Spring sends Delhi into a sort of a panic: the days of blooms, balmy breeze and glorious sunsets are painfully short-lived, sandwiched between a grey winter and fiery summer. This means a packed calendar in February and it is in the midst of this spring fever that the Hindu festival of Basant Panchami arrives at the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya.
There is a charming story to this interfaith celebration: left distraught by the death of a nephew, the city’s beloved Sufi pir refuses to emerge from bereavement for days. To lift his spirits, his closest disciple, Amir Khusrau, arrives at his door on Basant Panchami dressed in the sunshine colours of the season, whirling and singing an uplifting bandish in raga Bahar, Sakal ban phool rahi sarson. The trick, it is said, brought the first smile on his spiritual master’s face in days.
It is this magic of music and love that draws thousands of people of all faiths to the Hazrat Nizamuddin Dargah this spring day every year. As the afternoon deepens, qawwali ensembles settle into the courtyard, singing the timeless compositions of Khusrau that Sufi music lovers can never have enough of – Chhap tilak, Mohe apne hi rang mein and, of course, Sakal ban, which is the anthem of the day.
As the music with its propulsive beat, open-throated voices, clapping of hands, and responsive and repetitive cycle of lyrics reach a trance-like peak, the crowds shower the qawwals with marigold and mustard flowers. It is a celebration not just of the city’s syncretic traditions but also of another equally important legacy – Khusrau’s place in the living traditions of Hindustani music system.
Sunil Sharma, a scholar of Persian and South Asian literature, describes Khusrau as likely the most popular, eclectic and incomparable cultural icon of medieval Islamic India whose works synthesised Muslim and Hindu elements. In his comprehensive biography, Amir Khusraw, Sharma points out that the poet was instrumental in forging distinct Indian-Islamic cultural traditions in classical music, Sufism, qawwali, Persian literature and in developing the flavourful vernacular language of the Delhi area, Hindavi, in which both Hindi and Urdu are rooted.
Like other musical icons, there are several apocryphal stories about Khusrau: that he learned by stealth the compositions of southern wizard Gopal Nayak, that he crafted dozens of ragas, created the khayal and invented the sitar and tabla. For a man who wrote prolifically, he documented none of the musical achievements attributed to him, all of it remembered and stored as oral history. But, as Sharma points out, so embedded is his spirit in this legacy that it is hard to question despite the lack of evidence.
What is undeniable is that he drew from his Persian roots and existing literary and musical forms to bring a new sound to the northern landscape. And that the qawwali, the tarana – a raga-bound composition strung together by syllables and interspersed with Persian text – and the early seeds of the idea of the khayal were his gifts to this pre-Mughal world.
“It is safe to assume that Khusrau had a seminal influence on the cultural and music traditions of Delhi and surrounding areas of Islamic influence,” said writer and commentator S Kalidas. “His lifetime saw the start of [a] serious exchange of information between Persianate and local traditions. And the khayal drew from the qawwali as well as the dhurpad traditions. But all these were generational developments that happened over centuries.”
Between the 12th and 18th century, this give and take continued in the courts and dargahs of the subcontinent. Here is Jahangir on witnessing a qawwali in Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri: “On the night of the 12th an uncommon and strange event took place. Some Delhisingers (qawwalan) were singing songs in my presence…[A] verse of Amir Khusrau was the refrain of the song.”
This remarkable rendering of Khusrau’s Man kunto maula, set in raga Shuddha Kalyan, shows how the khayal, qawwali and tarana merge seamlessly like strands of the same root. It is led by the legendary qawwal Munshi Raziuddin, whose Karachi- based family traces its ancestry to Qawwal Bache, the lineage started by Khusrau’s primary disciples:
Enduring traditions
Today, the world of the qawwals and khayaliyas are perceived as sharply divided, the one considered light and popular and the other classical and exclusive. But it was the qawwals who “owned” the khayal, says ethnomusicologist Katherine Schofield in her research work, Hindustani Music in the Time of Aurangzeb.
“The qawwals of Delhi have been renowned as the heirs of Amir Khusrau’s musical traditions from his own time until the present day,” she writes. “At the same time they have been implicated in the development, preservation and transmission of both qawwali and khayal. Thus it is clear that from its first appearances in the Mughal literature around 1637, khayal was considered an integral part of the repertoire of the qawwals of Delhi.”
The lineage of Qawwal Bache, highly sophisticated qawwals, are said to have been tutored by Khusrau’s prime disciple Mian Samat Bin Ibrahim. This heritage is still alive – in the hereditary qawwals who hold the right to perform at the Nizamuddin dargah, in the Delhi gharana of khayal singers with a vast repertoire of compositions across rare genres, and in the exquisitely trained qawwals of Karachi in Pakistan and Hyderabad in India.
Hyderabad-based Nazeer Nasir Warsi, who inherited the art from his father, the legendary qawwal Aziz Ahmad Warsi of the Qawwal Bache gharana, talks of straddling the worlds of khayal and qawwali in an archival recording. “I trained in khayal for 18 years and would have made a career [as a khayaliya] but I had to carry forward the qawwali legacy of my father when he was no more,” says Warsi. “But I keep both arts alive, the qawwali and the rag raginiyan. The qawwali of the khankah is not an easy thing and we only sing parampara ki cheezein (traditional compositions).”
Aziz Ahmad Warsi sang what is one of the most moving qawwalis in a film. It was written by Kaifi Azmi for Garam Hawa and, as his son points out, was a superb amalgamation of ragas Bhairav and Ahir Bhairav.
To thread the links between these forms it is important to look at Khusrau and his eclectic sensibilities as a poet, musician, Sufi, chronicler and courtier. A man of many parts, he is a hard figure to pigeonhole. He wrote deeply moving poetry in praise of his Sufi master but he also wrote odes to the emperors of Delhi Sultanate, five of whom he served. He wrote in elegant Persian but seamlessly wove in the earthy tones of Braj Bhasha and Khadi Boli dialects into his poetry. He was the star of the courts and elite salons, a survivor in a very material sphere but also an otherworldly mystic. He dwelt in the realm of the beloved’s eyes, nightingales and scented gardens, but also led armed combat for the reigning sultan.
Khusrau fancifully referred to himself as “tuti-e-hind” or the parrot of India, the voice of its many-hued cultural practices. When he was born into the family of a Turkish slave-turned-nobleman in the service of Iltutmish, Delhi was already a cosmopolitan city absorbing multiple influences from invaders, traders and travelling scholars, says Sharma. Something of a teen prodigy, he was a sought-after poet by age 20. Two years later, he met the Sufi saint of the Chishti order, Nizamuddin Auliya.
The khanqah or the meeting place of the Sufis was a performance spot for the works of poets like Khusrau. Sama, the practice of listening to music as a means of reaching spiritual bliss, is popular in the Chishti Sufi stream and the poet’s ghazals with their expressions of love – interpreted as romantic love or love for one’s spiritual master – became a staple at the dargah.
Whether in Sufi establishments or the courts, there is a reason why the qawwali became hugely popular – it appeals to the lay listener and the initiated, to the devotee and the connoisseur.
“The singer’s aim is always to move, to arouse, and to draw the listener towards his sheikh, the saint, God, and into the ecstasy of mystical union,” writes ethnomusicologist Regula Qureshi in her essay, Qawwali: An Introduction, in the compendium on the poet-composer, Jashn-e-Khusrau. “But while one singer lifts the Sufi spirit with a stately classical tune in forceful rhythm, another melts his heart with lilting melody, or captivates his mind with a new composition.”
Khusrau is believed to have trained a group of disciples – the numbers vary from two to 12 in different accounts. It is this elite batch of Sufi musicians that became the early proponents of the khayal, working as a sort of laboratory for its evolution in the 16th and 17th century. According to Schofield, Khusrau did not invent the khayal but his musical legacy, in play with various northern regional styles, metamorphosed into the contemporary khayal.
Subsequent exponents of the khayal style are all said to have ties with master qawwals. Of these, Niamat Khan or Sadarang, popularly known as the pioneer of the style at Muhammad Shah’s court, may also have learned from a qawwal. The Gwalior gharana is seen as the first formal school of khayal singing and it too bears the influence of Lucknow-based Qawwal Bacha Bade Mohammad Khan.
But it is likely the Delhi gharana, which names Khusrau as its founder, where this link between qawwali and khayal stayed close right until the time of Bahadur Shah Zafar. Tanras Khan of the gharana, Zafar’s court musician and renowned khayal vocalist, was a Qawwal Bacha.
“The Delhi gharana has always been one of qawwals,” said Kalidas. “It splintered during Partition with many of the greats moving to Pakistan and even before that about a 100 years ago when one line moved to Hyderabad.”
But even then the Dilli gharana has a distinct repertoire of taranas, qawwalis, and multiple ritual folk forms of the region, all of which have the Khusravi stamp of eclecticism. Among the hereditary legends to emerge from this gharana was Chand Khan and Naseer Ahmad Khan.
As Regula Qureshi points out in her seminal work, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan, qawwali and khayal share the same “language area”, the tonal and rhythm framework, the concepts of asthayi and antara (refrain-stanzas), the use of taan and layakari (interplay of notes and rhythm). Where they differ primarily is in the emphasis on poetics and the extent to which the purity of the raga turf needs to be maintained.
Kalidas recalls an interesting anecdote featuring his guru, the great khayal maestro Mallikarjun Mansur. At a Mansur concert, an elderly member of the audience sitting next to him in a sherwani and topi was responding keenly to every nuance. “I asked him, ‘Did you like this music’? ‘Why would I not,’ he shot back. ‘I am a khalifa of the Delhi gharana.’” The ustad, it turned out, was Munshi Raziuddin, the Karachi-based Qawwal Bachey stalwart. As the concert wound up, Mansur came down to greet the singer from across the border and ask after the qawwals who moved after Partition.
Khusrau’s legacy clearly did more than create music styles – it wove transcendental links between people across countries and cultures, between high art and popular art.
Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.
