Former scientist Raghu Dixit has taken the Indian music scene by storm. Now his sights are on the UK
It's just after 1am in Bengaluru, southern India, and the Shivratri festivities are at their height. A boisterous crowd is packed into a square where two large stages have been constructed. On one there's a polystyrene temple, complete with a duck pond with real ducks and a statue of Lord Shiva, but attention is centred on the second stage, where local musician Raghu Dixit is about to perform. "It's a religious festival," Dixit explains. "According to the legend, Shiva has drunk poison to save the world, and his followers have to make enough noise to keep him awake."
Bengaluru is Dixit's home city, and when he comes on stage Shivratri turns into a rock show. Dry ice fills the stage as he launches into Hey Bhagwan, "a prayer to the Lord to give us a second chance", strumming an amplified acoustic guitar. He could be a soulful Celtic folk-rocker if he wasn't singing in Kannada, the local language, and wasn't barefoot, wearing a traditional kurta shirt and a lungi.
Dixit is a singer-songwriter with a mission. This one-time scientist gave up a career in Europe to return to India and create a fusion of Indian themes and western pop that sets out to "represent what India is today . . . deeply rooted in our tradition but marrying influences that the internet boom and globalisation are throwing at us".
The aim, he says, is to bring new pride to those who speak Kannada. Bengaluru may be India's fastest-growing city, thanks to the boom in call centres and the IT industries, but the influx of Hindi and Tamil speakers looking for work means the language is under threat. "We have developed an inferiority complex about our own language," says Dixit. So he deliberately sings in Kannada, and updates the work of such local poets as Shishunala Sharif.
In Karnataka state, his campaign is clearly working; he is stopped wherever we go. So with all this local success, why is he trying to succeed in the west? "It's necessary for me to create sensational concerts outside India. It increases pride in the language if a Kannada speaker is getting standing ovations at British festivals."
Born into a conservative family, Dixit wasn't allowed to listen to western music, wear jeans, or play guitar "which was associated with Christianity". At Mysore university, he studied for an MA in microbiology, getting the highest marks in his year. It was while working in Belgium as a pharmaceutical researcher that his landlord heard him singing, and arranged for him to appear on a Brussels radio station. The response was so encouraging that Dixit returned to India, determined to become a musician.
It took him seven years to succeed, scraping together enough money to record an album of his own songs. Released in 2007 (last year in the UK), it made him a star in India. Since then, he has used much of his earnings to try to launch his career in the west. He was initially sceptical about performing on the BBC's Later, where he appeared on a show with Arcade Fire ("who I didn't have a clue about . . . but they were magnificent"), and admits, "I wondered why I had spent so much money coming just to play one song". But his album has since become iTunes's top world-music download.
Meanwhile, he's also been talent-spotted by the Southbank Centre's artistic director Jude Kelly, who invited him to become an artist in residence after seeing him perform in India. He is, she says, "savvy and clever, mixing folk themes and the contemporary". His wife Mayuri Upadhya runs a dance troupe and they plan to write a musical together: "It will be a magnificent sight," he promises. He is, one suspects, about to become one of the unexpected success stories of the year.
? Raghu Dixit opens the Southbank Centre's Alchemy festival, tomorrow, London SE1. Box office: 0844 875 0073. Then at Glastonbury, Latitude, Rhythms of the World and other summer festivals.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/apr/13/raghu-dixit
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