The performers stand or fall on their ability to deliver a sense of rapture to the audience the most famous qawwals command huge fees and when shrine performances occur banknotes are showered on performers who make a particular lyric or sentiment hit home. Qawwali can be pious but also transgressive in its adoration of the saints and its glorification of states of "intoxication" and loss of self. Sufi saints are thought to be channels of "baraka" – divine blessing – and to have powers of intercession. Celebrating the union of Sufi saints with the divine, qawwali is designed to create an ecstatic trance mood, and is most typically performed at Sufi shrines.
Sufism is often celebrated as the softer face of Muslim culture. We're part of a British Council/Southbank Centre project called The Language of Love that facilitates collaborations between musicians from India, Pakistan and the west.
Sam, my producer and guitarist and I have come from London to connect with this deeply-rooted and hugely popular form of devotional music.
#Indian urdu qawwali full#
Nusrat, who died in 1997, was based in Lahore, and today the city is full of musicians of all sorts. Its roots go back seven centuries, although it was the great qawwal Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who brought it to international exposure. Qawwali is a form of Muslim mystic – Sufi – devotional music. The food is not always for the faint-hearted before we settle on the chickpea joint, we are taken as a treat to a restaurant where we are offered the three bovine options on the menu: brain, hoof or tongue.Īlongside its culinary arts, Lahore's other cultural treasure is its music, which is why we are here. Lahore surely has some of the world's great street food, often served by one-dish restaurants, which its famously epicurean inhabitants will cross the city to sample. But look around you, nobody is bothering you, people are happy that you are here." We are sitting at a street restaurant in the old city of Lahore, near the astonishing Mughal citadel of the Lahore fort and the Badshahi mosque, ordering bowl after bowl of utterly delicious chickpeas stewed in a chicken and coriander stock, served with nan bread fresh baked in their clay oven.
#Indian urdu qawwali driver#
"Everybody thinks we are all terrorists," our friend and driver Asif tells us, "that's why there are no tourists here these days.
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