Bulleh Shah's poetry finds a contemporary voice

The album artwork depicts the artistes travelling in an autorickshaw alongside Bulleh Shah, a transgender woman, and two youths, heading towards a more inclusive world. Pics courtesy/Radhika Sood Nayak

For more than 300 years, the poetry of Sayyid Abdullah Shah Qadri, better known as Bulleh Shah, has outlived empires, borders and generations. Chal Bulleya was independently released on Spotify on July 3 where singer Radhika Sood Nayak and musician Neil Mukherjee have given the 18th-century Sufi poet's message of equality and humanity a contemporary soundtrack in the hope of introducing it to younger listeners.

"The track has been in the pipeline for a very long time. Neil had the melody in mind before we even met, but when we eventually started working together, he asked me to sing it. I genuinely feel it has a destiny of its own because it waited for us to meet. It also gave me the opportunity to choose Bulleh Shah couplets that best suited the melody and reflected what we wanted to say," shares Sood Nayak.

Radhika Sood Nayak

For Mukherjee, the journey began nearly 15 years ago with a simple idea that slowly found its direction. "The initial idea first came to me around 15 years ago as a creative exercise to create an upbeat traveller's song, which eventually found its setting in an auto-rickshaw, carrying Baba Bulleh Shah's timeless message of equality. What began as an experiment for ourselves encourages younger listeners to discover Bulleh Shah's words," he says.

Neil Mukherjee

Instead of following a conventional song structure, Chal Bulleya threads together three of Bulleh Shah's couplets, anchored by the central refrain of Bulleh Shah's couplet, Chal Bulleya, Chal Othe Chaliye, which imagines a place where nobody is judged by caste or placed on a pedestal. "People often think Sufi poetry is only devotional, but Bulleh Shah was writing about society. He questioned everything, including fanaticism, caste and the authority of religious orthodoxy. To this day those hierarchies haven't disappeared; if anything, they've become even more pronounced. That's the lone simple reason why his words feel relevant today," Sood Nayak sums up.

Bulleh Shah

The centuries-old verses blend beautifully with the energetic, 1980s-inspired soundscape, making the track catchy and timeless. "When ideas of equality, inclusion and shared humanity reach young people through music they enjoy, there is hope that those ideas will continue to live on," concludes Nayak.

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