From India, Songs in The Key of Jagjit Singh

By S. Mitra Kalita
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 25, 2004

There's a song Jagjit Singh croons in Urdu about giving up everything if only he could relive his childhood.

"Ye daulat bhi lelo, ye shohorat bhi lelo," go the lyrics. Take my wealth. Take my looks.

About 5,000 fans joined his longing on Friday night at the Patriot Center, closing their eyes, nodding their heads and waving one hand in midair as if urging Singh to harmonize their nostalgia. The words of the popular Indian singer, graying and bespectacled at 62, carried many back to days spent swatting flies around a veranda and swinging cricket bats with the boy next door and learning to cook a proper Indian meal before boarding the plane to America. The younger set remembered the Sunday mornings they awoke to the strains of Singh's voice playing on the stereo and the long car rides when the adults chose the music and Singh was always the choice.

Call him the Frank Sinatra of South Asia. Jagjit Singh's soft, soulful music ranges from Urdu poems set to music, known as ghazals, to love songs played on the soundtracks of Bollywood, India's prolific movie industry. And as generations elsewhere with Sinatra, kids eventually seem to come around.

"My generation's music is very different from this. It's very in-your-face," said Mandira Mehra, 20, who had a front-row seat and wore jeans and a floppy hat that looked more reggae than raga. "I think if he were to mix this with techno, our generation would be all over it."

Still, Mehra, a senior at George Washington University who grew up in Fairfax, said she has become a "Jagjit junkie" as she's gotten older, trying to understand his lyrics and singing Indian classical music as a hobby. "It definitely keeps me cultural," she said, comparing Singh's depth and musings on life and love to rapper Eminem.

She swooned as he sang a love song about seeing the sun and being reminded of life. "You are the shade that I seek," Mehra whispered in translation.

Friday night's show kicked off a series of concerts catering to the Washington area's burgeoning South Asian community. On Saturday night at the Patriot Center, Bollywood stars including Hrithik Roshan, Lara Dutta and Aishwarya Rai will dance and lip-sync songs from their most popular movies. Beauty queens turned actresses, Dutta won the title of Miss Universe in 2000 while Rai won Miss World in 1994. In September, another Bollywood show will be staged at MCI Center with a similar lineup of stars, including Shah Rukh Khan, a household name in South Asia and, increasingly, among the region's diaspora.

"There's a bigger population, more awareness of India," promoter and concert organizer Vijay Taneja said. "We are on par with Western shows now."

As the South Asian population in the Washington suburbs has grown, so have the number of concerts and the venues. Between 1990 and 2000, the Indian population in the Washington-Baltimore area doubled to about 88,000, mirroring a national trend, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Madan Chitkara, a clothing importer who lives in Gaithersburg, remembers attending a Singh concert attended by about 200 fans at a Maryland high school in the late 1970s.

On Friday night, as Singh sat cross-legged on an elevated platform, flanked by a troupe of musicians and dozens of marigold garlands hung from the stage, Chitkara marveled at the difference: Thousands sat silently around him.

"Then, just a handful of Indians lived here," Chitkara, 60, said. "He didn't have as many musicians. . . . But his voice sounds the same. It hasn't aged. This guy sings from his soul."

As he pumped the folds of a harmonium, Singh interrupted his melancholy music often to tell jokes and charm the audience. When his songs sped up, some audience members stood up, raised their hands and shrugged their shoulders as if dancing to bhangra, an upbeat Punjabi music that has found its way onto American albums by such stars as Britney Spears and Jay-Z.

"This is not an American audience," Singh said in an interview after the show. "It's an Indian audience. Still they are Indian at heart."

Singh's fan base, though, spans all of South Asia, which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, even Afghanistan, among others countries.

Singh, who performs in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, the dominant language in Pakistan, had spoken out for years against Pakistan's ban of performances by Indian artists. In February he was allowed to stage a concert for 2,000 in Karachi, Pakistan, as the two countries agreed to peace talks.

Humayun Khan, who emigrated from Afghanistan at age 10 and is now a musician in Annandale, said he appreciates Singh's music because Khan speaks Persian, which has similarities to Urdu. Khan, 31, teaches classical Indian music and was invited to the concert by one of his young proteges.

When asked to interpret Singh's lyrics, Khan struggled and finally deemed it impossible. The poetry and music, he said, need to be felt.