Strains of friendship: post-partition rāgadārī music publics in London

ABSTRACT

How is cross-cultural communication around music in the British Asian diaspora shaped by the Partition of 1947? This article will discuss this question through a case study of the writings and relationships of four key South Asian music enthusiasts: one female patron of music, and three male scholar-researchers of music who befriended each other, and in the process redefined rāgadārī (classical) music publics in Britain, beginning in the 1970s and 80s. Through a discussion of their life-stories and narratives I reveal the importance of (i) storytelling and memory in the creation of diasporic homemaking, (ii) a gendered politics of musical commemoration, (iii) the anecdote as ‘musical gift’ (qua Sykes), and (iv) postcolonial cultural custodianship, in producing a unique rāgadārī musical public in London, across the Indo-Pak national border.

KEYWORDS:

• Partition
• Diaspora
• rāgadārī music
• homemaking
• gift-giving
• custodianship
• gender
• commemoration

Introduction

Tales of music’s power in causing the turbulence and violence that defined Partition; vivid memories of witnessing the horrors of 1947, or stories of narrowly escaping them; and accounts of cross-border musical bonhomie between Indian and Pakistani musicians and listeners in 1960s Britain and beyond.¹ In each of these ‘genres’ of the Partition story, music, and memories of it, have been key to shaping South Asian rāgadārī musical publics in Britain.² In turn, these stories and memories of Partition have propelled diasporic South Asians in London to simultaneously study and celebrate the shared traditions of rāgadārī music.³

The role played by musicians in building bridges between India and Pakistan has been key over the past 75 years, especially because of the absence of any memorial to those who died during the violence in 1947–1948. Accounts of musicians migrating across the rigid political divides of 1947, how this displacement changed the music they made, consequently altering the musical landscape of north India and Pakistan are yet to be holistically studied. However, attempts have been made in this direction by three London-based music-lovers in the South Asian British diaspora.

A love for rāgadārī music unites Balbir Singh Kanwal, an Indian origin independent Sikh scholar of Punjabi culture; Firdous Ali, a Kashmiri origin scholar who had an abiding interest in Urdu literature, poetry and music; Khurshid Qureshi Aulia, hailing from the famous tabla family of Ustad Alla Rakha Qureshi (her father) and Ustad Zakir Hussain (her brother) and the Pakistani journalist and poet Ayub Aulia. Four individuals, divided by Partition’s political boundaries – hailing, respectively from Hoshiarpur (Indian Punjab), Srinagar (Kashmir), Pathankot (Jammu) and Gujranwala (Pakistani Punjab) – have all worked to honour music histories, musicians and courtesan-poets of north India and Pakistan, across the religious-political divides of 1947. Though not always explicitly framed as such, the life work of each may be interpreted as an act of collective musical memorialisation that works to offset the sordid legacy of 1947. Beyond the books written by Ali, Kanwal and Aulia that specifically coincided with Partition’s 70th anniversary in 2017, Kanwal and Aulia have continued to write and publish more books in the six years since, especially in the 75th anniversary year in 2022, while Khurshid Qureshi Aulia has organised several musical events in the British capital over the last 40 years.

As a PhD student investigating social histories of music in colonial Punjab in London during the years 2014–2018, I was a regular visitor to the British Library on Euston Road.⁴ Here, I became acquainted with Firdous Ali, who was in constant attendance at the Asian and African Studies Room, researching some aspect of South Asian cultural history or the other. I was introduced to Kanwal and the Aulias by Ali: indeed, Firdous sa’ab went the extra mile to assist my research journey into Punjab’s musical pasts; an experience shared by several other researchers of South Asia, who often encountered his encouraging presence at the British Library. That it was a Kashmiri individual, hailing from a region of protracted military conflict due to Indo-Pak belligerence, who put me in contact with South Asian scholars from across the India-Pakistan border, is in itself remarkable, revealing the power of music to bring people together.

In what follows, I shall foreground the creation of a unique diasporic space of cultural exchange in London, that helped South Asian connoisseurs of rāgadārī music subvert the Partition-induced borders of 1947.⁵ In this regard, the paper offers a critique of the fixation on national identities and religious music that defines the relationship to classical music for some other sections of South Asian diasporas.⁶ Instead, the concerns of this paper are closer to Jasmine Hornabrook’s emphasis on ‘transnational connectivity and synchrony with other diasporic localities,’ delineated in her study of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in London (Hornabrook 2006, 310).

In some ways, the focus of this paper is also on what Pnina Werbner has termed, in the context of diasporic popular and filmic cultures, ‘a thriving transnational popular commercial cultural sphere imported from South Asia in which Muslim, Hindu and Sikh artists, actors, musicians, and producers are all equally prominent’ (Werbner 2004, 897, emphasis added). For the Punjabi, Dogri, and Kashmiri figures at the heart of the South Asian desi diaspora featured in this article, Helen Kim’s articulation of ‘diasporic desiness’ in the context of a youthful British Asian music scene is particularly apt. For Kim, ‘desiness’ is ‘the lived form of diaspora … where a focus on one’s “roots” can be a way of establishing and negotiating new “routes” and spaces’ (Kim 2012, 560). And yet, ‘diasporic desiness’ also works ‘to unlatch diaspora from the confines of ethnicity … and offers a window into how people negotiate belonging that exists both above and below the national.’⁷ In the context of the cross-border friendships and relationships discussed here, I will demonstrate how the world of ragadari music enables some South Asians in London to articulate a sense of belonging that goes beyond the confines of the national.

The paper then seeks out the ways in which the four friends discussed here consistently subvert the boundaries of the ‘national.’ Through a discussion of their life-stories and narratives around producing a unique ragadari musical public across national borders, I reveal the role played by these narratives in shaping the present of the friends, but also, the ways in which particular memories are mobilised by three of the friends, and with what impact.

This article is divided into two major parts, each made of four major sections exploring a unique, coherent concept. Part I considers memory, belonging and commemoration. Section I focuses on homemaking and belonging and considers music’s unique role in what Anindya Raychaudhuri has called the radical politics of diasporic homemaking, in carving out such spaces of belonging and home for the four figures at the heart of this article. I explore these connections by delving into the importance of life-narratives, memory and nostalgia in shaping belonging for these four friends through an engagement with rāgadārī music publics in London. In Section II, I focus on the only woman featured in the article, Khurshid Qureshi Aulia, the gendered politics of commemoration and legacy-creation in rāgadārī music publics in London, and its wider implications for South Asian music.

Part II focuses on Partition, gift-giving, and custodianship. Section III traces Partition’s impress on the lives of three out of these four figures to reveal the ways in which that experience of disruption and violence early in their lives framed their cosmopolitan choices as South Asians immigrants settled in Britain later on. Section IV emphasises the importance of the anecdote (following Naresh Kumar) and the genealogy in diasporic mappings of rāgadārī music, for an altered understanding of Jim Syke’s notion of the ‘musical gift.’ The ideas of gifting are then connected to those around custodianship and generosity, particularly considering the extensive anthropological literature surrounding the concept, and I conclude this section by offering a theory for postcolonial custodianship in the diaspora, testing its relevance for the subcontinent more widely. The article then concludes by rejecting any easy notion of ‘Punjabiyat’ in understanding these music-based friendships in the British Asian diaspora.

Part I: memory, belonging, commemoration

I. Music, belonging and life narratives in the diaspora

For two of the four people featured here, music – in its diverse avatars as musical history, genealogy, and performance – emerges as a central motivator that shapes belonging and homemaking in a diasporic location. In other words, in their life stories, music figures as a tool to frame the narratives and trajectories of these patrons and scholars of rāgadārī music, and especially in its role to help assuage the pain of displacement and settling in a foreign land.

Balbir Singh Kanwal: from east Punjab to Essex

Born in 1934 in village Jaura of the district Hoshiarpur in east Punjab, Kanwal was educated at Government College, Lahore which had moved to Hoshiarpur after Partition. He is renowned in the Punjabi diaspora in the U.K. as well as Punjabis in India and Pakistan, as the author of books on Punjabi cultural history: especially on wrestling and music. This interest stemmed from his childhood spent in 1930s east Punjab, a time when the elders in his village had two major passions: attending wrestling matches and listening to qawwali and classical musicians. Kanwal also narrated the fascination and reverence for the gramophone records his father had: the ritual of using a new/clean needle every time, to ensure better sound quality, and him often receiving a thrashing for not doing this properly.

Foremost among his musical memories of pre-1947 Punjab were the shared spaces of wrestling and musical performance (both spaces often referred to as ‘akhara,’ the term for a wrestling pit). He narrated how his father took him the dargah of sufi saint Diwan Shah in Dasuya, a veritable shrine for music, one where Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’'s forebears often used to pray for children, and which is today managed by the prominent Sikh Virk family. This was a dargah located near Garna Sahib gurudwara. Here the person who was singing was Ustad Tawwakal Hussain Khan of Talwandi gharana, and who also trained Sham Chaurasi duo, Salamat Nazakat Ali: Tawwakal Khan sang, ‘Hardam tendi ghulam pe miyan tuko main jaanu kya.’ Babu Ram Dasuya, a harmonium player, who regularly performed at the Harballabh festival of Jalandhar, was accompanying Tawakkal Khan, and apparently, he couldn't stop crying every time the vocalist sang a new verse.⁸

This emotional resonance and mysterious quality of the music propelled Kanwal’s fascination for music and inaugurated his research journeys into the field. Given his postgraduate MA degree in English, Kanwal found it easy to obtain a visa to work and live in the U.K., and he first came to Britain in 1964. The early years of settling in the U.K. were marked by hardship and suffering. After starting a job at the Post Office in Barking, east London, Kanwal found it hard to enjoy the mundane work of ‘sorting’ letters, given his passion for reading and writing.

I joined the Post Office since I was fond (‘shauq’) of writing and reading, the Manager said I had nice handwriting. But the job of sorting was boring; so I left it. However, in those days, we people did not get jobs. My reference was ruined, I had to run from pillar to post and also do labour. but then I reluctantly went back into post office.

After a few years, I was lucky to discover Ustad Karam Singh Chakravarti (a big musician and scholar of Sanskrit) who lived nearby some 10–15 minutes away on Khartoum Road. Then, slowly, and gradually, with God’s grace, I began to feel at home (‘dil lagne shuru ho gaya').

Kanwal’s account of the hardships he faced during his early years in Britain illustrates what Aminah Mohammad-Arif and Christine Moliner term the inherently ‘disruptive experience’ of migration, which generates a deep ‘sense of insecurity’ (Mohammad-Arif and Moliner 2007, 2). While recounting the story of his life in the U.K., Kanwal notes how his life took a turn for the better after he met his musical guru, Ustad Karam Singh Chakravarti, a musician trained in the Patiala gharana tradition, and a serious scholar of Sanskrit. Kanwal’s interests were more aligned with recording oral histories of music, and to a lesser degree with learning music as a performer of music (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. (L) Balbir Kanwal with two of his articles in Urdu and English, at his home in Ilford, Essex, 5 August 2017. (R) The Lifetime Achievement Award conferred upon Kanwal by the Harballabh festival organisers, 2016.

Figure 2. Balbir Kanwal with some of his books on wrestling and music photographed at his home on 10 August 2021.

As a result of the association with Chakravarti, and especially due to his trove of anecdotes on Hindustani rāga music and musicians, Kanwal stated that he began to feel at home. Thus, Kanwal could finally feel a sense of belonging, and peace [‘dil lagna’ literally translates as ‘my heart started feeling at home/at peace’] only once he had assured access to Chakravarti and his trove of anecdotes and storytelling around music and musicians, of oral histories and cultural knowledge of an old and established tradition.

Ayub Aulia: from Gujranwala to Tooting

Born in 1938 in Gujranwala and educated in Lahore in Pakistan, Ayub Aulia arrived in London in 1969, some 5 years after Kanwal, as an employee of the former PIA (Pakistan International Airways). He is Chief Editor of a magazine titled The Light Weekly, London, and a former President of the U.K.’s Faiz Cultural Foundation, where he organised poetry festivals in honour of the famous Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz for many years. Aulia, besides his friendships with London-based Indians, also has a more intimate connection to India, as he is married to Khursheed, the elder sister of tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Hussain.

Aulia narrated the roots of his early fascination with music, rooted in the devotional sounds of Sikh kirtan music which reverberated in his neighbourhood in provincial Gujranwala.

On the corner of the Krishan Nagar, on the road towards Noor Bawa – where we used to live – there was a gurudwara. And we used to listen to the songs there; every morning there used to be kirtan happening. We were children. So, this is how I developed an interest (shauq), in childhood.

Despite the general discouragement of his father and grandfather, who used to dissuade a young Aulia for listening to songs on the radio – a medium they believed was only useful for accessing the news – he managed to retain and grow his early interest in music.

As a result, in the urban milieu of late 1950s and early 1960s Lahore, where he went for further studies at the Forman Christian College, Aulia became a regular participant in the city’s emerging public and private musical gatherings. One of the most abiding musical conferences which emerged in Lahore at this time was the All-Pakistan Musical Conference, founded by Hayat Ahmed Khan – in response to the threat of legendary musician Roshanara Begum to give up music. In an interview in September 2022, he narrated the story of how, he was one of the Lahori notables and music connoisseurs responsible for persuading Roshanara Begum to not give up music, which she felt compelled to do with the drying up of appreciative listeners and music connoisseurs in Pakistan in the aftermath of Partition. ‘I wrote that letter to Roshanara ji, that “don’t give up”.’⁹ The APMC also famously hosted musicians from India, including Rasoolan Bai, Begum Akhtar and Munira Khatun. His musical background as a young adult thus lies in the thriving world of cross-border musical exchange in Lahore. It was at one such private musical setting that he first encountered Ustad Alla Rakha, the tabla maestro from Bombay, whose daughter (Khurshid Qureshi) he would go on to marry.

Aulia’s writing was positioned as a major part of his life and identity as a journalist and cultural critic in the diasporic space. His 2017 Urdu book Sangeetkaar (Musicmaker or Musician), with a Hindi translation out in 2023, adds to the cache of anecdotes about prominent Hindustani musicians, containing recollections of a shared musical heritage pre-1947, with a wealth of musical conviviality in the cultural capitals of pre-1947 India: Lahore, Delhi, Lucknow, and Calcutta (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3. Ayub Aulia with his wife Khurshid Qureshi Aulia at the release of his Urdu book Sangeetkaar at the Nehru Centre on 16 August 2017.

Figure 4. Aulia and Kanwal with Aulia’s brother-in-law and son of Ustad Alla Rakha, the percussionist and djembe player Ustad Taufiq Qureshi, at the Namdhari gurudwara in East London, on 5 August 2017.

Firdous Ali: from Srinagar to Hayes

The late Firdous Ali, a London-based independent scholar from Srinagar in Kashmir, also had an abiding interest in music. His 2017 Urdu publication, Bazaar-e-Husn Ki Shaayra (Poetesses from the Courtesans’ Quarter) includes poetry by many accomplished courtesans and female musicians of north India from the past two centuries.

In the final decade of his life, Firdous Ali became a regular visitor to the British Library. He was ever eager to help young scholars working on different aspects of South Asian culture and language, often guiding them to details of the many sources in the Library. Ali grew up in Srinagar in Kashmir and moved to Kolkata to study dentistry. Although he became a dentist, he never chose to practice, instead moving to the city of Bombay, where he attended to his twin passions in music and cinema (Williams and Kapuria 2017) (Figure 5).

Figure 5. The late Firdous Ali (L), with the author (C) and Ayub Aulia (R) photographed on 24 March 2017.

He then migrated to the U.K. in the mid-1970s, some 5–7 years after Ayub Aulia, and a decade after Kanwal. Once in the U.K., he embarked on a long and productive career in the creative industries, including producing path-breaking programmes on South Asian music and culture with Channel 4. He was also involved with community and council projects in Brent, where he put on a series of concerts in the Brent Town Hall, inviting some of the most celebrated artists of Hindustani classical music to perform there.

In the incompleteness of information around Firdous Ali’s early years, the article is itself haunted by a sense of loss around the his early years in Kashmir and the roots of his interest in music.

II. Khurshid Aulia: gender and the politics of commemoration in South Asian music publics

Khurshid Qureshi Aulia is the only woman among this quartet of ‘friends’ (given Kanwal’s wife died several years ago). All three men were united by a love for food cooked by her, foregrounding the gendered ways in which food and belonging are produced and articulated in the diaspora. While her husband and Kanwal wrote books about music and hailed from families that discouraged music as a profession, Khurshid Qureshi Aulia’s connection with rāgadārī comes directly from her family. As the eldest daughter of tabla maestro Ustad Alla Rakha, her life-story from Pathankot to London via Bombay reveals multiple layers.

More centrally, in her role as her father’s de facto London manager for his Europe tours, and later as founder of the Alla Rakha Foundation, her example illustrates how ‘through the act of recalling and documenting memories, some diasporic women have been able to resist the definition of Others about themselves and their histories’ (Hua 2005, 205). Whilst her father was alive, Qureshi Aulia managed his visits and concert performances in the U.K. After he passed away in 2000, she began organising the London chapter of musical gatherings held in honour of her late father, as described in the excerpt below:

When Abbaji died in 2000, and then in 2001, Zakir did a very big event on his barsi (death anniversary). All my brothers are playing (various instruments) in Abbaji’s name, they are doing all this, as a daughter, what am I doing? (Is the question I asked myself). Because neither can I sing, nor can I play, but I should do something for my father. So then I spoke to Zakir. And at that time, Ismail Merchant, who was a very big film director, I also spoke to him. And they said to me, we will give you full support. I said, I want to establish the Alla Rakha Foundation. My desire is that, in Abbaji’s name, here, every year, his birth anniversary be celebrated, because his death anniversary was being celebrated on a big scale by Zakir. Further, because Abbaji has always had a connection with London. And his daughter also lives in London. So, here, Abbaji has many disciples and people who hold him in high regard, so we should do something or the other for them, and for Abbaji. So, Merchant agreed, and Zakir agreed, their position was that they would do whatever was possible for them. So, in this way, in 2001 I started the Alla Rakha Foundation.¹⁰

As is evident above, Qureshi Aulia was unable to offer musical tributes to her deceased father, on account of a lack of training in music (unlike her brothers, speaking to the gendered ways in which musical training is organised in north Indian and Pakistani families). To rectify this, she began the Alla Rakha Foundation, which is still going strong. To mark her father’s centenary, she donated, or ‘gifted’ (see Section IV below) Ustad Alla Rakha’s London set of tablas to the British Museum, and they are temporarily housed at the South Asia gallery of the Manchester Museum.¹¹ This donation, and indeed the creation of the Alla Rakha Foundation itself are acts of commemoration – both as a tribute to her father’s life, but also a testament to her role backstage, so to speak. In this regard, the remembrance and retelling of the story in establishing the Alla Rakha Foundation can be seen as a methodology to ‘resist the erasure of the aesthetic legacy produced by women of colour and women in general,’ in Anh Hua’s eloquent paraphrasing of bell hooks (Hua 2005, 203–204) (Figures 6 and 7).

Figure 6. Ustad Alla Rakha’s daughter, Khurshid Qureshi Aulia, during an interview at her home in Tooting, 2 June 2022.

Figure 7. Ustad Alla Rakha’s daughter, Khurshid Qureshi Aulia (Centre) and her husband, Ayub Aulia (Right), photographed with the late Firdous Ali (Left), on 24 March 2017. A portrait of Ustad Alla Rakha hangs in the background.

Concluding part I

The repetition of stock stories and anecdotes of interacting with the greats of Hindustani music – framed within the trope of being the chosen one, the special one to whom this knowledge would be revealed – helped create a sort of moral economy of anecdotes, shared by the three men within the circle of four friends. Between these men , there was therefore an element of competition around who had first access to the jealously guarded knowledge of musicians’ life stories. By thus becoming keepers and purveyors of the stories of musical ustads and pandits of yesteryear – through their writing as well as their raconteuring – the four friends, but especially the three men among them, shaped their identity as London-based cultural custodians and listographers of South Asian rāgadārī musicians and music. In so doing, they also crafted a sense of belonging in the U.K. which helped in their construction of a diasporic ‘home.’ In contrast to the three men, musical memory functions rather differently for Khurshid Qureshi Aulia, on account of both gender, but also kinship (as the biological daughter and sister of two world renowned musicians), Instead of the trope of the chosen one to whom precious knowledge needed revealing, we find instead a conscious effort at commemorating Qureshi Aulia’s contribution to her father’s success in Europe, through the creation of the Alla Rakha Foundation. With the three remaining members of the quartet now well into their late 70s (Qureshi Aulia), early 80s (Aulia) and late 80s (Kanwal), the recalling of these musical memories, stories and anecdotes featured here enforces nostalgia for a time of the past, but also a sense of urgency in disseminating their knowledge to members of the next generation, including this author. In particular, what helps the three living respondents create ‘home’ in the present are stories of the idyllic, undisrupted home from pre-Partition times, stories to which we now turn.

Part II: partition, gift-giving & custodianship

III. Partition’s impress: two ways

At a musical mehfil (soiree) in early 1947 in Delhi, the famous sārangī player Ustad Bundu Khan played Raga Deepak, a Raga believed to hold the power to produce fire. He did so despite repeated objections from his cousin, Ustad Chand Khan, the prominent Delhi gharānā vocalist. When the fire of mass violence spread across the land later that year, Chand Khan teased his cousin for being entirely responsible for the violence, exclaiming, ‘I did tell you, didn’t I, not to play this sinister (‘manhoos’) Raga?’

What makes this story singularly poignant is Bundu Khan’s legendary innocence and musical brilliance, remarked upon by all who knew him (Dhar 2005, 49–57).¹² The story recalls another tale of Deepak’s destructive impact: of Saraswati, daughter of legendary musician Miyan Tansen, countering the Raga’s fiery influence with the cathartic showers of Raga Megh, at Emperor Akbar’s sixteenth century court. This story was narrated to me by Ayub Aulia in 2017, Partition’s 70th anniversary, a key example of the musical gift I discuss later.

More importantly, the story is a unique attempt at forcing a narrative form onto a chaotic and cataclysmic event whose fallout is felt till today. In the several versions of the story that have circulated among music aficionados of rāgadārī music, the ‘raga that burned down Delhi’ encapsulates the attempts of some musicians and music-writers to make sense of the madness that gripped north India and Pakistan in 1947.¹³ It reveals an alternative narrative to place the frenzy, insanity and ‘fire’ of the 1947 Partition, understanding it in musical terms, beyond the ‘rational’ explanations of high politics. Yet, as an inherently ephemeral artform, music is part of what Ananya Jahanara Kabir suggests is a non-narrative mode of remembering Partition (Kabir 2009, 489). Non-linear and fluid, the ephemeral moment of performance becomes an important site for connection and bonding, and even to a certain extent, for healing from the wounds of Partition.

Kavita Puri’s book offers a detailed study of the memories of Partition among the diaspora (Puri 2019). However, there is little to no research on memories of Partition of musicians, their families, or of music patrons and aficionados in the diaspora. Below, I discuss two ways in which Partition affected the life narratives and outlooks of three of the four respondents: both direct and indirect. The examples below illustrate the way in which narratives were often forced onto the chaotic and inexplicable events of Partition, often framed by nostalgic visions of the remembered village and the pre-1947 home, as discussed in the writings of Dipesh Chakrabarty (1996) and Ashis Nandy (1999).

Of all the figures featured in this article, Khurshid Qureshi Alia, eldest child of Ustad Alla Rakha Qureshi and wife to Ayub Aulia, is the only one directly affected by Partition. Born in 1947, she was a toddler when the Partition riots spread in August of that year to Bombay – where her father was then based, working as a music director in the film industry. What follows are excerpts from an interview conducted on 2 June 2022:

Khurshid Qureshi Aulia (KQA):

In ‘47, I was born in May, and of course, August was when we got independence. Which means, you can take me to be a couple of months old (in August). And at that time, my mother’s brother (Mamu), Tufail was his name. So, at that time I was  … only 1–2 months old , and he had come to take Ammaji (mother) to Pakistan.

Author (A):

And where was your Abbaji (father) then?

KQA:

Abbaji had work (in Bambaiy), so he told him (Tufail), because he was also a music director, of course, he was the one who had helped start Bombay Radio, so he was quite busy. So he said, ‘Tufail, you please take your sister and my children away, I will follow you from behind.’ So this was the plan.

While her parents were based in Bombay in the 1940s, they hailed from the Dogri speaking regions in and around Jammu, including Ratangarh. As the interview continued, I enquired about her family in Jammu, and in response, Khurshid aa’pa (elder sister, an epithet that many young people employ, when addressing her) described the crises and violence faced by her family that led them to run to Pakistan for safety.

My Dadi, Dada (paternal grandparents) and my other Chachas (father’s younger brothers), they had all reached Sialkot (from Jammu) from the perspective of safety. They had to run. And for two days, some Brahmin, who was a household neighbour, neighbour to my Dada-Dadi, kept them hidden for almost three nights in his house. And then, he said to my Dada Dadi, that once this normalises, once this cools down (you can return), because right now there is a lot of bloodshed and butchery, and they will probably also kill you … So, in the middle of the night, in bullock carts, my Dada-Dadi, my Chachas … went to that part of Pakistan in order to be saved … So in this way, this division occurred in our family.¹⁴

The emphasis on the division that occurred in her family is repeated at multiple times in her story, including in the passage below. Here, she describes the way in which her mother had to return back, children in tow, to Bombay from Delhi, where they discovered that it was impossible to travel into Amritsar, and thence further into Sialkot on the Pakistani side of the border, on account of the mass killings aboard trains in Punjab:

And so my Mamu was sent to us, they said to him ‘Go to Bambaiy and bring them back.’ Because, in Bombay, my father or mother had absolutely no clue as to where the rest of the family had gone … The post was also not being delivered. So nobody knew a thing, my father did not know a thing, then my Mamu arrived and told them that somehow or the other, we reached the vicinity of Sialkot safely. So in this way, this division occurred in our family.

So then he came to take (my mother). My father said to my mother ‘you take these children and go’, there were only two of us (children) at the time. And then … that railcar, which Ammaji had to get on, basically they had to reach until Amritsar. So first they reached Dilli, then they found out that the trains that are coming back from Amritsar had no survivors in them. No one was saved in them. All of them had been murdered. (Pause). Then my Maamu brought my mother back home. Then, he brought her back to Bombay.¹⁵

In some ways then, Ustad Alla Rakha’s success as a music director and composer for Bombay’s radio station and the film industry based out of a city somewhat less frenzied than the violence engulfing the Punjab, served to protect his family and establish him as an ‘Indian’ as opposed to a Pakistani musician. The division of Qureshi Aulia’s family across borders captures the predicament of a large section of Indian Muslims whose families were similarly displaced in 1947.¹⁶

Kanwal was not from a family displaced during 1947, given that he was a Sikh who hailed from east Punjab. However, as a 13-year-old teenager, he was a witness to the Partition riots, and memories of the violence remain clearly etched in his mind, and as the sentences below reveal, continue to haunt him:

Can there be any more harrowing scene than when I saw a small innocent child in the heap of dead bodies, sucking milk from her dead mother’s breasts? Can such a horrible scene be ever forgotten?¹⁷

At a more direct level, for Kanwal, the memory of Partition existed in the post-1947 context of a visit to Pakistan in the 1960s. Kanwal had the opportunity to visit Karachi for research on his book on Gama Pehelwan, and also for his research into music, in September 1960. He recounts his visits to Pakistan with great fondness, especially since he took part in the World Panjabi Conferences about 7 times, where he received a lot of respect, and was honoured with shields, prizes, and awards. However, he also notes a fraught moment during the 1960 visit to Karachi, when he was nearly fatally attacked:

The most horrible thing which happened was that one evening when we were roaming about on the Bunder Road, one of the most famous roads of the city, from the other side of the road a person with a chhura (chopper) in his hand dashed towards us in order to kill me. He was mad with rage. On seeing that, a sweetshop keeper (halwai) intervened … The halwai fell upon my feet, asking for my forgiveness, telling: ‘Sardarji, I am so sorry for this behaviour. You don’t have to mind it, keeping in mind that when in India during Partition, all his family members were murdered by a gang of Sikhs and he saved his life by hiding somewhere. That hatred, which still lurks in his brain, makes him run after the turbaned men, to take revenge. Come on, you are our honourable guest: have some lassi or any other cold drink with us!’¹⁸

This anecdote reveals, similar to the one narrated by Qureshi Aulia, a description of both the perpetrators of violence (in and after 1947), and also of those who stood as protectors of minority communities against majoritarian violence. This reflects the popular narrative of protection by members of other faiths, and connects well with the emphasis on shared cultural heritage that abound in the musical anecdotes displayed in this article .

For Kanwal, the main musical victims of the 1947 Partition were the rabābīs, the community of instrumentalists, traditionally Muslim, tracing their lineage back to Bhai Mardana, Guru Nanak’s Muslim companion and musical accompanist of Guru Nanak in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In response to the question ‘according to you, how has the Partition of 1947 impacted the music of Punjab?’ he responded:

The Rababis were the worst sufferers. During migration, some were murdered on their way, some had a narrow escape … Those who were able to cross the border were not all happy, many of them were unable to recover from the trauma the Partition had caused. Some of them like Baba Malang Khan, even Bhai Chand (1905–1949) one of the greater Rababis of the 20th century, died of depression and hunger within one year. There are many such sad tales.¹⁹

More significantly, Kanwal went on to reflect on the real damage caused by the division, which was that the shared tradition of Ganga-Jamuni culture or ‘tehzeeb’ ‘was shaken suddenly to its very foundations’:

I would call it the greatest tragedy (that) happened on Earth. Nobody knows how many human beings were uprooted from both sides; atrocities of various types which were never heard before, women raped, innocent children slaughtered and so on. Nobody can judge the economic loss we all suffered.²⁰

According to him, by far the greatest cultural loss for Indian Punjabis, however, was the migration of the community of mirasis (Punjab’s hereditary caste of musician-bards-genealogists) to Pakistan, a migration that also led to the retreat of humour and tolerance in east Punjab:

To me the greatest impact, which the historians ignore, is that we as a nation have lost all our sense of tolerance, as with the migration of Mirasis to that side of the border, we lost our sense of humour which resulted in our losing our spirit of tolerance. Now we run to the courts over small things, cut each other’s throats over petty squabbles.²¹

Beyond the immediacy of the violence, Kanwal also remarked upon the deep sense of loss and separation his elders experienced with the migration of Muslim musicians to Pakistan, visible in the following answer to the question ‘how did your ancestors specifically respond to the violence of 1947?’

I had two grandfathers: the elder one was married in Hariana [a district of east Punjab, distinct from the present-day state of Haryana], where the celebrated Hariana gharana originated from, while the other one was married in a village near Sham Chaurasi. One was a votary of Hariana and the other thought that the exponents of Sham Chaurasi are more melodious. In my childhood I observed that, very often, they debated upon this subject, though at that time, I was quite alien about such things. When all the exponents migrated to Pakistan, my ancestors sometimes missed them so much.

Above, Kanwal lists several important features of a pre-1947 Punjabi cultural matrix for us. First, both his grandfathers’ affinity to a particular musical gharana accruing from their being married into a family from the city of the gharana – revealing a sense of ownership and loyalty toward their respective wives, the wives’ natal village and musical lineage. Second, the friendly but competitive debate around which is the better gharana, witnessed by the young child Kanwal. And finally, in the aftermath of the 1947 exodus, a sense of irreparable loss of their favourite musicians to Pakistan.

This sense of loss is echoed in the memories of pre-1947 west Punjab shared by Ayub Aulia as well. While reminiscing about his childhood he recalled the story of a Sikh gentleman named Sardar Santokh Singh, who was not simply his grandfather’s business partner, but also a de facto father/uncle to Aulia’s father, as evident in the following narrative:

I have seen him and remember him well, he used to love me a lot. So, when my father was to be married, he accompanied our family, as his father, saying I am his ‘wali’ (father), and ‘I will give him away.’ So, this is the kind of love – he used to regularly come to our homes, he used to call my mother his ‘bahu’ (daughter-in-law). He used to eat and drink with us, we used to eat and drink at his home. In other words, this is the kind of environment in Punjab, in our city (Gujranwala) those days. It was a very good time.

Speaking of the reasons behind Partition, and contemplating possible ways to have avoided the violence of 1947, Aulia held the high men of South Asian politics – Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, and Patel responsible:

Everybody of those actors were very selfish … if they were less selfish, this (Partition) would never have taken place … And a really good formula was offered by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan – he was a very learned man, a sagacious man! He said that if before Partition, every home had a child or two that sang or played music, Partition would never have happened. This is such a big thing to say, it is a very big thing! The only solution was if you entered ‘saqaafat’ (culture), your style of arts, then your love (for the arts, and thereby humanity), would increase. It was his solution – Partition would never have been possible!

Above, Aulia invokes the common story attributed to Ustad Bade Ghulam Khan, twentieth century Punjab’s most prolific rāgadārī vocalist, who was a citizen of both Pakistan and India for a decade each after 1947 and suffered both personally and professionally as a result of the division. Similar to Kanwal’s comments about the Ganga-Jamni tehzeeb, Aulia too went on to comment on the division of the arts themselves:

Partition of the arts also took place. Of the arts, of music; people became displaced and homeless. How many would have been killed on the way, you never know. How many Tansens died along the way, how many Mantos died in the midst, you never know. If 2 million people died, then there must be so many intellectuals among them too!²²

The above examples encapsulate well Ananya Kabir’s argument about the diasporic ‘Punjabi postmemory taking shape in Britain, out of the very debris of the Partition of 1947’ and the ‘redemptive and commemorative potential’ in the idea of ‘musical recall’ amongst the Punjabi diaspora’ (Kabir 2004, 174). For Qureshi Aulia, Kanwal, and Aulia then, 1947 and the borders that subsequently came up created loss and division at a personal/familial, and at a broader cultural level, respectively. Perhaps it is in acknowledgment of what was lost in 1947 that ideas of generosity, collaboration, friendship, and sharing took such a firm hold in the lives of the Ilford-Tooting-Hayes quartet discussed here. It is to these ideas that we now turn.

IV Anecdotes and genealogies as ‘musical gift’

All figures featured in this article are united by a love of, and fondness for, the anecdote, storytelling and especially stories handed down to them by the great Ustads and Pandits of music, and a fascination with collecting gharana genealogies and family trees of musicians. I wish to frame the exchange of these anecdotes as acts of generosity, and the gifting of knowledge to each other and also to younger generations and audiences.²³ For the former, this entailed sharing with each other key information on a range of musicians of Punjab and elsewhere in north India and Pakistan. For the latter, this entails the generosity with which all four figures treat younger generations of music lovers and researchers (this author included), freely sharing their knowledge gleaned from years of independent enquiry. Their trademark generosity with anecdotes, lists of different categories of musicians (a feature that is common to the writing style of all three men), or in their handing down of musicians’ gharana genealogies are in direct contrast to the jealously- guarded secrecy that defines the moral economy of contemporary academia.

While this paper has already featured a number of anecdotes, including the Raga Deepak one ‘gifted’ to me by Ayub Aulia in 2017, I wish to focus on another important anecdote, which was bestowed by Kanwal as part of my research on this paper. It features all four figures discussed here. Apparently, during the ‘Raag Rang: A Festival of Indian Music’ concert series held at Brent Town Hall in London, Firdous Ali, as the videographer was often tailing Us. Alla Rakha, recording documentary style.²⁴ In response to the massive video camera perched on Ali’s shoulder, Us. Alla Rakha, who was renowned for his legendary humour, is said to have remarked: ‘This is Kim’s gun, it might break your shoulder!’ (‘Yeh bhangion waali top hai. Kandha na tor de!').

This anecdote is particularly important on two counts: first, on referencing an important landmark (the eighteenth-century Zamzama gun, one of the largest ever made on the subcontinent) from the city of Lahore, cultural capital of pre-1947 Punjab, one that united and fascinated all present.²⁵ Second, it resonated in its referencing of the power of audio-visual media, which in tandem with live performances, were key in cementing the status of Us. Alla Rakha (and his collaborator Pt. Ravi Shankar) on the world stage.

Apart from the anecdote, as another example of this musical generosity, I wish to present an example of a more tangible and material gift. This is a handwritten family tree of the family of Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, that Firdous sa’ab especially inscribed for this author. He did this of his own accord, not in response to a specific request, believing this genealogy would be useful for the general direction of my research into pre-1947 Punjab’s musical cultures. In other words, it is an example of an intergenerational ‘gift’ from an older scholar to a younger one (Figure 8).²⁶

Figure 8. Firdous Ali’s family tree of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, handwritten for and gifted to the author, 2017.

In many ways, then, such generosity with the gifting of genealogies and anecdotes is a variation of what Jim Sykes has termed ‘the musical gift.’ For Sykes, this is a term utilised in the context of the ‘sonic generosity’ practised by rival ethnic groups in contemporary Sri Lanka as a ‘technology of care’ to protect other humans with sound (2018, 15–16).²⁷ While this usage of the ‘gift’ aligns somewhat with Syke’s concept of the musical gift on the subject of giving and exchange between different communities, it is distinct from his discussion of the protective power of musical giving in the context of Sinhala-Tamil relations.

Any discussion on ‘the musical gift’ in the context of Kanwal cannot omit dwelling on his friendship with the Pakistani Punjabi duo of Ustad Salamat Ali-Nazakat Ali, who hailed, like Kanwal, from Hoshiarpur, and represented the Sham Chaurasi gharana with origins in east Punjab. When they visited London, they would stay at Kanwal’s home, and performed at many festivals co-organised by Kanwal. Kanwal was particularly close to the senior member of the duo, Ustad Salamat Ali, apart from shared origins in Hoshiarpur, they were also united by age: both were born in 1934. The most famous artefact exchanged as a ‘gift’ in this friendship was the creation of a brand new, Raga Kanwal Bhairon, composed by Ustad Salamat Ali in honour of Kanwal, and performed for the first time in Geneva.²⁸ Such friendships, including acts of musical gifting and exchange between Pakistani musicians Us Salamat Ali and Indian-origin British writers like Kanwal could only be possible in a diasporic context, far removed from the hard borders on the subcontinent.

Postcolonial custodianship in London’s cross-border diasporic musical public

The above discussion on how ‘musical gifting’ was central to the shaping of diasporic rāgadārī music publics feeds well into ideas of custodianship towards the shared culture of pre-Partition times, often located in Punjab, and especially for the culture of the Other community. All four figures possess a shared sense of pride and identity as music connoisseurs and rāgadārī music lovers. This pride was especially grounded in the difficulties associated with organising music festivals featuring both Indian and Pakistani musicians on the subcontinent. As Kanwal reflected:

Interaction between the artists of both countries can serve as a big bridge for better understanding. The Harivallabh MahaSabha Jalandhar, and Calcutta people have been inviting some artists from Pakistan. But that is not sufficient. From 1993, International Bhai Mardana Yaadgari Keertan Darbar Society Ferozepur have been inviting Rababis. From that end, All-Pakistan Music Conference people invited Rasoolan Bai and Begum Akhtar in their second conference.²⁹

To encourage more such ‘cultural exchanges’ Kanwal organised several music festivals in conjunction with the Aulias and Ali. Kanwal organised performances by Salamat-Nazakat Ali and other Pakistani musicians at programmes in Ilford. In fact, Kanwal’s location in the diaspora has given Kanwal continued access to, and friendships with, a range of Pakistani musicians and scholars across generations. Apart from Us. Salamat Ali-Nazakat Ali, Kanwal also fondly recalls his friendship with the Pakistani music critic, and a man many years the senior of Kanwal, Mr MA Sheikh.

The friendship between Firdous Ali and the Aulias is also revealing of several practices of ‘gifting.’ The indefatigability and large-heartedness of Firdous Ali is best revealed in a story narrated by Qureshi Aulia , who considered herself as a sister to Ali. She recounts how he helped her family locate missing recordings of rare songs recorded by her father. Apparently, the only copy of Punjabi film Madari (1950), including songs composed by Alla Rakha that were immensely popular, had perished in a fire at the film archives in Bombay (now Mumbai). Ultimately, it was Firdous Ali who located rare recordings of the songs in Southall and ‘gifted’ them to Khurshid, who passed them on to her father in Bombay. Ustad Alla Rakha’s joy knew no bounds.

To further situate these ‘gifting’ practices in the desi and rāgadārī musical publics in Britain, I would like to bring perspectives on ‘custodianship’ from the research on postcolonial literatures done by Filippo Menozzi. In Menozzi’s understanding, custodianship is defined as ‘a responsibility for the other, constituting acts of cultural and historical inheritance.’ Menozzi notes that, ‘to transmit something without seizing it: this might be the task of custodianship’ (2014, 3). This perspective also holds for contemporary practices, e.g. the safekeeping of shrines, mosques, or gurudwaras that continues on the subcontinent. Equally, it holds for the cross-border recognition of scholarship around cultural memory, and around cross-border musical dialogue among north Indian and Pakistani origin South Asians in post-war Britain.

This is not to say that there is a complete lack of disagreement or discord among the friends, particularly among the men in the quartet. The most common point of disagreement or resentment is around the who first gained access to a prized anecdote or story, or, in keeping with our discussion of ‘gifting’ and ‘custodianship,’ who was first ‘gifted’ an anecdote by a particular musical Ustad, or discovered it in a rare book containing such anecdotes. Such disagreements are a common note to friendships in general and Indo-Pak friendships in particular.

Conclusion

The non-narrative and non-linearity of building, nurturing, and facilitating a rāgadārī musical public in Britain is evident in the ways in which all the three surviving figures discussed here traverse many identities with equal ease and commitment. Yet, there is a way in which Punjabiyat is the hidden note to some of these friendships: in particular that between Kanwal and Aulia. As Kanwal put it:

Yes, these labels (Indian versus Pakistani) are useless. My primary identity is Panjabi … as music unites, not divided.³⁰

Despite such claims, however, both Kanwal and Aulia do not primarily identify as pure secularists. Their identity as cosmopolitan first-generation British Punjabis is still grounded in their Sikh and Muslim roots, which they are intimately connected to in everyday practice. For them, these roots are not neatly grafted onto their later national ascription as either Indian or Pakistani, indeed, South Asian 'Punjabi' seems to be their primary identity in Britain

Apart from the greater Punjabiyat story on Partition’s impact on music that forms the dominant note of this article,³¹ there is a deeper, underlying story of non-Punjabis as interlocutors, typified by the Kashmiri gentleman Firdous Ali in forming a bridge between Kanwal and Aulia. Indeed, the news about Firdous Ali’s somewhat untimely death was relayed to this author by none other than the Aulias, whilst Kanwal accompanied me to his burial in 2017. Again, the role essayed by Ustad Alla Rakha, a Dogri speaker from Pathankot in popularising the Punjab gharana of tabla, given his training in Lahore, and in composing the music to several Punjabi films in the 1940s–1950s reveals the limits of Punjabiyat. In this, Ali and the family of Ustad Alla Rakha are not exceptional; they comprise a longer historical trend of prominent cultural producers from linguistic regions neighbouring Punjab influencing, popularising, and often even embracing a Punjabi cultural identity.³²

The four main figures discussed here were all born in South Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. As a result, their personal life stories on the subcontinent were intimately connected with the experience and violence of Partition. During their lifetimes, they not only crossed over from South Asia to Britain, but were also able to traverse the rigid borders of 1947 within the subcontinent itself, crisscrossing between the rival nation-states of India and Pakistan. This ease of mobility across the Indo–Pak border was in part due to the relatively greater porosity of the border especially during the 1960s and 1970s, in marked contrast to the hardened borders of the present. In the case of the Aulias, this was also evident in the form of a cross-border marriage, fixed for his daughter by Ustad Alla Rakha, and brokered in the diaspora, to a certain degree, by Kanwal.

But apart from these external factors, the drive and desire to cross the border and visit the ‘Other’ country came from a need to explore and enjoy the cultural riches each city on either side had to offer. In other words, the need for cultural exchange, and even for custodianship of the cultural riches of the ‘Other’ nation. I have argued that such practices of custodianship were equally framed by a reciprocity best theorised by Jim Sykes (albeit in the very different context of ethnic rivalry in Sri Lanka) as the ‘musical gift.’

For all three men, the interest in writing and researching about music was a means of dealing with the disruption of immigration and the subsequent difficulty in securing modes of employment that were creatively and intellectually fulfilling. For Khurshid Aulia Qureshi, the push towards leadership in the establishment of the Alla Rakha Foundation for nurturing classical music performances came from a need to commemorate her father in the face of the grief around his death, and a need to exercise her own agency as a daughter within a gendered musical universe. For all four individuals, the compelling need to research music, and/or preserve its cultural legacies among the diaspora in Britain is a good example of what Mohammad-Arif and Moliner have termed the ‘adaptation strategies’ of immigrants, through which they ‘redefine their self-perceptions and their collective identities’ (Mohammad-Arif and Moliner 2007, 2).

By writing, and raconteuring, about a shared musical legacy grounded in pre-Partition Punjab and north India, the friends’ quartet has found a means to feel at home in the alien context of the U.K. Nostalgic memories of home in the ‘shared space’ aesthetic of pre-1947 Punjab served to facilitate a radical politics of 'homemaking' in the diasporic present. In creating this new attachment to home on a distant shore, the memories shared by Kanwal, the Aulias and Ali constitute a version of nostalgia that ‘is often cross-border, and pan-state in nature, and is therefore very different from patriotism or nationalism’ (Raychaudhuri 2018, 12, 14).

Though not stated overtly, the writings of all three men, and the musical efforts of Qureshi Aulia capture an instance of collective musical memorialisation that works to offset the sordid legacy of 1947 well into Partition’s 76th year. As music festival organisers, and passionate writers and archivists of music, the Ilford-Tooting-Hayes quartet together symbolise a critical diasporic musical public that framed the discourse around rāgadārī music in the U.K.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewer for their comments, and also to Naresh Kumar and the co-editors of this volume, especially Jasmine Hornabrook, for their feedback on the essay. I thank the Leverhulme Trust and colleagues at the Department of History, University of Sheffield, especially Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, who generously supported the research that led to this article. I am also grateful to B.S Kanwal, Khurshid Qureshi Aulia, and Ayub Aulia for sharing so much about their musical life in the U.K. and in South Asia. This article is dedicated to the memory of the late Firdous Ali.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust ECF 2019–2022 ‘Subverting Borders: Musicians, Nationalism and Memory in Punjab,’ Ref ID 86190.

Notes

1 Elsewhere, I have discussed the shifting nature of memories around music and Partition in the Punjab region of the subcontinent. See Kapuria (2018).

2 I use the term music publics drawing on Adrian McNeil’s discussion of the public sphere of Hindustani music in the context of late- nineteenth-century Calcutta. McNeil defines this as a ‘sort of inclusive oppositional space set apart from the exclusive sphere of feudal privilege and power that Hindustani music had inhabited until that time’. See McNeil (2018).

3 I use the Hindustani/Urdu term ‘rāgadārī’ or ‘rāga-based’ here consciously, to avoid the labels Indian (Hindustani) or Pakistani classical music, given that this is a shared/singular tradition. On the larger literature around the problematic of using the term ‘classical’ with regard to rāga-based music in South Asia, and in particular the complicated legacy of colonialism in the creation of the label, see Allen (1998). For a more recent discussion of the issue, see Kalra (2014b).

4 This PhD research has been recently published in monograph form. See Radha Kapuria, Music in Colonial Punjab: Courtesans, Bards, and Connoisseurs, 1800-1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2023a).

5 For a longer and broader history of cultural transgressions of this border, see Purewal (2003).

6 This is particularly true of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora in the United States, as demonstrated in Subramanian (2008).

7 Kim (2012, 560). This sense of bypassing the national, is also evident in discussions on Punjabi diasporic shrines and pilgrimage as mapped out in Kalra, Ibad, and Purewal (2013).

8 Narrated to the author at an interview dated 5 August 2021.

9 Interview dated 15 September 2022.

10 Interview dated 2 June 2022.

11 https://www.britishmuseum.org/sites/default/files/2022-08/indian_tabla_display_british_museum.pdf, See also https://www.mouseiologia-museology.gr/l/legendary-indian-instrument-to-go-on-display-for-the-first-time-anywhere-at-british-museum/ and https://exploring-london.com/2022/08/25/this-week-in-london-celebrations-as-museum-of-london-marks-final-100-days-at-london-wall-ustad-alla-rakhas-tabla-at-british-museum-and-lucian-freud-in-his-grandfathers-home/ and https://www.thefeaturist.net/art/a-museum-like-no-other.

12 Partition affected this musical family, as it did several others: while Chand Khan remained in Delhi, Bundu Khan eventually migrated to Pakistan to join his sons; and died in Karachi in 1955.

13 For iterations of this story in the context of Urdu literature, see Williams (2021).

14 Interview conducted at Tooting on 2 June 2022. Emphasis added.

15 Interview conducted at Tooting on 2 June 2022. Emphasis added. It is possible that this is a reference to the horrific Amritsar train massacres of 22 September 1947. See Khosla (1989, 286) and also Kaur (2011).

16 On the unique predicament of Indian Muslims during much of the twentieth century, see Shani (2010).

17 Questionnaire (written) interview with Balbir Kanwal dated 20 August 2020.

18 Questionnaire (written) interview with Balbir Kanwal dated 20 August 2020.

19 Questionnaire (written) interview with Balbir Kanwal dated 20 August 2020.

20 Questionnaire (written) interview with Balbir Kanwal dated 20 August 2020.

21 Questionnaire (written) interview with Balbir Kanwal dated 20 August 2020.

22 Interview dated 14 November 2021.

23 For a more detailed exposition of the centrality of the anecdote as an unconventional archive in music history, see Kumar (2023).

24 Some of these recordings are housed in the British Library under the Firdous Ali collection. See ‘Tabla battle: Ustad Alla Rakha & Zakir Hussain’, Brent Town Hall, Brent, London, 1986-07-26, Firdous Ali Collection, British Library (ISRC: CKEY8673574).

25 Us. Alla Rakha had trained in Lahore with his teacher Miyan Qadir Bakhsh Pakhawaji in the 1930s. His son-in-law, Ayub Aulia, was educated at Lahore, while both Kanwal and Ali had often visited the city for research.

26 On gifting, see Mauss ([1950] 1966).

27 On the ‘gifting’ of performance in early nineteenth century Punjab see Kapuria (2020).

28 YouTube recording of Ustad Salamat Ali performing Raga Kanwal Bhairon is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIcFxPqN-n4&t=5s. A more recent rendition by Ustad Salamat Ali’s son Ustad Shafqat Ali Khan is available to view at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIcFxPqN-n4&t=5s.

29 Questionnaire (written) interview with Balbir Kanwal dated 20 August 2020.

30 Interview with BS Kanwal dated 5 August 2021.

31 For an in-depth analysis of diasporic Punjabiyat in the context of the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, see Kalra (2014a, 181, 183, 184, 188).

32 I have discussed this historical cultural trend, see Kapuria (2023b).