The best in him was yet to be

One grieves over the death of Amjad Sabri not only because an artiste has been murdered but also over the kind of society we have gradually become. Every time we think we have hit a new low and it cannot get worse, we are proved wrong. It appears every time the rock bottom may still be far away.

He was in his forties, for some the prime of a musician’s life. Many thought the best in him was yet to be. He had many years to go as a vocalist and his life was brutally cut short by an assassin’s bullets.

It appears that everyone is under threat. No one feels safe as he or she could be killed for whatever reason. If an artiste is killed or humiliated, some other reason is attributed to it than the mere fact that they are discriminated against. If it happens to a woman, the blame is fierce character assassination. This growing intolerance has reached a proportion where it is truly becoming suffocating and hard to breathe.

The artistes have been receiving threats, as indeed did Amjad Sabri, and finally he was gunned down in his own very Karachi, not very far from the place which he called home. Nusrat Fateh Ali, too, in the latter part of his life received threats but, like a true believer, he used to say that death was predestined and nothing could deter him from practicing what he thought was pure truth and sincerity. He continued to perform and became the representative of this culture in places where even the name of the country was unknown. People of all hues and denominations queued up to meet him and thank him for the aesthetic pleasure of his music.

But the qawwals who first took this music outside of the subcontinent were the Sabri Brothers -- Ghulam Fareed and Maqbool Ahmed -- the father and uncle of Amjad Sabri. In the festivals in Europe, especially in Avignon France, in the late 1960s, the famous international music festival became their favourite haunt. The French swooned over this music and it became their launching pad for the recognition of qawwali as a popular form that could transcend the barriers of language, musical intonation and culture.

International recognition uplifted the qawwals and they became celebrities. After their performances at the Carnegie Hall in New York in the mid-1970s, people who listened to qawwalis but had nothing to do with the qawwals felt happy to be introduced as belonging to the land which was represented by the Sabri Brothers.

Amjad Sabri belonged to the next generation who had a ready audience and a platform, actually an international platform for their art. He did not have to struggle in the same manner in which his elders did. They had set the stage for the next generation to rule over with this form of music. The previous generation had brought the qawwali out of the shrine and then into the concert hall of not only the subcontinent but internationally as well and, without knowing the concept or the context, people swayed to this music.

This is the significance of art which may originate from a particular ideology or circumstance but transcends boundaries and time spans to appeal to a broader section. An expression based on diversity of sources has been the quest of the artistes in the Indian subcontinent. An ancient land, with people inhabiting it over millenniums, its many thought and emotional patterns only resonate to a more inclusive archetype and the artists did exactly that -- representing it in poetry, visual arts and particularly music. Thus the conflict between an orthodox and a more pluralistic reading has been an endemic one, with the arts unfolding the banner of a more humanised expression.

Read also:Remembering Amjad Sabri

The text is of importance in the qawwali and as the form evolved, the beginning of qawwali recital was the Arabic verses, either from the holy text or the hadith followed by poetry in Persian, while the major and the bigger chunk consisted of the last section based on the text in vernacular languages. Many have traced its origins to the musical inheritance, straight to Medina and sahaba but the genre of qawwali, as it is known, is an expression of the South Asian environment.

It is not surprising that all qawwals trace their antecedents back to the era of Amir Khusro. This popular hybrid form usually sung at the shrines and on the urs of saints and sufia had the blessings of the Chishtia Sufia who came out very strongly in favour of Sama. It took various forms including that of the qawwali.

Our connection with Arabic cultures is not of modern Arab culture but as perceived through those heavily mediated fourteen hundred years. Similarly, Persian poetry still means for us Hafiz, Rumi, Jami and Saadi but the living connection between Iranian arts and us has been snapped. The genre of qawwali, too, has undergone changes. From the shrine it was brought to the concert hall where the expectations from it changed. The gradual shifting of focus to the western sources of knowledge has weakened our links with our heritage encapsulated in classical Arabic and Persian languages. Most of the repertoire of qawwali being in Persian with an icing of Arabic is lost to history.

Qawwali did not originate in the area which is now Pakistan because it was in and around Delhi and was rendered in Rajasthani, Brij, Khari and Poorbi dialects. Gradually, the kalam of the Punjabi sufia got incorporated in its repertoire, to be followed by many other lyrics which were in extant vocabulary.

Amjad Sabri’s great challenge was to keep the drawbridge lowered between its classical origins and the changing reality in language, poetic idiom and musical intonation. There was much that he sang in the traditional ang but there was more that he rendered keeping in view this changing musical taste.