Shemeem B. Abbas - The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual - Devotional Practices of Pakistan and India-University of Texas Press (2003)
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oaa oeeeAbbas Shemeem Burney Abbas
Also of interest middle eastern studies; women’s studies; ethnomusicology Foreword by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea Also of interest
The
The female voice plays a more central role in Sufi ritual, especially in the singing of devotional
men and popular music in algeria “a trade like any other”
poetry, than in almost any other area of Muslim culture. Female singers perform sufiana-
The Social Significance of Raï Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt
Female Voice in Sufi Ritual
kalam, or mystical poetry, at Sufi shrines and in concerts, folk festivals, and domestic life,
by marc schade-poulsen by karin van nieuwkerk
while male singers assume the female voice when singing the myths of heroines in qawwali
and sufiana-kalam. Yet, despite the centrality of the female voice in Sufi practice through-
Raï music is often called the voice of the “Van Nieuwkerk’s book is unique because
out South Asia and the Middle East, it has received little scholarly attention and is largely
voiceless in Algeria, a society currently swept it transcends formulaic suppositions and
unknown in the West.
by tragic conflict. Raï is the voice of Algerian provides intelligent analysis of a world which
This book presents the first in-depth study of the female voice in Sufi practice in the
men, young men caught between genera-
The
has been overlooked for too long. She has
subcontinent of Pakistan and India. Shemeem Burney Abbas investigates the rituals at the
tions and classes, in political strife, and in partaken in the life of humble entertainers
Sufi shrines and looks at women’s participation in them, as well as male performers’ use of
FemaleinVoice
economic inequality. In a ground-breaking and has tried to understand and explain what
the female voice. The strengths of the book are her use of interviews with both prominent
study, anthropologist Marc Schade-Poulsen their daily and professional lives are like, how
and grassroots female and male musicians and her transliteration of audio- and videotaped
uses this popular music genre as a lens they perceive their profession and themselves
performances. Through them, she draws vital connections between oral culture and the
through which he views Algerian society, and how they are perceived by others. In do-
written Sufi poetry that the musicians sing for their audiences. This research clarifies why
particularly male society. He situates raï ing so she has written a highly readable and
the female voice is so important in Sufi practice and underscores the many contributions of
within Algerian family life, moral codes, and enjoyable ethnography.”
women to Sufism and its rituals.
broader power relations. —Middle Eastern Studies
Shemeem Burney Abbas is Professor of English Language and Applied Linguistics at Al-
Sufi Ritual
isbn 0-292-78723-5, paperback
Modern Middle East Series, published lama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad, Pakistan. She is currently teaching in the English
with the Center for Middle Eastern Stud- Department of the University of Texas at Austin.
ies, University of Texas at Austin printed in u.s.a.
Visit us online at www.utexas.edu/utpress,
isbn 0-292-77740-x, paperback
or write for our Middle Eastern studies catalog.
University of Texas Press Devotional Practices of
po box 7819 austin tx 78713-7819
Pakistan and India
University of Texas Press
Austin
texas
Tseng 2002.9.25 07:23 6657 Abbas / THE FEMALE VOICE IN SUFI RITUAL / sheet 1 of 239
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6657 Abbas / THE FEMALE VOICE IN SUFI RITUAL / sheet 3 of 239
The
Female Voice
in
Sufi Ritual
G
by Shemeem Burney Abbas
Foreword by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
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©
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition,
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work
should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press,
P. O. Box , Austin, TX -.
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements
of / .- () (Permanence of Paper).
--
Abbas, Shemeem Burney, –
The female voice in Sufi ritual : devotional practices of Pakistan and India /
by Shemeem Burney Abbas ; foreword by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
--- (cloth : alk. paper)
. Music—Religious aspects—Sufism. . Sufi music—Pakistan.
. Sufi music—India. . Sufism—Rituals. . Muslim women—
Pakistan—Religious life. . Muslim women—India—Religious life.
I. Title.
..
.''—dc
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Dedicated to
the musicians who speak here
and
all those who supported this research
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Contents
’ : , ,
ix
xiii
: ’
xvii
xxix
. History and Economy of Women in Sufi Ritual
. Ethnographies of Communication
. Female Myths in Sufism
. The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual
. Closing the Circle of the Mystic Journey
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Follows transliteration system for Urdu and Pakistani languages
ب b ڑ ṛ ک k
پ p ز ze گ g
ت t ژ zh ل l
ٹ ṭ س s م m
ث s ش ś ن n
ج j ص s Panjabi retroflex nasal
ن n
چ c ض z
as in jā
nā
ح h ط t
و v
خ kh ظ z
ه h
د d ع
as in khā e
۶
ڈ ḍ غ g
ىے y
ذ z ف f
ر r ق q
a as in bas i as in bichānā
ā as in ām ī as in dīvānī
ã as in ãgūr ĩ nasalized ‘‘ī’’ as in nahĩ
nasalized version of ā ū vowel as in oo
as in kah nasalized ‘‘u’’ as in h
e as in hue o as in ho
ε as in hε õ nasalized ‘‘o’’ as in hathõ
ẽ nasalized ‘‘e’’ as in mẽ
which is ‘‘I,’’ and also
the preposition for ‘‘in’’
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Author’s Note: Translations,
Transliterations, and Conversation
Analysis Transcript Notation
All the translations and transliterations (see opposite page) are mine unless
otherwise indicated. The translations are not a literal rendering of the text;
rather, they are done to convey the mood of the Sufi poems so that the reader
can enjoy the emotion of the lyrics as they are sung.
In order to represent some of the qawwālī and sufiāna-kalām contexts, I
have adapted the conversation analysis transcript system,1 which enables
readers to follow the transmission of live speech. I further adapt the system
to transcribe the interviews with the musicians. In some of the qawwālī con-
texts discussed in the earlier part of the study, I adapted the conversation
analysis system to capture the turn-taking among the qawwāls.
Letters such as A, B, and C represent the different qawwāls, and lines are
numbered according to the pauses in the musicians’ narratives and where
semantically I find the end of the line. A Panjabi qawwālī sung by Ustad
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his ensemble in England in is represented
thus:2
C Sir devĩ te vafā na mang ĩ-ehī pīr Farīd dā dase
A Palak palak pardesī- kāran--merī akhī ne savāṇ lāe
B Palak palak pardesī- kāran--merī akhī ne savāṇ lāe
A Allah jāne—
C Give thy head, expect no loyalty in return—
O, this is Farid, the Saint’s wisdom
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A For the one who went have my eyes shed a monsoon of tears--
B For the one who went have my eyes shed a monsoon of tears--
A O, God alone knows—
In the transliterations, punctuation is not used to mark conventional gram-
matical units; rather, the marks attempt to capture characteristics of speech
delivery. Thus, I use the following symbols:
// Slash marks represent overlapping utterances in the qawwālī per-
formance, such as when the Sabri Brothers sang a qawwālī in England
in using Mira Bai’s voice where she expresses her devotion for
Khawaja Muinuddin Chishti of Ajmer:3
A ncī beṛī mere Khāja kī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī
B // ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī
A O, mighty is my Khaja’s abode
B // ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-ī-
-- Hyphens between the long ‘‘ī’’s represent Mira Bai’s melismatic cry
or other such occurrences in qawwālī. Otherwise a hyphen indicates a
short, untimed pause within a sentence.
: Colons indicate an extension of the sound of the syllable they
follow:
co: lon Kubra : we we: re going
Allāh ho - Nabī:: O ::O 4 God ho - Prophet:: O : O
Allāh ho - Nabī:: O :: O God ho - Prophet:: O : O
Allāh ho - ho Nabi :: O : O God ho - ho Prophet:: O : O
In the sufiānā-kalām contexts where a solo singer chants, such as Abida
Parvin’s performance at the Open University auditorium in that is cited
below,5 the lines are numbered and the performers are marked with let-
ters. The audience interaction is represented through the overlap symbols
(slashes), such as:
A Ik harf iśq dā na paṛh jāṇan
A Bhulan phiran bicāre hū
B // th /th /th /th [audience claps] 6
A They can’t read a word of love
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A The poor souls are lost
B // th /th /th /th [audience claps]
The conversation analysis system was adopted only in the earlier perfor-
mances that I studied between and . I do not follow it in the per-
formances that I transliterated after , although I use some conventions
from the system in the interviews with the musicians.
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Foreword
Western scholars have described Islam as a ‘‘male’’ religion, a characteriza-
tion that continues to be repeated well into the twenty-first century. As
evidence for this position, commentators state and restate that no women
are observed in the mosque for prayers, that only boys appear to be stu-
dents in the Quranic schools, and that female participation is lacking dur-
ing the major religious feasts (the Iid al Fitr which follows Ramadan, and
the Iid al Adha, or feast of sacrifice). If this is actually the case, how could
Islam be seen as other than male-focused? This view arises from several
misconceptions.
Primary among these is the early scholars’ need to compare Islam to a
familiar system, i.e., Christianity. Such a comparison ignores a central fact:
the mosque is not, like the Christian church, the center of religious obser-
vance. The focus of Muslim practice, like the focus of Judaic religious prac-
tice, lies in the home. The home is where the rituals marking the religious
year take place and where women have tended to pray. And girls have always
attended Quranic schools and received religious education, though often in
private settings separate from boys. Further, early Western studies of Islam
were text-based, rather than being the result of on-the-ground research and
fieldwork in Muslim countries. The absence of a common language has also
contributed to an ethnocentric view. Until very recently, knowledge of Ara-
bic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, and other languages spoken by Muslims around
the world was minimal in the West. Muslim scholars themselves only began
to write in English, French, and German after the nineteenth-century incur-
sions by Western colonial powers.
Ethnocentrism also affected scholars’ recognition of the importance of
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different categories of religious behavior that might not be present to the
same degree in Christian practice. Here I speak of Sufism, or Islamic mysti-
cism, and the far-flung series of lodges that the Sufi brotherhoods and sister-
hoods have established over the centuries throughout the Islamic world.
Sufi lodges, or zawiyas, are found from Morocco across the Fertile Crescent
to Turkey, South Asia, and the Gulf States. (They are not found, of course,
among Wahhabi adherents in Saudi Arabia.) Sufism, however, has always
been regarded with some ambiguity by Muslim imams and mullahs, who see
the rituals of the Sufi tariqas (organizations) as less than orthodox. But as is
the case with all religious institutions, the way in which a belief is formally
stated and the way in which it is expressed often differs among believers.
Thus, just as the rise of holy figures and the pilgrimage to shrines such as
Lourdes, Ste. Anne de Beaupré, and Our Lady of Guadalupe arouse contro-
versies within the orthodox hierarchy of Christian Catholicism, so do the
activities of the regional cults or organizations evoke mixed feelings among
the theologians of Islam.
But the Sufi brotherhoods and sisterhoods have persisted, despite religious
disfavor and government attempts to curtail their practices. In Libya, dur-
ing the Italian colonial period, it was the chain of Sufi Senussi lodges that
kept Islamic learning alive and served as a rallying point for Muslims object-
ing to Italian occupation. Mustafa Kemal outlawed the Sufi lodges in Turkey
in the s, believing that they had a deleterious influence on his coun-
try’s modernization program, and also perhaps posed a political threat to
his new republican government. In Morocco and Algeria, young survivors of
the French colonial period saw the shrines as evidence of backwardness, and
a program to discredit them began among the newly independent citizens.
But the Sufi groups survived, and they continue to prosper throughout the
Islamic world. Similar organizations are found in South Asia.
Sufi rituals vary from country to country and from rural to urban areas.
In some, the lodge is an adjunct to the local mosque, and the activities are
closely related. In others, the lodge is a separate building and organization.
The organizations embrace both men and women in the rituals, sometimes
separately, sometimes together in congregational settings. French ethnogra-
phers in North Africa noted early the marabouts (shrines) scattered through
the countryside as well as the cities, shrines dedicated to walis (holy men),
which are the focus of annual moussems, or celebrations of the lives of the
holy men and women for whom the shrines are named. But the French eth-
nographers seldom mentioned the women auxiliaries of these same mara-
bouts. It is only in the work of indigenous social scientists, such as the
Tunisian anthropologist Sophie Ferchiou, that we find accounts of women’s
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participation in annual rituals, and their daily or monthly visits (ziārat) to
the shrines. And almost nothing has been published in English about men
and women in South Asian Sufism.
Given these gaps in western scholarship about Islam, then, it is a great
pleasure to introduce the book that follows: The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual,
by Shemeem Abbas. Dr. Abbas is a native of Pakistan who has lived and
studied in the West over a period of several years and holds advanced de-
grees from both British and American universities. Dr. Abbas’ first inter-
est in South Asian Sufis focused on the linguistic and performance aspects
of their regular rituals. For her doctoral dissertation, she documented per-
formances and linguistic variations within Pakistani communities. She at-
tended sessions not only in her native land, but also in England and the
United States, where Pakistanis far from home were developing their own
versions of traditional rituals.
Now Dr. Abbas has built upon her earlier research to give us the follow-
ing work. She has set down events in the ritual cycle in which both men
and women are participants. Through her work in historical archives, she
has discovered early examples of women’s roles as participants, performers,
and creators of texts. In travels throughout Pakistan, she visited village and
city groups, recorded local variants of rituals, and interviewed not only the
Sufi singers (both men and women), but also members of the audiences and
local critics. This was possible because of her command of local languages,
which allowed her access to local oral traditions. She has translated many of
the texts in a fluid and accessible style. Dr. Abbas’ research and insight has
allowed her to integrate this new material into a South Asian case study, an
in-depth view, in English, of women’s role in Sufism.
The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual will come as no surprise to Muslim
readers. But for Western audiences, it offers an introduction to an area of
religious expression—that of women—which has been largely ignored and
which is important to all people in the diverse world of Islam.
Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
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Map . Landmarks of Sufi shrines in the subcontinent, adapted by the author from
Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, vol. (New Delhi: Munshiram
Manoharlal Publishers, ), –.
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Preface
’
This book documents the place of women in Sufi practice in the subcon-
tinent of Pakistan and India. Samā, or the context where devotional Sufi
poetry is sung and heard,1 is almost unknown in the West but is widespread
in the Muslim cultures of South Asia and the Middle East. Although it is a
significant dimension of Sufi Islam, samā is poorly documented and scarcely
understood among the wider scholarly audience. Women’s contribution to
this is even less known. Despite the strong gender component of Sufi ritual
discourse, the role of women has been ignored in scholarly work. It is very
much a part of the living Sufi traditions in countries like Iran, Iraq, Turkey,
Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and India.
In the Islamic world, the mosque is primarily an arena for male activity,
with little visible participation of women in the rituals. In the major mosques
in Pakistan, for instance, there is a small space where women can go and
pray on Friday or on religious festivals such as the Eid.2 In the local mohallā
mosques there is no possibility for a female to offer her ritual prayers. The
domain is exclusively for male participation. Thus, the important spheres of
religious and spiritual participation for women are the Sufi shrines. There,
women’s input is visible and they are significant participants in events.
The field has never been the subject of investigation by either native
or western male scholars for a number of reasons. Among native scholars
the area is ignored despite the fact that women have done much to educate
the renowned male Sufis. Women are only referred to as mothers or sisters
or spouses of the members of a Sufi silsilā (order).3 A researcher of Amir
Khusrau has stated,
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We do not know whether Khusrau had any sisters, for the eastern phi-
losophers generally do not bother themselves about the female rela-
tives of a person; they are considered to be either too insignificant to
be mentioned or too sacred and inappropriate to be brought into the
glaring and unholy light of publicity.4
Western male scholars have ignored the field because, as men, they cannot
access the female domains of participation. They cannot enter the culturally
close-knit networks among women in the ritual participation at Sufi shrines
or at the community festivals, called melās, where much activity takes place.
Furthermore, they have been handicapped due to their lack of knowledge
of the indigenous languages. They cannot fathom the nuances of the dis-
course in which the ritual linguistic play of Sufi poetry is carried out but in
which the illiterate yet informed audiences of the events are fully proficient
through oral instruction.
I bring my own understandings and experiences of the culture that I por-
tray. I convey the intuitions and subtleties of an oral culture where infor-
mation is passed through word of mouth, from person to person and from
family to family. I am still astonished, though, when I hear housecleaners
and daily-wage workers at car washes in Pakistan recite Waris Shah’s Panjabi
poetry from memory, or when the technicians at the Institute of Sindhology
educate me in the female myths of Shah Abdul Latif’s poetry.
When I make certain references, such as to child-marriage or widow-
marriage, the western reader may not find scholarly references to the
same subjects. When I transcribe Hazrat Amir Khusrau’s lyric about child-
marriage, the intepretation is novel because there is no documentation of
the subject in the literature. There is scant literature on child-marriage, and
it is only recently that nongovernmental organizations in the subcontinent
started to address the issue as an object for social reform. To a native re-
searcher like myself, such events are endemic in the contexts in which I
work. Although no one has examined the material in the particular way I
propose, my approach is within the accepted ideas and practices of the in-
digenous culture that I represent. There is little scholarly evidence available.
I investigate the rituals at the Sufi shrines in Pakistan and look at female
participation and the female voices in the ceremonials. My research is a lin-
guistic anthropological study of discourse and poetry used in devotional set-
tings. I apply a range of theories to interpret the data in the book: I have
utilized the ethnography of speaking.5 In addition I have applied the conver-
sation analysis system wherever appropriate to the context.6 The translitera-
tion of live speech and its context in the performances is based on a conversa-
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tion analysis scheme with adaptations, especially in the turn-taking among
qawwāls. I am aware that there are a number of theories about speech and
performance, but I use only those that relate to my work. The field is broad
and the research expansive. Therefore, I use references that I can link with
the study.
Many contexts and linguistic codes that I use are familiar to native schol-
ars in Pakistan and India, but there are some features in the songs in the in-
digenous languages that western scholars may not understand. Thus, I bridge
the gap between the East and the West in this book by giving a contextual in-
terpretation of the lyrics in the translations. I have avoided a word-for-word
translation but have made sure that the text is an authentic rendering of the
poetic narrative that communicates the sophistication of the mood in which
the musician sings. I transmit the flavor of languages such as Panjabi, Siraiki,
Sindhi, and Urdu to the reader.
I studied Sufi practices at the shrines of Bulle Shah in Kasur, Bibi Pak
Daman, Data Ganj Bakhsh Hujwiri, Shah Hussain, and Hazrat Mian Mir
in Lahore, Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and Shah Abdul Latif in Sind, and
Hazrat Bahauddin Zakariya and Rukunuddin Shah Alam in Multan. At these
shrines I observed the rituals that both women and men performed. Some
rituals were common to all shrines, and some were particular to just that
shrine. For example, women participated actively in the support services at
the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in Sehwan: a female muridīānī gave water
to the devotees. A woman was the caretaker of the tombs of Shah Abdul
Latif’s female relatives who were buried in a compound of the shrine. Among
the rituals that I observed was one in which women devotees held up glasses
of water to seek ritual blessings from the guluband or heart-shaped necklace
that belonged to Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and that hung over his tomb
in Sehwan. The glasses of water were then shared with their kinswomen and
men. To orthodox Muslims this may seem to be a fetish, but devotees draw
strength from the ritual.
My guide to Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine was a senior librarian
at the Institute of Sindhology at Sind University in Jamshoro, Hyderabad.
Although an orthodox Muslim, he was a devotee of the Sufi saint. Many like
him go to the shrines because they look upon the spaces as venues for medi-
tation and worship. There is tolerance among individuals like him for the
rituals that devotees perform. In recent years, with the coming into power of
orthodox Islamic governments in Pakistan, there has been a trend to extend
and renovate the shrines of Sufis such as Hazrat Data Ganj Bakhsh Hujwiri 7
in Lahore into mosques and places of worship. Data Darbar has been ex-
tended to almost ten times its original size and has been remodeled with
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the most expensive Italian marble. Huge congregations of devotees perform
the Friday prayers in the shrine courtyard. I noticed the same feature at the
Hazrat Mian Mir (d. ) shrine in Lahore, which I visited this summer.
The shrine had fallen to pieces almost a decade ago. It has been recently
restored and is also used as a mosque.
The audiences at the shrines come from a variety of socioeconomic back-
grounds. Gender plays a role as can be seen in the discussions and the photo-
graphs in this book. Women come in large numbers. The majority of par-
ticipants are rural peasants, factory workers, housewives, and middle-class
devotees. A large number who come are illiterate but well versed in the oral
culture. The shrines fulfill devotional needs and provide outlets from the
chores of daily life. There are many affluent and well-to-do devotees at the
shrines who go there for prayer and meditation and also to make a mannat (a
vow). When that vow is fulfilled, they go to the shrine to make an offering—
usually food or charity that they give in cash.
Women’s participation in singing sufiānā-kalām or Islamic mystical
poetry is noticeable in the shrines, at the melās, in concerts, and in the larger
domains of female domestic life. Although the main body of my research
was directed toward the musical traditions, in the course of my fieldwork I
was able to identify the following areas of female participation in Sufism and
its rituals:
• Women as mystics in Sufi practices.
• Women as creators of Sufi poetry.
• Women who have influenced male Sufis in their roles as mothers,
daughters, nurses, and mentors.
• Women as ethnographers and patrons of male Sufi mystics, such as the
Mughal princess Jahan Ara, daughter of Shah Jehan.
• Women as singers/musicians/participants of Sufi songs, sometimes
even called the faqīrīanī in the Sindhi shrines.
• Women as preservers and guardians of Sufi discourse or lore, such as
Mai Naimat, a maidservant of Shah Abdul Latif, from whose memory his
entire Risālo is said to have been reconstructed.
• Active ‘‘female’’ participants at the shrines, known as the hijṛās or
eunuchs. They have been identified as khawājāsarā in earlier shrine tradi-
tions during the rule of the Muslim kings in India.
• The aesthetics of the female voice, a poetic device in which the speaker
is the female, even in the narratives of male musicians. The musicians
play with the syntactic and semantic structures of the languages to speak
as though they were females.
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• Singing in the falsetto, even by male musicians, to impersonate a
female voice, as is done by the faqīrs or musicians at Shah Abdul Latif’s
shrine in Bhit Shah. They mimic the heroines of Shah’s poetry.
• The myths of female lovers, such as Sassi, Sohni, and Hir, used as aes-
thetic devices to speak of broader social, political, caste, and gender issues.
In this study, concentrating on the oral culture of the subcontinent, I have
found a common thread that runs through each myth, though Sufi poets may
use the myths according to their own intention. Male protagonists in the
myths are discussed, but in the oral traditions romance is created through
the aesthetics of female voices. Male musicians whom I interviewed con-
firmed this. Although I focus on female voices in this study, there is substan-
tial discussion of male participation as well. I bring in references to Amir
Khusrau and his lyrics, to Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sabri Brothers,
Shaikh Ghulam Hussain, and Alan Faqir. A large number of the lyrics ana-
lyzed in the book are the compositions of male Sufi poets. Whether or not
the Sufi poets of the subcontinent wrote in empathy for women is an area
of research in itself. The lyrics do have strong female voices, and I leave the
field open for further exploration.
The scope of this study is limited to its present undertaking as it is not
possible to include every dimension of Sufism here. I do not discuss differ-
ent versions of the female myths, or delve into male rituals, or bring in every
theory or study that a scholar has done on Sufism. I document research in
my own field for an informed, educated audience interested in the female
dimensions of Sufism in the Pakistan-India subcontinent.
I interviewed a wide range of female and male musicians of Sufi perfor-
mances in Pakistan between and . My first interview was with
Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.
Although the interview was a formidable undertaking, I was able to solicit
responses to questions. My key questions to him were about singing in the
gendered voice of Hir or Sassi. His responses are documented in this book.
Within a month after my meeting with Khan, I was able to interview Abida
Parvin and her musician husband, Shaikh Ghulam Hussain. I received valu-
able responses from both musicians and discuss them in this study.
Although contacting key musicians was always a challenge and rather
stressful, it was quite rewarding in the end when I transcribed the interviews.
Alan Faqir even shared with me the politics of singing the female myths em-
bedded in the poetry of the Sufi poets.
I did additional fieldwork at the Sufi shrines and recorded women’s in-
put into the rituals that are performed on a day-to-day basis and during the
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urs or melā that celebrates the death anniversary of the Sufi saint.8 Major
databases in this book are my own field recordings of performances. There is
input from professionals such as music directors, producers, archivists, and
scholars in Pakistan who are linked with the singing of ritual Sufi discourse
at the shrines, in concerts, and in the media, especially the radio. The radio
seems to ensure the continuity of this tradition in the popular culture among
the speech communities.
Although this book has developed from the fieldwork that I did in Paki-
stan between and , it gains from the methodology that evolved dur-
ing the first part of the research between to , when I worked on my
dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin. I depended on archival ma-
terials that were a comprehensive collection of multimedia resources from
Pakistan, India, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and Canada.
The key archives from which I collected the materials were the Institute of
Folk Heritage and the Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad and the
Institute of Sindhology in Hyderabad, Sind. I obtained other materials from
the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and
Oriental Star Agencies in the United Kingdom.
Between and , I focused on the musicians’ speech samples and
transcribed them meticulously. I saw the same patterns emerge in Urdu,
Purbi, Hindi, Panjabi, Siraiki, and Sindhi poetry that the musicians sang. I
found references to mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers, and gen-
erally to kin relationships with women. There were allusions to the mystic
veil, to women’s work, such as husking, grinding, spinning, and weaving,
and most fascinating of all to bold female lovers like Hir, Sohni, Sassi, Layla,
Mira Bai, and many more. In addition to singing devotional poetry that paid
homage to the prophet Muhammad, his family, and his azwāj (wives) the
musicians further recited the Prophet’s hadīth (sayings). They invoked bridal
imagery to speak about the mi’rāj (the Prophet’s ascension) and the Prophet’s
meeting with the deity, when the veil is lifted or the state of kaśf is attained.
They sang about the Sufis of the Muslim world and about gender, class, color,
and caste. Their discourse challenged the patriarchy and the establishment
through the device of the female speaker; even in the metalanguage of the
mystic ecstasy, the musicians spoke as females. These findings and the musi-
cians’ poetry sung to the mesmerizing percussion in the music became the
impulse of the study.
Most importantly, in the same period in the eighties when this study was
maturing, world music was claiming Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and his
qawwālīs resonated in the concert halls of the West.9 He infused a new life
into the qawwālī by integrating the vibrancy of the Panjabi qawwālī ang
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(style) with experimentation in musical forms, especially the subtle use of
saxophone for instrumentation. His Panjabi qawwālīs of the time are fasci-
nating for the versatility of the linguistic resources, which portray the many
female voices and which inspired the second phase of this study, focusing
on the female speakers of Sufi poetry. He was able to infuse a subtle humor
through language play in the qawwālī, which is traditionally serious mystic
discourse.
Within the same time frame, Oriental Star Agencies in the United King-
dom was promoting musicians who sang Sufi poetry in concerts for the Paki-
stani and Indian expatriate speech communities. Invariably, the charismatic
female voices in the musicians’ narratives lent the performances elegance.
I wonder if they were aware of it, or did they too suffer from the ‘‘paradox
of familiarity’’ as I did? At home in Pakistan during this very period, Abida
Parvin, a female musician, was framing her critiques of the orthodox estab-
lishment in public concerts, using the poetry of the Sufis of the subconti-
nent. It was at this time that I did substantial data collection of multimedia
sources in Pakistan and the United Kingdom.
I have created a large repertoire of transliterations from Sufi songs that I
recorded at the shrines. Some transliterations produced from archival multi-
media sources are documented. These are in Urdu, Purbi, Hindi, Panjabi,
Siraiki, and Sindhi and include an engaging use of dialect by the musicians
to communicate with their audiences. Some of the Panjabi dialects that por-
tray the female speakers would be stigmatized by purists, but they give the
flavor of popular speech, and that makes them unique. These are the dialects
of the old walled city of Lahore from where I trace the ancestry of my mater-
nal family and where I have my roots. These are the dialects of Gujranwala,
Faisalabad, and Sahiwal, which are the heart of the Panjab. I found them in
Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s narratives, and now in Mehr Ali and Sher
Ali’s qawwālīs.
There are sections of qawwālīs and sufiānā-kalām where the musicians
switch to elitist codes like Persian and Arabic or they switch codes intralin-
gually, between, say, Siraiki, Sindhi, Panjabi, and Urdu. There is evidence of
turn-taking among the qawwāls. These collections, together with my poetic
‘‘transmogrifications,’’ are the data that speak. The many female voices form
the basis of this study, and there is much more that speaks to an ethnog-
rapher; the material establishes its own authenticity. The transliterations
verify the metalanguage of ecstasy; the cakkī-nāmās and the carkhī-nāmās
demonstrate the discourse of women’s work at grinding and weaving. I found
many linguistic and thematic variables in these databases that can be ex-
plored for future research.
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I stated earlier that I do not try to fit this book into any theoretical frame. I
apply the ethnography of speaking and the conversation analysis frame. I let
the musicians speak about the female voices, about themselves, about their
linguistic resources, and about their songwriters. They are the ones who tell
about the roving minstrels and answer the host of questions that the research
generates.
As I developed this study, I claimed my own roots. I had listened to the
narratives of older women in the family as they talked about my maternal
family’s descent from Hazrat Bahauddin Zakariya (d. ) and Rukunud-
din.10 My family’s elder women further spoke about a connection with Haz-
rat Shams Tabriz.11 They spoke about the lineage that came from Iran and
what is now the Middle East and Central Asia. They further affirmed that my
ancestors were appointed as Muftis (religious scholars) of the city of Lahore
in the reign of the Muslim slave king Shamsuddin Iltutmish, who ascended
to the throne of Delhi after the death of his master, Qutubuddin Aibek, in
. Qutubuddin Aibek was himself a slave king. I found this evidence
in M. Wahid Mirza’s study of Amir Khusrau:
Shamsuddin, a brave and generous monarch, welcomed to his capital
many unfortunate people driven from their homes by the Mongols.
‘‘Towards men of various sorts and degrees, Qadis, Imams, Muftis
and the like, and to darweshes and monks, land-owners and farmers,
traders, strangers, and travelers from great cities, his benefactions were
universal. From the very outset of his reign and the dawn of the morn-
ing of his sovereignty in congregating eminent doctors of religion and
law, venerable sayyids, maliks, amirs, sadrs, and (other) great men,
the Sultan used, yearly to expend about ten millions; and people from
various parts of the world he gathered at Delhi.’’ 12
Kanhyalal affirms the information.13
My mother, like other Muslim women in the subcontinent, had a home
education and was proficient in reading and writing Persian, Arabic, Urdu,
and English literary texts.14 She was a writer for Ismat, a leading women’s
journal, which I read as an adolescent and which made me proficient in
Urdu. Muslim women among the elite, including Mughal princesses such as
Jahan Ara Begam, daughter of Shah Jehan, were educated at home with eru-
dite female mentors who were related to distinguished male doctors of medi-
cine, letters, sciences, history, and the arts.These women were accomplished
in classical Arabic and Persian texts and could recite them mnemonically.
Interestingly, I have found evidence in the same source from M. Wahid
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Mirza 15 about my paternal ancestry, which is claimed from Ziya’al Din
Barani (– ). He was the author of Tarikh-e Firuz Shahi, a history
of the Muslim monarch Firuz Shah Tughlak (– ), who was prob-
ably of Turko-Mongol stock and came from Khorasan during the reign of
the Khilji sultans.16 Barani’s history of the Delhi sultanate in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries is additionally a major source to study the Muslim
ethnomusicology of the time. A substantial portionof Mirza’s study of Amir
Khusrau used Barani for a resource.
I was born in Pakistan and raised in the North Indian and Bengali tradi-
tions of ethnomusicology and poetry, which I further claim from my father,
who was an architect educated at Rourkee and Aligarh.17 I grew up in Ban-
gladesh, which was then East Pakistan and had, immediately after partition,
a strong musical tradition. The context was all around me. My father was
posted there to build Comilla cantonment. He was a connoisseur of music
who played the tabla with articulation. My mother played the sitar. I can
now see the gradual evolution of the present study from a multicultural back-
ground: the Panjabi and Siraiki Sufi literary, musical, and linguistic traditions
from the maternal side; they were the Muftis and Gardezis who belonged
to Lahore and Multan. Among the paternal roots is the Burney lineage from
which I inherit the North Indian cultural, musical, and linguistic traditions
of ‘‘UP,’’ now Uttar Pradesh, of Buland Shehr 18 near Meerut.
I shall now let the musicians of Sufi melodies speak for themselves. My
role is that of the interpreter of the culture.19
: Readers who would like to learn more about the music discussed in
this book are urged to acquire the CD (with accompanying explanatory ma-
terial) Troubadours of Allah: Sufi Music from the Indus Valley, available
from Weltmusic Wergo, Postach - D- Mainz DDD LC , ISBN
---.
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Tseng 2002.9.25 07:23 6657 Abbas / THE FEMALE VOICE IN SUFI RITUAL / sheet 27 of 239
Map . Linguistic regions of the subcontinent, from Colin P. Masica, The Indo-Aryan Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, ), –. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
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Acknowledgments
I acknowledge the musicians who speak here and those who supported this
research. Elizabeth Fernea had faith in the subject of this book and patiently
read several versions of the manuscript. Joel Sherzer read the manuscript and
gave valuable feedback in addition to arranging my affiliation with the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin. Gail Minault gave insights on the historical ma-
terial and supported my nomination to the American Institute of Pakistan
Studies Lecture Series. Patrick Olivelle and Peg Syverson provided access
to computer facilities. Herman van Olphen guided the phonetic notation of
Pakistani and Indian languages.Yildray Erdener clarified the terms. Jim Mag-
nuson, John Ruszkiewicz, Annes McCann-Baker and Kamran Agahie steered
me through difficult situations.
Val Daniel, Carl Ernst, Miriam Cook, Jonathan Kramer, Guy Welbon and
Wilma Heston hosted me for the American Institute of Pakistan Studies Lec-
ture Series. The United States Educational Foundation in Pakistan gave me
a Fulbright Travel Grant.
My colleagues at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Allama
Iqbal Open University in Islamabad prepared the multimedia materials. Dr.
Latif Mughal, Dr G. A. Allana, Gul Muhammad Umrani, Qasim Makha,
Syed Qalandar Shah and Gul Muhammad Mughal organized the data col-
lection in Sind. Khalida and Jaleel Naqvi participated in the fieldwork in
Lahore and Kasur. Maria Gillard, Khaula Mahmoud, Yasmin Jehangir and
Zakia Malik were always there for me.
Lorraine Sakata, Regula Qureshi, Amy Catlin, Nazir Jairazbhoy, Helene
Basu, Amy Maciszewski and Anita Slawek shared materials and insights.
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John Bordie, the late Edgar Polomé and Robert Hopper directed the earlier
stages of the research.
At the University of Texas Press Jim Burr provided immense support as
did his team of editors, designers, marketing specialists and print-production
staff; Leslie Tingle coordinated the editing with care. My copyeditor, Carolyn
Russ, persevered with the aesthetics and conventions of the transliterations,
conversation analysis, translations, and discussion in the manuscript. The
reviewers gave valuable feedback.
To all, I am deeply grateful.
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History and Economy
of Women in Sufi Ritual
Q
Although there is a long history of women’s participation in the many di-
mensions of Sufi life, that is, in the traditions of Islamic mysticism, there
has been no adequate documentation of it in the literature. In general, little
ethnographic investigation of rituals at Sufi shrines, where both women and
men participate, has been done. It is only in recent years that some studies
have been published,1 and even in these studies, focus is on male partici-
pation. Qureshi discusses the Qawwāl Bachche, a lineage of male qawwāls
(performers of Sufi music and poetry) in the subcontinent of Pakistan and
India.2 Schimmel has covered areas of the female voice in the subcontinent,
but hers are literary and theoretical studies.3 Likewise, Smith has researched
Rabia al-Adawiyya and some other women mystics of Islam, but neither she
nor Schimmel has investigated women’s rituals from an ethnographic or per-
formance perspective.4 This applies as well to other research works that are
either literary, theoretical, or historical investigations.5 No researcher has
examined the sociolinguistic aspects of the female voice or some of the per-
formance fields that I have identified in my study, such as the female musi-
cians who sing at the Sufi shrines or who sing the poetry of Sufi poets or texts
about Sufi saints and their supernatural powers.
In this chapter I discuss how women who sing Sufi poetry have tradition-
ally supported themselves as singers. I further investigate how community
attitudes toward women’s work changes depending on class and women’s
marital status, as becomes evident in my interviews with the Sidi musicians
that took place in Hyderabad, Sind. I analyze the economy where female
musicians participate in various community festivals and make a living by
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. Shrine of Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan, Sind. Courtesy Hakim Center,
Karachi.
singing devotional poetry that I call ‘‘Sufi’’ because its content is about the
Sufi saints of the Muslim world, as well as the life of the prophet Muham-
mad and his family. Most of these women also sing at the Sufi shrines such
as Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan, where they make a living. Here,
they find an audience at any time of the night or day that pays them for their
performance.6 Generally, they sing at shrines during the annual urs celebra-
tion or on Thursday evenings, the eve of the Muslim sabbath on Friday.7 They
are free to sing there at any time except during the prayers. However, due to
state control of Sufi shrines, the areas where they can sing may at times be
confined to the female sections.
In Islamic societies that integrate religion into almost every aspect of
social life, these women and men acquire the skills to earn a living that
matches the devotion of their patrons and their audiences. Thus, in family
contexts they create devotional settings wherever necessary, be it a birth, a
wedding, or an initiation ritual such as a male child’s circumcision. Their
lyrics invoke Muhammad and his family, and within these frames they add
references to Sufi saints. All of this becomes evident in my interviews with
both women and men performers. Male musicians’ perception of females in
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their family performing at community rituals is also evident in the inter-
views. In addition to the traditional orthodox Muslim view of Sufism as pe-
ripheral to the larger community practice, men and women who sing Sufi
poetry take into consideration the way in which local communities view the
place of women in public performances, as well as their need to earn a living
from those performances. I point out these considerations in my interviews
with the musicians.
Female musicians thus make a living by singing in the feudal households
and within their own communities. They sing at the shrines and are paid by
the devotees. In addition to singing at Sufi shrines, women musicians per-
form on the radio or television. Female musicians in the cities sing at cere-
monies such as births, weddings, aqīqā celebrations, and circumcisions.8
Taj Mastani, a female folk singer who also sings some Sufi lyrics, informed
me that, although her hometown is Sehwan Sharif, where the renowned Lal
Shahbaz Qalandar shrine is located, she moved to Hyderabad because it is
a large urban center. She affirmed that in Hyderabad she can earn a living
from the radio. She can further negotiate business contracts with television
stations and her clients from the affluent feudal households in Sind, who can
reach her for ritual ceremonies. She said that Lok Virsa, the Institute of Folk
Heritage in Islamabad, contacted her through Radio Pakistan in Hyderabad.
Through Lok Virsa she was able to go to international concerts in the Middle
East and Europe; as a state organization, Lok Virsa could afford to pay for
her trips abroad. On her own she does not have the resources to travel over-
seas with her entourage. It is through international travel that world music
discovered her and other musicians such as Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.9
The interest of world music in the Sufi variety has provided financial
opportunities for female musicians like Taj Mastani. However, earnings of
women such as Abida Parvin and Reshma are not regular, and they depend
on the whims of recording companies abroad. Sometimes, the female musi-
cians do not have managers able to negotiate with recording companies
overseas. Compared with female performers, male musicians such as Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan and the Sabri Brothers have done much better as a result
of their international networks of male professional and community con-
tacts. Female musicians have fewer direct contacts with male organizers and
sponsors overseas. For all three female musicians that I discuss here, namely,
Abida Parvin, Taj Mastani, and Reshma, their husbands functioned as nego-
tiators. Due to cultural norms, female musicians have limited access to their
male patrons and therefore their earnings are much less.
Although the female performers have made some capital from concerts
in the Middle East, Europe, and North America, their earnings are small
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. Abida Parvin in concert. Courtesy Institute of Sindhology, Sind University,
Jamshoro.
compared to those of their male counterparts, for example, Nusrat Fateh Ali
Khan or the Sabri Brothers. This is in part because they sing sufiānā-kalām
and not the more popular qawwālī that is sung in the classical traditions
of North Indian music.10 Their skills are considered more in line with folk
music. As a result, Abida Parvin, who is trained in the classical music tradi-
tions, has lately adopted a qawwālī-like style while she sings sufiānā-kalām.
Since the early nineties she has tried to establish an identity comparable to
that of the male qawwāls by singing the traditional qaul, ‘‘Mun kunto Maulā
fā Alī-un Maulā,’’ in a call-and-response pattern with one of her instrumen-
talists.11 Like the male qawwāls she has added a formidable repertoire of
Amir Khusrau’s Sufi lyrics in her performances.12
For the female musicians that I discuss here and the lesser-known ones
in the rural areas and the urban centers, the cassette culture has provided
a source of income.13 For instance, within areas such as Hyderabad or Fai-
salabad the local recording companies have assisted women musicians in
earning a living from recording their Sufi lyrics with music. Their songwrit-
ers are male relatives or men in the community. In fact, this small industry
has become a source of income for many women and men. For example,
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Rehmat Gramophone Company in Faisalabad provides female musicians
with a livelihood by recording their songs during Milad-ud Nabi, which cele-
brates the Prophet’s birthday. In popular culture, people love to hear their
songs. Their recordings are played on the local buses, in the restaurants, and
on the radio. Rehmat Gramophone Company releases special audiocassette
editions in which female and male performers narrate the tragedy of Ker-
bala ( ) during the annual Muharram mourning rituals. These elegies,
. Reshma of Mast Qalandar
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. Taj Mastani with spouse
called nohās and marsiyās, lament Hussain’s martyrdom and that of the
male members of his family. The lament tradition is expressed in the voices
of the women who survived Kerbala, mainly Hussain’s sister Zainab and his
daughter Sakina. The musicians who chant these narratives can therefore
make a living through the local recording companies.
The terms Sufi and Sufism belong to the world of Islam. There are many
definitions of the term Sufi in the literature mentioned in this chapter.
Briefly, Sufism is associated with the Islamic traditions of metaphysical
thought and practices. Sufis believe in intuition and creativity and less in the
fundamental and literal interpretation of the holy scriptures. A Muslim is
a follower of Islam, the religion given to the Muslim world by Muhammad
the Prophet (d. ). The Quran revealed to the prophet Muhammad is
the core of Islam.
Many in the Muslim world object to the rituals at the shrines. How-
ever, the Islamic world is diverse. There are close to . billion followers
of Islam in the Middle East, North Africa, and the countries of South Asia,
and six million Muslims in North America. The majority of Muslims live in
South Asia, including Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and
China.14 Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, and reli-
gious practice there is integrated into the indigenous practices and beliefs.
Islam is diverse and has a local color in each geographical region.
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Mystical performances originated in Sufism in the eighth century in the
Arabian peninsula. The Quran occupied a central position in the life and
works of the Sufis. They relied on excerpts from the Quran, for example,
‘‘He loves them and they love Him’’ (Sura :) to develop a particular kind
of attachment that shows the love between man and God.15 According to
the Sufis, words have a zāhir (overt meaning) and a bātin (covert meaning)
that can be used to alter the consciousness through zikr, which is based on
deep, disciplined breathing exercises in which the devotee incessantly re-
peats God’s many names from the Quran. Additionally, short verses from
the Quran can be used. Zikr is central to the samā practice, to the extent
that a state of ecstasy is reached. These concepts are built into both the qaw-
wālī and sufiānā-kalām traditions, with the result that a competent musi-
cian aims to induce this state among the listeners through the boundaries
of music, speech, and song.
Sufi poetry in the high tradition was written by Sana i, Attar, and Mansur
Hallaj, the famous martyr of love who was crucified in for his free-
thinking beliefs and his famous doctrine of anāl-Haqq, which means ‘‘I am
the truth.’’ Mansur Hallaj was a master of word play and a favorite person
in the lore of musicians of mystical poetry in the subcontinent.16 Addition-
ally, in the high tradition, al-Ghazzali wrote his famous Book on the Right
Usage of Audition and Trance in the Middle Ages. These are the names of
only a few of the leading Sufis, for the list is long and their silsilās (lineages)
are countless in the Islamic societies.
Sufi poetry outside the high tradition of the samā was used in the eleventh
century in Iran. From there it spread to Turkey and gradually into the Paki-
stan-India subcontinent, where it became popular in the thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries. Jalaluddin Rumi (d. ) founded the Mevlevi order
of the whirling dervishes at Konya in Turkey. He wrote exquisite mystical
poetry in Persian and became a strong influence for the Sufis of the subcon-
tinent. Sufi poets and musicians adapt his Persian poems in their composi-
tions to establish the authenticity of their narratives.
The present study focuses on the Sufis of the subcontinent whose poetry
musicians sing today not only in Pakistan and India but also in England,
France, Canada, the United States, Japan, and the Gulf States. Not only were
the poets immersed in the centuries-old Islamic written and oral discourses
such as the Quran, the Sharīa, and the prophet Muhammad’s hadīth; they
were able as well to interpret the texts for application to religious and prac-
tical matters. Because of their scholarly wisdom, even monarchs and func-
tionaries in power sought the Sufi scholars’ guidance.17 As missionaries they
undertook the dissemination of Islam through an oral medium whose basis
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was the written religious discourses. The Sufi khanqahs (monasteries) were
institutions of learning where both men and women were involved in sev-
eral levels of activities and continue to be so in present times.18 The female
voice has always been important in these rituals.
Sufi poetry emerged for centuries while the subcontinent was ravaged
with strife between the different Muslim and Hindu factions. Later, civil
wars between other religious groups aggravated the conflict. Dissent was
also generated within the Muslim factions between the obscurants and the
freethinkers or mystics who absorbed the wider spiritual and intellectual
influences around them.
Furthermore, there were external onslaughts from various Central Asian
neighbors coveting the riches of the Indian plains. Tamerlane, an ancestor
of the first Mughal emperor Babar, led such an attack. The Mongols of Cen-
tral Asia ravaged the Indian subcontinent and took the famous Sufi poet and
musician Amir Khusrau (– ) as prisoner to Balkh. He remained
there for two years and wrote one of his finest marsiyās (lament poetry) for
Prince Muhammad, Sultan Ghiasuddin Balban’s son, who was killed in the
Battle of Multan. Amir Khusrau also wrote mystical poetry that had strong
female voices, which I will discuss later.
In Pakistan and India, Hazrat Amir Khusrau largely popularized qawwālī,
especially the singing of sacred text such as the hadīth (the sayings of the
prophet Muhammad). He was a pupil of the famous Chishti saint, Hazrat
Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi (d. ). The qawwālī in the subcontinent is
associated with the Chishtiyya order of Sufi saints whose founding member,
Hazrat Muinuddin Chishti (d. ), hailed from Iran and settled in Ajmer.
The Qawwal Bachche are singers of Sufi lore who trace their lineage to Amir
Khusrau.
The singing of Sufi discourse to music is rooted in the Sufi practice of
samā (musical concert) that goes back to the middle of the ninth century—
references to this event are found in Baghdad. In this setting verses were re-
cited to music accompanied by a whirling dance.19 The context is based on a
qaul, which in Arabic means a famous saying. The singer of such discourse
is called a qawwāl, someone who speaks well.20 In the subcontinent of Paki-
stan and India, the institution of qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām, the singing of
mystical poetry, is based on verbal art that is central to the Sufi theory of
tauhīd, which declares God as one.
Qawwāli is essentially a male genre, usually sung by professional musi-
cians, who come from a line of qawwālī singers, and consists of a team of
five to twelve musicians who take turns singing a single narrative. They sit
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during the performance. Two or three main vocalists lead the group. Qaw-
wālī performances are characterized by the use of rhythm, created through
the percussion of drums and handclaps, together with the melodies. The per-
cussion and the handclaps create the ecstasy in the performance and to a
large extent depend on the interaction between musicians and listeners. The
socioeconomic status of the listeners and the degree of their involvement
in a particular context generate the structure of the event. No two perfor-
mances are expected to be identical. The performance contexts define the
emerging nature of the lyrics and the isomorphisms of language, culture, and
society.
Sufiānā-kalām, on the other hand, is mystical poetry usually sung by a
solo musician to minimal instrumentation.21 Women’s input in this tradi-
tion is significant. Sometimes, two or more singers will perform in a chorus.
In Sind this form of choir singing is called sūng. However, whether it is a
monologue or a chorus, it does not have the structured, classical, turn-taking
dialogue found in the qawwālī. The musician generates body language to en-
gage the audience in the performance. The audience, in turn, complements
the performance with strong, appreciative, linguistic cues. The audience
additionally communicates through body language. Male singers of sufiānā-
kalām, such as Alan Faqir, would dance as they held a stringed instrument
in one hand. Usually sufiānā-kalām is sung to a capṛī (castanets) or a tam-
būr or yak-tārā (stringed instruments). Folk singers like Alam Lohar and his
son Arif Lohar would use the cimṭā (long tongs) to create the percussion, and
their vigorous body language almost resembles a dance. I have seen male
Baluchi musicians dancing to the rhythm of the rabāb (a small stringed in-
strument) while singing mystical poetry. Sometimes a ghaṛā (large clay pot)
is used for percussion to sing the sufiānā-kalām. Women called loṭevālī, or
ghaṛevālī or challevālī, use a small aluminum pot on which they create per-
cussion with the ring on the middle finger while they sing mystical poetry.22
By and large, sufiānā-kalām seems to be associated with the mobile, in-
digenous mystical traditions. As part of popular culture it was sung among
roving minstrels at the shrines during the urs, the melās (folk festivals), and
on Thursday evenings. Unlike the qawwālī, where the musicians have to
have rigorous training in the genre, the singing of sufiānā-kalām requires
less rigid training. An average singer of sufiānā-kalām can get by using in-
digenous folk melodies and songs. The singers pick them up from the shrine
environments or from the folk festivals. Now, of course, radio, television,
and the cassette culture are an aid for the musicians, both as venues and as
models for their performance.23
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Linguistics Poetics Myths Ecology Performances
elitist vernaculars doha Layla-Majnun birds Qawwali Sufiana-Kalam
codes git Sassi-Punnu animals
kafi Sohni-Mahival rivers male genre female & male
Khari Boli
vai Mumal-Rano deserts many singers solo+1
Arabic Urdu/Hindi turn-taking continuous
abiyat Hir-Ranjha mountains
Persian Brajbhasa North Indian indigenous
bani others pastures
Avadhi elitist grassroots
rekhti seasons
Purbi drums+claps strings+
ghazal
Deccani
others proverbs
Rajasthani
metaphors Arabic vernaculars
Panjabi
cakki-namas images Persian Sufi poets
Siraiki
carkhi-namas Urdu/Hindi
Sindhi
kapa’iti songs diverse
Hindko mothers-daughters indigenous
wedding songs Sufi poets
others folk
festival songs classical
rituals classical
female speech shrines, concerts, folk festivals
female narrator males & females
. Comparative model: Qawwālī and Sufiānā-Kalām
. Sometimes there can be more than one singer.
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Sufiānā-kalām evolved at the same time as qawwālī within the frame-
work of the oral mystical traditions in the subcontinent in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. The purpose of qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām is to make
a spiritual experience available to the people in an idiom they understand.
The use of vernacular languages in qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām repertoires
entails the singing to music of Quranic texts, the hadīth, and the wisdom of
the Sufis. Such an approach enables the mystics to teach the core of religion
without the intervention of the clergy.
Qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām are performed at the shrines of the Sufi saints
and in public concerts. At the shrines they are performed on Thursday eve-
nings in anticipation of the Muslim sabbath and during the celebrations of
the death anniversary of the saint. A public concert, on the other hand, may
be held at any time. At some shrines, such as Bulle Shah, Hazrat Lal Shahbaz
Qalandar, Shah Abdul Latif at Bhit Shah, Bahauddin Zakariya, and Rukunud-
din Shah Alam, qawwālī is performed every evening after the prayers. Musi-
cians as well as audiences prefer evening performances that continue well
past midnight. The musicians expect to attain a maqām, the spiritual station
that enables them to create ecstasy among the listeners.
The performers interact among themselves and with their audiences in
a cultural and religious context, which may be inside a Sufi shrine or in a
concert hall. Although there is a marked difference between a shrine perfor-
mance and one in concert, the former being more traditional and the latter
somewhat secular, the key musicians that I interviewed affirmed the sanc-
tity of both contexts. Abida Parvin categorically affirmed that she sang her
poetry with veneration even at public concerts. Whether inside a Sufi shrine
or in a concert hall, the musicians uphold the purity of the context. During a
qawwālī performance in Rawalpindi in , I witnessed the Sabri Brothers
request the then–federal minister for education and his entourage not to clap
during the event. Almost all the Sufi musicians with whom I spoke insisted
on the distinction between sacred and secular contexts even in concert set-
tings. They state that their performance in concert is sacred and not secular,
because of the text they sing, and that the text cannot be trivialized. They
also assert that their poetry is not folk, but devotional and ritualistic, as they
perform with the utmost sanctity (adab).
A typical performance of qawwālī ritual begins with a qaul or hadīth in
Arabic. Alternatively, it may begin in Persian, which is considered the lan-
guage of higher intellectual thought. To establish the authenticity of their
texts, the musicians recite the initial verses in Arabic or Persian and then
switch to the vernacular. This can be either Urdu, Hindi, Purbi, Brajbhasha,
Sindhi, Siraiki, Panjabi, Hindko, Baluchi, or any other code depending on the
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audience and the speech communities involved in the event. The dialect of
the performers themselves is significant as they switch codes and use many
linguistic and musical improvisations to communicate with their listeners.
Whereas the devotees who visit the shrines do not claim to be Sufis,
who in their perception may be associated with great spiritual achievements
through rigorous discipline, they firmly believe that they are Muslims and
belong to the ummah of the Islamic world.The Wahabi followers of Islam dis-
dain the Sufi practices at the shrines as a form of biddat (dissent). However, in
the Iranian, Turkish, Middle Eastern, and South Asian versions of Islam, the
practices have become indigenized with the aboriginal practices. The Bhakti
movement (– ) meshed with it, and many devotional movements
emerged at this time where poetry written in the vernacular was sung to
music—these movements emphasized a personal and emotional relation-
ship with God. The poetry of Kabir and Nanak in the fifteenth century was
an outcome of these movements and led to the founding of Sikhism. There-
fore, a musician who sings qawwālī or sufiānā-kalām or the poetry of the
Sufi poets does not claim to be a Sufi but only a transmitter of Sufi discourse
or poetry. This poetry glorifies God, His prophet, Muhammad, Muhammad’s
family, and the great mystics of Islam in the Muslim world.
Samā in the Pakistan-India subcontinent is generally understood as the
context in which Islamic mystical texts are sung and heard, whether in the
shrine or in a public context. I found the word used in other contexts as well,
especially in the vernacular languages. To create the samā also means to cre-
ate the context. A grassroots Panjabi musician, Dai Haleema, used the word
this way:
When the musicians and audience sing together there is a lot of peace
in the assembly. It creates a nice samā, and you involve more people.
This is better than singing alone. And, when we sing it is with full force
and passion.
Thus, the terms used in this book are from scholarly literature as well as from
the popular culture: These are the beliefs of the participants of the speech
events and the grassroots musicians.
Terms like samā, maqām, wajd, kefīat, hāl, zikr, and qaul have meanings
according to the context, and they are applied across a broad spectrum in the
literature on Sufism. Musicians such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (), Abida
Parvin and Shaikh Ghulam Hussain (), and Surraiya Multanikar ()
have given them various meanings. Researchers have defined the terms in
context.24 For instance, Shaikh Ghulam Hussain, a music director and Abida
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. Grassroots musician: Dai Haleema, Talagang
Parvin’s late husband, used the word kefīat as a state of altered conscious-
ness. In my interview with him I understood kefīat as a refined state of spiri-
tual awareness, induced through the combination of Sufi poetry and music.
Shaikh Ghulam Hussain made this clear when he demarcated the bound-
aries of speech, song, and music and said that there is a fine line between
the ecstasy of kefīat and what is vulgar. ‘‘Vulgar,’’ he said, is when words or
music trespass the fine balance and violate finesse or refinement. He elabo-
rated by using the example of rock ’n’ roll, which he considered the opposite
extreme of Sufi music that produces kefīat.
When I interviewed Sikandar Baloch and Naseer Mirza at Radio Pakistan
in Hyderabad, they defined the word maqām as a hierarchical movement
toward ecstasy in a Sufi concert. They explained the term while discussing
the Sufi musical concert at Shah Abdul Latif’s shrine in Bhit Shah. Because
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of the diverse linguistic codes, cultures, and contexts of the subcontinent,
the word maqām is polysemous.
The term wajd (trance) may seem pejorative to orthodox Muslims or to
someone in the West. Kefīat and hāl are states of ecstasy in the same mysti-
cal experience, although there is a difference in degrees of expression.25 Hāl
is a state of arousal outside the control of self.26 Kefīat is subtle and covert
although it involves ecstasy. Even singers are involved in the kefīat, and
there is no samā (context) without interactional kefīat between listeners
and singers. These are the subtle dynamics of a performance. The musicians
who sing the lyrics or the listeners who attend the speech events perceive
the state in its manifold aspects. Among some participants it is a desired
state that the musicians create. For the musicians it is an indication of the
success of their performance: They have succeeded in creating a spiritual
ambience through language and music if some among their audience have
reached kefīat or hāl. They are obligated to continue singing until the af-
fected overcome the state of ecstasy.27 For the audience that experiences this
state, it is an expression of devotion or perhaps even temporary spiritual
escape.
Sufism and its practices evolved over centuries and at the grassroots level:
there are many in the Muslim world who pay homage to the Sufi masters who
interpret and present Islam to the average unread individual in simple terms.
In the subcontinent of Pakistan and India the hegemony of a clerical order
was perhaps not encouraged because the Sufi saints, who were sometimes
also poets, simplified the Quranic texts for the masses. Orthodox Islamic
zealots are known to have executed Sufi adherents such as Mansur Hallaj
(d. ) and Sarmad (d. ).
Sufi Islam was brought to the subcontinent by the Chishtiyya saint Hazrat
Muinuddin Chishti. The hallmark of the Chishtiyya order of Sufism in the
subcontinent of Pakistan and India was the use of music to sing devotional
texts. Ustad Ghulam Haider Khan, a qawwāl, reports that when Hazrat Mui-
nuddin Chishti, originally a resident of the town of Sanjar in Iran, came to
Ajmer in India, he studied the Hindu style of worship.28 He found that music
was a significant component of worship, and the Brahmins sang aśloks,
śābāds, and bhajans with percussion and wind instruments. Hazrat Muinud-
din Chishti adapted the same practice, and thousands of Hindus converted
to Islam. Ustād Ghulam Haider further claims that qawwālī or samā is
centuries old. It came from Khurasan in Iran where the nomads sang lyrics
accompanied by drums and handclaps. Thus, according to the musician,
Hazrat Muinuddin Chishti integrated Iranian practices into native Indian
devotional rituals.29
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Until recently, the samā performances of the male Sufi groups in coun-
tries like Iran were secret rituals in which ordinary uninitiated persons were
not allowed to participate. Women’s entry was even more difficult. Perhaps
the Pakistan-India area is one of the few places where the performances are
held in the public contexts of the shrine, the folk festival, and the concert.
Now the ritual concert is performed among the expatriate speech communi-
ties in the West and the Gulf States, where it has evolved within the frames
of world music though still retaining the devotional speech forms and ethno-
musical content. In all the public contexts women are active participants,
thus making it possible for the ethnographer to study the speech events.
’
‘‘Manam Ahn Koolee Aśiq-e-sanam divāne’’
I am that gypsy A lover and crazy
is a Persian Sufi song that I heard Mohammad Firozee sing in Austin, Texas,
at the Rumi Festival in the fall of . The Texas audience was mixed, con-
sisting of members of diasporic communities interested in Sufism and the
local population who also were interested in Sufi music. Mohammad Firozee
himself was from Iran and had been in the United States for more than two
decades. The term ‘‘Koolee’’ that I heard repeatedly in the musician’s reper-
toire was similar to that applied to female peasants I had seen during my
fieldwork in Sind in , especially at the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif in Bhit
Shah, who were known as Kolhi. The women wore colorful long skirts and
were draped in large, equally colorful veils. They had fine features and dark
skin that they highlighted by wearing intricately crafted silver jewelry: thick
silver bangles almost up to their elbows and ivory bands that covered their
arms. They also wore large silver nose rings and several earrings around the
earlobes.
The Kolhis are the indigenous peasant communities of Sind who are
sometimes migratory. Usually they are temporary farm laborers in the large
feudal holdings. They are non-Muslims, and together with the Bhils they are
the native inhabitants of the Sind-Rajasthan continuum. Their women are
ardent devotees at Muslim shrines such as those of Shah Abdul Latif at Bhit
Shah. They go there primarily because the shrine is located in Hala, the heart
of a fertile agricultural belt, where they can make a living working on the
large feudal farms. Secondarily, Shah’s jamālī (aesthetic) poetry, written in a
syncretic context and sung in falsetto by his faqīrs who imitate the female
voices of his heroines, draws non-Muslim populations to his shrine. Shah’s
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. Non-Muslim Kolhi women: Shah Abdul Latif’s shrine, Bhit Shah,
Sind
sūrmīs (heroines) such as Sassi, Sohni, and Marvi are drawn cross culturally
from the centuries-old pre-Islamic myths of the region that he blended into
the Islamic mystical framework. He made his sūrmīs into representations
of the pining soul in search of the beloved. And since Shah wrote his poetry
in the Sindhi vernacular, the Kohli and Bhil male and female peasants can
understand and relate to it; they can read their own sufferings in the narra-
tives of heroines like Sassi or Marvi.30 The Bhil and Kolhi women can iden-
tify with Shah’s heroines, thus, they are ardent devotees of his shrine.31
After the concert in Austin, I spoke to Mohammad Firozee, trying to make
the connection between the ‘‘Kolhis’’ in Sind and the ‘‘Koolee’’ or gypsy in
his lyric. Firozee explained that his poem was about a heart that was a gypsy
moving from place to place in its restless passion for the beloved. I was able
to relate his mystical lyric in Persian to Shah Abdul Latif’s Sindhi mysti-
cal poetry that also describes gypsies or roving mendicants.32 Shah’s poetry
evolved through his experiences as a roving minstrel. I address this evolution
in my interviews with Abida Parvin and her husband later in this chapter.
Firozee’s lyric established more connections when I met with ethnomusi-
cologists who had researched the Kacch-Rajasthan-Sind-Baluchistan con-
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tinuum.33 The mystical lore of the region that includes Sind, Baluchistan,
and the coastal belt of Iran shares myths, melodies, and linguistic codes.34
Among the melodies are the famous ‘‘Mast Qalandar’’ dhun, which most
female and male minstrels sing to the popular text that pays tribute to Ali,
the fourth caliph of Islam and the spiritual mentor of a large number of
Sufi silsilās (lineages). The ‘‘Mast Qalandar’’ is a theme about the ecstatic
mendicant who gives up the material world and roves from place to place
in search of divine wisdom. Firozee’s Persian lyric was very much in the
roving-minstrel tradition that he called the ‘‘Koolee’’ or gypsy. Such poetry
is about the faqīrs and mystics whose restless souls make them rove from
place to place.
The roving-minstrel traditions of Sufi poems, speech, and song evolved
from the indigenous, grassroots oral culture in the subcontinent perhaps in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. About this time there was a reli-
gious renaissance in the subcontinent, and Central Asian Sufism influenced
the local Bhakti movement in Hindustan.35 Reformers and mystics like Kabir
(b. ) and Guru Nanak (b. ) were certainly influenced by Sufism.
. Kolhi women’s performance. Courtesy Institute of Sindhology, Sind University,
Jamshoro.
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To this day some of Shaikh Fariduddin Ganj-e Shakar’s (d. ) best Sufi
poetry in Panjabi is preserved in the Gurmukhi script in the sacred texts of
Sikhism.36 In the syncretic religious environment of the time, when India
was ruled by the Mughal emperor Akbar (– ), Tulsidas (d.
), Surdas (d. ), and Mira Bai (b. ) were writing devotional
poetry in the vernacular languages. Mira Bai wrote in Hindi and Gujrati, and
I discuss her later in the study. Earlier Amir Khusrau (d. ), who was both
a poet and musician, wrote some of his Sufi lyrics in the Braj dialects such as
Hindawi and Purbi, in addition to writing in Persian, which was considered
an elitist language. Khusrau’s Hindawi poetry is sung in qawwālī compo-
sitions to this day, together with his Persian texts, and is now claimed by
the female musician Abida Parvin, who sings it with improvisation in the
sufiānā-kalām tradition. This is a grassroots oral tradition where performers
sing in the vernacular languages and not an elitist tradition like the qawwālī,
which is based on the Perso-Arabic traditions established by Hazrat Amir
Khusrau.
The great religious and spiritual renaissance in India that started around
the fourteenth century reached its peak under the Mughal emperor Akbar
in the sixteenth century. He patronized the fusion of Sufi mystical Islam
with the indigenous practices of the subcontinent, and he himself was an
ardent devotee of Shaikh Saleem Chishti, a Sufi mystic who, according to
legend, prayed for him so that he would have a son. His prayers were an-
swered when Saleem, later known as Jehangir, was born and succeeded Akbar
to the Mughal throne.
Thus the mystic poetry of India, including that of Sufism in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, was emotional and expressed the devotees’ love
toward a personal God. The movements that emerged at this time challenged
hegemonic religious authority, caste boundaries, gender inequity, and the ex-
clusive use of elitist languages in religion.37 In South Asian Islam, the trend
appeared in Sufism and particularly in the sufiānā-kalām traditions that used
poetry written in the vernaculars by the Sufi poets. As stated earlier, since
this model was an indigenous one that required minimal musical skills and
resources, women’s input in the singing of this poetry is visible. Mira Bai,
the Rajput princess who ‘‘disappeared’’ among the people and whose bha-
jans (devotional poems) are sung among the minstrels in India, is a telling
example of the roving-minstrel tradition.
Since the sufiānā-kalām tradition of singing mystical texts in the vernacu-
lars was based on the roving-minstrel culture, there are indigenous devo-
tional elements in them. In this form of worship the emphasis is on the repe-
tition of God’s name.38
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In the Sind region Shah Abdul Latif (d. ) and other Sufi poets com-
posed poetry in the vernacular languages and dialects in which they sang
as roving mendicants within an Islamic framework. For fear of the clergy
mystic poetry sung to music remained confined to the minstrel class.39 That
is why the sufiānā-kalām traditions are strong among this class of roving
musicians who sing in the indigenous languages such as Siraiki, Sindhi,
Baluchi, and the regional dialects of Pakistan. This further explains why the
non-Muslim Kolhi and Bhil communities are devotees of Shah Abdul Latif’s
shrine in Bhit Shah, Sind: his poetry is linguistically diverse and is tolerant
of other beliefs.
The Sufi mystical traditions came to the subcontinent of Pakistan and
India through the Sind province with the coming of Islam in when
Muhammad bin Qasim conquered the region. Muhammad bin Qasim was
an Arab general of the Ommayad dynasty who came to Sind through the land
route from Iran. After his conquest, a long line of Sufi mystics came to the
region through Baluchistan, Mekran, Multan, and Sind itself. In the province
of Sind alone there are said to be more than a hundred thousand Sufi shrines.
Sufi mystics additionally came through the northern routes to the subconti-
nent. They came from Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the entire
region that is now the Middle East and the Central Asian Republics.
The Sufi version of Islam in Pakistan and India was based on syncretism
and reconciled differing beliefs. It was holistic as it blended in with the be-
liefs of local cultures and populations who were Davidians, Aryans, Hindus,
Buddhists, and all native creeds. At that time in India many converted to
Islam because it offered relief from caste oppression. Thus, through Sufism,
an indigenous model of Islam evolved in the subcontinent. Since some
of these cultures were ‘‘matrimythical’’ 40 and used the indigenous female
myths, the Sufi poets creatively blended the female voices from these myths
into their poetry that they sang to music. The purpose was mainly aesthetic
and devotional.
The best example of such synthesis is the work of the Sufi poet Shah
Abdul Latif, for he was both a poet and a musician; his compositions in the
local Sindhi vernaculars appealed to his devotees. And even today when his
faqīrs (mendicants) sing the daily mystical concert at his shrine, they chant
in the falsetto that imitates the female voice. It is precisely for this reason
that his shrine is known as the jamālī (aesthetic) shrine.41 Furthermore, both
Muslim and non-Muslim devotees venerate Shah Abdul Latif’s shrine be-
cause he was a Syed, who claimed descent from the prophet Muhammad
through his daughter Fatima and son-in-law and cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib.
Thus, it is not surprising that when poets like Shah Abdul Latif recon-
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structed and reframed the existing folk legends about female heroines (sūr-
mīs) into mystical texts and sang them with music, they won many devotees.
And, because the myths had a pre-Islamic, indigenous origin, non-Muslim
devotees had no problem putting the female myths into their own devotional
schemas or worldviews. Shah’s Risālo is a poetic narrative of several hero-
ines where the protagonist of the discourse is a woman such as Sassi, Sohni,
or Marvi.42 Additionally, the female heroines in his Risālo invoke references
to God and the hereafter that are linked to the Quran.43 Among musician
communities in the Sind, Shah’s Risālo is treated with great respect because
of its sacred Quranic context, and the book is not allowed to lie around on
the floor.
Furthermore, in Shah’s Risālo, especially in the section called ‘‘Sūr Rām
Kalī,’’ there are innumerable references to mendicants (faqirs) who are as-
cetic with slit ears and who wear large rings in their ears.44 They travel from
place to place in search of divine wisdom and wear colored robes. This tra-
dition evolved in relation to the other existing mendicant traditions such
as those of the Bhakti, especially Mira Bai, who herself ‘‘disappeared’’ as a
roving mendicant. Her poetry is sung in the regions discussed here. She also
belonged to the Sind-Rajasthan continuum. I discuss her later as a subject in
the poetry of the Sabri Brothers’ qawwālī concert in the United Kingdom.
The model (see Fig .) will enable the reader to understand that sufiānā-
kalām was sung among the roving mendicants who could sing simple mne-
monics as solo performers to their audiences with sometimes only a yak-tarā
(a one-string instrument). They would travel from place to place and camp
wherever the night came. I interviewed Abida Parvin and her late husband
Sheikh Ghulam Hussain about this tradition:45
A:46 Can you tell us of the times when the Sufis were both poets and
musicians—they would go from place to place and sing mystical dis-
courses—I believe this is the banjārā [roving-minstrel] tradition? 47
H: In the case of Shah Latif you will find at least fifty places where
he used to spend the nights. Audiences would come there and sit there
at night—there would be a paṛāo [a camp]—they would make a fire—
and they would have a mehfil—and when he sang his narratives, there
would be faqīrs and dervishes with him—so like the Shah, these der-
vishes would also wander around the areas—and when night fell—
they set up their camps—burnt the fires—came together to sing mysti-
cal texts—
P: And they would do this
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H: The same is true of Bulle Shah—
P: They were mobile people—you don’t get anything by just staying
in one place—it is only when you leave the home—that you achieve
something—the wisdom—you have to wander like the dervish or the
faqīr—you have to fill your cloak with the wisdom—the pearls of wis-
dom—that you gather from mobility—you see, this universe is for us
to learn—you can even learn from the stone—this wall can teach you
something—it is said of Shaikh Sadi that he would greet a wall every
day as he went past it—every time he would do it—until people asked
him, ‘‘Sir, there is nothing there—why do you bend yourself every day
as you greet this wall?’’ Sadi replied, ‘‘Really, there is nothing—but once
upon a time there was something very wise inscribed on this wall—
which enriched my knowledge—’’
While Abida Parvin spoke, I saw the performer in her speak as she would
to her audience, in a concert:
P: The universe teaches you everything—nature teaches you—and
then He is the greatest teacher—and this is the way the Sufis learnt—
they would go to the people—and adopt their language—and why is it
that today we cannot read that language?
A: You understand it better—
P: This is a great point—for instance, Shah Abdul Latif—he went to
Rajasthan—and the person there is a Rajasthani—the Shah took very
simple words from him . . . and although the individual from this re-
gion is not literate—the Shah acquired great wisdom from him—from
the people—
A: You mean from the oral tradition?
P: Those people were roving bards—there are very few Sufis among
‘‘educated’’ people—the educated man is sitting where he was—look at
the folks in the universities—every person who is coming out of there
is uneducated—like the husk—they have no spiritual connections—
education only teaches you to become slaves—the educated man denies
the truth—but the Sufi is the slave of truth—he is the slave of the true
God—the slave of the true God.
I have reinforced the musicians’ interview with written sources about
the roving-minstrel traditions in which Shah Abdul Latif was immersed. He
evolved as a Sufi poet within this heritage. I have especially looked at the cre-
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ation of his female narrators and the mendicants whose ears are slit and who
wear rings in their ears. Somehow Shah’s jogīs are closely interlinked with
his female voices, and there is hardly a sūr (a melody) in his Risālo where
there is not a reference to one or the other. The Sindhi terms that Shah used
for the jogis in his Risālo are jājak, maganhār, atāi, pān, chaṛan, rāgī, baraṭ,
and rabābī.48
Shah Abdul Latif’s poetry emerges from his own experiences as a wander-
ing minstrel. He writes about these ascetics in ‘‘Sūr Ram Kali’’ in Sindhi:49
Kanna kaṭā kāpaṭā kāpṛī kana jε kaṭāīn This community of jogīs who have their
ears slit and lobed
Lāhutī Latīfu cāī māgu nā maṭāīn These Lahutis, according to Latif, do not
alter their goal
Jε khudī khε khāīn halo tā takīa pāsõ Let us go and visit the dwelling place of
tinjā these ascetics, who have consumed
their ego completely
Latif further says:50
Let us visit the abodes of these ascetics who are in trance
O sisters, I am extremely beholden to these lobed jogīs
Their patronage has reformed my heart
Abida Parvin has sung Shah Abdul Latif’s poetry in Sindhi and has risen to
international fame for her performances. When I asked her about the female
voices in the Sufi poetry that she sang, she said,
P: Male and female does not even come into it—what you call Allah
is one—God is the mehver [center] of everything—you make a round-
about and whatever way it goes—it is in that direction—it is as if you
have put up a clock tower, and every passage will go through it—it will
go to it—it really does not matter whether it is male or female—in fact
we can really say that in the Sufi’s terminology—if someone is not a
male—he is called a female—
A: I don’t quite understand this—
P: In the Sufi thought [khayāl ] you say:
Masjid ḍha de, mandir ḍhā de Demolish the mosque, demolish the
mandir
Dhā de jo kuch ḍhānā Demolish all that can be demolished
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There is only one God, and there is his temple in each individual—God
is in you—He sits in you—His majlis [company] is in you—the Sufi
propagates God’s message and for this he utilizes song—it is a kefīat—a
state of ecstasy that draws him to God—Allah—and in the end it is His
name—and the tranquility that comes from singing His name—time
will stop—this circulation continues—the day is timeless—the same
day—and then—wherever you sit—it is the moment—what is the year
then—and what the age then? Time will stop—the Sufi man is separate
from other folks—and every man who sings is not a Sufi—and until
I understand what you mean—how can I sing it? You know that Sufi
spirit—every one cannot get into it—we all have the Sufi in us—when
someone is born—we say he has God’s face—the Sufis never got out
of this circle—and there were mystics like Baba Bulle Shah—the Sufis
never come out of this canvas.
I asked Abida Parvin to explain the kefīat (ecstasy) that is induced through
Sufi speech and music. She explained it as a state produced or transmitted
through zikr. This is repetitive chanting of devotional kalimāt (phrases) in
Arabic:
P: It is not customary to sing Sufi discourse—wajd [ecstasy]—the
rhythm of Sindhi music has never been in the West—the Sufi tran-
quillity—there is a great connection between words and music—we
can’t become the Sufi—but we can try to become like him—his tarz
[music] together with his words draws us to purity—there is a purity
in music—there is a state of wajd—of kefīat that is the state of being—
of prayer—so that apart from prayer—there is another state of being
[kefīat]—of ecstasy—of intoxication—fiqr—he who is tied to prayer five
times a day is not a Sufi—the Sufi is always in zikr of God—there is a
lagan [devotion] in us—there is a purity in us—in every one of us—and
we are divorced from that purity in us—We only sing the kalām of the
Sufia—as no one can express a khayāl [thought] like them—I sing Shah
Hussain, Bulle Shah, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, Hazrat Khawaja Ghu-
lam Farid, Sacchal Sarmast, Baba Farid, and Guru Nanak—the banis of
Guru Nanak—there is Baba Farid’s kalām in the Guru Granth Sahib—
God has said that the more knowledge you acquire—the more you
should say that you don’t know enough—there is fun in being stupid—
a lot of fun indeed . . . why should we say we are wise—when there is
no fun in it?
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Abida Parvin’s account was reinforced with another interview that I had
with Sikander Baloch and Naseer Mirza at Radio Pakistan in Hyderabad in
.
The radio in Pakistan has played a significant role in identifying musi-
cians and providing them a livelihood. Baloch and Mirza both affirmed that
women musicians like Abida Parvin are immersed in the rūh (spirit) of Sufi
poetics and music and can create the contexts (racāo) of that discourse. They
used the indigenous term sūng for the practice in the Sufi poetics and music
where the lover woos the estranged beloved through a serenade on the capṛī
(wooden castanets).51 The speech and song create ecstasy, which is a very
special context of some shrines in Sind. Abida Parvin’s evolution, they said,
has been within these grassroots mystical traditions, later to be enhanced
through her training in the semiclassical and classical traditions of music
through her father, Ustad Ghulam Haider, and her tutors Ustad Nazakat Ali
Khan and Ustad Manzur Hussain. Baloch and Mirza reported that since she
was trained within the male traditions her style is exceptional. She uses the
ḍohra or the bait, short two-line verses, within the main body of her narra-
tive, a style she imbibed from her male mentors, including her late husband,
Shaikh Ghulam Hussain. They claim that no other woman musician in the
Sind has this style, which is essentially a unique male style. The fact that
now Abida Parvin has introduced the qaul in the sufiānā-kalām tradition
fits in with this assertion. The qawwālī genre of Sufi music is essentially a
male domain.
In the officially organized urs celebrations in Pakistan commemorating
the Sufi’s death anniversary at his shrine, key musicians are invited to sing.52
In the Sind, performers like Abida Parvin are invited to sing at Shah Abdul
Latif’s shrine.53 Although she does not belong to the roving-minstrel tra-
dition, she does sing lyrics related to the tradition, at the shrines and in
concert. I have transcribed a mystic text about a female mendicant (joganī)
that the musician sings in Urdu. The lyric was composed by Hakim Nasser
around the eighteenth or nineteenth century and is one of Abida Parvin’s
popular concert compositions.54 I find allusions to the Layla-Majnun myth in
the discourse, where Majnun has become a madman for love of Layla. People
in the streets ridicule him and throw stones at him:
Je. . . Je . . . .na . . .na. . . Je. . . Je . . . .na . . .na. . .
Nadī kināre The river’s bank
Dhu uṭhe Arises some smoke, some fire smolders
A . . . .A . . . A . . . .A . . .
Nadī kināre . . . . The river’s bank . . . .
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Nadī kināre . . uṭhe The river’s bank . . arises
Dhu uṭhe . . . Arises smoke . . .
Mẽ jān kuch ho..e I wonder something happens ther..e
Jis karān mẽ jogan banī For whom I became the female mendicant
Kahĩ vohī nā jaltā ho--e Has he ignited himself--e
Nainā tumhī bure ho O eyes, thou are wicked
A . . tumhī bure ho A . . thou art wicked
Tum sā burā nā ho . .e None can be worse than thee . . e
Aāp hī prīt kī āg lagāī Thou started this fire of love
Aāp hī beṭha ro..e Now you sit there weeping . . e
A . . .ā. . . ā. ā A . . .ā. . . ā. ā
. . . . . . . .
Jab se tune mujhe Since thou made me
Divānā banā rakhā hε A mad one
Sang har sakhs ne A stone every person
Hathõ mẽ uṭhā rakhā hε Carries in their hand
In the song there is the metalanguage of one who is ‘‘possessed’’ or has
become a divānā. Additionally, there is subtle humor in the verses when the
musician sings of the smoldering fire. The speaker who is the female mendi-
cant is fearful that it is perhaps the one she loves who has set himself on fire.
Such discourse is rarely sung in the sufiānā-kalām traditions in the regional
languages, but I selected it for its uniqueness and humor.
In this section I explore some aspect of the personal histories of women
musicians who sing devotional Sufi poetry. Their histories, told partly by
themselves and partly by others, show how the melodies that they sang at
Sufi shrines became marks of their personal identities. I present some per-
formative contexts.
During my fieldwork in Sind at the Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine
in , I studied women roving minstrels who sing devotional narratives to
the Sufi saints. I looked for them at this shrine because Reshma, who was
once a roving gypsy woman, rose to international fame while she sang her
famous ‘‘Mast Qalandar’’ melody here in the late sixties. Women informants
who live around the heavily populated area of the shrine reported that during
the urs celebrations, which last for more than a week, it is almost impos-
sible to walk in the narrow streets of the city. Sehwan, the historic city built
within a large fortress from the time of Alexander the Great, is flooded with
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large numbers of female musicians who converge on the city to earn a living.
The informants reported that most of the women musicians come from the
Panjab and the neighborhoods of Sind itself. They perform in every nook and
cranny and attract huge audiences.
I found that a favorite melody, sung in the roving-minstrel traditions, is
the ‘‘Mast Qalandar’’ dhun, a tune reported to be sung all along the Rajas-
than, Sind, Baluchistan, and Iran continuum. Reshma sang it in Siraiki at
the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in the sixties with a passion that made her
internationally renowned. The melody is dedicated to Ali and is sung in all
the regional languages along the continuum. Almost every folksinger in the
region can sing it because of its simple mnemonics and rhythm. The lyric,
although dedicated to Ali, is also dedicated to Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar,
a Sufi mystic of Sind. Hazrat Lal Shahbaz is venerated in the lyric as the be-
stower of children.55 Reshma’s performance uses the standard lyric sung in
the popular ‘‘Mast Qalandar’’ folk melody:
Lāl merī pat rakio bhalā O Lal Qalandar, save my prestige
Jhole Lālan O thou of the cradle
Sindhṛī dā O thou of Sind
Sehwan dā Of Sehwan
Sakhī Shāhbāz Qalandar Thou bounteous Shahbaz Qalandar
Damā dam mast Qalandar Thy ecstatic trance is the healing breath
Alī Shāhbāz Qalandar O Ali-Shahbaz Qalandar
Alī dam dam de andar Ali’s name is the healing breath
M v n pira bachṛe denā Thou giver of children to mothers
Behn n denā-e vīr bhalā Thou giver of brothers to sisters
Jhule Lālan O thou of the cradle
Sindhṛī dā O thou of Sind
Sehwan dā Of Sehwan
Sakhī Shahbaz Qalandar Thou bounteous Shahbaz Qalandar
Alī dam dam de andar Ali’s name is the healing breath
Performers like Reshma sing the melody in their high-pitched, full-
throated voices at the shrine without the support of microphones. They also
sing poetic texts that glorify the karāmāt (mystical prowess) of Hazrat Lal
Shahbaz Qalandar. The Sufi saint is known as a jalālī pir, a mystic with in-
tense supernatural energy.
The female roving minstrels are accompanied by small groups of instru-
mentalists perhaps playing percussion or accordion. But, by and large, they
have minimal instruments. They will either play a yak-tārā or a ghaṛā, an
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earthen pot used as a drum. Their identity is a ring (chalā), which they wear
around the middle finger and use to create percussion on a loṭā (aluminum
pot) or a ghaṛa. These minstrels are called loṭevālī for playing the loṭā, chale-
vālī for playing the chalā, or ghaṛevālī for playing the ghaṛā.56
The loṭevālī or chalevālī are roving gypsy women who move from one
shrine to another while their families trade in livestock and peddle inexpen-
sive local textiles and pots and pans. Their audiences are women and men
from their own socioeconomic background who participate in the shrine ac-
tivities at the time of the urs and who give them small sums of money dur-
ing the performance. Women tend to pay less because they are unemployed,
while men can be more generous.
I interviewed Reshma, who performs in Pakistan and before large dias-
poric audiences in the Gulf States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and
America. I conducted the interview with her in Urdu, though she sang some
melodies for me in Marwari.
A:57 When you started to sing—did you sing sufiānā-kalām?
R: I first started at the Shahbaz Qalandar shrine—
A: Yes—
R: Every year we go to the Shahbaz Qalandar shrine—
A: Yes—
R: I was young at the time when I went there and made a mannat—
for my brother—and then I went for his mannat 58
A: Yes
R: And I went there for his mannat—my brother was arranged to be
wedded—every sister wishes that her brother should get married where
the tribe wants—that we should get a good match in the tribe—God
helped us and my brother got married—where we all wanted him to be
married . . .
A: Then you went to Shahbaz Qalandar—to fulfill the mannat and
you became famous
R: There I sang—
A: Yes—before that what did you do?
R: We were traders—we bought horses—you see, we were traders—
we are from Rajasthan—our region, you see, is the desert—our area is
Rajputana—Rajasthan is the area we come from—
A: I see—
R: My tribe is Kalyar—we are from Bikaner—we lived in Jaipur—our
area touched Jaipur—
A: I see—
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R: From there—from there we would bring camels—from the state
of Bikaner from Jaipur—from Jodhpur—the camels from there—the
camels from that place were famous—they had long necks—meaning
to say—their bodies were small—they were beautiful—
A: Yes—
R: Then my mother and father—they would bring the camels to
Pakistan and from here they would take cows, buffalo, and horses—
race horses—we would then take these horses—my mother and father
would take these back to Rajasthan—
A: Was there anyone else in your family who sang?
R: There was no one else—except my grandmother—my father’s
mother—she was very fond of singing—my father’s brother was very
fond of singing
A: So—what did you sing?
R: We used to sing our songs from Rajasthan—wedding songs and
suchlike—
A: I see—
R: Things like mānḍ—songs of joy like mānḍ Banro—
A: What language do you sing in?
R: This is Marwari—this is the Marwari language of the desert—
A: The famous Shahbaz Qalandar song made you so popular over-
night—where did you learn this song?
R: This is a passion—to sing whatever you wish to—whatever words
you can put together—
A: Yes—
R: Whatever poetry you can compose—the words have their own
meanings—language—words that come from desire—from the heart—
from love—and so I sang there—
A: Can you tell me if you sang in Sahiwal—the people there say that
you sang in the jhuggīs [gypsy tents]—that there was a Nanga—pir or
jogī who prayed for you that made you so famous?
R: We always go to pirs and jogīs—I still go to them—I believe in all
of them—I just went to a pir’s shrine—Baba Mushtaq Gilani—his photo
is hanging there 59—we would sometimes live in the jhuggīs—whenever
night came we would be there—and anyone who belongs to the tribe—
got absorbed there—it is not written on anyone’s face whether they are
tradesmen or gypsies like us—
A: Can you tell me more about yourself?
R: I was born under a ṭālī tree—there was no shelter—no jhuggī—
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A: Yes
R: We were wandering gypsies—wherever markets were—we went—
to Sahiwal—Chicawatni—Faisalabad—it was from there that I devel-
oped this desire—there people would sing—I would learn that—and
sing myself—my tribe’s language was Rajasthani—no one understood
it—my village was called Malashi and my patron’s name is Bheron—
and whenever we are in pain or sorrow—we call him—it is the tradition
of my tribe—to sing—when we are in pain—day in and day out—we
sing the poetry of our patron—Babaji—and this is in Rajasthan—
A: Did other people in the tribe sing like you—like the gypsies?
R: Yes—my people used to sing very well—
A: They sang sufiānā-kalām—mystical poetry?
R: They sang excellent mystical poetry—
A: Where did they learn the language of mystical poetry?
R: On our own—they composed their own mystical poetry—
A: Did they not sing the poetry of the Sufi poets—such as the poetry
of Shah Latif?
R: Yes—they did—they would go to the Sufi shrine and sing that
Sufi’s poetry there—then they went to another shrine and sang that
Sufi’s poetry there—they made their own kalām [discourse]—they were
themselves the poets and the composers and the singers—
A: Tell me—for someone like you—who is so immersed in the life
of the desert—does the desert affect your being—your moods and
temperament?
R: It means that whatever our soil is—wherever our ancestors are—
their language follows us—the same dialect—the same region—the
same deserts—the same simplicity—that is our identity—there is no
deceit or pretension there—just like the desert—the people are like
that—and it pervades our total being—we cannot live without that—
A: Yes—do other women sing at the shrines there—around the
deserts?
R: Several—
A: Do they come to the shrines in Sind to sing mystical poetry?
R: They come and they sing with me—
A: Is it that this is more of a tradition in the Sind—in the Rajasthan
area that women will sing at the Sufi shrines?
R: Yes—this is so at the shrines—not so much in Rajasthan—but it is
at the Shahbaz Qalandar shrine—and it is at this shrine that I sing—
A: And are other women there, too?
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R: Yes—there are other women—women who are looking for a liveli-
hood—they join in the singing of sufiānā-kalām—and this happens
every year—I go there every year—
A: You go there every year?
R: I go even now—I just returned from there—
A: Yes—
R: The Sufi Shahbaz Qalandar calls for me at least three or four
times—I go there and sing for him—I sing for my master—he listens to
my songs—
Sikander Baloch and Naseer Mirza at the Hyderabad radio station con-
firmed Reshma’s input thus:
M:60 These were gypsy women who only sang at the Shahbaz Qalan-
dar shrine—certainly, that is the only place in the Sind now where the
loṭevālīs come—to sing there—there is no such tradition at Sacchal Sar-
mast—I am forty-three years old—I have been associated with Radio
Pakistan for the last twenty years—we have covered all the melās at the
shrines—I have not seen such a tradition at Bhit Shah—not at Sacchal
Sarmast—not at Rikhail Shah—or any of the Sufi dargāhs [shrines] in
the Sind—no loṭevālī passes by these shrines—except at Qalandar Lal
Shahbaz—another woman who made a name there is Zeena Bai 61—she
used to come here to sing—
A: Is she related to Reshma—or are they from the same family?
M: This is a tradition—Zeena Bai is connected to this tradition—this
is a Rajasthani gharānā [musical lineage]—Zeena Bai’s—that is, the
loṭevālī—they come to the Shahbaz Qalandar shrine with a loṭa—and
sing there—and make a livelihood on a rupee, two rupee—the alms
they get there—God had given her a great voice—but a great guvya
[musician]—Ustad Muhammad Khan who belonged to Hyderabad 62—
was greatly impressed with her voice—she created a great spiritual
bond with him—she adopted him as her mentor—she chose to live
with him—she became his pupil—she learnt classical music under his
patronage—he belonged to the line of Ustad Amir Khan Indorewale—
there are two gharānās in Hyderabad—the Indore gharānā and the
Gawalior gharānā—Zeena Bai is a product of this century—she was
born in this century—and she died in this century—she died around
the partition—another person to whom she was spiritually inclined
was—Shah of Ranipur—she said that because of his special prayer for
her—there was so much sūr [melody] in her voice 63—the lineage of the
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pirs of Ranipur continues even today—she mainly sings his texts—
his kalām—but at the same time she also sang a lot Shah Latif—she
was an Ahl-e Taśhih or a Shii—she has also sung about the tragedy
of Kerbala and about Imam Hussain in a pūr soz (affective, emotional
voice)—she sang it with rhythm and had it recorded with a lot of emo-
tion in her voice—she earned a great name for herself because of her
ustād [mentor]—she is buried in the Hyderabad graveyard where all
the great musicians of the city are buried—you see, it is not just that
she was associated with a great ustād—she had that link with Rajas-
than—he too was associated with Rajasthan—it was called the Maṛichā
gharānā—she too was associated with it—the women who wear those
large skirts—they would wear the colī [short top]—women who wore
that attire—
B: That is the culture—the Rajasthani culture—that is Gujrati—that
is Rajasthan—
M: People who knew her—those who saw her until the end—she
always wore that dress—
A: You mean the ghāgrā?
M: She used to sing in that great maidānī voice—in those days—
there were no loudspeakers—people report that—in a litter—where
the litter is—she would ride a camel—and sing—the range of her voice
would resonate—around half a mile—this is a tradition—it is an ustād
gharānā—whose sons and grandsons are all alive—this is something
not very old—she died around Pakistan—say, somewhere around
, —
A: This means that there are other loṭevālīs, too?
M: Yes—but only a few become great musicians—come to the lime-
light—producer Saleem Gilani discovered Reshma—and Ustad Muham-
mad Khan discovered Zeena Bai—that tradition has died when we
would go to the melās—to hunt for talent—now educated women are
there in the field—
Baloch and Mirza informed me of several other dimensions in the re-
search. When I asked them about the maidānī voices, they said that this was
the poetic content and the dialects in the female musicians’ speech.64 They
said that Mai Bhagi, who is also known as Sehra ki Rani or the Rani of Thar,
sang in the maidānī voices that are the dialects of the Thar region in Sind.
The languages used to sing mystical poetry in the Thar region are Dhatki,
Kacchi, Marwari, and Sindhi. Zeena Bai, in the roving-minstrel tradition,
also used the maidānī dialects. With their extensive experience of commu-
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nicating with women musicians through the radio, I asked both Baloch and
Mirza about the female voices in Sufi poetry, and this is how they responded:
B: Why the musicians use the female alāp [narrative]—is because
there is a beauty in her voice—there is a niāz-mandī [humility]—there
is a hilm—and there is a modesty—when mystical poetry is sung in
these voices—it creates the soul of the context—like when we pray—
we beg—we sing His sanā [praise]—so that is what the female voices
do to the context—that is why there is this school of thought in Sindhi
Sufi poetry—the sūng 65—in which the lover sings to win back the es-
tranged beloved—this is called manānā—it is within these contexts
and voices that the musicians build in the ecstasy—
M: The sūng—the manānā—is done on the capṛi [castanets]—this is
the tradition of Shah Inayat of Jhokevale—but we do not find this in
Shah Latif’s poetry—his moods are more mellow—
B: Shah’s poetry is kind of melancholic—that is why the faqīrs at
his shrine wear black—it is the same with his followers—his faqīrs
sing his poetry like females—creating the female voices—his poetry
is sung throughout the night at his shrine—there are maqāms in his
poetry when certain sections are sung at particular times of the night—
his poetry is sung on the tambūrā [stringed instrument]—it is sung
in rhythm—only very sensitive people can listen to his poetry with
understanding—people who can enjoy it—they are the people who
understand the soul of the poetry—about his sūrmīs [heroines]—and
they are the people who can get ecstatic about his poetry—
Baloch further reiterated,
B: The words [bol] are put in the woman’s voice for artistic purposes
and then—when the woman sings it herself, it brings out the color—
the elegance—whenever women musicians have sung mystical poetry
it has been very popular—such as Sushila Mehtani—Bali—Zeena Bai
or Mai Bhagi—when women understand the content—understand the
soul [rūh] of the poetry—and sing it—musicians like Abida Parvin—
Mai Bhagi—Taj Mastani—Rubina Qureshi—the listeners enjoy the
performances—the performances become very popular—
Some of the women, like Zeena Bai, who sang as roving minstrels at the
Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine, evolved into trained classical and semiclassi-
cal musicians in Hyderabad.Taj Mastani affirmed that she belongs to Sehwan
Sharif where the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine is located, but she moved to
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. Manganhar musician: Mai Bhagi. Courtesy Institute of Sindh-
ology, Sind University, Jamshoro.
Hyderabad to learn the music arts. Now she sings folk and mystic poetry
in concert within the country and abroad among diasporic Pakistani speech
communities. She is additionally engaged by large landowners for private
events such as weddings and births.
Although the ‘‘Mast Qalandar’’ melody is a favorite among female musi-
cians who sing at the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine, it is also linked with
the dhammāl (the Qalandari dance performed at the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar
shrine in Sehwan every evening). The dhammāl that the qalandars or the
faqīrs perform at the shrine is similar to the dance of the whirling dervishes
at Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi’s shrine in Konya. This dance creates an ecstasy
in which the mind focuses on the name of the Creator and the whole body
moves in devotion. In this dance the soul, mind, and body are said to func-
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. Manganhar musician: Begam Faqiriani. Courtesy Institute of
Sindhology, Sind University, Jamshoro.
tion in deep contemplation of God’s name. The state of ecstasy is induced
with the rhythmic beat of the naubats (drums). Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar
is reported to have said of the dhammāl: 66
For the sake of the love of the friend
I dance over fire
Sometimes I roll in the dust
And sometimes I dance on the thorns
I have become notorious in your love
I beseech you to come to me
I am not afraid of this disrepute
To dance in every bazaar
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Both men and women participate in the dhammāl. Women perform the
dance in a certain section of the courtyard. Many times, families will bring
women who are emotionally disturbed to participate in the dhammāl, which
devotees claim has healing powers. In Baluchistan, such healing ceremonies
are called guāṭi. The family of the unwell woman will negotiate with the
‘‘Sufi’’ certain terms that will be fulfilled when the woman gets well, such as
a vow that there will be a ceremony and the woman’s husband or family will
buy her an expensive gift, perhaps in gold, if she recovers from her illness.67
I discovered that one can buy cassettes of healing music for emotionally dis-
turbed persons in the bazaar outside the shrine.
I have only touched the periphery of the female roving traditions, and the
. Jeevni Bai. Courtesy Institute of Sindhology, Sind University,
Jamshoro.
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. Singing theosophical themes: Sushila Mehtani. Courtesy In-
stitute of Sindhology, Sind University, Jamshoro.
field needs to be further researched. The findings at two major shrines in
Sind, that is, Shah Abdul Latif at Bhit Shah and Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar
at Sehwan Sharif, point toward significant female input in Sufi rituals.
’ :
In my search for female minstrels who sing Sufi poetry, I did fieldwork in
among the Sidi and Mohana fisherwomen in Karachi Mori in Sind, Paki-
stan. The research was among a community that lies about twelve miles
from Jamshoro, where Sind University is located. Sidis were initially brought
as slaves from Africa to work in the subcontinent of Pakistan and India.
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Although they are now free, some of them are attached to the feudal house-
holds in the Sind province of Pakistan. Their native language is Sindhi, but
they can communicate in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. They are
followers of Islam and pay tribute to their black Sufi saints, Bava Gor, his
brother Bava Habash, and a sister, Mai Misra, who in turn trace descent from
Bilal, a black follower of Muhammad the Prophet (d. ).
I was able to observe the speech community through my professional con-
tact with Qalandar Shah, who is the Syed mentor of this community.68 He
is additionally a senior faculty member in English at the University of Sind
at Jamshoro. I spoke with the Sidi female musicians Karima and Kubra in
Urdu, and sometimes they responded in the same language.69 Generally, they
. Patronized by a landowner: Hinda Bai, later known as Bali.
Courtesy Institute of Sindhology, Sind University, Jamshoro.
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. Abida Parvin and female musicians of Sufi poetry. Courtesy Institute of Sindhol-
ogy, Sind University, Jamshoro.
spoke in Sindhi, and Qalandar Shah interpreted the dialogue for me in Urdu
or English. The text of the interview with Qalandar Shah and Kubra is trans-
lated into English. Although Kubra is a musician, she is shy to admit her skill
as a singer, due to negative community attitudes toward female performers.
Her reluctance is accentuated by the fact that her husband holds a position
as an ‘‘official,’’ a clerk in the Sind University administration. Since her hus-
band holds a visible government position, her identity as a musician is not
viewed favorably in the community.
Q:70 So—I was telling you that the Africans—the Africans are present
in the Sind in large numbers—because of the slave trade—they were
brought here in large numbers—and then—with the abolition of
slavery 71—here too they were set free—
A: When did they come here?
Q: They had been coming continuously—through the ages 72
A: Is there no record of them?
Q: Yes—in the history books—in the archives—they came from
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Zanzibar—Habash and places—they are also in India along the coastal
belts—the interesting thing is that they are called Sidis—
A: Yes
Q: Sidis—which is linguistically derived from Syedi—Cid—the word is
there in Spanish and French—Cid—
A: Yes
Q: Syedi—very interesting anthropologically—because although they
were slaves they were called ‘‘our Syedi’’or ‘‘my lord’’—
A: Interesting observations—good fieldwork—
Q: Their allegiances have been to the ruling families—
A: Yes
Q: Although now they are employed—in various professions that in-
clude work with government departments—such as Sind University—
they carry on with their singing—
A: Yes
Q: They have their African drum—it stands vertical—they call it the
mugarman—Do you all have it?
K: No—but our relatives have it—
Q: The beat is African—the dance is African—they dance around
it—both women and men dance around it—for them it is extremely
sacred—this is their link with an African past—they keep it in different
places to sing—do you sing?
K: No—I don’t sing—I am ashamed to sing 73
Q: Her other sister sings—they are not like the Manganhars—the
traditional caste musicians that people invite to perform at rituals—
but the Sidis are also invited to sing at celebrations such as births and
weddings—they have a humor that people like—they sing and their
audiences reward them well—
K: We sing in Sindhi—not in Urdu—
A: You go to weddings—do you sing?
K: I don’t sing—my sister sings—my sister-in-law that is my hus-
band’s sister sings—my husband’s sister-in-law who is his brother’s
wife sings—they all sing—my husband will not let me sing—he says
it does not look nice 74
Q: You see—her husband is a clerk in the university 75
K: But at weddings we sing—my sister—
Q: Do you sing at the ziarāt [shrines]? They have a big congregation
in Karachi at Manghopir—in April—Manghopir is the pir of the croco-
diles 76—they have a large conference and Sidis from all over come
there—they get a big press coverage—Have you been there?
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K: No, that is in Karachi—we sing at weddings—songs that are called
sehrās—in Sindhi—we sing for ceremonials—for the aulīyā [Sufi
saints]—
Qalandar Shah gave her a prompt, saying he remembered that, as a child
when he went to a Sidi shrine, they sang something like ‘‘sal-āl -e,’’ 77 to which
Kubra responded very spontaneously with the Arabic chant:78
Allāh ho - Nabī : : O: :O 79 God ho - Prophet : : O : :O
Allāh ho - Nabī :: O : : O God ho - Prophet : : O: : O
Allāh ho - ho Nabi : : O: O God ho - ho Prophet : : O: O
O Nabī : : āl :e: e- O Prophet : : thy family : e : e-
Ho yal :: āl : e : yal:: āl : e Ho thy family : : family : e : thy family : : family : e
Allāh ho ::: ho:: Nabī ::O: O God ho ::: ho: : Prophet : :O: O
Nabī yā :: le :: ya :lā :le:: Prophet ho :: thy :: family : thy : family
Ho : yā :: le:: Ho : thy : : family : :
Hey : : sal āl e- Hey : : blessings on thee and thy progeny e-
Māmā Gor sal vāle le 80 Blessings on thee Uncle Gor and thy progeny 81
Māmā Gor sal vāle Blessings on thee Uncle Gor and thy progeny
Māmā Gor sal vāle Blessings on thee Uncle Gor and thy progeny
Sal āle : : Nabī yā le Blessings on thy family : : O Prophet and thy
progeny
After my conversation with Kubra, Qalandar Shah’s wife and daughters
served me a delicious lunch, fish cooked in curry, a traditional Sindhi lunch
eaten with rice and flatbread. The village women spent another hour tuning
the ḍholak (double-sided drum). That in itself was a performance.82
Later Kubra’s sister Karima arrived. She was the family’s musician and
gave me further information about the shrines at which she sang, as well as
her performances in the landowners’ households and community festivals.
She said they sing the ‘‘Mama Gor’’ composition at their pir’s melā after mid-
night.83 Later, when I asked her if they sang at other shrines, she affirmed
that they mostly sing at their pir’s annual melā, which is on the sixteenth
day after the Muslim festival of Eid ul Azha, when the faithful offer a sacri-
ficial animal. Their pir (spiritual mentor) is Qutb Din Darya, whose shrine
is called Tando Jahana and is in the Civil Lines at Hyderabad. The women
musicians Karima and Kubra also explained that the Sidis have a huge melā
of another pir at Manghopir in Karachi.84 Qalandar Shah had talked about
the annual festival at this shrine in his interview.
I researched the reference to Mama Gor in the poetry of the Sidi musicians
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. Sidi and Mohana fisherwomen sing of Sufi mystics, Karachi Mori,
Sind.
from Karachi Mori. The first reference to Bava Gor is as an Abyssinian saint
whose grave was visited by Sultan Ahmed, a Habshi aristocrat, in .85
Then there is the oral account of the legend that relates to the travels of
Bava Gor to India by ‘‘Abdulkader,’’ whose words were attended with respect:
‘‘Hazrat Bava Gor Rehmat ullah-elah was a Habshi, and Hazrat Bilal’s fol-
lower.86 He was an Abyssinian lord named Sidi Mubarak Nobi, who went on a
pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. The place pleased him and he remained
in the service of the venerable Sallah-ul-Salam.87 In those times a demon-
ness lived in Hindustan, who through the power of her magic kept a butter
lamp burning whose light could be seen all the way to Arabia. Her name was
Makhan Devi (Butter Goddess). It was her habit to kill men daily, eat them,
and from their blood make a tilak (mark) on her forehead. All the elders
gathered in Arabia around the venerable Sallah-ul-Salam and said, ‘Vener-
able one, if you give us the command, we will go and kill the demonness.’ 88
One day he called Sidi Mubarak Nobi and ordered him to go to Hindustan to
break the magic of the goddess and to light the lamp of Islam. Sidi Mubarak
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. Sidi musician’s kefīat: Karachi Mori, Sind
Nobi gathered a great army made entirely of Sidi people. They departed and
reached Baghdad, where he became a disciple of Ahmed Kabir Rifa’i and re-
ceived the khilafat (permission to represent) and his name, ‘Bava Gor,’ from
his master. Then Bava Gor departed with his army. They came to Karachi,
where they rested. In Karachi there is also a memorial shrine, and every-
where that Bava Gor stopped on his journey a shrine was created and each
time one of the Sidis from his army remained in the place.’’ 89
Bava Gor created a community for the Sidi in the subcontinent, and his
sister Mai Misra and brother Bava Habash are said to have followed him.
Although I did not find any reference to roving minstrels among the Sidis
in Karachi Mori, I recently made some connections to roving mendicants
among the Sidis in Ratanpur and Rajpipla in Gujrat of India.90 I also made
some connections to the linguistics of ‘‘Māmā Gor’’ in Kubra’s chant. Mama
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Gor, who is originally called Bava Gor, is a major Sidi Abyssinian saint in
Gujrat, where there is a big shrine dedicated to him, his brother Bava Habash,
and their sister Mai Misra in Ratanpur. Supposedly until forty to fifty years
ago all the Sidis living near the shrine lived as faqīrs and religious mendi-
cants. Some even lived in jungles among tigers. There seems to be a con-
nection between escaped slaves and faqīrs. Rajpipla princes invited Sidis
occasionally to dance in exchange for token annual donations to the shrine.
At harvest and the end of Ramazan they received jakat in the form of pro-
duce and handicrafts from members in peasant and craft communities in
nearby villages.91 The shrine originated at the time of the king of Rajpipla,
who came from Rajasthan in the twelfth century. Basu does not offer any
historical discussion on the origins of the shrine, but her interviews with
Sidi elders refer to their memories of the past relationship with the raja,
whom they visited and for whom they sang. He would send Bhils to their
village to deliver grains, oil, and food stocks.92 An eighty-year-old woman
told Basu,
In the days of the raja we had ijjat (honor). He would send Bhils to
Ratanpur with big containers of oil, ghee, rice, flour. Nobody was hun-
gry. And all the Sidi houses had rights (copadio). Sometimes I went with
my sister, with my Dada (father’s father). He wore a big turban and
played a malunga. We went for days at a time from village to village.
People said, ‘‘come, come’’ and invited us. We ate and drank, sometimes
three or four days in one village, sometimes we went further. We re-
ceived rice and jovar from farmers, dishes from potters, oil from the
oil-pressers and sometimes also old clothes the people gave us. So we
had no difficulties. But now things are much more difficult.93
Basu reports similar accounts from other elders of memories of travels
from place to place, singing and dancing for rice, oil, produce, and handi-
crafts.94 There are also references to the dhammāl (the ecstatic dance at an
urs) lasting for seven nights, in the manner of the dhammāl at the Lal Shah-
baz Qalandar shrine.95 There are references to mast faqīrs (intoxicated men-
dicants) in Basu’s research, and more needs to be investigated to establish
links between the Sidi minstrels in South Gujrat and their related commu-
nities in Sind in Pakistan.
For these reasons, I found use of the terms Māmā Gor, Allāh ho, and
Nabī O as referents in Kubra the Sidi musician’s lyrics interesting.96 The lyric
signifies a definite Sidi identity that I have represented in the preceding para-
graph. The terms link the Sidi to an Abyssinian past through
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Allah → Muhammad the Nabi → Hazrat Bilal → Bava Gor
Allah ← Muhammad the Nabi ← Hazrat Bilal ← Bava Gor ←
The hierarchical referents in the song start with Allah or God, linked
through his prophet (Nabi) Muhammad and further linked through Bilal and
Mama Gor. Most Sidis are convinced that a special bakhśīś (gift) has been
bestowed upon them by their ancestor Bilal.97 The signification in the song
is communicated through the words, the melody, and the musician’s move-
ments of her hands as she sings. The musician herself is a part of the signify-
ing process. The words are used as performative acts to ritualize the event:
the initiatory devotional ceremony at a Sidi shrine that pays homage to the
prophet Muhammad through Bilal and Bava Gor.98 The Arabic phrase ‘‘sal-
vāle’’ or ‘‘sal-āl-e’’ is a ritual chant to bless the prophet Muhammad and his
progeny, and through articulating her speech thus the performer blesses her-
self. She does the same through the performative act of blessing Bava Gor/
Mama Gor: she actually blesses herself. There are several referents in her
speech: Bava Gor and his family (his brother Habash and Mai Misra), the
prophet Muhammad and his family (his wives and children discussed here),
and the musician and her own family, although the reference to her is only
implied.
The signification to Muhammad’s family in Kubra’s song is a complex
one. First, it signifies prayers in the scriptures that send blessings on Muham-
mad’s family, his children, and his several wives. Furthermore, it is a refer-
ence to his daughter Fatima, her husband Ali (who was also the Prophet’s
cousin), and their sons Hassan and Hussain. In the internecine conflicts after
the Prophet’s death, his grandson Hassan was poisoned and Hussain was
killed with his sons in the Battle of Kerbala. Kerbala is a trope in Islamic
discourse that marks the distinction between Shii Islam and Sunni Islam.
Followers of Hussain are the Shii, but in South Asian Islam there is venera-
tion for Kerbala and Hussain’s family among both the Shii and the Sunni
Muslims. Thus, in Kubra’s lyric the trope of Kerbala is used without an overt
referent except through blessing Muhammad’s family, which she articulates
as ‘‘yal-āi-e.’’
When I visited Karachi Mori, the community of more than a hundred
women and their children created a rural concert (melā) in Qalandar Shah’s
large village home. His wife, daughters, and sons hosted me. They served
me a sumptuous lunch of curried fish with rice and flatbread. After that, the
Sidi women musicians and their neighbors, the Mohana fisherwomen, cre-
ated a performance for me in which they sang texts dedicated to the prophet
Muhammad and his family, to the local Sufi saints of Sind, and to the events
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of Kerbala. The context was almost ritualistic as the Sidi women musicians
sang a variety of songs on the ḍholak (double-sided drum) in the open court-
yard of the house. They created the contexts for whatever discourse I re-
quested. These ranged from mystical songs to the lament poetry of marsiyā
or nohā in the Shii traditions sung during the Muharram rituals.99 However,
since the context was a joyful one, their main focus was on songs that are
ceremonial, such as those sung at births and weddings. Sufi poetry that pays
tribute to the prophet Muhammad and his family was sung.
Karima, the key Sidi musician, led the singers. Her sister Kubra and some
women from the Mohana fishing community supported the singing. Karima
entertained all of us as though we were participating in a wedding. She
joked with Qalandar Shah’s son Kutb and teased him about his forthcoming
wedding.100
As stated earlier, during my research on the female Sidi musicians in the
Sind in Pakistan, I made connections to their related Sidi community in the
coastal Gujrat province of India. This happened through the ‘‘Māmā Gor’’
chant that Kubra sang for me.
Bava Gor’s sister Mai Misra is mentioned earlier. Her shrine, too, is with
her brothers in Ratanpur Gujrat. She is reported to have joined her brothers
to fight the female demonness—the Butter Goddess called Makhan Devi.101
Mai Misra’s shrine in Gujrat has become known for healing female infer-
tility, as her brother Bava Habash’s shrine is renowned for healing male infer-
tility. Whereas female devotees who are infertile are fed Mai Misra’s kichri,
the male devotees who are infertile are given ‘‘Bava Habash’s milk’’ full of hot
spices.102 Infertile female devotees eat the kichri and sing jikar (devotional
songs) at the shrine, such as,103
On the Mother’s mountain
We have lots of fun
Kinky hair, kinky hair
When we are all at Mai Saheb’s
We lots of fun have after eating kichri
Kinky hair, kinky hair
We dance dhammāl and have fun 104
Kinky hair
When we
Are all at Bava Habash’s place
We dance dhammāl
Kinky
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At Bava Gor’s place
We dance dhammāl
Kinky . . .
In connection with the performance of devotional lyrics sung to Mai
Misra at her shrine in Gujrat, Basu reports that slaveholders often enjoyed
watching comic dances performed by the Sidis.105 These dances were called
goma dance, a term most likely extracted from the Swahili ngoma. These
dances got fused with the local dhammāl (ecstasy dance). The devotees at
Mai Misra’s shrine talk about it and perform it, as do female devotees at simi-
lar Sidi shrines. The Sidi female musicians in Karachi Mori performed it for
me, and Karima wriggled her body for the bridegroom and her audience as
an initiation rite for the forthcoming wedding.
Performance that includes cultural criteria such as verbal, musical, and
body language becomes a mark of identity and sometimes an initiation rite,
such as Karima wriggling her body for the groom-to-be. Whereas Kubra only
sang the ‘‘sal-vāl-e’’ lyric for me, her sister Karima did much more, for ex-
ample, using comic laughter that involved verbal play combined with body
language. The context is a mutually achieved interaction between perform-
ers and their audiences. A largely female context, only males such as Qalan-
dar Shah and his son Kutb can enter the intimate veiled (pardā) world of
women. These men were part of the intimate inner circle because they were
heads of the family units. (Kutb was the man in charge of the family in Kara-
chi Mori while his father was living at the university some miles away.)
Such performances are segregated so that women can create a context of
their own. They can be themselves without being stared or gazed at by men
who do not belong to the inner circle. Although the performance in Karachi
Mori was specially organized for me, it was also an opportunity for Qalandar
Shah to visit his family.
There is evidence of roving minstrels in the Sind-Rajasthan area. Among
them are the jogī snake charmers and flute players.106 However, there is an-
other community that may be linked with the roving minstrels. These are
the Manganhar, who are distinct from the Sidi. Alan Faqir belonged to them,
and he is reported to have sung on the buses and trains between Rohri and
Sehwan Sharif in his youth. He also sang at the dargahs (shrines) in the
Sind.107 He confirmed his roving-minstrel lineage in his interview with me.
In Sind there can be no ritual without the Manganhar, be it a birth, a
wedding, or a death. They are the designated community musicians, and
each community has its own Manganhars. ‘‘Manganhar’’ originated from the
words mangan, which means ‘‘to beg,’’ and hār, which means ‘‘a garland of
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flowers.’’ Thus, according to an informant at the institute of Sindhology at
Sind University, a manganhar is one who begs for flowers. In the roving-
minstrel traditions, alms were given to the minstrels in return for their musi-
cal services.108
I interviewed Alan Faqir, who claimed to be a faqīr of the Bhit Shah shrine.
He explained the tradition thus:109
F: The Syeds—when they have weddings they invite us to sing—we
play the śādmānā—when the Syeds come—we play the haswārī when
a pir comes—or if we see a murshid come—you see, our family is from
this—when we have a wedding—when there is a wedding—we sing—
if a son is born—we sing—they come to us and say, ‘‘Faqīr—play the
drums—sing the songs of prayer—duā—śādmānā—haswārī—olang—
or the candar—they have invited so many people—the musician who
plays the drums is the Manganhar—a manganhar means someone
who begs—in India they are called manganiārī—the woman musi-
cian too is called a mangiārī—or a mangtī—in those days the money
was very little—lots of grain—we used to get paid in grain—lots of it
there was—one sack—four sacks—this was more than enough for a
poor household—we used to get invited to the Syed households—they
would invite us and say, ‘‘Faqīr, do the duā [the prayer] for us’’—if there
was a dispute they would come to the faqīr and say, ‘‘Faqīr, do a duā
[a prayer], that I may be reconciled with my brother’’—you see the
vaḍerās [landowners] have disputes with each other . . . who will tie the
horse? Then they come to the faqīr and say, ‘‘Faqīr—I am your slave—
faqīr—I am your faqīr—help me—reconcile me with my brother’’—you
see, we lessen our life spans with our deeds—
A: Can you tell me more about your women?
F: The women in our families are called mangtī—faqīriānī—our
family is called faqīr bādshāh—we beg—faqīr sāĩ—faqīr sāhib—this is
our family title—the women are mangtīs—the women sing gīts or gīc—
they sing duā [prayer]—He then sang a song and continued:
F: The women sing the sehrā—they sing the lāon [wedding songs]—
They get the murād—the female musician gets it—the male musi-
cian gets it—we sing songs like ‘‘Allah has given you a groom—like the
moon—and there will be much prosperity—or Allah has given you a
bride like the ruby—and may you grow and prosper—’’
. . . .
A: Do women in your setups sing now?
F: The woman would not sing—unless her circumstances forced
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her—if her husband was alive, she stayed at home—but if he was not
there then she had to do the man’s work—naturally she had to sing—
they had to decorate the drums . . . they had to sing the sehrās for the
weddings—they had to sing the gīts or the gīc—they had to sing the
duā—they had to sing the lāon for the bride and the groom—they
would sing the arifānā-kalām of Shah Latif—some songs do not have a
poet—you sing songs for the love of God—you sing ‘‘Allāh hū—Allāh
hū’’ and finish off with ‘‘and so says Shah Latif—O Latif, I say your
sanā [praise]’’—my grandmother sang—her name was Mai Hajra—the
children’s maternal grandmother sang—her name was Mai Bhand 110
My interview with the musician in was indeed timely because less
than a year later he passed away. It was an unusual interview because he
talked informally about the women who sang in his family. Musicians like
him are extremely reluctant to discuss the subject because of the shame asso-
ciated with being caste musicians, especially where women were involved.
It is a matter of socioeconomic caste. The musicians perhaps had little choice
in the past except to become caste musicians, since social structures dis-
couraged individual enterprise. Today, caste musicians want their children
to get educated and be employed in the government service, which promises
a stable job and an income, together with social prestige. They further want
their children to become professionals such as doctors, engineers, MBAs,
or educators. They no longer wish to be associated with the stigma of only
being musicians.111 Alan Faqir’s daughter, who was present during our inter-
view, studied liberal arts in a college. Another musician, Syed Zufiqar Ali,
is a faculty member at the University of Sind, Jamshoro. He is the son of the
renowned musician Ustad Niaz Hussain Khan, who belongs to the Gawalior
gharānā (lineage). Ali provided me with valuable contacts during my field-
work in Sind and, although he has a stable faculty position in the university,
he pursues the musical trade on the side, working for the radio and television
and giving public concerts. Ali claims that his father, Ustad Niaz Hussain
Khan, is one of the musicians who composed for Abida Parvin, the renowned
female singer of Sufi poetry in Siraiki, Sindhi, and Panjabi. He further asserts
that his father composed for female singers of Sufi poetry in the Sind such
as Zarina Baluch, Parivash Bhutto, and Shazia Khushk.
Presently, the many communities that were once involved in the roving-
minstrel tradition are undergoing transformation due to the newly emerging
socioeconomic structures. Although many kinds of communities are in-
volved in the roving-minstrel traditions—the Manganhars, the Sidis, snake-
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charming jogīs, flute players, potters, and many more who lived on the mar-
gins of the society—their lifestyles are changing fast.112
Over the last quarter of a century the practices have changed. Musicians
are now paid in cash rather than agricultural produce. Instead of singing from
village to village, these communities ‘‘rove’’ in a different way. The more re-
sourceful among them have become more visible through connections to
radio, television, and various arts councils. Clients such as wealthy landlords
or individuals in the cities contact them at their urban locations for various
festivals. Abida Parvin, for instance, lives in Islamabad and not in her home-
town of Hyderabad, because Islamabad is the capital and she can negotiate
business from there. Her clients are the foreign diplomats in the city and
state and private agencies. Through these contacts she gets invited to per-
form at concerts and can make a comfortable living. Education among the
younger members of the musicians’ community has now made it socially
more acceptable for them to sing for the multimedia. Baloch and Mirza at
Radio Pakistan in Hyderabad affirmed that they no longer have to go to melās
at the Sufi shrines to hunt for talent. Many educated female and male per-
formers come themselves to the radio and television for auditions and are
contracted to sing. In the last ten years, multinational companies like Pepsi
have hired young female and male singers for promotional purposes. These
musicians, who are mostly professionals such as doctors and engineers, sing
for television, and Pepsi sponsors the programs. Furthermore, they sing at
public concerts within the country and internationally. Pop groups such as
Ali Hyder and ensembles who sing Bulle Shah’s poetry with electronic in-
struments sing substantial Sufi poetry. Female singers like Taj Mastani may
be discovered through the radio, instead of at Sufi shrines, as were Reshma
or Zeena Bai. I recently heard Hadiqa Kiani, a young, upcoming female per-
former, sing a lyric in which she uses a metaphor from the Sohni-Mahival
myth, which is a favorite form of representation for the Panjabi Sufi poets.113
The bol (words) of the lyric in Panjabi are:
Kanḍe lag j gī kaccā ghaṛa ban ke I shall come ashore as the earthen pot 114
Mẽ av gī havā ban ke Like the breeze I shall come
She sings a folk melody that appears to be drawn from the roving-minstrel
tradition as there is the jingle of bells (talyoon) in the background that is in-
dicative of the mendicant traditions. The jogīs (mendicants) also tied another
form of bell called a ghungrū to the yak-tarā (one-string instrument) that
they carried.
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A number of musicians whose elders were associated with the roving-
minstrel culture were absorbed into government employment because it
gives them a stable income and social prestige. However, they keep their
base in the parent community in the form of a family home to which they
will always return. Only one or two members of the family follow the musi-
cian trade.
When I went with Qalandar Shah, my informant, to do fieldwork in Massu
Bhurgri, a stronghold of Manganhar musicians seventy miles from Jamshoro,
the key woman singer was away. Qalandar Shah had sent word to the vil-
lage about his coming with me, but the musician had already gone for the
last week to a big vaḍerā (landlord) wedding. There is perhaps no need for
them to travel from village to village and collect alms in the form of produce.
Also, the vaḍerās prefer to pay in cash rather than in agricultural commodi-
ties. Alan Faqir stated this in his interview. The vaḍerās want to be in the
cities for better education for their children, better health care, and more
freedom and a quality of life different from the rural setups. With the chang-
ing lifestyles of the vaḍerās themselves, there is also a change in their atti-
tude toward patronizing community musicians such as the roving minstrels.
The younger generation of landlords no longer lives in the villages. They live
in large urban centers like Karachi, Lahore, or Islamabad, or they study in the
academies of the West, from where they return to join the country’s politi-
cal forces. The land thus becomes a base from which political identity and
votes come.
The younger musicians feel that their elders were perhaps menials of the
landowning communities. They say that now education gives them more
options. I have seen communities of workers, such as musicians, village bar-
bers, and potters who had a variety of other roles in the landowning struc-
tures, disperse within the last twenty-five years.115 This is because of socio-
economic changes and industrialization and most of all because of awareness
among the peasant communities.
Male members of the immediate family of the Manganhars are employed
in government services such as the police, education departments, or ac-
counting services. The universities employ them because they are part of the
community from surrounding rural and urban neighborhoods. Some of them
hold influential positions with the federal government in Islamabad. This
the musicians call a pucci naukri (a permanent job) that gives them higher
social status.116 Many of my informants in and contacts with these commu-
nities were individuals who worked at Sind University. Follow-up research
on the mendicant traditions and their transformations is bound to produce
interesting results. However, practitioners will allow a glimpse into the com-
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munity only if the right channels of trust are established for the individuals
in the services to ‘‘keep face’’ in social structures that are still very close and
tightly knit. Shame (izzat) is a concern for men, and they are silent about
their womenfolk’s singing.117
The male musicians are reluctant for a number of reasons to admit that
their women sing. It reflects poorly on their own image as breadwinners,
for example. Middle-class or bourgeois respectability is a significant factor.
Additionally, within the bourgeoisie it reflects poorly on the men’s public
image when their women are involved in a stigmatized trade such as sing-
ing at community rituals. This is evident in Kubra’s words when she ad-
mits that she is ashamed to sing because her husband will not let her do
it. Her husband has a visible public position at Sind University. Thus, if she
sings for money as a professional musician, the couple’s trades will not blend
socially—the husband has a respectable official position whereas the wife is
a low-paid musician.118 The community attitudes in relation to women sing-
ing are also linked with women’s veiling (pardā). Women must not be seen
in public, especially by unrelated men. Then, to sing is even more damaging
socially for the position of their male relatives who struggle to change socio-
economic class and break out of the old community bonds of servitude to
landowners.
The emphasis in South Asian communities is very much on an accept-
able, public image of the individual in the social context. Thus, some Man-
ganhar or Sidi musicians who once belonged to the roving-minstrel tradi-
tions now struggle to change social class and may hesitate to claim their
socioeconomic background as musicians.
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Ethnographies of Communication
Q
, , ,
In this chapter I describe performances of Sufi poetry sung to music in socio-
linguistic terms, looking at both qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām. Briefly, these
are contexts where devotional poetry is sung to music. The speech events
may take place in a Sufi shrine, on the outskirts of a shrine during urs
celebrations, or in a concert setting. The participants of the events are the
musicians, who are the speakers, and their audiences, who are the listeners.
Therefore, the discussion here may be perceived in terms of speaking as a
cultural system.1
The number of musicians in a qawwālī concert can range from one to
twenty or even more depending on the resources of the group leader. The
larger groups are led by one or two qawwāls who sit either in the center, as
do the Sabri Brothers, or on the right-hand side, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
did. The key musicians, such as those who play the harmonium, sit in the
front row, while those who clap and sing the chorus sit in the back row. The
group leader is called the mohri, which means the ‘‘leading chess figure.’’ 2
The leader orchestrates the performance. The other musicians give their in-
put on the cues that they get from the mohri. As the group sings, an organized
system of turn-taking in speech takes place among the musicians. Turn by
turn the musicians ‘‘take the floor.’’ Thus, verbal interaction occurs among
the qawwāl group in addition to their interaction with the audiences.3
In the shrine setting of the urs at the Nizamuddin Auliya shrine in Delhi,
the qawwālī performance is guided by a shaikh or his spiritual representa-
tive, and the audience is exclusively male, primarily the associates of the
pirzade or the sajjādā-nashīn and his Sufi associates.4 Under the guidance of
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the shaikh the performance follows a ritualistic order, and the discourse that
the qawwāls sing is sacrosanct. During that period, even if the performance
is for the grassroots devotees, it is guided by a shaikh and the poetry pays
homage to that particular Sufi and his spiritual lineage, including Hazrat
Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam, from whom the Chishtiyya trace descent. In
the Chishtiyya Sufi shrines in Pakistan, such as Hazrat Data Ganj Bakhsh
Hujwiri in Lahore and Baba Fariduddin Ganj-e Shakar at Pakpattan Sharif,
the same ritual in qawwālī discourse is followed. Since this is an exclusively
male domain, women’s presence at such performances is rare.
Since qawwālī in the subcontinent is associated with the Chishtiyya order
(silsilā) of Sufis, an invocation is always made to Ali, the fourth caliph of
Islam, from whom the Chishtiyya trace descent. Thus, the ritualistic qaw-
wālī performance is always initiated with a qaul or saying of the prophet
Muhammad, ‘‘Mun kunto Maulā fā Alī-un Maulā,’’ in Arabic. During an urs
performance at the Chishtiyya shrines the poetry is focused on Ali, on the
saint buried at that particular shrine, and on his spiritual lineage. Also, the
poetry in the shrine setting during the time of the urs is based on sacred
texts that the Sufis used themselves. The qawwāls frequently use Arabic
texts from the Quran and Persian mystic poetry from great Sufi masters such
as Amir Khusrau and Rumi in their narratives in order to establish the au-
thenticity of their performances. In short, during an urs performance the
qawwāls follow a ritualistic order of discourse.5
Outside the urs context, and particularly in shrines not associated with
the Chishtiyya, the qawwālī performance may not necessarily follow a strict
ritualistic pattern, as will be seen in the description of the qawwālī perfor-
mance that I recorded at the Bulle Shah shrine in Kasur. Shrine performances
and qawwālī routines may differ from shrine to shrine.
Qawwālī performances in concert are a product of the twentieth cen-
tury, a feature of postcolonial politics when large Muslim populations from
South Asia moved to the West, particularly to the United Kingdom, France,
and Germany, in search of better economic prospects. Later, they moved to
the countries of the Middle East for the same reasons. In Pakistan itself,
after the partition of , qawwālī was promoted in concert and through
the media. This was perhaps through the efforts of the postcolonial state-
sponsored ministries of culture and the various art councils to create an
Islamic identity for the country. Therefore, although it retains much of the
traditional character of the shrine in terms of Sufi poetry, style of singing,
and instrumentation, the concert is somewhat different. Its audiences are
urban elites. In concert, qawwālī evolved as an aesthetic musical form, albeit
generated through the singing of devotional Sufi poetry.
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Within Pakistan, it is the urban middle classes that patronized qawwālī,
for they can pay to go to the performances. In international settings, qaw-
wālī audiences are either affluent expatriates who are connoisseurs of the
performances but who are not necessarily Muslims, such as the Sikhs, or
western audiences who have an interest in the esoteric elements of Islamic
mysticism. Furthermore, speakers of the indigenous languages of the sub-
continent patronize the events in which the qawwāls sing in Hindi, Urdu,
and Panjabi and in which they often use the dialects of the Braj regions of cen-
tral and north India. Qawwālī discourse in concert thus has become more
diverse. Musicians sing the qaul ‘‘Mun kunto Maulā fā Alī-un Maulā,’’ which
has a devotional intent together with an aesthetic goal. In concert, qawwāl
musicians sing a variety of texts especially in Panjabi that appear secular.
Musicians, as exemplified by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan during his lifetime, cre-
ate playful environments through the mystic poetry that they sing, using
feminine voices of female lovers like Sohni and Hir for their listeners in
the United Kingdom. The Sabri Brothers brought in syncretic references to
female mystics like Mira Bai, a Rajput princess, for their Indian expatriate
listeners at a concert performance in the United Kingdom.This eclectic form
of poetry would not be permitted inside the shrine settings of the Chishtiyya
or other orders. On the other hand, the concerts create linguistic and musical
diversity for qawwālī due to the diversity of the listeners or the consumers
of the speech events, especially in international settings.
The same is true of sufiānā-kalām, especially when Abida Parvin sings
it with improvisations. A sufiānā-kalām performance can also be held in a
shrine during the urs celebrations of a Sufi saint or poet, on Thursday eve-
nings, or on a daily basis. This form of mystical poetry is usually sung in
the vernacular and is a feature of the shrines in Sind, especially those of
Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and Shah Abdul Latif at Bhit. Sufiānā-kalām is
additionally sung in concert within Pakistan and in international settings.
Female input in this form of performance is significant as is evident from
my interview with Reshma and Abida Parvin in the previous chapter. Per-
formers sing the sufiānā-kalām in a monologue, and there is no turn-taking
as in qawwālī. If the musicians sing in a group it is in the choir form where
they do not take turns speaking. Moreover, in sufiānā-kalām the musicians
do not use handclaps and the vibrant percussion of drums that mark the
identity of qawwālī.
In this chapter I analyze three speech events to distinguish between qaw-
wālī and sufiānā-kalām, two that look at qawwālī compositions and one
that investigates a concert in Islamabad. Since qawwālī is a male genre I
will investigate two contexts by male qawwāls and their ensembles, Nusrat
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Fateh Ali Khan in the United Kingdom and Muhammad Bakhsh at the Bulle
Shah shrine in Kasur.6 Kasur is seventy miles from Lahore. I did fieldwork at
the Bulle Shah shrine, where I recorded a performance and interviewed the
qawwāls of the shrine. In the male musicians’ qawwālī, I discovered that
many times they sang in female voices. They did it to express the disciple’s
submission to the spiritual mentor, represented as the female.
For the sufiānā-kalām I will use a concert performance of Abida Parvin
in Islamabad in where I was a participant in the event. As previously
stated, she is a female musician who sings in several Pakistani languages,
including Sindhi, Siraiki, Panjabi, and Urdu.
Qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām are both musical genres connected to the
singing of Sufi mystical poetry in Pakistan and India. The tradition evolved
around the thirteenth century . Qawwālī is embedded in the structures
of classical music using elitist Perso-Arabic linguistic forms found in Hindi
and Urdu poetry or poetry in vernacular languages such as Panjabi. Sufiānā-
Kalām is mystical poetry sung in the vernacular languages of the subcon-
tinent such as Hindi, Gujrati, Sindhi, Siraiki, and Panjabi and the other
regional varieties. Musicians who perform sufiānā-kalām rely on the folk
melodies in the environments around them such as the Sufi shrines, the
melās, and now of course the cassette culture. They even use film melodies.7
The qawwālī or sufiānā-kalām concert is characterized by the intimate
communication between performers and audience. In such a concert, space
is created so that the audience has free access to the performers, especially
during moments of emotional bonding between ‘‘addressers’’ and ‘‘receiv-
ers.’’ 8 This is especially true of the smaller, more intimate performances
called mehfils. The performers know their patrons closely and respond to
verbal and nonverbal cues from them that condition the structure of the per-
formance. Unlike the strict structure of a western concert that is linear, the
concept of time in qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām concerts is cyclical; there
are moments when time is suspended and performers and their audiences
are caught in a timelessness. Depending on the audience’s response, the per-
formers may sing a particular text for an extensive period of time with all
kinds of improvisations and verbal manipulations. The aesthetics of the per-
formance is the quality of timelessness. The quality of Hindustani music is
its cyclic movement, somewhat like jazz. The performers can play around
a tāl (a beat) and continue to improvise around that tāl, which may engage
their audience at a particular moment. They embellish a particular section of
the performance by repeating a verse or a couplet with a particular melody.
Thus, within the same time period, they can sing different verses to the same
tune and continue their linguistic play with melodic repetition in a cyclical
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frame, which may create an ecstatic state. Such patterns may be described
as statuesque.9 Thus, one can see that even the linguistic phenomena here
are spread over time and space, with music becoming an added variable.10 In
short, between performers and audiences the boundaries of time and space
fade away the more both become involved in verbal play. Most performances
continue well into the night beyond the allocated time.
Both qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām are invested with emotions that the
musicians generate through music and Sufi poetry in the vernaculars that
their listeners understand. Although at times their listeners are nonliter-
ate, they are conversant with the content through the oral media around
them, such as the festivals at the Sufi shrines. Sometimes, they absorb the
poetry in community gatherings when members of a speech community get
together. Here, the performers demonstrate their competence, through lin-
guistic and musical resources, to the speech communities who participate in
the events. The musicians are the speakers who bring their linguistic wealth
of poetry, folklore, myth, syntax, and semantics that they build into verbal
play with music to mediate ecstatic spiritual experiences for their listeners.
In the events where the speech communities get together, a ‘‘universe of dis-
course’’ is created.11 In this universe, Sufi poetry with its many complex and
intricate tropes is sung to music.
In such gatherings, the researcher who looks for communication in a cul-
tural system of speaking does so through the linguistic variables in the musi-
cians’ speech, the themes that they sing from Sufi poetry, and most of all the
response that their discourse generates among the listeners. In other words,
the significance lies in what is verbalized and how it is verbalized.12 An ex-
ample of such a universe of discourse is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwālī ‘‘Je
tū akhī de sāmne nahĩ rehṇā’’ (If thou wilt not nurture my eyes, O Beloved)
that he sang before his Panjabi-speaking audiences in the United Kingdom.13
A large number among his audiences were Sikhs whose first language is Pan-
jabi. The musician and his ensemble sang a text that they initiated with cou-
plets from Baba Farid Ganj-e Shakar’s Panjabi poetry. Although Baba Farid
(– ) was a Muslim Sufi saint who wrote devotional poetry in Pan-
jabi, his texts are revered among the Sikhs because he influenced the founder
of their own religion, Baba Guru Nanak (b. ). Some of Baba Farid’s poetry
is preserved in the sacred texts of Sikhism.
Thus, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s linguistic resources in the particular per-
formance under discussion were devotional poetry that was sacred for most
of his listeners, Sikhs and Muslims alike. His individual competence lay in
his narrative skills in the Panjabi dialects that his musicians matched with
an appropriate qawwālī tāl (beat). He used a lot of takrār (linguistic repeti-
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tion) together with body language, humor, and eye contact with his listeners
that made them ecstatic. When Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his ensemble ini-
tiated the qawwālī with the following verses from Baba Farid’s poetry, his
listeners were overcome with rapture and began to shower him and his en-
semble with nazrānā in pound sterling notes. It was also the melody that
captured his listeners.
14 B Sir devĩ te vafā na mangĩ-ehī pīr Farīd dā dāse
C Sir devĩ te vafā---
C Sir devĩ te vafā na mangĩ-ehī pīr Farīd dā dase
A Palak palak pardesī- kāran--merī akhī ne savāṇ lāe
B Palak palak pardesī- kāran--merī akhī ne savāṇ lāe
A Allah jāne--
A Allah jāne--
A Allah jāne--
B Ky der gy --tang sāl ga-e nahĩ āe
A Yār Farīd ābād thī vaṇ o jhok-rab phir vīrān basāe
B Give thy head, expect not loyalty in return, O, this is Farid, the
Saint’s wisdom 15
C Give thy head, expect not loyalty . . . .
C Give thy head, expect no loyalty in return --Oh, this is Farid, the
Saint’s wisdom
A For the one who went--have my eyes shed a monsoon of tears
B For the one who went have my eyes shed a monsoon of tears
A O, God alone knows--
A O, God alone knows--
A O, God alone knows--
B Time has gone by--the return never happened
A O lover Farid, alive were those habitations once--may God bring
the wilderness to life again!
The audience danced in ecstasy before the musicians. This is what I mean
when I say that at times a performance like this one can be perceived in
terms of the interplay between linguistic and musical resources on the one
hand, and the performers’ individual competence, on the other.16
I had to transliterate the qawwālī carefully to discover what was mysti-
cal about the content and what made the Panjabi-speaking Sikh audiences
in the performance so ecstatic. To an untrained ear it would seem like a flir-
tatious love poem. However, when I transliterated the opening verses of the
qawwālī where the musicians invoke the spirit of Farid—‘‘Yār Farīd ābād thī
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vaṇ o jhok-rab phir vīrān basāε’’ (O lover Farid, alive were those habitations
once—may God bring the wilderness to life again!)—I understood the mys-
tical trope of the qawwālī. The trope was in ‘‘Yār Farīd’’ (line of translit-
eration), the invocation to Baba Farid. This very poetry had influenced Guru
Nanak, the founder of their own faith. Thus, he is a revered Sufi among the
Sikhs as well as among his Muslim devotees. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a
competent musician and linguist who was ingrained in the traditions of Pan-
jabi Sufi poetry that he acquired through his own qawwāl lineage of the Pan-
jab.17 He was himself a devotee of the Sufi saint and performed at his shrine
in Pakpattan Sharif.18 Hence, he selected verses that would evoke an emo-
tional response from his affluent Panjabi-speaking audiences in the United
Kingdom, that is, the Sikhs and the expatriate Pakistani and Indian listeners.
In a section of the same qawwālī that follows, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in-
jected immense sensitivity, humor, and intimacy through poetry, linguistic
structures, and music to sing for more than two hours, improvising to the
ecstatic responses of his audiences. He sang about a beloved and made allu-
sions to the veil. Had it not been for the very sacred frame at the beginning,
when his ensemble invoked Baba Farid, a researcher might have taken the
performance for a secular love song where a lover seeks a beloved and sere-
nades her. The latter seems to play hide-and-seek, an episode that Nusrat
Fateh Ali Khan articulates with competence through his own verbal play.
B Je tū akhī de sāmṇe nahĩ rehṇā
B Ve bibā sāḍā dil moṛ de
A Kar beṭhī sajnā bharosā tere pīār te-roṛ beṭhī dil mẽ -- 19
A E-roṛ beṭhī---dil tere itebār te
B If thou wilt not nurture my eyes, O Beloved,
B Then, O Beloved, return my heart!
A Thy love did I trust, O Beloved, my heart I risked --
A My heart I made hostage, in thee I put my trust
When I interviewed Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in , I specifically asked
him about this clandestine, flirtatious style of singing qawwālī in England
before expatriate Pakistani and Sikh audiences that made them ecstatic.
Khan smiled quietly and took some time to say that such a state is attained
after much riazat (practice) in singing mystical texts.
In such performances the ‘‘extralinguistic entities’’ obviously exceed the
bounds of poetics and of linguistics in general.20 By this I mean an explo-
ration of how the environment in the performance is created. For the per-
formers it means swaying their bodies and making eye contact with their
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audience during the concert. The musicians’ body movements, together with
the rhythm of the music and language, can create a kefīat (mystical delight)
among the listeners.21
A typical performance, whether at a shrine or in a concert, is a jointly
achieved collaborative action between musicians and their audiences. The
singers will sit in a group with their musical ensemble, facing their audi-
ences. Sometimes, the gatherings are exclusively for men, but in the popular
culture of today, whether at the shrine or in the concert, it is usually a mixed
group, except during an urs such as at Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore, when
the shrine establishment segregates the women’s sections. Women may be
hidden from men’s view by a curtain, and in some shrines they sit behind a
curtain set up between them and the musicians.
Today, when devotees go to a Sufi shrine, they do so because of their rev-
erence for and belief in the spiritual powers of that Sufi. They believe in
the mystic’s capability to have performed karāmāt (miracles) in his lifetime.
The devotees continue to attach the same spiritual powers to the mystic’s
shrine and the mystic’s ability to provide spiritual and emotional relief even
after death.22 Listening to qawwālī repertoire or samā and sufiānā-kalām for
devotional purposes forms part of the rituals that devotees undertake dur-
ing a hazrī or salām at the shrine. The qawwāls share the same worldview
whether they are men or women. They look upon themselves as devotees
of the Sufi saint or poet. Lahori supports his claim when he uses the very
term ‘‘hazrī’’ in connection with qawwāls who sang at the Sufi shrines in
Lahore before the partition of and after it.23 He mentions notable musi-
cians such as Ustad Bare Ghulam Ali, Ustad Chote Ghulam Ali, Niaz Hus-
sain Shami, Fateh Ali Mubarik, and Dina Qawwal, who performed hazrī in
terms of singing mystical texts at the urs of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore. He
also mentions women musicians who performed hazrī at the Sufi shrines in
Lahore, especially at the time of the urs.
The musicians believe that they reinforce their own spiritual connec-
tion with the mystic through the medium of language and music, especially
if they sing his poetry.24 If they sing at a shrine, they consider themselves
the murids (disciples) of the Sufi, and they believe that their performance
is a nazar (gift) to the spirit of the Sufi who is buried there. They take upon
themselves the role of mediators. As such, they assume the aesthetic ability
to enable their audience to make a spiritual connection with their pir or
murshid, who is the Sufi. As competent musicians, they know that they have
to transmit the spiritual experience to their audience.25 They have to be-
come the conduit between the mundane and that world of ecstasy, that eso-
teric world of the mystic. How do they do it? They create this ecstatic world
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. ‘‘Women’s Entry Prohibited Inside the Shrine’’
through the magic of their language and music. The more accomplished the
performer the better she can accomplish this. It does not matter whether it
is the shrine or the concert, today’s singer of Sufi discourse has learned that
charismatic art, that fine intersection of language and music, brings about
the esoteric state for the ordinary person in the popular culture. I speak here
of performers like Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parvin, and the Sabri
Brothers and, to some extent, the unknown, undiscovered performers who
sing at the shrines or in small rural communities in social contexts. Perfor-
mance distribution via electronic media (videos, CD-ROMs, audiocassettes,
‘‘dish,’’) to large expatriate speech communities in the Middle East, Japan,
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and the West, especially in the United Kingdom, has considerably enhanced
the quality and the creativity of the performances.
The performers mediate spirituality through inducing a state that they
call kefīat. They do this all within the context of a performance. They will
use their linguistic resources of poetry, myth, syntax, semantics, and tonal
and speech patterns together with music to create the samā. They will im-
provise linguistic constructions at every stage, and they will create rhyth-
mic melodies with drums and other musical instruments to bring about the
kefīat in the samā. At the grassroots level, samā is also understood as a con-
text or environment, and the aim of every competent performer of Sufi music
and discourse is to create the samā.
Devotional attendance at a Sufi shrine is called hazrī-denā in native terms,
which means paying a ritual visit. Other native terms for presenting one-
self at a Sufi shrine are salām-karnā or doing a ziārat of the saint, achieved
through the rituals that are performed there such as listening to qawwālī or
. Female devotion
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. Forms of devotion
kalām and performing prayer (fātehā).26 During the urs or on Thursday eve-
nings, or at any time of the day or night, devotees flock to the Sufi shrines, to
communicate with the mystics spiritually. The communication brings relief
to their emotional and personal concerns.
Faqīrs (devotees who wear orange robes) perform the ritual dhammāl
(dance) every evening at the Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in Sehwan
Sharif. The large drums (naubats), which are played for the dhammāl, can
be seen lying in the large courtyard of the shrine during the day. Informants
at Radio Pakistan in Hyderabad compare the dhammāl of the faqīrs at this
shrine with that of the whirling dervishes of Maulana Rumi in Konya. The
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passionate whirling dance of the faqīrs in a circle is said to express the im-
mense jalāl (energy) of Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar. His devotees believe
that many prayers are answered at the shrine and many wishes granted.
Reshma, one of the leading female singers of sufiānā-kalām in the subcon-
tinent, sang the popular melody
Lāj merī pat rakio bhalā O, keep my prestige 27
Jhule Lālan, O Lalan, protector of the cradle,
Sindhṛi dā, O thou of Sind,
Sehwan dā, O thou of Sehwan,
Sakhi Shahbaz Qalandar Benevolent Shahbaz Qalandar
at the shrine in Siraiki, when she was discovered by the media. This was dur-
ing an urs of the mystic in the sixties. Her linguistic resource was a folk
melody that honored Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s jalāl or spiritual powers
as a bestower of children. When I interviewed Reshma, she claimed that she
had met with immense success because she offered her musical and linguis-
tic talents to sing of the benevolence of this Sufi mystic. She believes that
Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar has blessed her.
Almost all the performers that I have interviewed for this study believe
. Preparing chaddar for hāzrī
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. Melā Chirāg Urs at Shah Hussain, Shalimar Gardens, Lahore
that they are divinely blessed by their murshids (spiritual mentors) for the
devotion with which they sing. Female informants in the city of Sehwan
Sharif confirmed that many female performers come from the Panjab during
the urs of Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and sing at the shrine with the ut-
most devotion. Their audiences are men as well as women. My female infor-
mants did not have much information about women singers performing at
other times of the year. However, professionals at Radio Pakistan in Hyder-
abad reported that women musicians come to the shrine only at the time of
the urs celebrations.
The Sidi, Mohana, and Manganhar women associated with feudal house-
holds in the Sind said that they sing devotional Sufi poetry at their mentor’s
shrine only on special occasions, such as his urs or a religious event. These
shrines are not far from where they live, perhaps within thirty to forty miles.
These musicians said that they only perform before female audiences in their
murshid’s shrine and that their female patrons pay them well. They said that
they sing some of the same devotional discourse in social contexts among
women, such as at birth or a wedding. However, I confirmed at the urs of
Shah Hussain in Lahore that women sing before large male and female audi-
ences and that there is no gender discrimination among the audiences. This
strengthens the claim of my female informants at Sehwan Sharif that women
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performers sing before both female and male audiences. This is perhaps due
to economic factors: male audiences are bound to reward better, since the
males are wage earners and most women are not.
Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar’s shrine is reputed for the jalālī or intense
supernatural energy of the Sufi. Shah Abdul Latif, Bulle Shah, and Shah Hus-
sain’s shrines are said to be of the jamālī or aesthetic mystics. The latter Sufis
were poets who wrote narratives that could be sung to music. In fact, some
were musicians themselves. Shah Latif wrote Sufi poetry in Sindhi, and his
best known work is his Risālo. Even today, his faqīrs sing his traditional
poetry at the shrine, in the melodies that he composed. They sing his poetry
in the falsetto, imitating a woman’s voice. The ritual of singing Shah’s poetry
to his melodies has been performed every evening since the shrine has been
there. The qawwāls at the Bulle Shah shrine in Kasur claim to do the same,
that is, sing his poetry to his melodies. They further claim that their family
has sung there for the last three hundred years. They assert that they are the
guardians of Bulle Shah’s oral poetry, some of which has not yet found its
way into the written texts.
Musicians like to sing about the murid-murshid or teacher-disciple re-
lationship in their performances. The murid becomes the lover and the mur-
shid the beloved. The former is represented as the submissive female. The
metaphor becomes more complex with the infusion of bridal imagery into
the relationship. The beloved becomes the bride or sometimes the bride-
groom wearing a veil. Musicians sing devotional songs to this bride or to
the groom asking them to lift the veil.28 I discuss the veil in reporting the
fieldwork at the Bulle Shah shrine.
The veil in Sufi poetry is intimately related to kaśf, or the doctrine of lift-
ing the veil, that is, the Divine Being revealing itself to the lover. Many a
song in the discourse of musicians of Sufi poetry revolves around this theme.
The prophet Muhammad’s ascension to heaven and his meeting with his be-
loved is embedded in images of the veil. The event is also called the mi’rāj.
Qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām singers display their aesthetic skills to sing of
the diverse allusions to the veil—the kaśf or the unveiling of the beloved.
One such qawwālī is Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Hir narrative that he
sings in concert in the United Kingdom.29
B Nī mẽ jānā jogī de nāl
A E-jogī-jogī matvālā 30
A&B E jogī- jogī matvālā
A Hath vic ‘‘Il-Allah’’ dī mālā
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A&B Hath vic ‘‘Il Allah’’ di mālā
A Nām hai ūs dā Kamlīvālā
A&B Nī mẽ jānā jogī de nāl
B // Jogī de nāl
B O, with the jogī will I go
A O, this jogī-- intoxicated jogī
A&B O, this jogī-intoxicated jogī
A ‘‘God is one’’ in his prayer, says he
A&B ‘‘God is one’’ in his prayer, says he
A ‘‘The One with the Shroud’’ is his name
A&B O, with the jogī will I go
The performer sings the Hir-Ranjha narrative in Panjabi. In Nusrat Fateh Ali
Khan’s narrative, Hir wants to go away with Ranjha, wearing rings in her
ears, and a tilak (mark) on her forehead. Somewhere at the end, the narra-
tive becomes fused with the ‘‘Kamlīvālā,’’ which is a reference to the prophet
Muhammad, who is known as the Kamlīvālā in the popular Islamic tra-
dition. The belief is that the prophet Muhammad received his revelations
while covered by a shroud (kamlī), hence the term that means ‘‘One with the
Shroud,’’ the ‘‘Kamlīvālā.’’ Here, in the text of the song, Hir’s beloved Ranjha
acquires a spirituality that blends with the shroud. Sometimes, the reference
can even be to the Divine Being or perhaps a spiritual mentor—the murshid
whose representation is a major preoccupation in Sufi poetry.
This qawwālī was sung in the same performance that I discussed earlier
and in which there are allusions to the veil, where Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
created a flirtatious discourse with the beloved through the metaphor of
the veil.
:
When I met Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and asked him about his immensely inti-
mate use of the Panjabi poetic and linguistic structures, he said the following:
A: 31 Well, it is all about the female voice—it is all about the nī—that
feminine gender in which you sing—a large number of your narra-
tives are sung in the feminine gender—there is that pervasive—that
persistent female voice—
K: What do you think of it yourself?
A: Really—I am not sure—that is why I come here to solicit your
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views—all I know is that text after text that you sing—narrative after
narrative is sung in that fascinating female voice—I am indeed curi-
ous—all this business about Hir—
K: The Sufi poets—in the tradition of Sufi mystical poetry—these
mystic poets—when they speak they do it in the female voice—they
present themselves as the female—for them their beloved—their men-
tor—their shaikh—is the male—whereas their own voice is that of the
female—their own discourse is that of the female—
A: Yes—
K: They court the beloved in the female voice, they woo the beloved—
themselves speaking in the female voice—you can read the entire
sufiānā-kalām—the entire Sufi kalām—that entire discourse is in the
female voice—
A: Yes—indeed—
K: You can see this in Amir Khusrau’s texts that are in Hindi—the old
Panjabi mystical texts—then when you read Baba Farid—Bulle Shah—
A: Yes—
K: In Bulle Shah’s mystical poetry—
A: Yes—
K: The narratives are all in the female voice—
A: Yes—
K: There is an elegance in it—there is an elegance—a humility in the
female voice—which is lacking in the male voice—all these aesthet-
ics—it is altogether something very different—all these aesthetics—
A: Yes—
K: They have spoken in the female voice—they found it very ap-
propriate—to communicate in the female voice—they found their
spirit—their soul—the essence of what they wanted to say in the
female voice—
The musician further affirmed,
K: In sufiānā-kalām—in arifānā-kalām—these things last—whoever
sings mystical texts—sings Sufi songs—leaves an impact—an impact
for centuries to come—it leaves an impact—it leaves an impact on
posterity—
A: Before this—do you know of any woman who sang Sufi songs—
songs that have left an impact on posterity?
K: I think I do not know of any other woman except Abida Parvin—
A: Yes—
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K: Probably women have sung Sufi songs—off and on—on differ-
ent occasions—but I don’t know of any such women—probably these
women never ever came into the limelight—were never ever acknowl-
edged for their Sufi narratives—
A: Yes—indeed—so, it seems that Abida Parvin has done something
new—now about these Sufi mystics—like Bulle Shah was a poet—Shah
Hussain—
K: I’ll tell you something—something about Bulle Shah—when his
shaikh—his mentor got annoyed with him—got weary of him—his
pir—he went away to spend twelve years among the dancing girls—
he adopted the dancing girl’s identity—that female’s voice—her iden-
tity—and returned to dance—dance like the dancing girl—before the
mentor—to woo him—to win him back—
A: Like the dancing girl—like the woman?
K: Like the woman!
When musicians sing they invoke the spirit of a particular Sufi in a frame
of reverence at the very outset of a performance. As mentioned, I have trans-
literated Sufi songs from Abida Parvin’s and Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s
performances, where they called upon the spirits of Sufi poets like Baba
Farid, Khawaja Ghulam Farid, Sultan Bahu, or Bulle Shah to validate their
singing of a particular text.
They sang the text but with a lot of improvisation built into it, according
to the context. Much depended on their listeners and the speech commu-
nities. Thus, I have discovered that performers like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
and Abida Parvin, who sang in the vernaculars, had a much wider repertoire
compared with performers who could only use the limited texts of the North
Indian style of qawwālī in Urdu or Hindi. Performers who sang in the in-
digenous languages had more linguistic resources to draw from, such as the
texts of the Sufi poets of their areas, the folklore, and nature, such as refer-
ences to birds, seasons, and the landscape. As such they had a much wider
linguistic and poetic base. Sometimes, they combined the original poem of
a Sufi poet with other fragments that they had either created themselves or
a songwriter had built into the text for them. They would even take verses
from the poetry of different Sufi poets and use them as adjacent texts, impro-
vising the discourse, according to the cues they received from the audience.
I noticed this in Abida Parvin’s concert in Islamabad where, in one perfor-
mance, she combined fragments from the poetry of Shah Abdul Latif, Sultan
Bahu, and Bulle Shah, thus blending Sindhi, Siraiki, and Panjabi with some
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. Singing in female voices: Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
Urdu prose discourse to talk to her audience. She mixed four linguistic codes
with elements of speech, song, and music to create the state of kefiāt (mys-
tical delight) in the performance.
I attended Abida Parvin’s concert at the Open University in Islamabad
where she sang for three hours in the summer heat of August. The university
sponsored her performance. The audience was mainly faculty from the uni-
versity, students, and bureaucrats from the federal government who work in
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Islamabad. The audience was invited, and the context of performance was a
postcolonial one. Islamabad is the capital and therefore its population con-
sists of officials linked with the federal government, and the foreign embas-
sies and their support staff. Since the Open University is a state-sponsored
institution, the concert was held for the benefit of senior government offi-
cials and faculty at the university. Invitations to such concerts are among
the perks that go with being part of the official Islamabad bureaucracy. This
practice has a colonial heritage. Since I am faculty at the university I too was
invited to the concert.
I have worked on the video footage of this performance for several years in
order to transcribe Abida Parvin’s speech and to study her interaction with
her listeners. Almost all the narratives were related to the quest for a Sufi
mentor. In fact, she even referred to the metalanguage of the heat and the
humidity in the auditorium as a context of energy for the seekers to find the
murshid, the beloved. She entertained her audience with humorous com-
ments about the heat and monsoon humidity. She caused them to roar with
laughter when she said that perhaps in the heat of the auditorium on that
August evening some among her audience might find their murshid. That
evening this woman performer sang in a fiery mood and blasted the orthodox
government of the time in the presence of its official bureaucracy by using
the frames of Sufi poetry. She was the solo singer of this concert of sufiānā-
kalām, and she had an ensemble of five musicians, who played the harmo-
nium or accordian, the tabla or drum, and the sitar and tambura, stringed
instruments used in classical Pakistani and Indian music. Her shεhnāīvālā
played like a bagpiper in the ensemble for only two melodies. Her narratives
were from the poetry of the Sufi poets in the various Pakistani languages.
The order of the narratives that she sang is listed here.
Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit Invocation Sindhi
Khawaja Ghulam Farid Siraiki
Hakim Nasser Urdu
Shah Latif Siraiki
Sultan Bahu Panjabi and Siraiki
Khawaja Ghulam Farid Siraiki
Shah Hussain Panjabi
Sultan Bahu, Shah Latif, Siraiki, Sindhi, Panjabi, and Urdu
and Bulle Shah
Shah Latif-Muhmal Rano Sindhi
Folk melody: Lāj Merī Siraiki
Folk melody: Jamālo Sindhi
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In her narratives she ridiculed the so-called ‘‘knowledgeable ones’’ or the
caretakers of faith. She compared them to animals, to cattle, to fish, and to
frogs. She sang the following text from Sultan Bahu in Siraiki, which she later
blended with Shah Abdul Latif’s poetry in Sindhi and that of Bulle Shah in
Panjabi.32
A 33 Ilm paṛhe-e aśrāf na-a thīnḍā
A Ilm paṛhe-e-e aśhrā-āf na-a thīnḍā-ā
A Jeṛhā mundh zāt kamīnā hū-ū-ū-ū
A Pītal dā soṇā-ā mū-ū-l nā theve-e
A Pītal dā soṇā mūl nā theve-e
A Tuṛe caṛe-as lāl nagīnā h-ū-ū
A Shūm t sakha kadhā-a na theve-e
A T-ūṛe hovan lākh khazīnā hū-u
A Alī binā-ā imān nahĩ Bāhū-ū-ū
A Toṛe dafan vic Medīnā hū-ū
A O-lā mi- O lā mī--O- lā mi- Ho lā-ā
A Je rab mildā nāte tote-
A Je-e rab-b Je-ā-ā-ā-ā-ā-ā
A Je rab mildā nāte tote te rab mildā ḍaḍū machī- nū-ū
A Āj vese sab log ko pasīnā āyā hūā hai śaid kisī ko mil jāε
B /th /th /th /th [audience claps]
A Je rab mildā-ā nāte tote te rab mildā ḍaḍū machi- nū
A Je rab mildā jhangal phirī- te rab mildā gāī- vachī- nū-ū
A Ve mī- Bulle-ā rab unh nū mildā ate dilī- sacī- achī- nū
A One does not become noble from reading books
A One does not become noble from reading books
A And if thou art also by nature mean-O hu 34
A Thou cannot buy gold for the price of copper
A Thou cannot buy gold for the price of copper
A Even if it is studded with rubies and jewels-O hu
A The miser will never become generous
A Even if he is showered with treasures
A Without Ali there is no faith-O Bahu
A For i-t is buried far in Medina hu 35
A O God, O God, O God
A If God could be found by being washed and cleaned—
A If God . . .
A If God could be found by being washed and cleaned, then the fish and
frogs would have found him.
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A Everyone in this auditorium is sweating today, perhaps someone will
find Him.36
A If God could be found by being washed and cleaned, then the fish and
frogs would have found Him.
A If God could be found by roaming the jungles, then the cows and calves
would have found Him.
A O gentle Bulle, God is found only by those who are true and noble of
heart
In the text of the song, for instance in line fifteen, is Abida Parvin’s meta-
language of the heat in the auditorium. In lines four to eight she uses simile
to describe a miser, and the miser in turn is the so-called scholar who is
mean by nature, in her speech. This is expressed in the first three lines of the
narrative. Her linguistic sources in this entire section of the narrative are
the local proverbs and folk beliefs. Further on, in this very narrative, she de-
rives her speech from Sultan Bahu to talk about the ‘‘caretakers of the faith,’’
comparing them with the genuine believer.
A Paṛh paṛh ilm hazār kitāb
A Paṛh paṛh ilm hazār kitāb- ālim hoe sāre hū
A Ik harf iśq dā na paṛh jāṇan
A Bhulan phiran bicāre hū
B /th /th /th /th [audience claps] 37
A Ik harf iśq dā na paṛh jānan
A Bhulan phiran bicāre hū-ū
A Lakh nigāh je ālim vekhe kise kandhī na caṛhī hū
A Hik nigāh je aśiq vekhe lakh hazār tare hū
B /th /th [audience claps]
A Ho lā mī--Vo lā mī-
A They read books and think they are scholars
A They read books and think they are scholars
A They can’t read a word of love
A The poor souls are lost
A They can’t read a word of love
A The poor souls are lost
A Thousands of scholars have we seen but none ever carried them on
their shoulders
A But when we see even a single lover, he appears like a myriad stars
A O God, O God
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Toward the end of this performance, she speaks to her audience in Urdu
in prose narrative and tells them the story of Bulle Shah and his mentor, Shah
Inayat.
A Bulle Shāh ke murśid Ināyat Shāh vo śahr-- Uch śahr ke rehne vāle thε
A Aur Bulle Shāh rehne vāle the Kasūr ke---
A Uch śahr ko aur Kasūr ko is tarhā biyān kīā hai peś kartī h
A Bulle Shah’s mentor Inayat Shah, he--he belonged to Uch city
A And Bulle Shah belonged to Kasur----
A Uch city and Kasur are described as I present it for you here
Abida Parvin brings in the themes of gender, class, and caste, which were
issues in Bulle Shah’s relationship with his spiritual mentor, Shah Inayat.
I shall discuss it in the context of the Bulle Shah shrine. She sings thus in
Panjabi:
A Tus uce tus dī zāt ucī
A Tus- uce tusdī zāt uci tus Uch śahr de rehaṇ vāle-e
A As Kasūrī sāḍī zāt Kasūrī as śahr Kasūr de rehaṇ vāle
A O lā mī- - Vo lā mī-
A Cal ve Bulle-ā cal authe calī-e jithe sāre ane
A Cal ve Bulle-ā cal authe calī-e jithe sāre ane-e
A Nā koī sāḍī zāt pechāne nā koī sānū mane-e
A Ā-ā-ā-ā
A Bulle nac ke yār manāyā-e
A Ho Bulle nac ke yār manāyā-e
A Sarā dil dā kūfr gunvāyā-e
A Ho Būlle nac ke yār manāyā-e
A Sarā dil dā kūfr gunvāyā-e
A Thou art great and thy caste is great
A Thou art great and thy caste is great—Thou art an inhabitant of Uch city
[Uch literally means high/great]
A I am a Kasuri and my caste is Kasuri and we are inhabitants of Kasur city
A O la mia-O la mia
A O Bulle—let’s go where everyone is blind
A O Bulle—let’s go where everyone is blind
A Where no one knows our caste and where no one acknowledges us
A A-a-a-a
A Bulle has won his beloved with the dance
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A Ho Bulle has won his beloved with the dance
A And he has lost all disbelief of the heart
A Ho Bulle has won his beloved with the dance
A And he has lost all disbelief of the heart
In this narrative Abida Parvin uses the metalanguage of the dance (nāc)
as a state of ecstasy through which the beloved is won. Earlier I talked of
the dhammāl, the dance of the faqīrs at the Lal Shahbaz Qalandar shrine in
Sehwan. Terms such as dhammāl, nāc, even qalandar are states of ecstasy
through which the devotee seeks the murshid. The reference could even be
to the Divine Being. It is evident, then, that those musicians who sing in
concert and at the shrines utilize much metalanguage.
On the basis of the evidence in the performances, it can be said that musi-
cians like Abida Parvin and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan have used the female
voice as myth and narrative in the many Pakistani languages that they know.
Their repertoire has been large because they can sing in Urdu, Hindi, Pan-
jabi, and Siraiki as well as the elitist Arabic and Persian texts of the Sufi mas-
ters. Abida Parvin has the additional resource of the Sindhi language. Since
she is a native speaker of Sindhi, she is able to sing the poetry of Sufi poets
like Shah Abdul Latif and Sacchal Sarmast in Sindhi, which her male qaw-
wāl counterparts cannot. Abida Parvin therefore has an advantage over her
male qawwāl counterparts because of her linguistic resources.
̄
I now discuss a shrine performance at Bulle Shah in Kasur. The city is about
seventy miles from Lahore. I traveled to the shrine with a female friend and
her husband, two days before the start of the fasting month of Ramazan.
My fellow devotees and I started from Lahore on a beautiful spring after-
noon and arrived at the shrine around five o’clock in the evening. When I ar-
rived, the qawwāls of the shrine, Muhammad Bakhsh and his paternal uncle
Karam Bakhsh, were already singing there. A young man who was said to be
a nephew also sang with them. There were two other musicians with them.
Their musical instruments were a harmonium (an accordion), a ḍholak (a
double-sided drum shaped like a barrel), and a pair of tambourines.
Since the shrine is located in the heart of the city, we had to drive the car
through extremely narrow streets, encountering large horse-driven carriages
(ṭangās). The street near the shrine was colorfully decorated with shops that
sell all kinds of artifacts such as marigolds, rose petals, candles, and small
earthenware lamps called divās, which are filled with mustard oil and have
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a cotton wick in them. They are lit at the shrine. The shops displayed in-
cense sticks, prayer beads, and silver-plated bangles with Quranic verses in-
scribed on them that devotees take to the shrine, or home as souvenirs. The
shops also sell sweets that the devotees buy as tabarruk, nazar, or niāz (food
for distribution in the shrine). Like most shrines, Bulle Shah’s tomb is in
the center of a brick courtyard covered with a concrete canopy. The crypt is
covered with green and red sheets decorated with gold tinsel. The devotees
bring these as offerings. There are several small tombs surrounding the main
tomb, all within the same compound. Here, the female and male relatives
of the Sufi poets are buried. Devotees light candles at these tombs and offer
fātehā (prayer).
While Muhammad Bakhsh and Karam Bakhsh sang, my companions and
I sat close to the ensemble. Male devotees in the shrine made a small circle
in front of the musicians and started to dance in rhythm with the music.
Later, some hijṛās (eunuchs) also joined the group. The hijṛās are known as
khāwājāsarā in the court traditions of the Muslim rulers of the subconti-
nent, and they held important positions at the court. They were also asso-
ciated with burial rites such as at the Nizamuddin Auliya shrine.38 Today
in Pakistan and India the hijṛās sing and dance at births, especially of male
infants, and at circumcisions and weddings.39 They have their own commu-
nity networks through which they find out about events and appear with
their musicians, hijṛās like themselves, to play music while some of them
dance. The size of the group may vary from two to any number. The fami-
lies reward them according to their means. Bulle Shah’s was the only shrine
where I encountered the hijṛās. Most probably they are traditionally linked
to the shrine because of Bulle Shah’s own life history of having lived among
the dancing girls for several years. He is reported to have learned the music
arts to win back his beloved murshid, Shah Inayat.
The hijṛas at Bulle Shah had ghungrū tied to their ankles. They danced
to the rhythm of the music. Women devotees who until then were perform-
ing their rituals of prayer or lighting candles and incense sticks at the poet’s
shrine or elsewhere joined the assembly to listen to the qawwāls. They came
and sat with me and my female companion. All together, including the musi-
cians, there were fifty women and men in the shrine.
Complying with my request to sing about the female voices in Sufi poetry,
the qawwāls sang six different verse compositions that I recorded. All the
compositions were in Panjabi, and five were sung as female narratives. The
musicians claimed that the five female narratives were Bulle Shah’s cre-
ations. They said they had inherited them orally from their ancestors who
had been qawwāls at the shrine for the last three centuries. Only one qaw-
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. Devotion to the deity: Hijṛā at the Bulle Shah shrine, Kasur
wālī was about Muhammad the Prophet; the other five were narratives about
different stages of Bulle Shah’s spiritual growth as a mystic and his relation-
ship with his spiritual mentor, Shah Inayat. The qawwāls sang about Bulle
Shah the murid (disciple) and Shah Inayat the mentor (murshid ) through
female and male representations.
In order to understand the songs we have to take a close look at Bulle
Shah’s biography. Bulle Shah is said to have lived approximately from
to in Kasur. His original name was Abdullah Shah, and his family
were Syeds who had settled in Uch Gilanian, the city of saints in Bahawal-
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pur, where Bulle Shah was born. The family migrated to Kasur when Bulle
Shah was six years old. Whereas Bulle Shah was himself a Syed, he chose to
become the disciple of Shah Inayat, who did not belong to his socioeconomic
caste but is said to have been of arāĩ descent. The arāĩ in the Panjab were gar-
deners or small cultivators who worked on their own land. There are several
legends in the oral lore of the qawwāls at the shrine about Bulle Shah defy-
ing the mores of his family and community to continue his discipleship of
Shah Inayat despite the fact that he was a Syed himself. Many such narratives
about Bulle Shah are also reported in the written texts.40 In this book, the
key performers, such as Abida Parvin, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and the
Bulle Shah qawwāls, talk about Bulle Shah’s relationship with Shah Inayat.
They have further used references to this relationship in the poetry of their
performances.
The first narrative that the qawwāls sang was from Bulle’s legendary rec-
onciliation with his mentor, Shah Inayat. The legend of Bulle Shah’s relation
with his spiritual mentor is that after several years of association Shah Inayat
excluded Bulle Shah from his spiritual company. Shah Inayat showed his dis-
approval of Bulle Shah’s poetry, which he considered to be too outspoken
against the priestly class. Shah Inayat dissociated himself from Bulle Shah
for his outright criticism of issues of gender, class, and caste. Furthermore,
he objected to Bulle’s ridicule of institutionalized religion. Shah Inayat had
to detach himself from his rebellious disciple because he was afraid of the
political forces of the time.41
. Devotees at a Sufi shrine
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Bulle Shah worked hard for several years to win back his murshid. He
knew that Shah Inayat was fond of music. Therefore, he went and lived
among musicians for almost seven years and became their apprentice. After
learning the musical arts, he returned to Shah Inayat’s company and won
him back by playing music and dancing before him. The event of Bulle Shah’s
winning back Shah Inayat through dance and music is sung in the qawwālī
and kalām traditions. In the first song the qawwāls sang they recounted this
very event. Bulle Shah portrays himself as a dancing girl who narrates how
she won back her beloved through dance. Hence, it is the disciple who is
represented as the dancing girl here. The text of the song (kāfī) recorded from
live speech is as follows:
Men tilk lagāvaṇ de Let me put the mark on the forehead
Kanjrī baṇiā merī zāt nā ghaṭ dī To become the dancing girl affects not
my caste
Te men nac ke yār manāvaṇ de Dance I shall to win my beloved, my
mentor
. . . . . . . .
Men yār de zimme lāvaṇ de Let me make my beloved, my master,
responsible for me
Tere iśq nacāyā thyā thyā Thy love has made me dance
Men pīr dī odhi lāvaṇ de Let me pay the tribute to my master
Ve sāĩ Bulle-ā te rab jāṇe O mystic Bulle, only God knows
. . . . . . . .
Bulle Shah ne pīr dī khātir Bulle Shah for the sake of his master
Ik nac ke pīr manā-yā-e Has danced his master back to
reconciliation
In the original Panjabi text, the word nacāyā is significant because it ex-
presses the act of the dance, which in itself is the metalanguage for ecstasy.
The second qawwālī that Muhammad Bakhsh and Karam Bakhsh sang
was about a bride who is forced to leave her father’s home to go and live
with her husband and his family. The metaphor of the journey to the in-laws’
home is a preparation for the hereafter, to which every human being is sub-
jected. This, too, represents the disciple-mentor relationship, with the dis-
ciple playing the role of the submissive bride. The refrain of the poem that
the bride sings to her female friend in Panjabi is this:
Merā bābul kardā dhakā kuṛe My father forces me, O damsel
Merā bābul kardā dhakā kuṛe My father forces me, O damsel
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The musicians again sing of the implied reference to the veil that covers the
bride’s face. All the toil, all the suffering is for that final state, that of the kaśf,
or the unveiling of the beloved, that state of illumination when the disciple
meets the mentor.
After this, the qawwāls sang a carkhī-nāma (spinning-wheel song) for the
assembly. Here, the narrative is of a young damsel who spins her trousseau
for the forthcoming life in her husband’s home. Again, as in the previous
song, the hereafter is equated to the in-laws’ home. The young damsel is the
disciple who must toil diligently to gain the mentor’s wisdom. The speech
in the song (kāfī) is this:
Kar kataṇ val dhiāṇ kuṛe Heed to thy spinning, O damsel
Kar kataṇ val dhiāṇ kuṛe Heed to thy spinning, O damsel
. . . . . . . .
Kar mān nā husn javāṇī dā Be not arrogant for thy youth, O damsel
Koī dūnīyā jhuṭī fānī dā This earth is a lie, and will perish,
O damsel
Kat le jo kūc katṇā-e Spin thou, whatever thou needs to spin,
O damsel
Nā rehsī nām niśān kuṛe Alas there will be no name nor sign,
O damsel
. . . . . . . .
Tū sadā nā peke rehṇā-e Thy shalt not forever be with thy parents,
O damsel
Nā pās amṛī de rehṇā-e Thou shalt not forever be with thy
mother, O damsel
O vic vichoṛā sheṇā-e Alas, there shall be a separation, O damsel
. . . . . . . .
Tū apnā dāj rachā leh-nī Decorate thou thy trousseau, O damsel
O Bulle da Sultan kuṛe He is Bulle’s Lord, O damsel
Kar kataṇ val dhiān kuṛe Heed to thy spinning, O damsel
Kar kataṇ val dhiān kuṛe Heed to thy spinning, O damsel
The references to the bride and the veil are evident in the poetry of the qaw-
wāls, even in the carkhī-nāma that they perform for their audiences. Even-
tually, the damsel will become the bride, or expects to become one.
An interesting kāfī that the qawwāls sang was about Bulle Shah himself
as if he were the bride, and the qawwāls were asking him to lift the veil so
that they could see the beloved’s face. The qawwāls sang as though they were
the bride’s female friends.
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O ghungat khol ā-sajnā Lift thy veil, O Beloved
O ghungat khol ā-sajnā Lift thy veil, O Beloved
Ghungat cuk le sajnā Lift thy veil, O Beloved
Ghungat cuk le Bābā Bulle Shah Lift thy veil, O Baba Bulle Shah
Sakhi vekhaṇ aī sajnā-- Thy female friends come to see thee,
O Beloved
O ghungat cuk le sajnā Lift thy veil, O Beloved
Again, the representation in this kāfī is that of the lover or the disciple.
The beloved is the bride and her friends; the disciples ask her to lift the veil
from her face. There is a playfulness in the verses, and the beloved or men-
tor’s image assumes multiple identities. Instead of the male, the mentor now
becomes the female bride. The hijṛās continued to dance with the tempo of
the music. Thus, the tropes in the poetry are complex. The Bulle Shah qaw-
wāls sang the entire evening, until after the evening prayers, affirming their
devotion to the Sufi poet. When I asked Muhammad Bakhsh, the qawwāl,
why they sang their narratives in the female voice or used the aurat kī avāz,
he said,
It is actually not the ‘‘female.’’ The voice is that of the spirit. This is
the subject of human existence. Life is a spinning, that is why it is the
female. If human beings lived the way they are expected to live, all
would be fine. We must live in humility. The female, who spins, lives in
humility.
When I asked Muhammad Bakhsh about the linguistic and aesthetic sources
for their kalām (mystic discourse), he answered,
We use poetic texts from Hazrat Muinuddin Chishti, Baba Ganj Sha-
kar, Data Ganj Bakhsh, Amir Khusrau, and of course we mostly sing
Baba Bulle Shah’s poetry. We find it easy to memorize Baba Bulle Shah’s
poetry, while with the others we have to work harder. Sometimes we
get poets like Bedam Arsi to write songs for us.
I asked the musicians about their audiences and their goals for singing at the
shrine. Muhammad Bakhsh responded thus:
We sing for the people. We use the mystical poetry of the Sufi saints to
talk about the larger meanings of human existence, of living. We are
linked to this shrine, we are bound to it, and we sing here out of devo-
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tion to Baba Bulle Shah. The saint will not let us leave this shrine, and
even if we do go away to other shrines to sing for the urs, we always
return here. Our family has served this shrine for the last three cen-
turies—generation after generation has sung here. We came with Bulle
Shah’s family from Uch Sharif, and we have learned his poetry from our
ancestors, who have always sung here. We sing here twice a day. We sing
in the morning from eight to ten, and then throughout the evening.
I sought information about the women in their family. The qawwāls were
reluctant to talk. They said,
Our women have never sung at the shrine. Perhaps, almost a century
ago, they would go to the Syed households on special invitation. They
would only sing among women. They sang Baba Bulle Shah’s poetry for
the Syed women.
This claim too was affirmed earlier by the Sidi, Manganhar, and Mohana
musicians who sing in the Syed households in the Sind among women audi-
ences only. They sing at the urs, or in social settings such as the maulud (the
prophet Muhammad’s birth anniversary), weddings, and births. Similarly,
female singers of Sufi poetry in the Talagang area near Rawalpindi claim to
perform only in the feudal households of the Maliks.
On the basis of the various contexts of performance that I have looked at,
it can be said that the musicians mediate spiritual experience for their devo-
tees. They are the speakers, who apply their linguistic resources of poetry,
folklore, myth, syntax, semantics, and all forms of language play accom-
panied with music. There is the social setting, or what may be called the
speech event, that could take place in either a concert hall, a shrine, a folk
festival, a household, or a large family setting exclusively for women, as dis-
cussed earlier. The musicians establish communication between themselves
and their speech communities through language that is emotive for them-
selves as well as for their listeners. Their goal is to fulfill the emotional and
psychological needs of their listeners, which they do through speech and
music. They create the communicative channels that I demonstrate with the
following model adapted from Jakobson (Fig. .).
In the contexts that are investigated, the performers become the trans-
mitters because they use cultural semantics embedded in a shared mean-
ing between themselves and their audiences, thereby making the process
interactional. They add body language in the transmission of the discourse
that further enhances the interaction. In Abida Parvin’s performance at the
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Context : samā
concert hall
shrine
melā
family settings
musicians contact audiences
singers code devotees
transmitters
ritual speech kefiat
ritual music samā
wajd
hāl
. Performance: The Qawwali-Sufiānā-Kalam communicative model. Adapted from
Jakobson, ‘‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,’’ –.
Open University, the recipients ratify her discourse verbally and through
body movement. In Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s concerts in the United King-
dom, the listeners ratify the poetry and music through body movement and
verbal affirmation that lauds the singer’s input. The hijṛās dance in response
to the music at the Bulle Shah shrine. Effectively, all the performances that
are investigated show that the event is a communication between musicians
and audience.
The performers transmit the experience through linguistic devices that
they alter and modify according to the verbal and nonverbal cues they re-
ceive from their listeners. The improvisation on certain segments of a text
that is largely fixed is closely linked to the interactional processes in the
anthropology of performance. The performers continue to sing certain seg-
ments of the text for an extensive time period because their audiences are
emotionally involved in it. They build the rapport with the singer, who then
has to respond affectively to sustain the communicative frame.
Abida Parvin’s performance at the Open University illustrates the argu-
ment. Since a large number of her listeners were from the Sindhi and Siraiki
speech communities, she initiated the performance with a mystical invoca-
tion from Shah Abdul Latif’s poetry in Sindhi. Later she mixed the linguistic
codes. Her performance was successful, because the interaction between the
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singer and her listeners was intense. She used a variety of texts and codes that
she kept changing as she went along. In such a performance, speech produc-
tion becomes an ad hoc process for the performer, requiring her to draw upon
all the linguistic, aesthetic, and emotional resources available to her. The
structure of the speech event and its organizing principle are largely created
through this interaction, mutually achieved and ratified within a cultural
code between performers and recipients.42
Sometimes, in a performance like that of the Sabri Brothers in the United
Kingdom when they sing the Mira Bai text, the poetry creates a context
when some in the audience sink into an ecstatic state and offer large sums of
money as nazarānā. This pattern occurred in Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s per-
formance in the United Kingdom when he sang ‘‘Je tū akhī de sāmne nahĩ
rehṇā’’ (If thou wilt not nurture my eyes, O Beloved). His audience showered
him with currency notes in pound sterling. It was a response to the text as
well as to the music, especially to the percussion of drums. The audience ex-
pressed appreciation of that portion of the performance through the nazar
or bel that they offered him and his ensemble. Also, they fell into an ecstatic
state and performed dhammāl, which showed their rapture.
Furthermore, the singers use a variety of styles. These are mapped in the
transliterations in this chapter. It is not uncommon to find metered verses
sung to music, and prose narrative in colloquial speech recited without mu-
sic or sung in duple meter. An example is Abida Parvin’s narrative where she
tells her audience that she will talk about Bulle Shah and his spiritual men-
tor, Shah Inayat. The Sabri Brothers speak in prose to their audience in their
Mira Bai narrative.
Performers further communicate with their audiences and with each
other by playing with the stress and intonational patterns of the language.
They manipulate language and create parallelisms in speech and song. An
interesting feature is the entire dynamic of turn-taking in speech in the qaw-
wālī ensemble. The qawwāls follow a complete organized system of social
interaction of ‘‘taking the floor,’’ which is mapped out in the transliterations.
The musicians know among each other, and through vocal cues, who will
take the floor and when. All this is done within a cultural context. I have
used the social-interactional approaches to study the speech communication
in my work.43
The performers further use their linguistic resources for code switching.
The major code of a performance can be Panjabi, Siraiki, Sindhi, Pushto,
Urdu, or a regional language. Within the major code singers can either start
a performance in Arabic or switch to it, because it is the language of the
Quran. They will also switch to Persian because it is the language of higher
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intellectual thought and the code that was used by some Sufi masters such as
Jalaluddin Rumi. The use of these prestige codes establishes the authenticity
of the discourse for the listeners.
This chapter then describes how qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām performers
interact with their audiences in particular contexts. They draw upon the re-
sources of the Quran and the hadīth. They seek inspiration from the lives and
the poetry of the Sufis of the subcontinent and the Middle Eastern regions.
The diverse resources, including their own linguistic and musical skills, are
blended with local folklore, proverbs, and ecology to create an oral culture
that is a visible component of the performing arts as well as shrine ritual in
Pakistan.
In the last two decades, large expatriate speech communities have given
immense patronage to qawwālī and sufiānā-kalām sung in concert. The mu-
sicians recreate it as a performing art, outside the shrine culture, where they
still uphold the sanctity of the ritual. And it is precisely in such contexts
that some of this study was carried out.
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Female Myths in Sufism
Q
, ,
The complexities of race, gender, class, and caste figure prominently in the
narratives of the qawwāls and sufiānā-kalām performers. Sufi poetry in Paki-
stan and India was sometimes composed in opposition to the religious estab-
lishment and was expressed in subtle ways. It survived through representa-
tion in myth and the complex tropes of the female voices. Whether or not
the Sufi poets were ‘‘feminists’’ cannot be claimed here as the term ‘‘femi-
nism’’ is a fairly recent one. However, the female myths in Sufi poetry cer-
tainly represent the voices of marginalized groups and continue to be used
as representative frames even today. This is evident in Abida Parvin’s perfor-
mance in Islamabad in that I discuss in this chapter and in my inter-
view with Alan Faqir, a singer of Sufi poetry in the Sind.1 The female myths
in the Sufi poetry of Pakistan and India further give it an aesthetic quality
that the musicians have claimed in their interviews with me. They sing the
native myths of lovers like Sassi, Hir, Sohni, Mumal, Marvi, and Mira Bai
because the myths have become metaphors for the polarities of gender, reli-
gious, sociopolitical, and economic hegemony. For instance, Sassi, Hir, and
Mira Bai are all upper-class, aristocratic women whose lives end in tragedy,
the frame of a classic Greek play. Hir violates her caste conduct to elope
with a cowherd, thus bringing shame to her family. Should her society pun-
ish her? How is it sung and communicated in the oral Sufi tradition? Why
do the musicians sing in the female voices? These are some of the questions
that are explored in this chapter.
Sassi’s story is also one of ‘‘tragically thwarted love.’’ Her voice, too, cre-
ates the mythical structures that give the Sufi poets the medium to express
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their own conflicts and differences with the social values of their time. Sassi
becomes the symbol of strength against patriarchy. Her death in the desert
is in fact her struggle to seek respite against social injustice. She tries to re-
claim her love. In the Sufi lore she becomes a paradigm of moral courage and
spiritual triumph.2 I have not found one standard version of the myth nor
specific dates for it as the myths have evolved over the centuries and each
Sufi poet creates a context around a loosely structured story that exists in
the written or oral sources. According to the myth, Sassi is the daughter of
the king of Bhambor in Sind. When she was born, the astrologers predicted
that she would bring shame on her family. (A similar prophecy was made
about Oedipus when he was born.) Sassi’s shocked father consulted with his
advisers and they agreed that rather than kill her, they would put her on a
raft to float down the river Indus. The raft arrived at a place called Bham-
bor where a washerman saw it and was surprised to see a living child on it.
He brought the girl-child home to his wife, and since they did not have any
children of their own, they adopted her and called her Sassi, which means
the Moon.3
In other versions of the story the chief of Bhambor adopted her himself
and when she grew up, he gave her state authority and made her a ruler.
The latter seems a more probable version of the narrative because Sassi
is said to have been a powerful ruler. Once, there was a famine in the neigh-
boring state of Kec Mekran, and the people from that territory came to buy
corn in her dominion. She allowed them to take the food on the condition
that they bring their handsome prince, Punnu, to her. Punnu’s father was the
chief of the Hot tribe. Sassi held two men from the Kec hostage until they
brought Punnu back with them. Punnu came to Sassi with all the pomp and
glory that befitted his royal standing. They became married, and he refused
to return to his people. His father was so outraged that he sent his brothers to
bring him back. Punnu’s tribesmen came and stayed in Sassi’s palace for sev-
eral days, pretending to be very cordial with her and her tribe. The tribe held
great festivities in honor of Punnu and his tribesmen. At one of these noc-
turnal banquets, Punnu’s brothers drugged Punnu and Sassi, and when they
were both incapacitated, they stole Punnu away on a camel. They crossed
the desert at great speed, bringing the prince back to Kec Mekran. The fol-
lowing morning when Sassi woke up, Punnu was gone. She ran after him and
walked for miles in the desert hoping to find her beloved, but, alas, she never
found him and died tired, hungry, and thirsty in the desert. The people built
a tomb over her dead body.
When Punnu woke up to find himself among his tribesmen in Kec
Mekran, he escaped to go back to Bhambor where he had left Sassi. On the
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way he saw her tomb. Passersby told him how she had died in the desert.
They also told him of her laments for him and all her woes. Punnu wept bit-
terly at her tomb, until the earth opened for him and he was buried with his
beloved.4
Such is the myth told in the lands of Sind and Baluchistan. In the oral
traditions of the region the legend is sung with all the emotion that mani-
fests Sassi’s grief and her distress as she tries to cross the formidable desert to
reach her beloved in Kec. Sufi bards have based entire sections of their com-
positions, such as Shah Abdul Latif’s Risālo, on the Sassi-Punnu myth. Even
the melody in which it is sung in Shah’s poetry is called ‘‘Sūr Sassi,’’ which
means Sassi’s melody. In Shah Abdul Latif’s poetry, Sassi is the epitome of
the lover who seeks the beloved as though the beloved is the Divine Being.
Pathana Khan, a renowned male singer of Siraiki mystical poetry, sang in
Sassi’s inflected voice as she laments for Punnu.5 The singer invoked the Sufi
poet Farid to create the mystical frame or context for his audiences:6
A U-U-A-A-A-A
A Ahkĩ Guḍ-e--e-dekh-h
A Akhĩ khuś akhĩ-e-vīl ro-e nā akhi nāl likhẽ dā
A In-ā akhi nā-āl jhiṛẽ de jheṛe-e-e-e
A Val akhi nāl manī-ī dā-ā
A E-ye akhī likhẽ vā-ā-ā-da-ard firāk- vāl-e
A Val akhi nā-āl paṛhĩ dā-ā
A Yā-ā-r Farīd in akhi -kū- kūj nā ākhĩ ve -in akhi can likhẽ dā-ā
A O-O- Āp-e bār muhabat cāiūmṛī
. . . .
A Sāb dukh- sul- dī tātā mī -am
A Gam dal(r)d anoha parāt-t mī- am
A Bheṛe dukhṛe bār umjhāiūmṛī
. . . .
A Sohnā Ho-o t Punal chad Kec gīyā-ā-ā
A Sun-n
A Sohnā Hot Punal chad Kec gīyā
A Gal so-z firāk dā pec pīyā-ā-ā-ā-ā-ā-ā
A Sohnā Hot Punal chad Kec gīyā
A Gal soz firāk dā pec pīyā
. . . .
A Rab avere bar-e sahāiūmṛi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i
. . . .
A Hik vār Farīd-ū yār mil-e
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A Seru panḍ-ḍ hī jaldā bār tale-e
A U-U-A-A-A-A
A Look at these eyes—
A These happy, joyful eyes–weep not with these eyes–for we write with
these very eyes
A These eyes that are like fresh-water springs
A And we affirm with these very eyes
A These eyes testify to the agony of separation
A We also read with these eyes
A O lover Farid, refrain thyself from reprimanding these eyes; for in them
are written the narratives of love
A I do carry the burden of lifelong love
. . . .
A O Love, thou art the source of all pain
A Love, thy sorrows and pangs befall me
A O Love, thy agony entangles me for a lifetime
. . . .
A My beloved Hot Punal abandoned me and departed to Kec to be with his
Hot tribe—
A Beauti—
A My beloved Hot Punal abandoned me and departed to Kec to be with his
Hot tribe—
A Around my neck is the mesh of separation
A My beloved Punal departed to Kec—O my beloved, thou abandoned me
A Around my neck is the mesh of separation
. . . .
A Will the Almighty help me to carry this lifelong burden?
. . . .
A O Farid, if only once could I meet my beloved
A Then would I cast away this consuming fire
In this transliteration the Sufi troubadour casts emotion into the narrative
through the use of myth. Sassi’s voice gives the poetry an aesthetic dimen-
sion that involves the listener in an emotional bond with the speaker. Essen-
tially, the poet sings of mystic love through Sassi, who carries that ‘‘consum-
ing fire’’ for the beloved within her. There is pain and there is sorrow in that
love, because it cannot mature without suffering. Reshma has sung the same
myth and describes Sassi’s pain:
Mẽ Thal vic hūk mār In the desert do I lament
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Hūk in the indigenous ethnopoetic terms is ‘‘the pain of the heart when it
laments in grief.’’ The test for a competent singer of Sufi poetry is to be able
to sing the myth with a passion that moves the listeners to tears. Some of
the other metalinguistic words that Reshma uses in this song to describe
Sassi’s sorrow are ‘‘dohaī ,’’ which means to ‘‘cry in agony,’’ and ‘‘kurlānā,’’
to ‘‘squirm in pain.’’ In the Siraiki language, these are the extreme degrees of
physical and emotional pain. Performers love to sing the Sassi myth in the
regional languages and dialects of Sind, Baluchistan, and the Siraiki-speaking
regions. They invoke images of Sassi, who tries to cross the Thal (the desert),
where daytime temperatures range from degrees upward in the summer.
Reshma refers to Sassi’s dry bulī (parched lips) as she drags herself in the
desert after Punnu. Singers like Reshma use a variety of melodies and styles
to sing about Sassi, who eventually dies from unmitigated love.
Some of the other myths that the Sufi bards sing are Umar-Marvi, Mumal-
Rano, Sohni-Mahival, and Hir-Ranjha. Shah Abdul Latif’s entire Risālo is
based on these narratives, and he evokes mystical poetry for his tragic hero-
ines to become symbols of otherworldly love. Each one of these romances
is sung in its own sūr. Thus, there is a ‘‘Sūr Sohni’’ in Latif’s poetry to sing
about Sohni, ‘‘Sūr Mumal-Rano’’ to sing about Mumal-Rano’s tale, and ‘‘Sūr
Marvi’’ to narrate Umar-Marvi’s story. Shah Abdul Latif created several sūrs
in this manner, all named after his heroines.7 Altogether, there are thirty sūrs
in the Risālo, and at least ten are dedicated to female heroines, or sūrmīs, as
they are called in Shah’s poetry. The male equivalent of the sūrmī is a sūrma,
which means a hero; someone who has prowess. Therefore, Shah intends his
sūrmis to be perceived as women with prowess.
In the Siraiki- and Panjabi-speaking areas, the Sufi bards have further cre-
ated narratives around the Hir-Ranjha and Sohni-Mahival myths. In the pre-
vious chapter I discussed Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s singing of sections of the
Hir-Ranjha myth. I explore the myth further in this chapter through descrip-
tion and narrative.
The Hir-Ranjha myth existed for a long time before Waris Shah (b.
) made it famous in the eighteenth century. The myth was probably sung
in the folk traditions for several centuries. Bulle Shah, who was a contem-
porary of Waris Shah, also worked with the Hir-Ranjha myth in Panjabi.
The narrative exists in Sindhi, Baluchi, Persian, Urdu, and even in Arabic. It
has been further translated into English and French. However, now, when-
ever a reference is made to the Hir-Ranjha legend, it is mainly to the Waris
Shah text.
Waris Shah’s text is used for a variety of reasons, the strongest one being
his creation of Hir’s character. Through her he challenges patriarchy, the
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. Hir-Ranjha
clergy, and issues of the socioeconomic caste system. Hir has many argu-
ments with the clergy where she uses the rhetoric of the Shara, the Islamic
legal system based on the Quran and the hadīth, to prove its narrow-minded-
ness and duplicity. In devising Hir’s character Waris Shah seems to have
banked on the caste inclinations of the Jats, for Hir belonged to the family of
the powerful Siyal Jats of Jhang. The Jats of the Panjab are zamindars (land-
owners), known for practicing widow-marriage.8 Furthermore, it is asserted
that Hir was obviously a favorite child and a spoiled one. The Siyal tribe is
more than usually considerate toward its women; it is one of the few tribes
in the Panjab that allow women to inherit property under customary law.9
The Hir-Ranjha myth can be summarized thus: Hir was the beautiful and
witty daughter of Cucak Siyal, the powerful Jat chief of Jhang Siyal, which is
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a vast agricultural territory situated to the southwest of Lahore in Pakistan.10
In the story, she falls in love with Dhido, who was also known by his tribal
name of Ranjha.11 He was the youngest of the eight sons of Chaudhry Muaz-
zam, also known as Mauju of the Ranjha clan of Jats of Takht Hazara, now
Gujrat District of Pakistan. He lost both his parents when he was still very
young. His brothers gave him the least fertile part of the ancestral land when
they divided the inheritance. They also bribed the religious establishment
to support them in this unholy act against their youngest brother.
Since Dhido was unmarried, he depended on his sisters-in-law to cook for
him and bring his meals to him in the fields, according to the rural custom.
His sisters-in-law did not take care of him, and when he complained they
scolded him. In fact, one of them even taunted him and said that, if he was so
fussy about being served well, why did he not bring Hir, the famous daugh-
ter of the Siyals, to be his bride. Ranjha, therefore, left home to win Hir. He
crossed the river Chenab and arrived in the territory of Cucak Siyal, the Jat
chief of the region.12 Here, Ranjha met Hir and they fell in love. Hir brought
Ranjha home to her father, who employed him as a cowherd, and because he
played the flute skillfully, he soon mastered Cucak’s herds.13
Hir-Ranjha’s romance thrived through clandestine meetings until Kaido,
Hir’s paternal uncle, a lame man, spied on the lovers. Kaido caused a scandal
in the village and even forced Cucak, Hir’s father, to descend on the lovers
during a rendezvous.14 Kaido scolded Hir’s mother, Maliki, for ignoring the
romance, because it was in violation of family honor. He asserted that Ran-
jha was only a cāk, a laborer in the household. Ranjha was expelled. After
his departure Cucak’s herds of cows and buffalo became unmanageable, for
no one could play the flute like Ranjha. Cucak was obliged to ask Ranjha
to return, and this time Hir’s mother Maliki had to promise Ranjha that he
could marry Hir and that she would help the lovers.
The Siyal Jats did not fulfill their promise. Although Ranjha was a Jat like
them, Cucak did not think that he had the inheritance that would make him
an eligible son-in-law or a powerful ally. Ranjha had further lowered himself
by becoming a kām , or a cāk, who was considered a menial of the Siyals. In
order to maintain their hegemony in the socioeconomic order, the Siyals had
to marry their only daughter into a powerful clan like themselves. Cucak’s
kinsmen counseled Cucak to marry Hir to Saida, the son of the prestigious
Khera Jat tribesman of Rangpur, and he agreed to their proposal.
Hir asked Ranjha to elope with her but he refused. As a result, she was
married against her will to Saida and sent off to the Kheras against the prin-
ciples of the Sharia, which stresses that a woman can only be married with
her consent. Hir refused to sign the marriage contract. Cucak bribed the
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clergyman and the two witnesses to fake her consent. She was pushed into
the palanquin on pain of death and the Kheras carried her off. On arrival
at her in-laws’ home, Hir refused to consummate the marriage with Saida
Khera. She pretended to be ill and sent a message to Ranjha, asking him to
come disguised as a jogī.
Hir’s sister-in-law Sethi, that is, her so-called husband’s sister, helped her
meet Ranjha secretly, and when he came she helped the lovers elope. How-
ever, they were caught. Hir’s family promised to allow them to marry if Ran-
jha would go back to Takht Hazara, and return with his brothers and brādārī
(extended family) to marry their daughter. Only then would it be a worthy
alliance for the Siyals. While Ranjha was gone, the Siyals poisoned Hir, and
he returned to find his beloved being buried. He killed himself at her grave.
Waris Shah composed Hir as an epic poem to be sung to music in public
contexts. He is said to have recited it with great emotion among his speech
communities in the Panjab. Although it is commonly believed that he was a
great musician, I have not found any evidence of that in the literature. How-
ever, there is now substantial recorded material of Waris Shah’s Hir avail-
able, both on audiocassettes and videos sung in the folk traditions. Many
renowned folk artists in the Panjab, such as Reshma, Zahida Parvin, Nazir
Begum, Sabiha Khanum, Tufail Niazi, and Iqbal Bahu, have sung it. And in-
deed there are many spiritual nuances embedded in the narratives of the Hir
epic, which each singer brings out according to his or her own interpretation
of the poetry.
Waris Shah gives the story a spiritual construction. He uses a formulaic
initiation for the poem, with an ode to God and to Love, obedience to the
prophet Muhammad and to his four companions, and more specifically to Pir
Chishti Shakarganj or Baba Farid of Pakpattan. As the poem develops, large
sections of the written Hir text, from which the singers draw their poetics,
bring out the sharp polarities between Hir and the religious establishment.
In one of her retorts to the religious establishment, she says:15
Iśq dā rāh pauṇā To measure the path of Love
Nahĩ kam, m-----, q----dā Is not for the Bigot
Es iśq maidān de kuṭhi nū Those who are the caretakers of the
laborious path to Love
Rutba Karbobalā dey gazi dā Attain the rank of the warriors of Kerbala
Turt vic dargā manzūr hove With great speed will be accepted In God’s
kingdom
Sajdā āśiq pāk namāzi dā The humility and prayer of true lovers,
true devotees
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Rānjhā nāl imān qubuliā mẽ Faith have I confessed in Ranjha’s
company
Qisa khatam kar dūr darāzi dā Create not differences, O Bigot
She further admits, in a song that I have transcribed from Tufail Niazi’s
kalām,16
Rānjhan ḍhunḍan mẽ calī In search of Ranjha do I go
Men Rānjhan mīlyā nā hī But Ranjha I cannot find
Rab mīlyā Rānjhā nā mīlyā God I found, but Ranjha I cannot find
Rab Rānjhā jehe vinā Even the Divine is not Ranjha
Ve mẽ nahĩ jāṇā Kheṛi de nāl O, with the Kheras I will not go
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang the following qawwālī in Hir’s voice in which
Hir informs her mother that she will not live with the Kheras.17
Rānjhe yār val mukh kīvẽ moṛ Ranjha will I not abandon
Mẽ Kheṛi de o nahĩ vasṇ With the Kheras will I not live
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Das me mukh kīvẽ moṛ? O Mother, can I ever abandon Ranjha?
Phaṭ Kheṛe. . . . phaṭ Kheṛe Blast the Kheras . . . blast the Kheras
Mẽ te nāl Rānjhe de rehṇā With Ranjha alone will I exist
Despite her protests, Hir was sent off to the Kheras by force. As she was
carried off in a palanquin, she sang her famous lament song, which is tradi-
tionally sung at almost every Panjabi wedding at the time of the bride’s de-
parture to her husband’s home. When a performer sings Hir, she uses all the
available aesthetic, linguistic, cultural, and emotional resources with the re-
sult that even the strongest person is unable to hold back tears. In the terms
of the culture itself, the performer’s stylistic creation of pain is called dard.
I quote from a written text:18
ḍolī caṛdeh Hir virlāp kitā As they loaded her into the palanquin,19
Hir shrieked in lament,
Men le cale bābulā le cale ve ‘‘They take me away, O my father, they
take me away
Men rakh le babulā Keep me, O my father
Ghaṭ ḍolī kahar cuk ke Through treachery, my palanquin, the
potters 20 . . . they take me away
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Pe dar pe cale ve They take me away . . . .
. . . . . . . .
Tere catar chav bābul rukh vang Thy shelter was the cool shade of a tree
A castle, O Father,
Asī vang musafir beh cale ve Like the traveler we get washed away
now, O Father’’
In all these sections Hir’s abandonment and her loss not only create the ro-
mance of the myth but also address patriarchal paradigms of religion, caste,
socioeconomic class, and gender, in which the weak are exploited. However,
the poets give the narrative a metaphysical and spiritual articulation. Hir is
forced into a union against her will to uphold her caste and family honor, for
which she dies in the end.
For the Sufi poets there is glory in Hir’s death, like Antigone’s in a Greek
tragedy. In the Hir narrative the lovers die, but eventually their struggle,
their suffering and pain are a metaphysical triumph. Hir expresses her pain
in the many contexts that are investigated. Her beloved assumes a spiritu-
ality and sublimity that transcends the divine. Thus, her female voice trans-
forms the earthly plane to reach a transcendental state. This is in keeping
with the Sufi principles where iśq-e majāzī (personal love) transforms itself
into iśq-e haqīqī (divine love). In Sufi poetry Hir’s voice thus becomes a
‘‘frame’’ or a cultural complex to describe esoteric meanings through the aes-
thetics of poetry and music.
Within the same traditions, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang another myth,
that of Sohni and Mahival. He sang it with his ensemble in a mystical frame
in a private mehfil in England in . Intimate interactions were seen be-
tween performers and the audience, who knew each other closely, and the
speech play evolved from that intimacy while the performers sang the Sohni
myth in Panjabi.
The background of the Sohni-Mahival story is narrated thus:21 Once upon
a time there was a well-to-do potter called Tulla who lived in the Gujrat dis-
trict of the Panjab. He had a beautiful daughter called Sohni, which means
the beautiful one. He and his wife raised their daughter with great care, so
that she blossomed into a mature woman of great beauty and intelligence.
In the story, too, is a young aristocrat called Izzat Beg, a rich merchant’s
son from Bokhara. After many wanderings, Izzat Beg decided to settle in the
small village where Sohni lived. Izzat Beg’s servant told him about Sohni’s
beauty, which made him interested in her. He would go to her father’s shop
on one pretext or another, so that he might see her. Most often he would go
there to buy pottery, and so his visits continued, until he spent all his money.
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He was forced to work for Tulla, who kept him as a mahival (caretaker) of
his buffalo. In Sindhi such a person is called a mehar.22
Now that Mahival worked in Tulla’s household, he got to see Sohni quite
regularly and their love flourished. Unfortunately, their meetings could not
remain secret for long, creating a scandal in the village. Sohni’s family threw
out Izzat Beg, and Sohni was married against her will to another potter’s son,
called Dam. Sohni refused to consummate her marriage. Mahival prudently
left the village to go and live in another place across the river Chenab. He
now grazed other people’s cattle but acquired a spirituality through which
he became a recognized faqīr. Sohni went to the faqīr to seek his counsel,
for she was still lovelorn. She found that the faqīr was none other than her
own Mahival.
The lovers renewed their meetings and Mahival crossed the river every
night to meet Sohni. He would bring roasted fish that the two ate together.
Unfortunately, one night Mahival could not bring the fish for Sohni as he
could not catch any. Instead, he cut a piece of flesh from his thigh, roasted it,
and brought it to her. He naturally lost a lot of blood and became very weak.
When Sohni saw him so pale, she made him confess on pain of death what he
had done to himself. Now, she promised to swim across the river herself to
meet Mahival. She knew she could do so because, as a potter’s daughter, she
had learned to swim on a ghaṛā, which is a round clay pot. Thus, she would
cross the ferocious river every night on a ghaṛā to see her beloved, and when
she returned, she would hide the ghaṛā in a special place. Her family again
found out about her secret meetings with Mahival and scolded her for her
rashness, but she would not listen.23
Finally, her parents discovered where she hid the ghaṛā on which she
would swim the river to meet Mahival. They removed the baked ghaṛā, and
instead put a half-baked one in its place, knowing very well that she would
drown if she used it. When Sohni took the ghaṛā to cross the river that night,
she did not realize that it was not the original one. When she was midstream,
her ghaṛā dissolved and she drowned. Mahival heard her screams and jumped
into the water to save her, but the lovers were washed down with the current.
Their bodies were found and they were buried together. The entire village
mourned their deaths.24
This is a favorite tale among Sufi poets, and the musicians among them
sing it. They sing of Sohni’s loyalty and courage. Sindhi informants claim
that this is a true story and that Sohni’s tomb is somewhere near Shahdad-
pur. Others say that she lived in a forest near Hajipur that is fourteen miles
from Hyderabad, on the bank of the river Indus. They also claim that there
is a forest named Sohni, after her. However, the myth is sung in Sufi poetry
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in all the regions of the Sind, the Siraiki-speaking area of the Panjab. Ustad
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his qawwāls sang it, assuming the ghaṛā’s voice;
the ghaṛā itself became Sohni’s intimate female friend and spoke to her:25
O dis de kuli sone yār dī 26 I can see the beloved’s abode
O mẽ kī kar kanḍā dūr nī aṛī-e? But alas, what can I do, the anchor is far,
my friend.
O ghaṛā kendā . . . . And the ghaṛā says,
Mẽ kī kar kanḍā dūr nī aṛī-e? ‘‘But alas, what can I do, the anchor is far,
my friend.
Eh, kadī na Sohṇī toṛ carhe dī O Sohni, a love will not blossom
Yār kache dī yārī That rides not with a ripe friend
Phaṛ palṛā murśid pake dā Hold on to a guide that is seasoned
Jehṛā ten pār lghā-ve For only will He help you cross the stream
Nī Sohṇī-e O female Sohni
O mẽ kī kar kanḍā dūr nī aṛī-e? But alas, what can I do, the anchor is far
my friend.’’
In this mystical interpretation of the myth, the ghaṛā assumes multiple
voices: the role of Sohni’s female friend; the mature murshid who would help
the murid, Sohni, cross the stream to the spiritual path; the ghaṛā that speaks
to Sohni. Sohni drowned because her ghaṛā was kacca and not mature. Her
myth, therefore, became a storytelling device or trope for the singer to talk
of the difficulties on the spiritual path, the iśq-e haqīqī. Sohni needed a sea-
soned guide or ghaṛā to help her cross the stream. In Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s
narrative, even Mahival responds to Sohni and says,
Ke mẽ iśq dī ag vic nī saṛiā? Have I, too, not been consumed in the
same fire, my beloved?
The fire becomes the element that purifies and transforms baser metals
into gold. The water is the cleansing element. And so the ghaṛā in Sohni’s
myth becomes a ‘‘metaphorical nature of representation,’’ as well as contrib-
uting to the aesthetics of the narrative.27 It becomes a medium that trans-
forms the earthly experiences to the spiritual realm by becoming a kind of
murshid or mentor. This was communicated effectively in Nusrat Fateh Ali
Khan’s qawwālī.
In Sufi poetry, many narratives are built around the ghaṛā or the ghaṛolī.
Abida Parvin explains the ghaṛolī to her audience in one of her concerts, sug-
gesting that it is a container that ‘‘receives’’ the murshid ’s spiritual bounties.
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