A Bigger High

By Mangala Ramamoorthy - The Hindu - Chennai, India
Monday, November 26, 2007

“Sufi is like meditation. It gives me a bigger high than wearing the biggest diamond or travelling abroad. It’s absolute bliss.” This is how singer Anita Singhvi describes Sufi music. The talented artiste with over 100 concerts has come out with her second album, “Sada-E-Sufi.”

The album has live recordings of her concert organised by Sufi Foundation of India. Anita says, “I have tried to retain the essence of Sufism. Out of the nine songs in the album, the kalam in three is in Persian because by translating these lyrics they would have lost their meaning.”

She confesses she developed interest in Sufism only recently. “It’s only two-three years back that I got into it. Till then, I was happy singing ghazals. I started reading a lot of sufi poetry by poets like Amir Khusrau and listening to more such music. The more I heard, the more I got drowned into it. So far I was singing about love between human beings but now I sing about the love between man and God,” she explains.

According to Anita though Sufism is the current flavour in the music industry in India, it has nothing to do with the release of the album. “Shouting and screaming is not Sufism. What musicians like Abida Parveen and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sing is real Sufism.” Seconds Sanjiv, “For us, it is just another step in taking good music to the audience.”

Anita insists that her kind of music is important in this world, where there is conflict everywhere. “Sufism is all over the world. It is true world music. It is such a unifying factor that speaks about love for human beings.”

Though her next venture is a ghazal album, which will release in February, she promises to do more of Sufi henceforth.