Opinion Nusrat at 75: He is a guide to spirituality in our polarised, violent times

For decades, this paean to Krishna, penned by the 20th century Urdu poet Tufail Hoshiarpuri, has found space and deep affection in many Krishna temples all over the world.

Interestingly, a large majority continues to attribute the lines of veneration to one of the 16th century’s most cherished poets and saints, Mirabai. One wonders if this is just ignorance, or politics of convenience. Acknowledging a Muslim poet’s affections for a Hindu deity and singing it in Vrindavan and Mathura is perhaps a conversation that’s best ignored. Either way, this allows for a slow whitewash of history, and with that, the age-old tehzeeb of pluralism. That said, if logic were sacrosanct, it’s important to note that Meera’s literary style had metric verses that were an amalgamation of Rajasthani and Braj bhasha. This piece is mostly in contemporary Hindi with a touch of Hindavi.

But much before people pitted Mirabai and Hoshiarpuri — both ardent worshippers of Krishna — against each other, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a budding Lyallpur-based qawwal in his 30s, took the bhajan and composed it as a qaul (an opening of closing hymn where words are of significance), and brought it to India in 1980 on the invitation of filmmaker Raj Kapoor. As Khan’s popularity soared in Pakistan and India, this composition, like all great melodies, found its way to people as a qawwali style bhajan – an unusual space and stayed. Even among those who made the expedient choice of changing the provenance of the piece. Looking at it now, it was a different and brilliant kind of music revolution. It certainly wasn’t inadvertent.

The pop culture titan, who died at 48 in 1997, would have been 75 today.

While this Krishna bhajan was a triumph, others like ‘Piya ghar aaya’, ‘Akhiyaan udeek diyan’, ‘Halka halka suroor’, ‘Aafreen’, ‘Tere bin nahin lagda dil’, ‘Dama dam mast qalandar’ and ‘Allah hu’ were a rage. Qawwali, from being an esoteric tradition for the West, was suddenly finding attention as world music. As for the singer, here was a voice that belonged to the older order, more focussed on the feeling of the notes than the notes themselves, music that brought the kind of intensity, mysticism and other-worldliness that one had heard stories of or read in books. The kind where you didn’t need to be religious to be one with some kind of higher power. I have always believed that art, especially music, has the power to do that. But Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan corroborated these age-old archetypes every time he sat down to sing. This music was rustic, rousing and for the first time, turned the spotlight on a Pakistani musician, turning him into a global star, somewhat like what Pandit Ravi Shankar was in the ’60s and ’70s, especially after the association with The Beatles.

In 1985, Khan sang at WOMAD Festival in London, which had been put together by English musician Peter Gabriel. The western audience was suddenly interested in what qawwali was and what Sufism meant. After the festival, Gabriel collaborated with Khan on Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Gabriel also released a lot of Khan’s pieces, often casting them in a western mould. Then there was the collaboration with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam on Tim Robbins’ moving and haunting Dead Man Walking where Khan sang on two tracks – ‘Face of Love’ and ‘Long Road’. The high-pitched alaap with the visuals of the teenage couple’s dead bodies remain etched in the collective memory.

What was interesting about Khan, who trained under his uncles and legendary musicians Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan and Ustad Salamat Ali Khan and began singing after a dream in which his father was beckoning him to do so, was that he was not only earnest about his own art form. There was a strange openness about his music — modified, used, remade, turned into a club number or put through a machine besides, of course, being covered extensively including an odd-sounding live version from Jeff Buckley. He didn’t take the legal course when his work was plagiarised extensively in Bollywood, allowing many Indian filmmakers to earn big money. Khan’s songs Mera piya ghar aaya (Annu Malik), Tu cheez (Viju Shah) which was a copy of Dum mast qalandar and Saanso ki mala (Rajesh Roshan) are still not credited to him. It is hard to imagine an artiste today who won’t stand up and call out the blatant theft. The only time he raised it was while speaking about his Allah hu that was turned into I love you (Auzaar, 1994) by Annu Malik. “He should at least respect my religious songs,” he is known to have said.

Every time he sang, his shows were sold out in India and abroad besides hundreds of albums that followed. In his lifetime and 27 years after his death, he remains a reason for many to take up music and others to change direction in theirs.

Globally, he became one of the only vocalists from the Subcontinent to find such attention. This was groundbreaking, not just for Khan but also for the pieces he was singing – lyrically rich text paired with a voice that could transcend boundaries. The symbolism came through poetry from different centuries. He sang of a humanistic philosophy propagated by saints like Baba Bulleshah, Sultan Bahu, Amir Khusrau, Guru Gobind Singh, Kabir, Rumi and Shahbaz Qalandar among others. Through them, Khan invoked Krishna, Radha, Guru Nanak, Ram, Allah, all of them, for spiritual salvation.

So he took the journey where it was all about the reverie and the belief that a plethora of religious paths led to the same kind of spiritual feeling. He could attain it by praising Nizamuddin Auliya in a dargah, singing shabads in a gurudwara or exalting Radhi-Krishna in a wedding or all of them together in a concert hall. These were songs of soul and Khan, in an attempt to find himself, became a guide for us too, looking at a kinship that, he felt, humanity deserved. He’d sing often, Chal Bulleya othe vasiye, jitthe saare anne/ Na koi saadi jaat pachhane, na koi saanu manne (Bulleh Shah, let us go to the place where everyone is blind. No one recognises our caste, nor does anyone revere us).

In the polarised world of today, where worship is political and not a personal matter, where men are killing men with gusto, where visuals of bloody children seem to have brought us to a point of no return, Khan and his music, are needed even more.

suanshu.khurana@expressindia.com