Urdu is his first love. Protecting it from dying out is second. Thirty-one-year-old, Mumbai-based film music composer, performer, and writer Sameer Rahat is proactively protective about the language of erstwhile royalty. His literary effort is to keep the soul of Urdu verse alive through every piece he creates such as his recently launched solo debut album 'Aamad'.
Today, it has taken the shape of ‘Urdu-blues’, a fresh and contemporary genre that experiments with the eponymous works of modern progressive poets. In the process, he is bridging the gap between an erstwhile courtly literary ethos and current vernacular idioms being popularised by the Hindi heartland’s anti-Islamic revival.
Urdu poetry and ghazals are diminishing over time. “A part of the English speaking younger generation has affinity to spoken word poetry, rooted in the Harlem Renaissance of 1960s America. Most of them have little idea of Hindi/Urdu literature and performance of the Mughal era and beyond.” Rahat conceived the album during a nationwide tour of his rock band ‘Joshish’ in 2010.
He had found it hard to convince himself to put together incomplete songs, written over the years, into a single collection. They were either too personal or too soft for his band. In 2018, his friend Kashif from the band ‘Parvaaz’ persuaded him to collate them. By early 2019, Rahat was confident about the relevance of these songs as he performed live at different locations. In June last year, he began recording and finished production in January. Rahat’s music is an amalgam of Urdu’s heritage and modern styles.
“By trial and error, we found the sweet spot,” he says. Folk-rock music from Ireland, Britain, and Spain, and American blues and country music have influenced his songwriting in a big way. He is the innovator of Urdu-blues—‘Classical ghazal sung in the traditional blues style.’ Gen-Z’s cultural sense of belonging lies in the re-imagining of Urdu and Hindi literature through slam poetry and various musical forms. “These are recent trends.
Young people must know about Kabir, and Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq, who was Bahadur Shah Zafar’s court poet,” he says. Born in the late 1980s into a family of poets, Rahat grew up listening to ghazal and Qawwali. Some of his earliest musical influences include artists such as Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, The Beatles, Buddy Guy and others.
Sameer has also launched the video of Aamad’s first track, ‘Jo Bhi Hai’ and is working on concepts for videos of the remaining six songs, which he plans to release in the coming months. He’ll also start recording another Urdu-blues album in October for a release early next year. Then there are the two films and two web series he is composing music for which should also be out this year. Looks like his hands are lyrically full.