There's a new Sufi in town

She is the new face of Sufi singing in India and, what’s more, she is a big hit with the youth, a segment that has been difficult to lure into the audience-starved classical music scenario.

Ragini Rainu, a disciple of Pandit Bhajan Sopori, the santoor maestro, climbs a few notches higher with every concert she performs. Her raw and robust singing and spontaneity brings to life the ecstatic expression of Sufism, each rendition drowning the audience in the richness of the tradition.

Yet, the Sufi genre seems a rather offbeat choice for this vivacious singer, who is blessed with a voice that has a lilting soprano vibrancy to it. Did she take it up because this style gave her the opportunity to distinguish herself, considering few women have trodden the Sufi path on the concert platform? Or, was it because she felt she could inject some fresh innovation into this light classical form? After experiencing one of her performances first hand, one is drawn to the latter conclusion.

Rainu’s infectious zeal and spontaneity effortlessly uplifts the listener’s mood. With her hands lifted as if reproducing the pleadings of the saint-composer to his Maker, this gifted artiste creates an aura of comfortable togetherness while singing. In the background, an Indo-western orchestral accompaniment of the dholak, tabla, guitar, sitar and harmonium stitch up the vocal strains into a composite rhythm.

Young sensation

Rainu’s musical journey began when she was only three years old. It was her mother, a singer and teacher in Jammu, who introduced her to the joys of singing on stage. There were several amateur performances that followed over the years with and without her mother, the young woman reveals. Being from a musical family — her father is a competent sitarist and a disciple of Ustad Imrat Hussain Khan — it was only expected that she would continue the family tradition and she did not disappoint.

The even-keeled practitioner-performer routine she was following would have continued had Pt Bhajan Sopori not dropped in for breakfast at the Rainu residence one day.

“Papa (Sopori) invited me to Delhi to sing for a new album which is being put together by the music company HMV. They needed a young, fresh voice. I was thrilled at this opportunity. After all, I was only 16 then. I sang a Rajasthani folk number and a romantic melody.” What followed was serious discipleship under her guru “because it was destined”. But even as she practiced diligently, doing riyaz for hours on end to hone her musical talents, Rainu continued with her undergraduate studies in English Literature on the side.

It was a vacation she took in England after she finished college that changed her musical goals forever. While she was thinking of taking up light classical singing and was even considering playback singing, she chanced upon a volume of Sant Mat by Sant Kripal Singh, a Sikh spiritual guru. It led to a radical personal transformation.

“I immediately booked my ticket back to India and decided that my musical journey needed to digress from the playback route it was taking to a spiritual one,” she recalls. Sufi was a natural preference for her, considering her guru.

“Guruji hails from the centuries-old Sufi gharana of Kashmir, in Sopore, so it was the obvious path to take. Also, there is plenty of literature available in the gharana as several saints have brought fresh compositions into its fold. Today, it has been more than 12 years since I first started singing Sufi renditions,” says Rainu, who is in her early 30s.

Of course, it took her some time to take to the concert circuit full time. In fact, according to media reports, after she did her Masters in music she went on to work as a “public relations manager for an American firm in Delhi for two years as it paid good money… but the guilt of not doing justice to my lineage was too big to ignore” and so she decided to dedicate all her energies to her one passion in life.

The right note

Rainu, who has been conferred with the prestigious Jammu & Kashmir Dogri Award 2008 and Sur Shree Award in 2006, is a thorough performer, keenly interacting with her audiences and engaging them with her music. For someone who has had hundreds of shows in India and abroad till date, she still experiences nervous excitement each time she takes to the stage.

She admits that keeping the audience happy is important for her. “My listeners matter to me. I do not like the prospect of seeing empty seats in the hall and so I strive towards performing in such a way that everyone gets involved and engrossed. So much so that many a time people are compelled to spontaneously sway, as if in a trance, to my voice. The sounds of clapping and foot-tapping must ring in my ears, as I sing,” she explains.

To make that happen, her selection of numbers is carefully mapped out and the lion’s share goes to Punjabi Sufi compositions and it helps that she is naturally fluent in that language.

Though the more popular Bollywood-style numbers are often on her audience’s request list, she prefers to entertain them with the alternate choices of Punjabi folk, moulded into a Sufi outlay. Her versions of Bulleshah’s “Be-dardan sang yari, rovan akhian”, Meera’s “Mero man Raam hi Raam”, Kabir’s “Raas gagan gufa” and Khusro’s “Chap tilak sab chini” never fail to bring the house down. She adds, “I love singing Waris Shah’s evocation of Ranjha as well, where the saint-poet likens his own guru to Ranjha.”

One of her memorable concerts was when this young Sufi songstress got the rare honour of presenting the first ever Sufi music recital as part of the country’s top festival, the Sankat Mochan Sangeet Samaroh at Varanasi in 2012. As she rubbed shoulders with Pt Jasraj, Pt Ulhas Kashalkar, Pt Rajan-Sajan Mishra, Pt Birju Maharaj, Pt Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and her own guru, Pt Bhajan Sopori, she managed to create her own space among the legends.

Rainu may be young, but she has already created her own dedicated fan following, thanks in part to the various music albums she has released, such as Runjhun, Kabir Bani, Meera Bhajans and Ma Haro Meri Pir. She has also lent her voice to the greatest musical hit from her home state, “Aao kadam badhayain”, the fund-raising song for Kashmir earthquake victims, along with Pt Sopori, Shubha Mudgal, the late Ustad Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar and several others.

Indian classical music needs young performers like Rainu to survive and thrive — and she takes her responsibility seriously. She firmly states, “I am a true Sufi. For me, this genre is a means of spreading the word on spirituality and I will continue to sing it as long as my heart is moved by it.”