The Evolution of Qawali - A journey from the shrine to the stage.

Qawwali as a distinct form and style of performing Sufi devotional music has seen an unprecedented popularity in recent times. It has evolved tremendously in the era of digital technology, aided and spurred by the meteoric rise in fame of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the Sabri brothers.[1]Today, Qawwali enjoys a global audience crossing cultural and language barriers across the world where it is labelled under the category of world music.

Some scholars have seen this development as constructive and an empowering. By disseminating the message of peace and brotherhood, the medium of Qawwali serves as both empowering and influencing cultural identity to youth subcultures. Additionally, it provides a spatial site of resistance and an answer to the negative image of Islam present in the global political arena. It is befitting that the secularisation aspect apparent in shrine based Sufi devotional music throughout the tradition’s history, albeit, in a local cultural context, is being embraced by a world audience just when the call for peace, harmony is most needed.

The long journey of Qawwali, as a traditional performance at shrines to its absorption into the mainstream popular culture is not without certain transformations that, as I shall argue, are contrary to the very spirit and intent of the sacred ritualistic element of Qawwali. The geo-specific contextualised performances of Qawwali as a ritual at shrines and Dargahs of Sufi saints is now being staged on global platforms and recording studios. As a result, is it widely disseminated to listeners who may overlook its lyrical content, an important component of Qawwali.

The paper maintains that analysing the absorption of Qawwali into the mainstream popular culture requires an understanding of the changes that has resulted. Firstly, in the performative aspect, along with the form and content of Qawwali. Secondly, in the way the medium is appropriated by the media industry as well as the audience. The paper attempts to show how Qawwali has undergone an alteration with the developments in technology and globalization. This transformation has contributed to the appropriation and commodification of traditional cultural art forms and sacred ritualistic performances.

The paper begins with a brief analysis through available scholarships on various aspects of Qawwali. These include origin, function, rules, tradition, and contextuality. Focus areas will be the ritualistic element of Qawwali, and conversely, the fluidity in the form, structure as well as in the way Qawwali has evolved. This will be followed by a discussion of the term ‘popular culture’, mainly in the post-colonial era that also is the era of globalisation and emergence of technologies. The paper will then examine the effect and transformations in the method and content of the performance of Qawwali through its absorption in the mainstream popular culture. The paper will conclude with final remarks on the subject.

Origin and Background of Qawwali

Qawwali is intrinsically linked with the practice of Sufism and rooted in the South Asian cultural practice where it originated as a performance of sacred music at local shrines and dargahs.[2] Sufism, or Tasawwuf, is seen as the mystical side of Islam. It is a way of striving for Divine Union and necessarily a path, suluk, in Arabic, that seeks divine union through certain development of rituals and practices. The Sufi path (suluk ) couples a “distinct model of human psychology with practical techniques for self-transformation”[3]. At its heart, Sufism is a discipline of ritual practices, as described by Rozenhal, borrowing a term from Foucault, as “technologies of the self.”

A concept of sama, literally translated as ‘listening’ but far more difficult to grasp, is central to an understanding of Sufi rituals. Sama, has a Turkish origin in the practices, a set of a rigid system of body movements to induce a trance-like state. Its development is attributed to Maulana Rumi (1207-1273 AD), one of the most revered and influential Sufi saints, and a prolific poet.

Qawwali is essentially the South Asian variety of sama, “the ritualised performance of Sufi poetry accompanied by music” [4]. The term originates from the word ‘Qaul’, which means ‘saying’ or ‘recitation’ which in the context of Qawwali refers to the recitation of Sufi poetry. The one who sings the Qaul is called the Qawwal. It is suggested that the term ‘Qawwali’ wasn’t used until a couple of centuries ago.

The invention of Qawwali as a form of Islamic devotional music is often attributed to Amir Khusro, (1253-1325), an iconic poet, musician, inventor and a close follower of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia, whose poems, supposedly written in honor and love for his master, are still the canonical recitations of Qawwali performances to date. This claim is contested with the example of the Bedouin musicologists, al-Kindi (D 873) & Al-Farabi (B 872) and the Brothers of Purity (lkhwan al-safa), in the eleventh century[5]. But it is from the vast scholarship of AI-Ghazali (1058-1111 AD), that we get the earliest understanding of sama as a “profound parts of a melodic show rendered for that purpose”.[6]

The Ritual of Qawwali Music

To understand how by being subsumed by the mainstream popular culture, Qawwali has lost its original context and purpose, it’s necessary to acknowledge the ritualistic element of Qawwali and the sacred nature of the performance. The use of music in mainstream Islam has always been controversial. As music “could culminate in ecstasy and trance”[7] and must be understood and practised in the context of sama. Virendra Karla gives examples of how some Sufi masters understood the worldly pleasure that music may induce. The Sufis strongly advocated that only a Sufi adept is more likely to use the power of listening with the body to understand the nature of sama induced by losing oneself in striving for the divine union[8]. This is why any movement of the body when listening and participating in a Sufi devotional music is not seen favourably and is only approved when it is spontaneous, like uncontrolled movements such as in a state of trance.[9]

In addition to the centrality of the concept of sama, certain rules associated with the performance prove the sacred ritualistic aspect of Qawwali and the necessary geographical contextuality of the performance. The whole enactment involves three actors: the performers, the audience and the location, the saint of that particular shrine or Dargah. A particular seating structure is followed. The recitation must follow a particular order beginning with praise of Allah. The singing itself follows Khusro’s description of the components of Qawwali into ‘qaul’ and ‘tarana’ where the latter is the melodic component of the recitation and central to the performance of Qawwali.[10]

Furthermore, there are three conditions important for a Qawwali performance that Rozenhal lists as Makaan, refering to the exclusivity of the location, Zamaan - a prescribed time for Qawwali when no other duties are at hand, and, Ikhwan, which means that only people of taste (abl-i-zauq) should be seated in the Qawwali assembli, also called the mehfil-e-sama, and only those in search of God (talab-i-baaq), ought to listen to the sama, including the Qawwals[11]. He states that as per the ‘Chishti Sabiris’, it is these requirements that transform the musical assembly into a sacred space.

It can be argued that the whole performance is based on fixed rules and rigidity of the structure of the performance as proscribed in early Sufi tradition necessary to qualify the practice as a ritual. However, there is a subtle freedom to improvise, only in terms of style alone, often through repetition that accounts for the uniqueness and transcendence associated with this tradition. It is due to this delicate mix of rigidity and freedom that Qawwali as a performance maintained its distinct identity for a period of more than 800 years without hardly going though a major change, until very late.

Qawwali’s Emergence in Mainstream Media.

There is a long history of the use of Qawwali in media beginning with the early exposure when the first recordings were made in 1900[12]. Sunder’s project is to detail the importance of Bollywood in using and popularising Qawwali. The advent of the gramophone and subsequent recording methods brought about changes and differences in and amongst the Qawwali traditions.[13] Another relatable example is the vast popularity of Rumi’s tradition of sama in the west, known as ‘whirling dervishes’ while recent translations of his volumes of poems have developed cult-like following.

But it is the rise in popularity of the Sabiri brothers and Nusrat F. Khan, both from respected Qawwali traditions that have brought Qawwali to the centre stage of the Global music market. With several international collaborations, particularly involving the late Nusrat with prominent western artists and collaborative projects that inspired fusion music all over the world and inspired bands like ‘Junoon’ as the rock-version of Sufi music. This was followed by Coke Studio, perhaps the most instrumental project in popularising as well as giving the platform to local Qawwali singers, though in a hybridised, packaged, rock to the folk style of fusion form of devotional music. The question arises as to how these developments impact the form and content of the act of performing Qawwali at shrines and dargahs.

Qawwali in the Popular Culture

There is hardly a word as vague in Cultural studies as the term ‘culture’ itself. The problem assumes larger proportion when the term ‘popular culture’ is used. A review of the literature on the subject of Qawwali in the context of its appropriation by mainstream popular culture suggests that it is mostly the early mass media theories and the critique of popular culture in the tradition of the Frankfurt school that scholars use to criticise the commercialisation and commodification of this form of devotional music. They rue the loss of the transcendental experience implicit in the concept of Qawwali in its mediatised form of popular culture as seen above.

Other studies suggest the positive impact of the globalisation of what typically a South Asian variety of Sufi devotional music is. The main argument is based on more recent developments in critical theory framework where the audience is supposed to have the power to give their own meaning to the text, devotional music in this case. This perspective highlights how the youth in different geographical contexts adopt Qawwali as a way of reconciling and reshaping their Islamic identity. The main reason for that is the message of peace and musical celebration contained in the concept of Qawwali. This is particularly relevant in a global political scenario where Islam is under attack for its perceived fundamentalism.

An interesting emerging aspect is the proliferation of female singers in Qawwali tradition, otherwise perceived as an all-male domain with few exceptions. Of late, we have Abida Parveen, associated with authentic Qawwali, in the sense that she uses the form and content of Qawwali in the traditional sense and continues to perform at shrines and dargahs, singing on global stages for a worldwide audience in the global arena of world music. These examples serve to elucidate how mainstreaming of Qawwali, originally meant to be performed at shrines and dargahs, is helping bring about gender parity in the performance of this art form. However, most of these female voices echo a more modern aspect of Qawwali and can’t be considered authentic from the viewpoint of contextuality as the main arena is a local stage and recording studios rather than shrines and dargahs.

In this digital age, corporations rather than the disappearing Qawwals who sing at shrines and dargahs, serve as active archives of folk and customary and traditional music. Qawwali in its mainstream version is markedly different –both artistically and spiritually – from the one that continues to be performed at shrines, even as the performers stay the same in some cases.[14]

Seen from the perspective of transmission and diffusion through technology owned by a corporatized world, we can only side with the early critical and mass media theory given the subversion of the very message, purpose, structure and ritual of Qawwali performance as it becomes another form of popular music – the loss of the aesthetics of Qawwali and Qawwali as an experience performed for the uninitiated which is against the rules of Qawwali.

While popular culture robs an art form through reification, commercialisation, packaging and commodification, this criticism is particularly relevant to Qawwali when it is understood as a ritualistic performance involving marifat and Sama. At the heart of the performance is the experience associated with it, where the whole process serves the purpose of transformation. A deeper historical analysis only confirms this by understanding the divergence within this art form, esp. as a Sufi practice, into patronised and local shrine-based performances.

The oral tradition and significance of a shrine in a local community give Qawwali a sacredness along with local historicity which again is lost as it is brought into the mainstream popular culture. Early media and mass culture theory is particularly informative in analysing this aspect of incorporation of the sacred into the popular. Relatively new understanding of media through the post-culturalist lens, especially from the perspective of cultural theorists and semiology shows how the sacred gets turned into the profane through this profusion of images and sound that exist without contextuality.[15]

Conclusion

It is interesting to note how new cultural forms are taking birth as the global meet the local. It is a time for celebration when artists from different geographies share a cultural space to produce something new. Hence a reexamination and criticism of rigid critique of culture and media or mass media is required especially in new age technology that empowers and disempowers both at the same time. Despite the liberal reinterpretation, it remains a fact that popular culture mostly remains a construct that is used to exploit for the sole purpose of profits and consumerism. This is further proven by how few conglomerates rule the media esp. the music space of the global music industry.

Promotion of Qawwali by corporate industries has led to the emergence of a music subculture, particularly within the musical community itself. After all what we see may seem to be a performance in a ritualistic format, but it is produced, promoted, advertised, and staged with several retakes. In such a setting, the essence of sama is lost on the mainstream popular culture. Consequently, Qawwali’s identity as performance in praise of the divine becomes a stream of signals lost in the labyrinth of computerised data that is available on demand.

Mainstream adoption of Qawwali in popular culture has helped the genre to spread globally but at the same time has lost the ritual property that made the performance experience and gave it a sacredness particular to a local group. It is decontextualised in its performance and subverted in its content in its mainstream avatar.

[1] Shahwar Kibria , Sound of the Chishtiya Khanqahs: Sufi Qawwali in Coke Studio Pakistan, (2017) 9. [2] Regula B. Qureshi, “His Master's Voice: Exploring Qawwali and 'Gramophone Culture' in South Asia”. Popular Music, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1999) [3] Robert Rozenhal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 211 [4] Rozhenhal, Islamic Sufism Unbound,213. [5] Adam Nayyar, Origin and History of the Qawwali By Adam Nayyar, Lok Virsa Research Centre, Islamabad(1988) https://sites.google.com/site/sufiqawwali/home/history-of-qawwali (accessed 13 December 2018). [6] Nayyar, Origin and History of the Qawwali, 2. [7] Rozhenhal, Islamic Sufism Unbound,213. [8] Virinder S. Kalra, Sacred and Secular Musics: A Postcolonial Approach(New York: Bloomsbury Academic) [9] Karla,Sacred and Secular Music,26. [10] Nayyar, Origin and History of the Qawwali,16. [11] Rozhenhal, Islamic Sufism Unbound,219. [12] Pavitra Sundar, Romance, piety, and fun: The transformation of Qawwali and Islamicate culture in Hindi cinema, South Asian Popular Culture, (2017) 139-153. [13] Regula B. Quershi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound,Context and Meaning in Qawwali, (London: University of Chicago Press),44. [14] Nabeel Jafferi, “The Lost Soul: Qawwali’s Journey from Ecstasy to Entertainment”, South Asian Composite Heritage, May- July 2016, Vol. 1. [15] Rokus Groot, ‘Music, Religion, and Power: Qawwali as Empowering Disempowerment”, (2011,Fordham Scholarship Online)