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hen Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died in 1997, at just 48, it felt as if an entire continent had fallen silent for a moment. His was not merely a voice but a force of nature, a sound that seemed to stretch across centuries and continents, carrying with it the devotional intensity of the Sufi shrine and the ecstatic energy of modern performance. It is tempting now, decades later, to view his career as a race against time: a man who knew, perhaps unconsciously, that his years would be few, and who set out to fill every available moment with song.
Born in 1948, just after Partition, in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), Nusrat came from a long line of qawwals, hereditary musicians steeped in the centuries-old tradition of Sufi devotional music. His family, the Qawwal Bachon ka Gharana, had migrated from Jalandhar and was already well known across northern India. Yet, when his father, Fateh Ali Khan, died young, few expected the soft-spoken son to carry the mantle. For years, Nusrat appeared to show little promise. But by the mid-1970s, something had shifted. Over the next two decades, he would conquer not just the subcontinent but the world, becoming the most internationally recognised Pakistani musician of his time.
His rise was meteoric and relentless. Once his voice found its full power, his calendar filled with performances across Asia, Europe and North America. He sang for packed auditoriums in Paris and Tokyo, collaborated with Peter Gabriel and Eddie Vedder and brought qawwali to audiences who had never heard Urdu or Persian but who understood, instantly, the language of ecstasy. The world embraced him, and Pakistan, for once, embraced him back.
His international acclaim was not a foreign validation of local talent, but a confirmation of what his audiences at home already knew: that he was extraordinary.
And yet, the drive that fuelled his art also hastened his end. Nusrat had never enjoyed robust health. The demands of constant travel and marathon concerts left little time for rest. Doctors advised restraint; he ignored them. The music required energy, and he sought it where he could, in rich food, strong tea and the adoration of his listeners. His performances were physical acts of transcendence: long, improvised, almost athletic displays of endurance. To witness him live was to see a man who seemed to channel something beyond himself, his body straining to contain what his spirit demanded to release.
Behind the mysticism lay craft. Qawwali, as a form, is rigorous, built on precise melodic structures, intricate rhythm cycles and deep poetic knowledge. Nusrat revolutionised it not by abandoning tradition but by expanding its scope. He introduced Punjabi verses into what had once been a primarily Persian and Urdu repertoire, making the form more accessible across Pakistan. He experimented with tempo and phrasing, lengthening improvisations and creating moments of near-operatic drama.
He sang as if he knew the clock was ticking. When it finally stopped, his music did not.
Before him, qawwali’s audience was largely confined to the shrines of Delhi, Ajmer and Lahore. In much of what became Pakistan, particularly Sindh, the north-west and former East Pakistan, it was virtually unknown. Nusrat changed that. He turned devotional music into concert music. The harmonium and tabla, once secondary to the voice, became electrified, amplified, and, in time, joined by the guitar and synthesiser. By the 1980s, qawwali had left the shrine courtyard and entered stadiums, universities and television studios.
The transformation was seismic. The Sabri Brothers had opened the international door earlier, performing in France and Britain, but Nusrat strode through it. His collaborations with Western musicians in the 1990s, the Passion soundtrack with Peter Gabriel, the Dead Man Walking score and his experimental albums with Michael Brook, marked a turning point. His music was suddenly part of the global vocabulary of sound. He sang of divine love, but his voice carried human longing: the ache of distance, the hunger for union, the joy of surrender.
At home, this Western recognition changed how Pakistanis perceived qawwali. What had once been considered an old, dusty form of Sufi chant became fashionable. University students danced to his recordings. His concerts became cultural events. Qawwali, infused with electronic beats and stage lights, replaced classical khayal and thumri as the concert form of choice. It was no longer confined to religious expression; it was performance art, a shared emotional experience that transcended creed.
There was irony in this too. The very process of globalisation that elevated Nusrat also began to alter the essence of the form he championed. The harmonium gave way to the guitar; the tabla to programmed percussion. The ecstatic call-and-response between singer and chorus began to resemble pop composition. What was once spontaneous became structured. But even within this transformation, Nusrat’s influence remained unmistakable. He was not afraid of innovation; he embraced it. He understood that the survival of a form depends on its ability to change.
Today, as artificial intelligence experiments with composing music and generating ‘voices,’ the world Nusrat glimpsed in his collaborations seems prophetic. He was among the first South Asian musicians to recognise that the boundaries between East and West, tradition and technology, were dissolving. What he began, the fusion of devotional spirit with global sound, continues to evolve through artists who remix his recordings, sample his voice and extend his legacy into digital eternity.
Nusrat’s story is one of both triumph and tragedy. He filled his short life with more sound, more energy, more emotion than most artists could in twice the time. He sang as if he knew the clock was ticking. When it finally stopped, his music did not. It continues to echo, in the alleys of Faisalabad, the studios of London, the dance floors of New York.
It is said that when Nusrat sang, he could make listeners cry without understanding a word. That was his gift, the ability to bridge the earthly and the divine, to make the human voice itself an act of worship.
Even now, decades after his passing, one can hear him somewhere, that immense, uncontainable sound that once carried a nation, and still refuses to fade.
The writer is a Lahore-based culture critic.