From the diary of an occasional
singer
Sufi music of our times
BY MADAN GOPAL SINGH
Jis tan laggeya ishq kamaal
Naache besur te betaal
(The body touched by the wondrous love/ Dances out of rhythm, out of note)
– Baba Bulleh Shah
I begin with a rather uneventful narration. This narration, in
my view, has a certain bearing on the purpose of this short introductory essay
on the unwritten polemic that surrounds the Sufi music of the subcontinent.
About a year ago I was invited to address a press conference as
part of a panel comprising mostly middle-rung musicians. The occasion was the
announcement of an ambitious project by a well-known record label in which I was
to feature as a singer of Sufi verses. I was a bit surprised when the organisers
presented me to the press as a Sufi singer. I had always maintained that a Sufi
singer was a separate and in today’s context possibly a non-existent category. I
was a mere crooner drawing liberally from the rich and all-inclusive heritage of
Sufi poetry and music and redeploying it with a clear political edge within the
space of cultural activism.
Whereas the distinction was extremely important to me for the
kind of work I did, the organisers did not feel the need to endorse my sense of
academic precision. For them perhaps this distinction was far too refined, far
too rarefied for the lay person to appreciate. They had little problem therefore
in sacrificing my pedantic concern at the altar of common sense where any singer
of Sufi verses was by implication a Sufi. What made me eminently suitable, I was
reassured with touching candour by another musician on the podium, was the aural
charm I exuded because of my flowing grey beard and perennially pensive eyes. I
did not quite know whether the comment was meant to genuinely assuage the
anxieties I had acquired as a somewhat reluctant scholar of Sufism or was
contrived to quite simply pull my leg. Nonetheless, I was left feeling somewhat
apprehensively happy.
My own little passage as a singer of Sufi verses had not only
been fortuitous but also, what seems like a cultural paradox, quite wilfully
eclectic.
My formative years, like most other children in the refugee
settlement where I grew up, were full of community pageants. Depending upon the
social scale on which these events unfolded, they could be both intimate and
impersonal. Some of these spectacles were woven around the rites of passage and
would always be accompanied by overpowering music. The larger community
ceremonies were invariably held at gurdwaras and were always a great learning
experience for at least some of us who nurtured visions of being able to perform
musically some day. The Gurdwara Kirtan Durbars1
and the Jor Melas2 on the one hand, and the darkened film theatres and the
radio on the other, held us enthralled.
These were songs of undying hope and deep despair; of
unquestioning surrender and exuberant challenge; of mystical romance and the
material desire to create, construct and shape a world around you. As one
approached the threshold of youthful maturity, the lure of popular music from
the West proved nearly catalytic in both its socially critical and joyously
romantic registers. My mother’s harmonium with a double German reed was the next
fetish object. My father sang songs of KL Sehgal – always standing, trying to
catch an invisible something – an emotion, an idea, a time gone by. We children
were held captive.
In the midst of all this, to borrow a poetic phrase from Neruda,
the Sufi music touched us…
Each summer we spent a part of our vacation at our maternal
grandparents’ crumbling house in Amritsar. It had dark unused corridors and
passages where light barely peeked through the sturdy iron mesh woven firmly
into each floor. The frozen darkness of the house was broken by the sound of a
radio set that had been mysteriously installed in that haunted mansion to keep
us, the little visitors from Delhi, pleased.
We would switch it on the moment the elders left for work. This
was a way of overcoming our fear of the fug of a hoary past that surrounded us
almost oppressively. We were beginning to confidently connect to a world out
there – a new world where we hoped to live some day. Even the squeaky radio
frequencies excited our imagination. We could see continents and seas beyond
borders beckoning us. We could also see the home our parents had left behind in
Lahore, barely 30 miles away from Amritsar – land now shut off by a political
divide. Glued to the Lahore station of Radio Pakistan, we would hear Allama
Iqbal’s hamd3: Lab Pe Aati Hai Dua Banke Tamanna Meri (A fervent
wish keeps coming to my lips)4 on the children’s programme and be deeply moved.
This was an amazing hamd – secular, warm and compassionate. Much later in
our lives were we to appreciate why this hamd was a popular morning
prayer at most schools before partition…
All this had changed in the schools that had come up after 1947.
I went to two such schools – a Nagar Nigam school run by the local municipal
body at first and a Khalsa school run by the Gurdwara Board later – in the late
1950s and early 1960s. The prayers had now become a lot more strident and
avowedly aggressive, doling out unabashed myths of religious superiority.
Special moral instruction classes were assigned where the instructors wove
hysterical tales of gory heroism, whipping up anti-Muslim sentiments.
This was also the period when the Muslim socials had virtually
disappeared from the film scene and the use of Urdu in mainstream Hindi cinema
was beginning to be a lot more restrictive and controlled. Nehru – the chacha we
so fondly looked up to – had suffered a paralytic stroke in the wake of the war
with China in 1962. His ailment, in retrospect, appears like a catalytic
metaphor of a major transition that was beginning to overtake the direction in
which India was now headed. The pristine dream of India as one family, one
community – Bapu (Gandhi), Chacha (Nehru), Sardar (Patel), Maulana (Azad),
Gurudev (Tagore) – was beginning to wither. We had quite clearly succeeded the
Midnight’s Children in much the same way as Shammi Kapoor’s ‘yahoo’ had
succeeded Dev Anand’s adventure through India as a joyous discovery made along
multiply connected highways. The IPTA songs had dried up. The Communist Party
had vertically split. Manoj Kumar’s developmental cinema of aggressive
self-assertion was waiting to happen. As indeed were the first Samyukta Vidhayak
Dal government, the militant Left, the agitations for linguistic and
regional identity, the famines… What’s more, India was getting sucked into a
decade of wars with Pakistan.
In the midst of all this turmoil, the hamd by Allama
Iqbal stood out as a secular reaffirmation of human dignity.
During these times of social repair and reconstruction we would
occasionally come across a teacher or two who carried a nostalgic longing for
the lost utopia into their pedagogic engagements. There was also a large crop of
poets, artists and performers who fearlessly espoused a vision of cultural
plurality even in the midst of those times of despair. The India of the late
1950s and early 1960s was, in a paradoxical sense, a vibrant space for much of
the displaced and homeless creativity.
Amritsar to us was like getting close to that mythical home. It
was there in the early 1960s that I heard for the first time a qawwali5 that was
to haunt me for a long, long while.
This qawwali was written by Sahir Ludhianvi for Barsaat Ki
Raat (1960) 6 and had an
entire community of singers, from the galactic Lata and Rafi to the marginal SD
Batish to Sudha Malhotra, participating in the true spirit of the Sufi zikr.7
This song was for the most part a mesmerising incantation in praise of ishq8
that seemed to go on and on. As a young and impressionable child I felt
intuitively drawn towards its heady beat. A little later, as a pubescent youth I
began responding to its thematic lure. Its use of takraar9
and the act of tying the girah10
were not merely saturated and resonant but profoundly assertive in a
creatively materialist sense. What’s more, the poem was unambiguously polemical
and unbelievably rich in its range of references. A significant body of the Sufi
heritage of Punjab seemed to have been seamlessly embedded in this song of
radical connectivity.11
This wondrous composition self-consciously eschewed inducing a state of wajd12
and thus succeeded in keeping its political edge alive and sharp and yet, unlike
the Brechtian technique of alienation, it did not shy away from being
emotionally excessive.
Sahir had always been taken up with the idea of homelessness in
both its celebrative and darker shades…
Unfortunately for us, the metaphor of homelessness has become a
dreaded reality driven by a brazen and murderously communal politics. In such
times of deep political crises and existential anxiety Sahir’s invocation of
this intrepid and secular Sufi tradition shows us the way. When we at SAHMAT
revisited the Sufi-Bhakti tradition in the wake of LK Advani’s communally
explosive Rath Yatra our cultural intervention was marked not only by the deeply
impassioned and persuasive intent of the songs but also by the profoundly
liberating influence they had on the performing artists themselves.
They performed with deep personal conviction and eventually
secured these songs forever in the secular space beyond the restrictive confines
of overt religiosity. Years later, when Rabbi Shergill sang Bulla Ki Jaana
Maen Kaun, we could clearly see the formation of a new cultural persona
rejecting identity politics without ever lapsing into a mode of surrender. This
was a joyous affirmation of a new selfhood. In one fell swoop we witnessed the
Sufi song move beyond the glorified capitulation of the self to an imagined
Ultimate Subject.
**
To return to the press conference with which I began,
immediately after I was introduced as a Sufi singer there was yet another,
totally unexpected and far bigger shock in store for me. Present in our midst
was the young and highly talented sarangi player, Kamal Sabri, with whom I had
worked closely for a while and performed in India and Pakistan. In his youthful
exuberance, he dropped a virtual bombshell by questioning the separate
categorisation of Sufi music as a full-fledged genre worthy of inclusion within
the project. He was very emphatic about this, averring that there was no such
thing as Sufi music. He maintained that it had no tangible or formalised
existence as distinct from other generically identified forms of Indian music.
The only thing Sufi about what was touted as Sufi music, in his view, was the
Sufiana kalaam (mystical poetry).
The entire heritage of what we had been given to believe was
Sufi music seemed to come crumbling down. It was not easy to dismiss the young
musician’s premise lightly. Not only was he a gharanedar musician (of the
gharana), his family had close links with the Sabria silsila (order).
Besides, his family had been very close to the well-known ethnomusicologist,
Regula Burkhardt Qureshi, whose work on the Sufi music of India and Pakistan
continued to draw unflinching admiration from the cognoscenti.
Within the space of an hour I was made to go through a crisis
that was both canonically and existentially crucial to my own somewhat
restricted engagement with music. What am I? A Sufi? A singing-masquerade? What
have I been singing all these years? If Sufi music did not exist at all then
what did I hear when I heard what people received and feted as Sufi music? How
would I now reclassify the names of Mian Abu Bakar, Hazrat Amir Khusrau, the
Qawwal Bachche; the singing of Ustad Fateh Ali, Mubarak Ali, Aziz Mian, Ustad
Jaafar Hussain, Sher Ali, Mehr Ali, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali, Allan Faqir, Alim
and Farghana Qasimov, Shajarian, Shahram Nazeri, Tufail Niazi, Abida Parveen,
Saeen Zahoor; and the list could go on and on.
If this press conference brought about a temporary disquiet in
my being about the nature of Sufi music and the direction in which it had grown,
there was a positive fallout as well. It made me think about Sufi music beyond
generic confines. I had always believed that in its eclectic energy Sufi music
had drawn and never stopped drawing liberally from diverse sources. Not that
Sufi music was generically non-existent. It made me realise that Sufi music has
in fact never been exclusively about music. Perhaps no other music can be, in
the sense in which Indian classical music has been. Earlier it was driven by an
etiquette of spirituality and its concomitant rituals; today it is monitored by
the cultural industry as a fetish object on the one hand and also espoused by
radical cultural activists as a poignant tool of resistance.
***
A few years ago I was invited to plan a musical soirée around
the theme of Sufism for a Delhi-based business tycoon who happened to deal in
ship scraps. I must confess to having been deeply fascinated by the image of the
gargantuan ships finally reaching their last, albeit temporary, abode. There was
something touchingly otherworldly and almost poetic about this transient image
of tired ships at the end of their long, dark journeys.
The event I was asked to design was part of an extended wedding
ceremony in the family. The venue was to be an exotic fortress-cum-hotel near
Alwar. The tycoon’s daughter was getting married and, doting father that he was,
he dreamt of the occasion as an effusive gift to his child. For hadn’t she once
expressed a desire to be initiated into the Sufi way through the irresistible
lure of its music? This was a Punjabi Hindu family with little religious linkage
to Sufism. In our part of the world Sufism continued to be perceived mainly as a
quaint and spectacular offshoot of Islam.
I had never designed such a function before and definitely not
for money. I considered myself to be an occasional cultural activist who took
pride in singing free of charge for progressive and secular causes. Such a
position has always seemed to me to be creatively closer to the Sufi spirit and
I felt somewhat purified and liberated after every concert. I had kept
judiciously away from the moneybags and it was only with extreme reluctance that
I was persuaded to accompany my painter friend, Manjeet Bawa, to liven up the
insulated penthouses of the rich and famous with Sufi melodies and verses. Sufi
music, as I understood it, was originally meant to be a community experience
where the rich and the poor would mingle freely and possibly without a sense of
divisive socio-economic hierarchy. It was meant to be performed in a spiritually
well-defined space for khalq-e-khuda (people of god) gratis.
In retrospect, I look back and wonder if a Sufi concert of the
kind I had designed was not in effect a contradiction in terms. In a traditional
Sufi congregation the performing musicians and devout followers were supposed to
be bound together in a highly coded etiquette of listening and spiritual
bonding. None of this was likely to be in evidence during the wedding pageant
wherein the Sufi verses and melodies I had chosen would be happily subsumed. And
this was only a minuscule part of the various ways in which I thought the very
nature of Sufi performances was beginning to irreversibly change.
Now the entire idea of Sufism in general and Sufi music in
particular was changing irreversibly. It was not only changing around me but in
my own case as a performer through me. I did not profess to be a Sufi. I was,
after all, not a Muslim. To make matters worse, I was a non-practising Sikh and
a near atheist. I was fascinated by Sufi music and had read detailed accounts of
the poets and the silsilas they represented. I had visited many Sufi
shrines and had been deeply moved by a large body of Sufi poetry and music. But
I was not a Sufi. Over a period of time I had somehow convinced myself of
the improbability of the existence of a practising Sufi. The age of fakirs had
withered and the dervishes had lost all their sanguine spirit to the whirling
traps of unending ritual.
Since my name had been recommended by the then reigning deity of
Indian popular music, with whom I had enjoyed working and for whom I had, and
still have, a deep personal regard, I accepted the responsibility without much
fuss. To my great joy I subsequently discovered that the rich tycoon for whom I
was to design the evening was a man of impeccable taste and no little learning.
His daughter was doing her doctoral research at Oxford and apart from being
superaffluent the family was academically almost awe-inspiring. The bridegroom
was to fly in from Dubai where he worked as a senior executive in a
multinational sports company. The audience included the rich and famous: poets,
painters, politicians, power brokers, professors, princes… and sundry other
shades of prominence. In the midst of this diverse audience, I, once a film
scholar and occasional cultural activist, now stood nervously as a learned
mirasi (minstrel) whose scholarship was acknowledged for whatever it was
more out of politeness than genuine conviction.
Our first goal was to identify musicians to the mutual
satisfaction of all. This did not prove to be difficult even if our host
insisted on the inclusion of a group of popular qawwals on the recommendation of
the reigning deity who had abstained from all deliberations thus far. I had over
a period of time developed fairly strong views on the quality of music produced
by the Indian qawwals and did not find their singing either traditionally
credible or musically convincing. After some persuasion our sponsor agreed to
drop the qawwals and settled on the Mangniars I had proposed instead.
I had lined up the finest singers from among the Mangniars, a
tribe of traditional Muslim singers from the sleepy deserts of Rajasthan. The
great advantage of inviting these singer-musicians was, I believed, their
repertoire which cut across linguistic and cultural barriers with amazing ease.
They could sing in six different linguistic registers without ever sounding
unconvincing. This group of extraordinary musicians usually sang lilting
melodies pertaining to Hindu rites of passage, of changing seasons, of rare
pastoral landscapes, lonesome trees and camels in vast deserts, of myriad Hindu
gods and goddesses. These musicians still saw themselves as belonging to the
jajmani system and their patrons happened to be largely Hindus who had
fallen on bad times.
On that particular day however the Mangniars were going to sing
haunting melodies that they offered gratis at the mazars of their pirs and
murshids for a gathering of believers who were willing to shed the
inhibitions of the self and pass into a state of trance. As for my musicians,
they happened to be professionals with a relatively lesser degree of spiritual
involvement in the enterprise of Sufism. My own position within this musical
show was that of a lec-dem performer – singing a little, explaining a lot.
I could clearly see through my own agency how in recent years
Sufi music had moved decisively away from its traditional performative spaces or
base. The khanqahs and the dargahs had receded in a dreamy haze. The new
exponents of Sufi music had emerged from chaotically diverse backgrounds of
cultural activism, exciting new scholarship, religious fluidity, transgressions
and musical lineage, if any. Some of these singers had emerged over a period of
time with more than moderate success as the embodiments of lifestyle statements
that go far beyond conventional modes of singing, musical adaa (style),
elan or etiquette. It seemed to extend into the domain of haute couture – a
certain styling of the look with an appropriately randomised vocabulary;
cross-continental diaspora, travelling histories and global tourism; new
technologies of communication and the parasitic cultural industry.
In another sense, its creative reach had been stretched and had
begun to extend well beyond the ambit of Islam or even what had been understood
as Sufism in the popular perception. The very nature of Sufi music as such stood
radically changed. In the light of these changes a series of questions were
bound to arise even as this cultural shift ushered in completely new and
unexpected possibilities.
Perhaps the single most important fallout of this emergent
phenomenon is that more and more people understand what they do of Sufism
through what they receive as Sufi music. There is a clearer desire to reinstall
Sufi music beyond the pale of religion, at times paradoxically within modes of
cloned religiosity. In other words, there is perhaps a problematic but
celebrative conflation of Sufi music with the idea of Sufism as imagined and
experienced by people across linguistic, cultural and religious boundaries.
With this change, vis-à-vis social reorganisations themselves
assimilating the vestigial, the very idea of Sufism becomes conflated almost
exclusively with a mode of singing. How does one relocate and readdress the very
question of Sufism as distinct from what is termed as Sufi music? Is there a
form of music quintessentially and non-negotiably Sufi in nature? What is the
status of the verses and melodies identified with the long-established
conventions of Sufism within the new order of things?
Conversely, how has the very idea of music changed in view of
its growing dissociation from its spiritual history and the centres of
spirituality in which it flourished and developed for almost a thousand years?
What role have the new technologies of communication – the talkies, the
wireless, the satellite channels and the Internet – played in not only
disseminating Sufi music but also in its integration within the growing idea of
cultural industry? How have these technologies helped produce syncretic and
secular communities of new consumer recipients? These are some of the questions
that both the cultural activist and the performing artist would need to address.
(Madan Gopal Singh is a musician, film historian and cultural
activist.)
Notes
1 The religious festivals of the Sikhs invariably culminated
in soirées of devotional music involving important exponents of kirtan held
within the precincts of the gurdwara.
2 A fair-like large congregation of devotees, held especially
within the precincts of the historic gurdwaras, where the folk and the popular
mingle freely with the canonically mystical.
3 Hamd, in the Islamic tradition, is a
poem/composition in praise of god.
4 Lab pe aati hai dua banke tamanna meri
Zindagi shama ki surat ho khudaya meri
(A fervent wish keeps coming to my lips/ My life may glow
like an impassioned flame, O God!)
Door duniya ka mere dam andhera no jaaye
Har jagah mere chamakane se ujaala ho jaaye
(My deeds may dispel the world’s darkness/ With my sparkle
may the entire world light up!)
Ho mere dam se yoon hi mere watan ki zeenat
Jis tarah phool se hoti hai chaman ki zeenat
(Because of my deeds may my homeland dazzle/ Just as a garden
through its flowers blossoms)
Zindagi ho meri parwaane ki surat ya rab
Ilm ki shama se ho mujhko mohabbat ya rab
(O Lord! My life may be the life of a moth/ O Lord! May the
flame of knowledge be my love)
Ho mera kaam garibon ki himaayat karna
Dard-mandon se zaifon se mohabbat karna
(May all my deeds be supportive of the poor/ May I forever
the suffering humanity love)
Mere Allah buraai se bachaanaa mujhko
Nek jo raah ho us raah pe chalaanaa mujhko
(Protect me, O God, from the evil path/ Make me tread the
path of good deeds, O Lord!)
5 A mode of group-singing associated primarily with Sufi
music. Structurally, it consists of a naghma (melody) played on
instruments, a rubai or a poetic verse that precedes the main composition
cutting into the naghme, a mukhra or refrain which may be like the
antara or the stanzas that follow by obsessive argumentation of
takraar or may go out of the main song altogether to tie a knot outside,
girah lagaana, and fortify a polemical loop before returning to the main
song. Qawwali is often led by one or two main singers who are supported by a
group who provide vocal and rhythmic support by clapping
their hands to fixed beat structures.
6 Na To Karvaan Ki Talash Hai.
7 Zikr is a creative act of remembrance in a
collective Sufi ceremony of listening known as samaa.
8 Ishq or Love – the concept central to all Sufi
practices.
9 Takraar or the argumentative in Sufi music –
especially in qawwalis – is an obsessive and recurring emphasis on a keyword or
phrase.
10 Girah lagaana.
11 To pick a few examples from the poem at random, the
following lines clearly invoke the poets whose names are parenthesised:
Ishq aazaad hai, hindu na musalmaan hai ishq (Bulleh
Shah)
Aap hi dhamar hai aur aap hi imaan hai ishq (Bulleh Shah,
Ghulam Farid)
Jisase aagaah nahi shekh-o-barahaaman dono (Kabir, Bulleh
Shah)
Us haqiqat ka garajataa hua ailaan hai ishq (Sultan Bahu,
Bulleh Shah)
Allah rasul ka farmaan ishq hai (Waris Shah)
Yaane hafiz ishq hai, quraan ishq hai (Ghulam Farid)
12 Wajd, a state induced by the zakir (the ones who lead
zikr – usually a set of musicians) in the listener during samaa when
the listener loses all worldly bearings and moves into a state of spiritual
unity with the one remembered.
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