Ghazal
Indian women in a moonlit garden, c.1800, courtesy Rhode Island School of Design Museum
The early Arabic ghazal originated in the seventh century and spread into Persia, from where it extended to South Asia. Its main themes being those of the beauty of love and the pain caused by separation from the beloved, the ghazal, under the influence of Sufism, soon developed metaphysical overtones. The classical ghazal is typically expressed in the voice of a passionate man who longs for his loved one, and it emphasises his feelings rather than those of the beloved, perhaps in order to allow a mystical reading of the lyrics, in which God is revealed to be the real object of desire, as in the well-known story of Layla and Majnun.
As time has passed, the secular and spiritual aspects of the ghazal have become more clearly differentiated, and instead of being associated with male courtly or formal performances, it has now been incorporated into popular and film music and is as often sung by women as men. Its spiritual aspect is more commonly found in qawwali, the musical form associated with the sama’, or spiritual concert, which originated in the Chishti Sufi Order. While the music is usually the most affecting part of a qawwali, the lyrics, often based on a ghazal, are at least as important, and their combination is intended to bring the audience to a transcendent or ecstatic state. Customarily performed by a lead singer and chorus, backed up by instruments and and hand-clapping, a qawwali concert might last for several hours, beginning with slower songs, gradually becoming faster and more intense, and then slowing again. In recent years the qawwali has become much favoured and widespread, with many different performers, but the late Pakistani singer, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who first came to notice in the West in 1985 at Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival, is still probably the most celebrated.
Technically, only men are supposed to perform qawwali, but this, too, has changed, and Abida Parveen, also from Pakistan, is now a greatly treasured singer of qawwali, as well as of ghazals. Sometimes called the ‘Queen of Sufi music’ and acclaimed for her ardent style, as well her modernisation of the genre, Parveen often sends audiences in Pakistan and India into something approaching rapture; it is not uncommon for people to swoon and faint at her concerts, and she has said that she occasionally hallucinates while performing. Descended from a long lineage of Sufi mystics and singers, she began to sing as a young girl; her father, Ghulam Haider, who had founded a devotional music school in Larkana, the Sindhi city in which she was born, decided that her talent was more important than tradition and encouraged her, rather than his sons, to pursue music. ‘I was very attached to my father’, Parveen has said; ‘Classical Sufi music, for him, came from the soul – I was pulled in by it. We spent hours at dargahs (Sufi shrines, often built over the graves of saints), singing and reciting at festivals. It was normal in the culture I grew up in’. Asked if she has found it difficult to be a woman in a male-dominated musical culture, she replied: ‘The concept of being a man or a woman doesn't cross my mind - on stage I'm a vehicle for passion.’
Arooj Aftab was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there until she was eleven, when the family returned to Lahore, Pakistan. Knowing that she wanted to be a musician but unsure how to make that aspiration a reality, she successfully applied to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where she was awarded a scholarship and studied music production and engineering. In 2010, not long after graduation and soon after a move to New York, she was asked to play at the city’s Sufi Music Festival, in which Abida Parveen was to be the main act. Aftab tracked her down, knocked on the hotel room door, and introduced herself. Parveen recognised the young musician from a festival audition, asked her in, and soon brought out a small harmonium so they could sing together. Before leaving, Aftab asked the great singer what she should do with her life. ‘Listen to my albums’, was Parveen’s reply.
A decade later Aftab lost a close friend as well as her younger brother, to whom she eventually dedicated the record on which she was working. Finding herself overwhelmed with sadness, Aftab turned once again to the familiar Urdu ghazals and qawwali that had inspired her first album, ‘Bird Under Water’. Her beautiful new record, ‘Vulture Prince’, released in 2021, took the ghazal’s characteristic yearning in a new direction, drawing on ambient music, jazz, folk, and reggae, as well as Indian classical music, creating a heartfelt expression of movement from grief to acceptance and resolution.
Now composing another album, Aftab is researching the Indian Urdu poetry of Chanda Bai, also known as Chanda Bibi. Born in 1768, Chanda became an influential member of the Nizam’s court in Hyderabad, her skills and charm later leading him to honour her with the title ‘Mah Laqa Bai’ or ‘Mah Laqa Chanda’. A fine singer, dancer, archer, and expert at spear throwing and tent pegging, she was also adept at diplomatic negotiations and a generous philanthropist. Most importantly in this context, she was a distinguished poet, the first woman in India to have a diwan, a compilation of Urdu ghazals, published posthumously, and the only woman to be included in the local poetic gatherings, or mushairas, that frequently took place in a walled compound that she had built on a hill near Hyderabad. Inside the compound were a mausoleum for her mother, a caravanserai, and a mosque; after her death in 1824 Chanda was buried there.
For further exploration:
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at WOMAD, 1985: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUpG4jCdqe4
Interview with Abida Parveen: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jul/08/abida-parveen-sufi-singer-passion
Abida Parveen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoJ9EO9CTZk
Interview with Arooj Aftab: https://pitchfork.com/features/rising/arooj-aftab-vulture-prince-interview/
Arooj Aftab, ‘Vulture Prince’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMWEQ3k1Ziw&list=PLgxqT2ynqZkmbrOWmqcJmygmzsJj_I6u2
Mai Laqa Chanda: https://www.theheritagelab.in/mah-laqa-bai-chanda/
Portrait of Chanda Bai, c. 1800