Tradition · devotional music tradition

Qawwālī

Function

Arts & performance

Confidence

Not assessed

Worth knowing

Tradition credits Amīr Khusrau with founding the qawwāl bachche, the hereditary singing line of Nizamuddin's shrine, and with the qaul that gives the form its name. Musicologists treat the attribution as a lineage claim rather than a documented invention: what is certain is that the Delhi shrine has had a hereditary qawwal family attached to it for close to seven centuries.

Connections (5)

• Craft tradition ofAmīr Khusrau

  Chishti tradition makes Amīr Khusrau the founder of qawwālī: he is credited with the qaul that names the form, with the hereditary qawwāl bachche of the Delhi shrine, and by later accounts with the sitar and tabla as well. Musicologists accept the first two as lineage claims with real institutional weight and reject the instruments as anachronism. What is documented is that Khusrau wrote Persian and Hindavi verse for the assembly, and that a hereditary singing family has been attached to his master's tomb ever since.

• Craft tradition ofHazrat Nizāmuddīn Dargah, Delhi

  Nizāmuddīn's dargah is the working home of qawwālī, and the qawwāl bachche who sing there trace themselves to twelve singers trained by Amīr Khusrau. The sung assembly, the samāʿ, was itself contested — jurists argued for centuries over whether music before a shrine was lawful, and the Chishtis defended it while the Suhrawardis largely did not. Thursday evenings at the Delhi shrine are the continuous performance tradition that argument was about, still held a few metres from both tombs.

• Craft tradition ofAjmer Sharīf

  Ajmer carries the same assembly on a far larger scale, and the ʿurs of Muʿīnuddīn Chishtī each Rajab is the biggest qawwālī occasion in South Asia, drawing singing parties from Delhi, Punjab and Sindh as well as hereditary Ajmer lineages. The form travelled the Chishti silsila rather than any court circuit, which is why its geography is a chain of tombs from Ajmer and Delhi to Pakpattan and Gulbarga rather than a chain of capitals.

• Craft tradition ofSachal Sarmast

  Sachal's kalām moved out of Sindhi devotional singing into the wider qawwāli and Sufi-rock repertoire of the subcontinent, and it is now among the most performed Sindhi verse outside Sindh. Abida Parveen, herself from Larkana, carries both his work and Latīf's; the Sabri Brothers and later Coke Studio arrangements took particular poems into a north Indian and Pakistani audience that does not read Sindhi. The words are usually sung without translation, which is normal in the qawwāli tradition and was true of Persian and Braj before it.

• Craft tradition ofIslam

  Conquest brought rulers; the Sufi orders brought a religion. The Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri and Naqshbandi silsilas settled the subcontinent's Islam, and qawwālī is how they did it — sung at the dargah in Hindavi and Braj as well as Persian, at shrines open to everyone, to music the orthodox repeatedly tried to ban. That is why the subcontinent's Islamic landscape is a map of tombs rather than only of mosques, and why the shrines have Hindu pilgrims.

On these journeys

• Chishti silsila

Sources

Wikipedia, “Qawwali”. Amīr Khusrau’s Persian and Hindavi dīwāns; Regula Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan (1986).

• Wikipedia — Qawwali