THE latest trend on British and American university campuses is to oppose so-called ‘cultural appropriation’. An increasingly influential offshoot of identity politics, cultural appropriation most often involves minority groups complaining that the majority is being oppressive by adopting elements of the minority’s culture. White British students, for example, are told that they cannot wear a shalwar kameez. To do so, the argument goes, amounts to an invasion of the cultural space of Pakistani students and is akin to colonialism. Similarly, non-West Indians are told they should not wear dreadlocks. On US campuses fancy dress parties have been cancelled for fear that people might be disrespectful of native American culture by wearing feather headdresses or insulting Mexicans by donning wide brimmed sombreros.

It’s not a line of argument likely to appeal to Madan Gopal Singh. The son of Punjabi poet Harbhajan Singh, he is an enthusiastic aficionado of cultural appropriation. He sings Sufi music with a Christian guitarist, Muslim percussionist and Hindu sarod player. Indeed Gopal Madan Singh is so committed to cultural diversity that he has translated Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and John Lennon into Punjabi and written his own Sufi influenced music to accompany their lyrics. He has even been known to mix up these western icons with Waris Shah’s 250-year-old love poem, ‘Heer’.

“I think it’s terrible,” he says of cultural appropriation. “We have to question the kind of identity politics that creates rigidity.”

Singh’s family fled Lahore in 1947. He was brought up in a refugee colony near Delhi, an environment, he believes, that helped embed values of tolerance and empathy. All around him people were speaking a mix of many dialects of the Punjabi language. “It is so important. The one way we can emerge from our trauma … the only way to get out of that was to not only celebrate who we once were but also look ahead and imbibe the diverse.”

Visitors to the home provided broad influences in the form of poetry books from all over the world and intellectual discussions that the young Singh was able to eavesdrop. “Critical debates were going on,” he recounts. “I would hide behind the curtains listening to these people speaking in a highfalutin way.”

Singh’s career has been as eclectic as his music. A composer, singer, lyricist, actor, screenwriter, film theorist and English literature lecturer, he once edited the magazine, Journal of Arts and Ideas. “I used to be an intellectual writing on critical theory, culture, film theory and so on. This is the work I did for 10 years. I was running one of the most esoteric journals you can imagine but one day I realised that I was not organic enough and had to do something that would bring me to the central core of whom I am. That’s how I became a mendicant singer.”

It was a part of his life he embarked on without any formal preparation. “I have no training in music. So this is all intuition,” he says.

Even so he started young. In 1959, when Singh was a slightly irreverent nine-year-old schoolboy, one of his teachers spotted some talent and decided to nurture it. He took his young pupil to a Punjabi village that, each year, hosted a festival for the refugees who had been uprooted during Partition. “Every year the people met to celebrate the songs they had lost and things they had left behind.”

Even though he sees no possibility of Punjabi reunification, Singh hopes he can foster connections between the two sides of the divided province by being an imaginary “floating bridge” between people in the two Punjabs. His many performances in Pakistan have included taking time out from writing the music for the award-wining 2003 film Khamosh Pani to sing at the Baba Bulleh Shah shrine near Lahore. “With every phrase I sang they rose in a wave: ‘my Shah, your Shah, Bulleh Shah, Bulleh Shah’. That was emotionally saturating.”

And it was followed by an unexpected experience. “I don’t believe in omens and signs but I was asked to place my hand on the tomb and I don’t know if it was real or not, but a current ran through my body.”

Singh is a man of broad horizons who performs his music all over the world. But however much he travels he remains firmly rooted in South Asia and holds tight to his determination to promote values of love, friendship and tolerance. “What happened in 1947 was horrendous … Now we have moved 70 years from that time and there is a sense of closure that should show itself in love and dance. That was the message of my 13 songs for Khamosh Pani ... we need a cultural articulation of unity”.

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2016