with the issues of multiculturalism, belonging and spirituality that interest him. Beyond Skin’s mix of multi-lingual vocalists, traditional Indian percussion and clear nods to popular dance music may have made it an instant success, but there was autobiography and even a touch of anger behind it. Its slow grooves dealt in hindu mythology and disgust at India’s nuclear testing programme. On the track ‘Immigrant’, sawhney’s own father can be heard recalling bittersweet memories of emigration. ‘We went to the Embassy and they showed us Kew garden pictures and pictures of the various parts of England.’ he is sold a vision of a country where ‘it is all just beautiful and everything is just right’. however, as the later song ‘Nostalgia’ commences, he can be heard to admit, ‘I think in the initial stages we had a lot of struggle…’ sawhney’s parents emigrated from Punjab and Nitin was born in Dulwich in 1964, before the family moved to Rochester in Kent, a county which prides itself on being the garden of England. he was open to a huge range of influences from a very early age – his father, Anandeshwar, was a biochemist, and his mother, saroj, a traditional Indian classical dancer. he began piano lessons when he was just five, and he later went on to also master both classical and flamenco guitar. his formal musical education introduced him to the canon of western classical music, from Bach to Debussy, while at home his mother would be found playing Indian classical records and his brothers the latest in contemporary rock. It’s ingrained in sawhney’s background that there are no hierarchical distinctions between any of these forms, and throughout his working life he has played fast and loose in combining seemingly disparate sources into a music that is culturally democratic. I wondered how much sawhney believed music can act as a conduit for change? It’s an oft-reported fact that, as the only Asian boy at his school ,he felt very excluded. Indeed, the music teacher was a supporter of the extremist, far-right political party the National Front, who completely discouraged sawhney’s natural love (not to mention gift) for music. Even though strains of those politics still fester in British society today, music is infinitely more global and the divides between cultures and races have broken down as a result. Young white boys, for example, find meaning and identity in American ghetto hip-hop. the whole generation of Asian musicians with whom sawhney grew up felt, with pride and sincerity, that their voice deserved to be heard to a wider public across the whole of Britain, and indeed beyond. Once again, though, one senses his ambivalence. ‘What you’re talking about here is what came to be dubbed the Asian underground. these were people expressing themselves, and yet within the media it was reduced to a fashion, a moment. It’s very reductive. the fact that Jay sean is number one in the us – a young Asian, coming out of hounslow – is a great development. But we still have a long way to go.’ there’s a moment in his album Human where he merges politician Enoch Powell’s legendary anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech with Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a Dream’ speech. And it’s clear from talking to sawhney that while his music wears its politics lightly, he draws
upon a vast, learned range of cultural reference points as inspiration. he recalls his favourite moments from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, and praises Edward said’s influential 1978 book Orientalism, which dealt with notions of exoticism, and how western colonialism was based on romanticised ideas of Asian culture. For sawhney, there’s an argument to be made that culturally we are, in fact, in a period of regression. ‘there had been right up till 2000 a real surge in Indian and Asian culture. then along came 9/11 and, in Britain, 7/7. so we regressed. Muslims became a focus for terror and suspicions.’ said had already discussed this in his introduction to Orientalism: ‘so far as the united states seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world.’ sawhney is acutely aware that today there is ‘a demonisation of ‘brown people’ and rampant Islamophobia. the fact we are at war with Muslim countries does affect the consensus.’ to an extent, this comes as no surprise to him. Looking back to his childhood, he is shocked at how badly his own culture’s history was taught. ‘Indian and African history was irrelevant in teaching unless it was connected to colonialism or slavery. this hasn’t shifted enough – even now.’ he tackled this head-on in the liner notes to Beyond Skin, writing: ‘ ‘history’ tells me my heritage came from the ‘sub’ continent – a ‘third world’ country, a ‘developing’ nation, a ‘colonised’ land. so what is history? For me, just another arrogant Eurocentric term. I learned only about Russian, European and American history in my school syllabus. India, Pakistan, Africa – these places were full of people whose history did not matter – the enslaved, the inferior.’ I don’t think it’s overstating the issue to suggest that these major cultural oversights are the reason sawhney becomes so agitated when the issue of world music is raised.there’s an obvious frustration in what he perceives as ‘white faces spearheading the ethnic element’. this is not simply a reference to the fact that the term world music was itself coined in the early sixties by a white ethnomusicologist, professor Robert E. Brown, but part of a wider discussion of the ways in which western musicians of the time colonised Indian and African musics. Much of the American avant garde would be non-existent without them. the pioneer of Minimalism, terry Riley, studied with a master of Indian classical forms, Pandit Pran Nath, and went on both to teach Indian classical music and to draw upon it for his seminal work In C. Another pioneer of the Minimalist form, steve Reich, made his breakthrough with a piece of phased tape manipulation called It’s Gonna Rain, using a sermon about Armageddon delivered by a black Pentacostal street preacher in harlem. his later studies in ghana with African percussionists would result in Drumming, arguably his masterpiece. Yet neither has ever been perceived as anything other than a conventional classical composer. Interestingly, sawhney has himself been moving closer to the world of classical composition. his forays into the world of the concert hall have been seamless orchestral hybrids, interweaving traditions and forms from
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