Part of Hindustani Classical
Hindustani classical vocal music is the singing tradition of North Indian art music. Singers develop a raga through composition and improvisation in khayal and dhrupad.
Historical Timeline
Qawwali grew in the sama, the spiritual concert, of the Chishti Sufi order, where listening to music was held to awaken divine love (ishq). Tradition credits Amir Khusrau, a devotee of the Chishti master Nizamuddin Auliya, with creating it, and the scholar Hussein Rashid writes that the art is usually credited to him.
The form has travelled far from its shrines. Rashid traces qawwali to the UK, the US, Fiji, Nigeria and Israel, and its performers now include Hindus, Christians and Jews as well as Muslims. In West Bengal a Bengali-language qawwali is sung by small Muslim and Hindu communities.
Amir Khusrau and the Chishti sama
Tradition credits Amir Khusrau, a devotee of the Chishti master Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, with creating qawwali for the order's sama gatherings. Khusrau died in 1325; Hussein Rashid gives his birth as 1244, other accounts 1253.
Harmonium Arrives
Qawwali parties adopt the harmonium as their melodic instrument in place of an earlier plucked or bowed one; Hussein Rashid names the sitar.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Real World
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan plays the WOMAD festival in 1985, and Real World issues the concert as Live at WOMAD 1985. He works with Peter Gabriel on the soundtrack of The Last Temptation of Christ and signs to Real World in 1989.
Global Reach
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan plays WOMAD in 1985, works with Peter Gabriel on The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and records Mustt Mustt with Michael Brook (1990). His nephew Rahat Fateh Ali Khan carries on the family line after his death in 1997.
Playing Techniques
Intensifying Repetition
A qawwali starts slow and builds, and its length follows the listeners' response, with popular sections repeated. The qaul, a song on a saying of the Prophet, traditionally opens the sama.
The ethnomusicologist Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, studying the Nizamuddin shrine in Delhi in 1975 and 1976, showed how qawwals use repetition, accentuation and acceleration, with gesture, to raise and sustain the spiritual arousal of their listeners. In the assembly the qawwals choose and improvise on the poetry in answer to what the listeners show.
Party Ensemble
A qawwali party is led by a lead singer, whom a chorus answers in call and response. Percussion comes from the dholak or tabla, hand-clapping drives the rhythm, and in the modern period the harmonium has taken the place of the sitar as the melodic instrument.
The make-up varies by region. In Bengali qawwali in West Bengal, groups of three to five play tambourine or small cymbals in place of clapping, with the lead singer at the harmonium, and most singers are self-taught.
Parties have traditionally been male. The scholar Hussein Rashid writes that, strictly, only men perform qawwali; women sing sufiana kalam, Sufi words, and a woman tends to sing solo.
Symbolic Layers
Most qawwali songs are ghazals: poems of couplets that can each stand alone, usually about a love whose object listeners may read as human or divine. Worldly images stand for mystical states, so romance and wine in a ghazal point to the soul's longing and to spiritual intoxication.
Qureshi described the qawwali sound as a code that carries several meanings at once, spiritual, social and economic, with the qawwal as the single voice of the assembly.
The poetry is mainly in Persian, Urdu and Hindi, with Sufi verse also in Punjabi, Saraiki, Sindhi, Braj Bhasha and Awadhi.
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