Harmonic Ascension - An Interview With Jasvir Rababan
Jasvir Kaur Rababan MBE, a Sikh sacred musician, filmmaker and scholar, has long wondered what happened to the once-thriving communities and musical traditions of her ancestors in the Punjabi region of India. In the mid 1800s, despite 100 years of British colonisation, Punjab was wealthy, functional and literate. The region was the last to fall to British rule and the only one that could not be conquered by force - to take Punjab required decades of strategic infiltration by the British. According to Jasvir, it was the sacred rituals and musical practices of the Sikh people that created an enlightened army of compassionate warriors too powerful to defeat.
Researching the systematic destruction of Sikh instruments and its subsequent effects has become Jasvir’s life’s work, as well as learning how to bring those instruments back to life and play them. These instruments, largely stringed but some percussive, were destroyed under colonialism and replaced by the harmonium, a simple pump organ. “When I started researching these instruments I couldn’t find anything written in any of the history books. The only references I had, besides what my teacher ultimately showed me, was through what we call sakhis, which are stories from history about the Sikh Gurus,” she explained. Jasvir's 25 years of research have come from the belief that outlawed instruments like the rabab, taus, dilruba, and saranda, were being used as a means of achieving enlightenment.
“Rabab means a limb of God,” she said. “And poetry was transmitted in what we call raags, which are different emotional capsules for us to access our humanity. When we access those emotions and we’re singing the tone and the sacred words, it activates a very deep and profound healing inside of us. This is how the Sikh path was laid out, it was built on this foundation of sacred poetry encapsulated in these 60 raags expressing different emotions that humans experience. And it was transmitted through these stringed instruments that are plucked or bowed.” Currently, Jasvir is at the intersection of music-religion-neuroscience while doing her PhD at UC Riverside researching the role of Kirtan (Sikh sacred music) as medicine, hoping to learn what frequencies those instruments activate and what the psychological and physical, measurable impact is.
Born and raised in England by a Punjabi Sikh family, Jasvir’s exposure to traditional music was limited exclusively to the harmonium. At age 19, while studying Sikh philosophy, she met the teacher who put her on the path of pursuing this research on Sikh Music. Unable to find any information about these lost instruments in the history books, she sought out elders at a local temple to learn more. Eventually, one of these elder men laughed in her face when she asked if Sikhs have always played the harmonium. “I was born and raised in the alleyways of Amritsar behind the Golden Temple. Back then the sounds were so melodic you could hear them from the street. They were stringed instruments. It was the British that brought in the box.” The stringed instruments he was referring to were formerly played daily at the sacred Sikh shrine Harimandir Sahib (The Golden Temple) in Punjab, India and ‘the box’ was the harmonium, which he would not call by any other name.
Back in class, her teacher told her the only way to uncover the lost history and power of these instruments was to learn to play. “I was always told my whole life to stay away from music,” she said, sure she was fundamentally tone-deaf. “So under his guidance I learned. Maybe there’s different types of musicality that can’t be taught, but when it’s music for healing, it’s accessible to all humans. Shattering the illusion that I couldn’t do it was big for me. The journey transformed everything for me, and made me who I am now. In the process was the deeper discovery of trying to figure out why these instruments have been erased from Sikh history books.” She began working directly with Sikh communities to restore their relationship with these instruments and the healing rituals they were built for.
Jasvir is prominently featured in the documentary Sikh Musical Heritage: The Untold Story, which describes a lasting change in meaning-making as one less obvious feature of the British colonization on Sikh culture. Attempts to take over the Punjabi region went all the way back to 1843. Sacred instruments were as important to take into battle as spiritual armour along with their weapons and, according to the documentary, the process to break the Sikh people from their heritage was how they were ultimately colonized. New structures were put in place of previous ones, the most famous example being the clock tower of Amritsar built on top of a former Sikh palace that was demolished by the British, fundamentally changing the meaning of time by making it precise and mechanical.
"The frequencies they were creating were activating the memory of true divinity, which is how you achieve that state."
It makes sense that the implementation of new structures would extend to replacing the instruments literally being brought to the battlefield, but the whole process took several decades. It was not until well into the 20th century that the harmonium made its way to the Golden Temple, which Jasvir says was the death knell of sacred Sikh musical practices in India. While the culture did not appear to be completely disrupted, the sacred nature of music as a means of healing and sense-making was lost. “I wanted to find out what it is about this music that was so dangerous that it needed to be erased? Not only any mention of it in history, but any visual representation of it,” she explained.
“We know now of the power of frequency to shift us from one state to another. The Sikhs are known as warrior saints, they were the most kind and passionate but fierce fighters. Those things don’t normally go together. What does it mean to take lives in full consciousness? To see with the eyes of a saint but move with the heart of a warrior? So even in battle they were taught to remain conscious and compassionate. In moments of chaos and injustice we’re taught as a people to step to the front line to protect others, that’s the basic foundation of what it means to be Sikh. But to become that, it means you need the right wisdom to guide you,” Jasvir continued. Only by breaking the culture away from that wisdom could the region eventually be dominated, starting with destruction of the education system, which was educating 400,000 Indian students for free before 1849.
The legacy of British colonization can still be heard in Sikh sacred music today. More than 175 years after the annexation of Punjab, the instruments Jasvir devoted her life to studying have not been reclaimed by the culture at large, and neither has the original relationship between the raags and their intended function as a technology for personal healing. The harmonium remains almost ubiquitous in Sikh worship, while instruments such as the rabab, taus and saranda are far less commonly heard. The effects of replacing the instruments to change the understanding of what the music was supposed to do still linger. “This was the carving of the psyche - the music, playing the instruments and the sacred poetry altogether created an aura of excellence for people who chose the path,” she said. “The frequencies they were creating were activating the memory of true divinity, which is how you achieve that state.”
It is this that makes the restoration of Sikh musical heritage more complicated than simply locating old instruments and teaching people how to play them. Jasvir is trying to help reconstruct an entire system of meaning in a culture that’s become very attached to the harmonium. Her research at UC Riverside is an attempt to study what happens in the body and brain when these traditions are practiced as originally intended, and perhaps neuroscience will eventually provide a new vocabulary for something Sikh musicians understood experientially hundreds of years ago. Jasvir describes the 60 raags as a filing cabinet of emotional experiences to create order from the chaos of being human.
“A painful memory turns from a human, materialistic experience into spiritual ascension. These things that we’ve been through as humans in our material bodies are to help us ascend when we can transmute them through the tools of frequencies, sound and sacred wisdom. We can elevate further by understanding that we are more than just this body, more than just this human experience - that’s all fuel for the spiritual fire,” she explained. For Jasvir, processing the loss of her brother showed her the power of playing this sacred music on her rabab. “It gave me the possibility of having a choice to feel better, to be better.”