Performing pain: Sindhi Sufi music, affect, and Hindu-Muslim relations in western India

ABSTRACT

This article examines the affective enactment of the Sufi emotional concept of the pain of separation by Muslim singers in Kachchh, Gujarat, a border region in western India adjacent to Sindh, Pakistan. In a discussion of two musical genres that feature the Sufi poetry of Shāh ‘Abdul Lat̤īf Bhiṭā’ī (1689–1752 CE) – kāfī and shāh jo rāg̈ – I argue that the musical performance of pain is ethically efficacious as well as politically salient. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in Kachchh in 2014–2018, the article traces the ways in which poetry performers and enthusiasts conceive of musico-poetic pain as a form of Islamic worship that has ethical benefits for performers and listeners, such as tranquility and the purification of one’s heart. It thus demonstrates how Sindhi Sufi music functions as an affective, embodied, gendered and vernacular means of engagement with the Islamic discursive tradition. The latter portion of the article widens the focus, taking the pain of separation as a lens through which to examine Hindu-Muslim relations in Kachchh, where Hindu nationalism and Islamic reform have contributed to socio-religious polarisation since the 1980s. Drawing on examples from local musical history, I explore the political salience of the pain of separation by showing how the musical performance of Shāh Bhiṭā’ī’s female-voice poetry historically facilitated interreligious forms of male sociality in Kachchh.

KEYWORDS:

• Sufi music
• pain
• affect
• South Asian Islam
• Hindu nationalism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Nicole Reisnour, Anaar Desai-Stephens, Jim Sykes, Peter Manuel, Jane Sugarman, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay. All shortcomings are mine. The research for this essay was funded by the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and The Graduate Center (City University of New York). I received support while writing from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An alternative translation of āyats (Qur’ānic verses) is ‘divine signs’.

2 je to bait^a bhāṅyā, se āyatūṅ āhīnⁱ / niyo man^u lā’īnⁱ, pīrī’āṅ saṅde pār^a d̤e.

3 All verse numbers correspond with Kalyan Advani’s (‘Abd al-Lat̤īf 1994 [1967]) edition of Shah Jo Risālo.

4 Founded in 1980, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political arm of the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In the 1980s, BJP leaders began agitating for the construction of a temple on the site of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid (Babar’s Mosque) in Ayodhya, alleging that the mosque was built on the site of the god Ram’s birthplace. This agitation culminated in the destruction of the mosque by a Hindu nationalist mob in December 1992, which led to Hindu-Muslim riots throughout India. Beginning in the early 1990s, the BJP began to consolidate power in Gujarat. The current BJP-affiliated Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, was Gujarat’s Chief Minister from 2001 to 2014. Modi is widely held to have been complicit in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat (see Ghassem-Fachandi 2012).

5 Kachchhi is a southern dialect of Sindhi.

6 Whereas sur (<Skt. svara) in much of South Asia refers to ‘tone’, ‘pitch’, or ‘note’, in Sindhi and Kachchhi it also means melody type, i.e., rāga.

7 In Sur Kapā’itī, for instance, Shāh Bhiṭā’ī drew on the model of women’s thread-spinning songs (carkhā nāmah) (see Hussain 1996).

8 It is worth noting that not all virahiṇī-perspective texts were composed by men. Mīrābāī (1502–1556) is the most well-known example of a female poet who composed female-voice devotional poetry.

9 ‘Ustād’ is a title of respect for men from the Laṅgā hereditary musician community.

10 I thank Inderjit Kaur for her suggestion of ‘heart-mind’ as a translation for man.

11 Most of my interlocutors speak Kachchhi, Gujarati, and Urdu-Hindi. I conducted my fieldwork in Urdu-Hindi and Kachchhi.

12 Sindhi-language molūd consists of group recitation in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. There are also performers of solo Urdu-language na‘t in Kachchh.

13 There was at least one female shāh jo rāg̈ singer in Kachchh in the mid twentieth century, namely Mā’ī Ji’āṅ, who was the grandmother of Mitha Khan Jat, the current leader of the shāh jo rāg̈ singers in Kachchh. My colleague Pei-ling Huang, who trained in shāh jo rāg̈ in Pakistan, has in recent years inspired a group of young Sindhi women to perform the genre.

14 According to Ismail Mirjat, a rāg̈ī faqīr from Pakistan, Shāh Bhiṭā’ī adopted the female poetic voice because he wished to uplift women’s place in society. Citing ‘honor killings’ as an example of how women are not accorded respect in Sindh, Ismail said that Shah Bhiṭā’ī assumed the names of women as a way of highlighting the honour and vulnerability of women (26 May 2020, personal communication).

15 For a Rajasthan-based perspective on the Sindhi sur repertoire, see Ayyagari (2012).

16 See Abbas (2002) for a discussion of the Sabri Brothers’ performance of a qawwālī composition from the perspective of the female bhakti poet Mīrābāī (1502–1556) (97–103).

17 See Yousuf Saeed’s 1997 documentary film Basant.

18 Although one could make similar claims for Kabīr, he is not nearly as popular in Muslim Kachchh.

19 At least two Hindu singers from Dalit (historically ‘untouchable’) communities in northern Kachchh continue to perform Shāh Bhiṭā’ī’s poetry in a stylistic variant of the kāfī genre which, like Muslim kāfī singers, they learned by mimicking artists they heard on Pakistani radio and cassettes, especially the Hindu performer Mohan Bhagat.

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Brian E. Bond

Brian Bond is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2020 dissertation (The Graduate Center, CUNY) examined the relationship between emotion and Islamic knowledge in Sindhi Sufi poetry performance practices in Kachchh, Gujarat, as well as the effects of Islamic reformist projects on Muslim musical life in the region.