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SARJIT BAINS, co-host of Sangam , Mondays, 7:30 — 9:30 p.m.

Sarjit Bains April, 2003

Sarjit was born in India, but his family moved to Great Britain when he was about seven years old. Graduating from Oxford with a PhD in Physics, Sarjit was employed by 3M in England before relocating to the Twin Cities in April of 1989. He is presently a research scientist with 3M. He lives here with his wife, also from England, and his son and twin daughters.

When moving here from England, Sarjit packed his Indian spices and his music collection thinking these would not be readily available in the Twin Cities. His music collection would lead him to Steve Rosenberg, host of the program ‘Musica Mundana’ at KFAI in 1989. After making a request in 1990 for a radio show focusing on Indian music and culture, Sarjit’s proposal was accepted. He had two weeks to prepare for his first show! He met his co-host, Mukhtar Thakur, the following year. Since then, they have alternated weeks as hosts of Sangam.

Interview by Susan Buesgens, March 28, 2003:

• In the early days I would spend Sunday evening preparing, usually trying to put a theme together. It might be a particular type of show, a particular time frame, or a particular singer or composer, but something that would hold the show together. That was tough with a young family at home. Each trip home to England I would acquire more music — music from India bought in England, which has a large Indian community. What tends to happen now is I keep a collection of old, modern, classical or semi-classical music in a carrying case and I will just switch out some of the music now and then. With Mukhtar coming one week and me the next, which is typically how we do things, it gives me a chance to pull some things out and replace them with something else. Now I will line up about a half-dozen songs or so and have an idea of what I want to play and then line the rest up as I continue the show. In the beginning, managing the board was about all I could handle, but once Mukhtar came along he was good about having listeners call in during the show, so that has become part of our show. We work alone so we have to manage everything: phone calls, lining up music, being on the air and everything else. We have people that call in with requests and we try to honor that as well, so after the first year or so I could see it wasn’t worth lining up the whole show. We try to stay flexible.

• Much of it is available at local Indian shops on Central Ave. in Minneapolis (Asia Imports, Bollywood Imports, Patel Brothers - all at Central & 19th - or Devon Grocers at Central & 26th); or online on the internet - for example through Indian websites like www.rediff.com. Otherwise, a trip to Chicago or the East or West coast!

• Because of the regions we are from — I’m a Punjabi and Mukhtar is from Maharashtra, which is further south and closer to Bombay, there are some differences. There is a colorful folk dance from Punjab, called ‘Bhangra’. The rhythmic music for this dance morphed with the 70’s/80’s British rock and roll sound to produce the fusion we now call ‘Bhangra’ music. I tend to have a little more of this music because its from my neck of the woods in India and the language is Punjabi. Mukhtar stays on top of the latest and greatest hits from Bombay more than I do.

• Yes. The ‘Hits from Bombay’ are songs from Hindi films, which are mostly musicals. Most Indian popular music - not all, but most of it - comes from films where the music begins to take on a life of its own, independent of the film. Film music tends to change over time and genres like the Bhangra music which we talked about earlier, has had an influence there.

• There is a difference, but of course there are strong language differences as well. I tend to play Northern Indian music, Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu, which covers a swath across North India…maybe not quite as far as Bengal on the eastern side. The language of the Bombay film industry is primarily ‘Hindustani’, which is a mixture of the three languages, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. This is the music both Mukhtar and I are most familiar with. In southern India you have very different languages. Every now and then we try to have guests on the show from that part of India, to play and talk about music from their specific regions. But hopefully, the music on our program is a generic blend of music that everybody can participate in and be a part of.

• It’s pretty mixed. In fact, that was one of the nice things about the place when I first came here. There were small pockets of people from every area of India somewhere in the TC. The India Association is one way of bringing together all these groups. Since I have moved here the Indian population has almost doubled and as a consequence some of the groups are large enough to be self-sustaining. It’s a natural human tendency to focus within your own group, but I am hoping as those groups grow larger that participation in the larger Indian community will continue. I certainly hope to continue the program’s policy of inclusiveness because with some of the things that go on in India, there are fences put up between communities there. We’ve tried to be a part of ensuring those fences don’t come up here.

• It started out, and still is, for people within all segments of the Indian community here and also for people from the local American community. Occasionally we get calls in from people who have just tuned us in, asking us where the music is from and sometimes they become regular listeners to the program. A few years ago there were some people calling in and I was having a hard time pronouncing their names. It took me awhile to realize these were Tibetan refugees from here who had grown up outside of New Delhi and had grown up with Hindi music. So, that’s another community I know tunes in. We have people from the Iranian community because some of the music is similar, as well as from North Africa. Indian music tends to permeate its way through Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, so many people from that part of the world have come across Indian music before they came here. This is particularly true because of the popularity of Indian film music.

• It varies. I think the majority of the people tune in for the music though they may not like all the music. The younger people tend to like the more popular music and the older people want to listen to more of the semi-classical material like ‘ghazals’. We try to play some of the newer, more upbeat music in the first hour and the older, more semi-classical music in the second hour. We also read announcements of community events half way through the program. Many of the community groups have figured this out and will send us flyers ahead of time to read on the program so the rest of the community is aware of these events. Every now and then again we will have guests who come to talk about things of interest to the community. We also may occasionally have guests on the show to address society or community related issues. A little while back, we had people from the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights on the show to talk about their work, particularly with regard to the communal carnage that took place in Gujarat, one of the states in Western India. Two or three weeks ago I interviewed a young lady who used to be a student here — she had taken a month out of work and traveled in India. She is associated with AID-MN and had gone to see some of the development projects they fund in India. She came on the air to tell us about what she saw. Mukhtar has been very good about contacting political candidates to air their views during the political season. He had a real estate agent on one time to talk about mortgages and accessing mortgages. So it’s a whole host of things depending on what comes up. A long time ago I had some people come in and talk about religions in India. Given what’s happening not only there but here too, I feel maybe its time to go through that again. I’ll have some guests come to talk about Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam as it pertains to the Indian subcontinent.

• I’m here to disseminate music and views to the community, but I’ve also been the recipient of ideas and information about the host community here and I’ve really enjoyed that. Fresh Air has been kind of my ‘university’ experience since coming to the Twin Cities.

http://www.iamn.org --The India Association of Minnesota — longstanding community/cultural organization in the Twin Cities;

http://www.silcmn.org - School of India for Languages & Culture — teaches language/social studies/geography to young students in the Indian community, held on Saturdays at Como High School;

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~aidmn - The Association for India's Development, MN Chapter - part of a nationwide organization of student groups supporting development projects in India, and raising awareness in the local community through cultural events;

http://www.thesouthasian.org - A recent addition to local papers, published once every ~ two months;

http://www.imsom.org - The Indian Music Society of Minnesota (organizes concerts of Indian classical music);

http://www.ragamala.net - Music & Dance theater run by two excellent local Indian classical dancers, Rita Mustaphi & Ranee Ramaswamy;

http://www.pangeaworldtheater.org - An eclectic theater company run by the very talented husband/wife team of Dipankar Mukherjee & Meena Natarajan