Representing Pakistan through Folk Music and Dance

Asian Music, 2006

Asian Music, 2020

This article examines techniques with which performers of Sindhi kāfī in Kachchh, Gujarat interweave Islamic teachings with dramatic events from regional narratives in order to locate musico-poetic affect within a paradigm of Islamic meaning. I analyze three implicit performance logics by which kāfī singers incorporate explication and storytelling into their performances, with each logic engaging in distinct ways with the allusive meanings of Sufi poetic texts. This article thus illuminates how the performative process of linking aspects of Islamic belief, history, and philosophy to sympathy for narrative protagonists and to feelings born of lived experience encourages the rich indexicality that undergirds musical affectivity.

MPHil thesis, 2014

This is my dissertation submitted towards the partial fulfilment of my MPhil degree at Jawaharlal Nehru University, JNU, New Delhi. Based on ethnographic and historiographic work, this study maps the sociocultural, religious, and political context of the contemporary proliferation of qawwali music in the Muslim pilgrimage space, Bollywood (specially post A.R. Rahman), and international and digital music cultures (including Coke Studio Pakistan).

Religions, 2020

In recent years, alongside the concurrent rise of political Islam and reactionary state policies in India, Sufism has been championed as an "acceptable" form of Islam from neoliberal perspectives within India and the Western world. Sufism is noted as an arena of spiritual/religious practice that highlights musical routes to the Divine. Among Chishti Sufis of South Asia, that musical pathway is qawwali, a song form that been in circulation for over seven centuries, and which continues to maintain a vibrant sonic presence on the subcontinent, both in its ritual usage among Sufis and more broadly in related folk and popular iterations. This paper asks, what happens to qawwali as a song form when it circulates in diaspora? While prominent musicians such as the Sabri Brothers and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan exposed audiences in the West to the sounds of qawwali, in recent years, non-hereditary groups of musicians based in the US and UK have begun to perform songs from the qawwali repertoire. In the traditional setting, textual meaning is paramount; this paper asks, how can performers transmute the a↵ective capacity of qawwali in settings where semantic forms of communication may be lost? How do sonic and metaphorical voices lend themselves to the circulation of sound-centered meaning? Through a discussion of the Sufi sublime, this paper considers ways sonic materials stitch together the diverse cloth of the South Asian community in diaspora.

The Muslim World Journal- "Qawwali: Poetry, Politics, and Performance", 2007

These collected essays are a diverse examination of the field of devotional music within the Sufi tradition called qawwali or sama'.

This article deals with origin, evolution and the heritage of Sufi music. The objective of this article is to trace the journey of Sufi musical practices and traditions across the world, their forms, and how Sufi music has created a heritage and subculture across the Muslim as well as non-Muslim world carving an identity for itself as liberal or spiritual Islam rather than legal Islam.

Torwali is a Dardic language spoken by a community of about 80,000-100,000 in the idyllic valleys of upper Swat district in north Pakistan. It is one of the Pakistan's 28 'definitely endangered languages' as categorized by UNESCO in its Atlas of World's Languages in Danger. In 2007 a team of community researchers undertook its 'preservation and promotion', organizing themselves into a local civil society organization Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT) – " Institute for Education and Development ". Since then the organization has made a number of revitalization initiatives, targeting youth and children. Initially IBT has developed orthography for the language; and based on that it established schools for children in their own language. The curriculum for the kids contains rhymes and poems. Secondly, IBT started a campaign in order to repackage the poetry and music so as to popularize it among all the community members relevant to all ages and genders. In Torwali music there has been only one genre of music called żo. This has been sung in one way only since centuries. This genre is very much liked by the elderly men and women but the youth and children, being influenced by modern Urdu and Pashto music, don't like this genre much. In the past, when the people of this community were less exposed to the dominant music and cultures, there used to be many poets, women and men alike, of żo, as people used to have their own cultural events and gatherings. In order to popularize the music, dances and traditional games among the youth IBT held a three-days indigenous cultural festival in 2011 with the name of Simam. In the festival youth sang Torwali songs in modern ways with modern themes. Though the way they sang was a bit of imitation of Pashto singing yet it popularized the Torwali music in the youth. In 2015 IBT undertook a Cultural Revitalization project wherein new songs are being produced and sung in a modern way where the 'modern' and 'traditional' will have a fusion. This paper is focused on the work done by IBT for Torwali music, its significance to foster identity based development; and, of course, the challenges it poses for the linguists, researchers and musicians.

Al Khadim Research journal of Islamic culture and Civilization

Traditional societies in all over the world carry a great sum of knowledge and wisdom which is constructed in the course of cultural process which is seldom heard and least understood. Folk forms of poetics and prose expressions are sole repositories of these societies which helps researchers, ethnographers, and cultural anthropologists to reconstruct an image of these societies which primarily rely on oral tradition. The folkloric genre of Pashto accumulates unprecedented texts and contexts to be unearthed. The most pervasive folkloric genres like Tappa, Sandara, Kakarai Ghardi, Char-Baita, Sarwakai, Loba, Da Attan Narey, Balandai, Mathnavis and several others have rich contents to unpack the popular notions of spirituality and people’s sense of religion and divinity. In order to study a unit of the Pashto folklore, this paper is taking on the Kakarai Ghari, a genre specifically created by the ordinary men and women in Northern Balochsitan predominantly inhabited by Pashtuns. The...

Music has always been a significant part of the lives of the people of Jammu and Kashmir in India. Since ancient times, Kashmir has been influenced by major cultures such as that of India, the near East, central Asia, and the West; the blending of different cultures (indigenous and foreign) has given Kashmiri music a rich and distinctive form. Sufiana Mausiqi is the classical Sufi ensemble music of the Kashmir region of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. This musical form developed through the Indo/ Central Asian cultural exchange that took place after the arrival of Islam and Sufism in the region during the 14 th century. The processes of globalisation and socioeconomic change, as well as the current volatile situation of the troubled region, have diminished and marginalised this glorious tradition and it is currently on the brink of extinction. The deplorable condition of this endangered art form is evident from the fact that there are at present only a few surviving artists struggli...