Not many people know this, but for many years, popular folk and Sufi singer from Rajasthan, Mame Khan, had been a percussionist. Back in 1999, he even went on a world tour as a percussionist. He stayed in Belgium for six months, returned to India for a short time, leaving his drums there. He had planned to go back to Belgium after a short while, but he was not able to. This became a huge turning point in his life. He was disappointed, of course, but then his father Rana Khan told Mame, “One door closed for you but at the same time you can open a thousand doors if you keep working hard on your music.”
“This was the day I stared singing – and my drums are till date in Belgium,” says Mame Khan, after a recent performance in Thiruvananthapuram. His late father Rana Khan, who gave the advice, is, he says, one of the best teachers he could wish for, and had been a fantastic singer. Mame belongs to a musician community from Rajasthan, called Manganiyar.
“Our musical journey started 15 generations back. It has been an oral tradition since. Born and brought up in a musician family, our traditional music has been part of my life and dreams since childhood,” he says.
But even as he became a percussionist and travelled the world with his music, it was very difficult to earn fame in India. “For many years, it was very difficult to earn yourself a name as a traditional folk and Sufi singer from the Thar desert. Many times, master singers of our community lent their voice to movies and many commercial projects, yet their names were never mentioned anywhere. As Manganiyars hails from a rural background, most of us do not know about marketing and brand building,” Mame says. But he had been lucky there. His entry into Bollywood — his first song was Baware with Shankar Mahadevan for the film Luck By Chance — and a Coke Studio performance of Chaudhary for Amit Trivedi. Mame says, gave his musical career a big push. He sang for movies like Mirzya, I Am, and in Malayalam, a Hindi song for Monsoon Mangoes.
“I feel blessed, that I got a chance to be part of this, I am proud of the fact that today people know me by my own name and not only by the name of my community. I am saying this, because I am sometimes concerned about the way music gets used, without the due respect and I am sometimes sad how limited the support for extinguishing arts in our county is. I think there is a long way to go to see how we can find new ways to keep our traditional arts alive. Looking back to last year, I can say that it was a great experience for me to see Rajasthan folk music being featured in mainstream Bollywood productions in a center position. For example, in Mirzya, I contributed to three songs and people loved it. This year, some new film productions are in the making and I am expecting the same love and support from people,” Mame says.
He is not overly surprised that his traditional singing — like the music style Jangra — has been appreciated across the country. Even in Kerala, there was a large crowd at the Kanakakunnu Palace to hear Mame Khan sing. “See, folk music is from people for people... I think this is how everyone can connect to it. Also, I always re-compose old traditional songs, making them interesting for a new generation of listeners. It is a fine balance between old and new. Music knows no border or language and the entire team of the festival (in Thiruvanthap-uram) was great and the audience response was overwhelming!” he says.
