How Mame Khan, once a little-known Manganiyar from Jaisalmer, became a favourite with Bollywood composers
On Tuesday, Mame Khan, a Manganiyar musician from Satto, a sleepy little village in Rajasthan’s Jaisalmer, walked the red carpet at Cannes as part of the Indian contingent led Information and Broadcasting Miner Anurag Thakur. Dressed in a fuchsia kurta and dhoti paired with a heavily embroidered navy blue jacket and Rajasthani pagdi, the folk singer was in an outfit put together Anjuli Chakraborty, who is an art and music manager. Chakraborty has worked with Khan for a few years and helped him find the right people and avenues to showcase his talent.
The contingent also comprises actors Nawazuddin Siddiqui and R Madhavan, two-time Grammy winner Ricky Kej, Chief of the Censor Board Prasoon Joshi, and director Shekhar Kapur, among others. This year, actor Deepika Padukone is part of the nine-member jury at the festival.
Amid a plethora of brilliant Rajasthani folk musicians who’ve become significant in the country’s cultural arena, such as Lakha Khan and Bhanwari Devi among others, Khan has had a slightly different trajectory. He went solo a few years ago and decided to collaborate with a slew of musicians rather than singing with one troupe all the time and travelling for performances at festivals with a typical Manganiyar folk group. Apart from his formidable talent, his going solo in the recent years has been one of the main reasons for him finding more mainstream attention, which has led to him to singing in a slew of films such as Luck Chance (2009), No One Killed Jessica (2011), Mirzya (2016), Sonchiriya (2019) and Dasvi (2022).
But for many years, Mame Khan’s life had followed a simple pattern: singing folk songs with others from his community at various local festivals and traditional events of his jajmaan (patrons), such as weddings and childbirth. This was till, one day, he was invited to sing at musician-actor Ila Arun’s daughter’s wedding in 2005. A Mumbai-based musician at the wedding spotted him there and mentioned his name to composer-singer Shankar Mahadevan, who asked him to come to Purple Haze in Bandra, a recording studio owned composer trio Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy.
A long train journey a couple of years later, Khan was in the city of dreams with his complete group because that’s how the Manganiyars sing: in unison. Once in the studio in Mumbai, Mahadevan gave Khan a basic structure and asked him to sing a freestyle alaap. His alaap audition would lead to Baawre in Zoya Akhtar’s film Luck Chance (2009), a splendid track that fused an array of sounds and uniquely tweaked the concepts of qawwali and Rajasthani folk. It would also be Khan’s first big-ticket Bollywood hit.
Born to Rana Khan Manganiyar, a Rajasthani musician whose ancestors have been supported landlords and arocrats for generations, Khan grew up lening to his father’s riyaaz at home and sang since he was a child. He’s always maintained that his mother has been a skillful singer and would sing bhajans at home. However, as is tradition, Rajasthani women do not sing in public.
The Manganiyars are a group of hereditary musicians who belong to a fringe Muslim community in Rajasthan. Since the beginning of their musical tradition, their patrons have been wealthy Bhaati and Rajput landlords and arocrats. The Manganiyars sing ditties of local maharajas, of gone battles, and stories of gods and goddesses that have been passed down generations. These songs are mostly in praise of Hindu deities and celebrate Lord Krishna and for centuries have bound the two communities together. Manganiyars sing praising Allah and Krishna apart from celebrating Diwali, Holi, and Eid with equal gusto.
While Baawre established Khan’s credentials, validation also came from ace composer Amit Trivedi in Coke Studio @MTV sessions in 2015. Khan crooned two numbers — a traditional folk called Chaudhary, and another titled Badri badariya, where he collaborated with singer Mili Nair. Then there were two pieces with popular fusion band Maati Baani at Sandstorm Festival in 2013. Khan began to frequent music festivals as a solo performer.
A slew of serendipitous encounters in Mumbai led him to meet theatre director Roysten Abel, who included him in The Manganiyar Seduction, one of his most ambitious projects. Inspired Amsterdam’s red-light drict, the stage is built up to a four-storey structure, comprising small boxes, each one outlined lightbulbs. Each box is occupied a performer whose box lights up whenever he joins in the performance. The performance was also showcased at London’s Womad Festival (2012).
But it was the songs in Rakesh Omprakash Mehra’s Mirzya, that established him as a formidable arte through some of the finest pieces from the arsenal of Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy.
While he comes with a brilliant vocal range, Khan has fought financial constraints for a large part of his life. But he’d always dreamt of an album to his name. Since no music label was interested in a Rajasthani folk album then, in 2015, due to lack of funds, he decided to crowdfund an album with the Manganiyars — a first for them. Someone told him that here the larger public would become his jajmaan and have them help us raise money for an album, which, eventually, would be given as a gift to them. His last song, the percussion-heavy Nakhralo in the Abhishek Bachchan starrer Dasvi (2022), was steeped in Rajasthani folk and found much appreciation and attention at the time of film’s release.
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