Out of the 18 months since he moved to Mumbai, Angaraag “Papon” Mahanta has spent maybe 90 days in his new city. Most of his time since his arrival has been spent working. 2011’s count has been: three movie soundtracks (Dum Maaro Dum, I Am Kalam and Soundtrack), two TV show sets (Coke Studio@MTV and The Dewarists), countless live gigs with his band Papon and The East India Company, a song on Indian Ocean guitarist Susmit Sen’s solo album, and the beginning of a year-long collaboration with Bickram Ghosh and Rachel Sermanni, called Troikala. He brings out his first Hindi album, called The Story So Far, next week.
There must be a holiday somewhere in his future, but Papon hasn’t seen it yet. His houses have been growing steadily smaller as his career has progressed: He has come to Mumbai from Delhi. “And I came to Delhi from Assam,” he smiles. “You can imagine.”
Wanderer: Papon’s new album releases next week. Photo by Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint.
We can imagine. Papon has steadily claimed our attention in the last year, not just with his sun-drenched voice in Hindi movie hits such as
Banao Banao and
Jiyein Kyun, but also with his arresting Assamese folk-rock, which we’ve heard in performances like
Bihu Naam (Pak Pak) on
Coke Studio@MTV, and
Khule Da Rabb, his collaboration with Rabbi Shergill on
The Dewarists.
His warm stage presence has energy without being frenetic. Watching him can feel like being at an exciting, but essentially laid-back jam session.
He happens to be a second-generation fusionista, which explains some things about his music. His parents are Assamese musical stars. Khagen Mahanta, his father, popularized the Bihu folk form and is a great melder of folk and popular styles; his mother, Archana Mahanta, is also a classical musician. “She was studying for her masters’ degree in classical music when she was pregnant with me,” Papon says. “I think the music started there.”
Folk and classical music resounded in the Mahanta house, and he studied both. “But my parents were also listeners of all kinds of good music,” he remembers. “I started picking up Mehdi Hassan ghazals when I was 5. People would ask my mother why I was into music that is so much about viraha (separation) , about the blues. ‘What blues does he have at 5?’”
The new album’s cover.
He remembers the music of Hassan, and Jagjit Singh, massively popular with his extended family (all musical) as the soundtrack of his childhood, and the voices of Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Farida Khanum. It wasn’t hard to fall into learning the tabla, the harmonium, and the khol (a terracotta two-sided drum), in which he was tutored by his father. His now-familiar guitar was a later addition. “You know how it is,” he grins. “You realize you want to jam, impress the girls.”
He moved to Delhi after school to be an architect, and music went from being his home to being a journey. It brought an epiphany with it. “The realization came that I could stand alone as a musician,” he says. “My parents are my influence and my inspiration, the source of everything I have become. But Delhi taught me that people who didn’t know my background would appreciate me for myself,” he says. “In Delhi, I began to think of music as a career.”
For a musician who now looks like he’s born to the stage, Papon’s career as a performer began much later than his career as a musician. Two years after his first album’s release, 2004’s Jonaaki Raati in Assamese, he held a live show in Guwahati because people began to clamour to hear the songs live. “I was really nervous,” he laughs. “I had only done school shows before.”
He jokes that he’s never completed anything in his life, but there has been an exceptional focus in Papon’s work since 2007, when he started Papon and The East India Company in Delhi, with his friends. Since then, he has worked often with the Midival Punditz, played concerts all over India and the world, and completed a cross-peninsular journey from Assam to the Arabian Sea.
His big project, starting next week, is The Story So Far. “It’s been in the making for the last 10 years,” he says. It was ready five years ago, but contract issues prevented him from releasing it. Having dusted it off, eager to liberate it into the light of day, he’s now thinking ahead. If he gets a chance, he’d like to stay in the city for a little while, and do some of the work he’s always meant to do in Bollywood. “I always knew I was going to be doing that some day,” he says. “I’ve grown with Bollywood, we all have. You can’t not. I wanted to be part of it—part of the good parts of Bollywood.”
Like his confrères the Midival Punditz, who asked him to sing on the Soundtrack album, he’s picked a worthwhile time to explore the industry. “You think so?” he says. “I think so too! For a while we’d lost that RD (Burman)-Kishore (Kumar) space—I don’t mean we were making bad songs for the last 15-20 years, but maybe we didn’t know where we were going. Now there’s such a wide open space. Every movie has a different sound now. It’s a great time.”
It’s been a tiring couple of years, but there are no holidays from music—not yet, at least, not even for someone who, as a child, never thought he was going to be a musician at all.
“Not never, that’s the wrong thing to say,” he corrects himself. “I took music for granted. People were always like, obviously he sings well, his parents are musicians. So I can say there was nothing surprising for me about music.”
The Story So Far releases on 10 January. Papon will play at the blueFROG, New Delhi, on 11 January, and at the blueFROG, Mumbai, on 12 January.
supriya.n@livemint.com