

1. Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (September 23, 1908 – April 24, 1974), a Hindi poet from Bihar, did not write the original Pagri Sambhal Jatta song – a song written in the Punjabi language which the distinguished poet unfortunately did not know.
2. The song was written in 1907 and Dinkar was born in 1908. Unless he ‘trailed the Worsworthian Clouds of glory’, he was unlikely to have written this song almost a year before he was born.
3. The writer of the original ‘Pagri Sambhal Jatta’ was Lala Banke Dayal for the Punjab Peasant Movement(?) which was led by Ajit Singh – uncle of Bhagat Singh.
4. This little-known movement(?) was a commemorative attempt to recall the 1857 uprising – a very unusual fact indeed since the Sikhs are always perceived as having actively opposed the uprising. Their role was complicit and brutal.
5. Rabbi’s Pagri Sambhal Jatta, unlike the original, is symptomatically communal. It begins by invoking the names of the temples destroyed by the Muslim invaders. He begins with Somnath Jagannath Ayodhya Banaras Mathura Kannauj. He names six Muslim invaders – Ghazni Ghauri Tughlaq Aibak Lodhi Babar.
6. It is interesting to note that LK Advani started his bloody Rath Yatra in 1992 from Somnath and vowed to end it at Jagannath touching the rest of the temples on the way. The names of the invaders mentioned above were raised to frighten the Muslims along the route.
7. The history of the communal strife in India in recent times is so complex and so delicate that you cannot afford to sing a song such as this and hope that your radical credentials would remain undented. By doing a song like this, you push the already marginalised Muslim community further into a shell of fear and distrust.
8. Thats not all. The song goes into a long list of Sikh (read Jaat) martyrs. The history of resistance in Punjab to the tyrannical regimes includes the Beshara Sufis (the list would be too large to be spelt out here), Mian Mir, the Nawab of Malerkotla, and outside people like Dara Shikoh, Ashfaqullah, Hindus like Mangal Pande and Sukhdev and Rajguru and Ramprasad Bismil.

Way to go Rabbi