KIRAN AHLUWALIA
by Tony Montague, for Sing Out magazine (U.S.)

Some sounds evoke landscapes. The voice of Indian and Punjabi singer Kiran Ahluwalia - her fine sense of phrasing, and the sweetness of her tone - suggests a rippling stream in the foothills of the  Himalayas on a hot day.
But Ahluwalia, whose self-titled international debut is creating a stir in world music circles, is no country girl. She comes from Toronto, Canada’s biggest city, where she’s part of a thriving South Asian arts scene and the leading composer and interpreter of ghazals
The tradition of these exquisite love-poems-set-to-music was brought to the Indian subcontinent from Persia 600 years ago. The ghazal (an Arabic word which means ‘talking to women’ ) is at once a literary and a popular art-form.
“The poem is made up of couplets, and is lyrical not narrative, so each couplet is able to stand on its own,” says Ahulwalia. “The composer and the writer are always separate – and don’t need to work together. It takes someone half their life to figure out how to write a good poem in the style. Then someone who’s spent many years studying ghazal music composes for it and sings it. It would be very rare to find someone who had both talents. It’s not like the singer-songwriter tradition or the Punjabi folk tradition in this way.”
Born in Bihar in the northwest state of the Punjab, Ahluwalia spent her early childhood in India, and her deeply-ingrained love of the ghazal dates from those years.
“My parents were both ghazal singers – they didn’t sing professionally but it was a major passion. All of their friends were either hobby singers or hobby listeners,” says Ahluwalia, laughing at the awkwardness of the words. “A typical party at home would be: people come over, you have tea and snacks and then people sing ghazals or something else, then you have dinner followed by more singing afterwards. When we moved to Canada in the early ‘70s my parents found similar friends here, and that style of having musical gatherings continued.”
Ahluwalia was also taken to hear music in more formal settings. “My parents went to many different types of concerts, where people sang ghazals, or Bollywood music, or Punjabi folk music, or Indian classical music. They also put me in music school, right from the time I was in India. I learned how to sing, as an extra-curricular activity, until I graduated from school and university and started my working life.”
While her studies were in classical song, the ghazal was always Ahluwalia’s greatest inspiration. But it wasn’t until five years ago that she felt confident enough to become a full-time ghazal singer. Or that she was prepared to take the financial risks involved in devoting herself exclusively to her art. Ahluwalia holds an undergraduate degree and an MBA, and worked for a while as a bond trader on the Toronto stock exchange. She’s also been a program producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and assistant general manager of the Putumayo world music record label.
But singing was always her passion, and in 1990 Ahluwalia quit her job at the time and went to India to study the Indian classical style at the highest level in Bombay. For the next several years she shifted back and forth between earning a living in North America and studying voice intensively in India
“Most people learn ghazal-style singing pretty much on their own, through recordings or from local ghazal singers. It’s passed down. The formal training is in classical – once you have that, you can go out in the world and sing whatever you do. It’s widely believed that Indian classical music is the best base to have for singing any kind of Indian music.”
But Ahluwalia wanted to live and learn from one of the few masters of the ghazal. “Of the four that I knew existed, three of them toured so you couldn’t learn from them in the normal sense, and the other one didn’t sing anymore. Then I heard there was another master in Hyderabad [central India] who had never recorded commercially but was very active.”
Ahluwalia was in Canada at the time that she heard about Vithal Rao, and listened to a scratchy tape of his singing. She resolved that on her next visit to Bombay she would study with her classical teacher for a month, then ask her permission to go and study with Rao.
“In India, your teacher has a higher status than a music teacher here would have. There are certain social rules you must follow. I was so afraid of what my teacher would say that I waited four months before I mustered up the courage to ask her. I was so afraid she’d banish me from her studio forever. But much to my surprise she was actually very supportive, knowing that this was important to me.”
It was during the monsoon season, and Ahluwalia vividly remembers calling Hyderabad from a public phone booth in the rains. “You’d be crazy to go out in that kind of rain because in ten seconds you’d be drenched from head to toe – even with an umbrella! I spent three minutes talking to Vithal Rao explaining who I was, where I’d come from, and that I wanted to come and learn from him. To this, he simply replied, ‘Well then, when are you coming?’ “
“Afterwards I remember thinking ‘I’m either insane or…’. I couldn’t get to the bit ‘or courageous’. I just felt ‘Yeah, I’m insane’. It was really tough to find his place in the old city of Hyderabad because the streets aren’t named and you have to ask people where someone lives. I finally got there in the heat and the sun, and he had me sing, then started teaching me right away. I could tell from the tape I had that he was a great singer but when I heard him in person I knew right away that I’d done the right thing.”
Since that meeting more than a decade ago Ahluwalia has spent several months of every year studying ghazal singing and composing with Rao - who was court musician in the palace of the nizam [king] of Hyderabad – and learning about high Indian culture in the days of the British Raj.
“He’s a great singer technically – he can do little runs of five notes so fast and so smoothly and sweet. And his tunes are going to be classics, because they’re so original. The pieces he creates are really quite contemporary. At the same time he’s got these amazing stories of palace life in the ‘40s, stories of going hunting with the king, and on this expedition there are three dancing girls, and five musicians, and ten cooks, and the people put up the tent, which is red and gold embroidery… things like that. I only get to hear these accounts because I’ve spent so many years now with him.”
Rao contributes the music to several of the songs on Ahluwalia’s first independently-released Canadian album Kashish (2000), nominated for a Juno Award (equivalent of the Grammys) for Best World Music Recording. The maestro still has one track on its follow-up Beyond Boundaries, but most of the composer’s credits on the 2003 release – which gained the coveted Juno – belong to Ahluwalia.
Interestingly, the lyrics written for three of her ghazal compositions on Beyond Boundaries – and on Kiran Ahluwalia, a compilation of remastered tracks from both her Canadian releases and a couple of new pieces – were written by contemporary Indo-Canadian poets. “Vo Kuch (Passion)”, comes from Tahira Masood who’s a home-maker and mother. “Yeh Nahin (Wandering Dusty Paths)” is from Rafi Raza, an electrical engineer, and “Kina Nere (The Unsung Ghazal)” was penned by taxi-driver Rasheed Nadeem.
"Some time ago I discovered there were many different organizations of South Asian writers in Canada, one of which is called - in translation - Caravan of Punjabi Pens. I went to a meeting where about 40-45 poets read from their own works. The writing was of a very high quality.”
“It's really exciting to have found these people here. I thought I’d always have to go back to India and Pakistan to look seek out poets and poetry to compose music for. But there are writers all across North America working in the ghazal genre. That was an important discovery for me because it means I can get freshly written poems – and have first dibs on a lot of things,” adds Ahluwalia, with a laugh. “I could also speak to the poet. It opened up a door to a community I didn’t know existed.
Nadeem also wrote the lyrics for one of the new pieces on Kiran Ahluwalia, the dreamy “Rabh da Roop (Image of Heaven)”, whose title and words are an indication that the ghazal, like the Islamic love poetry of the Sufis, often has a spiritual dimension. The entire poem reads, in translation:
I have found my beloved,
He appeared as the image of heaven.
My friend, I have found my love
But lost myself.
The intoxication of my passion overwhelmed me
And I lost myself.
The recording of “Rabh da Roop” and the Punjabi folk song “Jhanjra (Ankle Bells)” features one of the most interesting combinations in Canadian world music –the voice of Ahluwalia and the fiddle of Cape Breton sensation Natalie MacMaster.
“Her style of playing is very fast, so it was natural to think I’d give her a couple of quicker-paced Punjabi folk songs. But when I was speaking to her she said she loves the slower playing, it’s just that her audience wants her to play fast stuff. So I composed something specially for her and I to do together. I went back to Rasheed and said:‘this is the kind of poetry that I want’, and he wrote it in a few days. It was like custom-ordered poetry!”
While ghazals are her specialty, Ahluwalia’s albums include several traditional folk lyrics from the Punjab. During one of her visits to India, she travelled north to the mountainous region where she was born, to explore its song traditions.
“I took six months off, and went to some small villages, and recorded musicians on my little Walkman, and spent time with them. Then I went over to the Pakistan side of the border and studied some of the literature with a professor, and researched and learned much more about Punjabi song. I was already familiar with the club scene bhangra, but I wanted to know the source of it all”
“Having that knowledge I came back and composed music for the lyrics in my own style. It was mainly material from the 1800s that interested me. The song “Ik Ranja” (on Kiran Ahluwalia) is a perfect example. The romantic verses by Bule Shah were written in the 1860s.”
One of the most delightful and popular items in Ahluwalia’s repertoire is the jaunty Punjabi song “ Koka”, about a girl trying to convince her lover to buy her a nose-ring. “
The way you’d hear someone in the Punjab singing it is quite different from our arrangement. It would be more rustic, with less variations in the melody, and more emphasis on the words. And you’d never have a guitar – the instrument used would be either tables or a dhol [drum] on the rhythm section and the melodic instrument would be a harmonium or a tumbi [a traditional instrument from the Punjab, which has only one string and produces a high tone] You could also put a drum kit on it, quicken the tempo, and it would be a club bhangra song. The lovely thing about Punjabi folk music is that it has great diversity in that way.”
For her regular concert appearances Ahluwalia is backed by a trio comprising her husband and guitarist Rez Abbasi, harmonium-player Ashok Bidaye, and tabla-player Ravi Naimpally  Over the past few years they’ve gained an international reputation for the excellence of their musicianship, performing  at many North American festivals of world music, folk, and jazz (a very open-ended genre in Canada) and in Europe.
Despite – or possibly because of – her refinement as a ghazal singer, Ahluwalia continues to practice and study Indian classical song. It provides the best possible exercise for her throat, and encourages her to create variations on musical themes.
“In ghazals you improvise as well, but the melody definitely takes up more time than  the improvisation. So if my melody is seven minutes-long the improvisation  portion might be at the most a couple of minutes. That’s how it is traditionally anyway. When I compose my own ghazals I find less of a need to improvise because I feel I’ve already said what I wanted to within the composition. But when I’m singing a piece by my teacher I’m more likely to improvise, because then I feel that I have something different to give it.”
Shortly after the Sing Out interview took place in December, Ahluwalia was off to India once more, to study with Vithal Rao and continue her lifelong romance with the ghazal. “Even though it’s so literary, and you’re singing it following an established structure, the way you sing should be as if you’re having a conversation with your lover,” says Ahluwalia. “It’s about how you feel right now.”