Part VI : Qawwali, The Oldest Branch

Qawwali has the strongest claim of any genre in these series of essays to be the tradition’s point of origin, and it is the one most often struck from surveys of the gharanas. The reason for the omission is not obscure. Qawwali is devotional music performed at Sufi shrines, and the twentieth century laboured to hold devotional music apart from classical music: after 1947 India claimed khayal as classical heritage while Pakistan promoted qawwali as Islamic devotional heritage, and the two genres were driven apart to serve two national self-descriptions. The distance now assumed between them is substantially an artefact of that period rather than a fact of the seventeenth century.

The case for including qawwali here is concrete rather than sentimental. The qawwal bachche of Delhi, the hereditary guild attached to the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, are identified in Katherine Butler Schofield’s archival work on Mughal music treatises as the principal community of the earliest documented khayal practitioners. Sadarang, conventionally the founder of modern khayal (disputed as his role is more of a composer of brandished as he was a core dhrupad performer) in the early eighteenth century, is recorded as having learned khayal from a qawwal. And Mian Qutub Bakhsh, titled Tanras Khan (dates uncertain, given variously as c. 1770–1872 and c. 1801–c. 1890), chief musician to Bahadur Shah Zafar, is ancestral to the Delhi khayal gharana and to the Karachi qawwal line alike. The strong claim, that khayal is derived from qawwali, is unproven and probably unprovable, since khayal’s origins are genuinely unknown and are attributed variously to Amir Khusrau, to Sadarang and to Sultan Husain Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur. The defensible claim is that the qawwal bachche were among the earliest documented khayal practitioners, that the two genres shared personnel, repertoire and technique through the Mughal period, and that their present separation is largely a modern construction. That claim is worth making, and this Part makes it.

Amir Khusrau, Nizamuddin Auliya and the Doctrine of Sama

Amir Khusrau Dehlavi (1253, Patiyali – October 1325, Delhi) was a poet and courtier to a succession of Delhi sultans, and from 1310 the formal disciple of the Chishti shaykh Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya (c. 1238–1325), who called him Turk-Allah. He died some six months after his master, and both are buried in the Nizamuddin complex, which remains the physical and ritual centre of qawwali to this day.

What is securely his is the poetry: substantial Persian divans and masnavis, documented, dated and attested in manuscript. His enthusiasm for sama is likewise attested by the contemporary Chishti malfuzat, notably Amir Hasan Sijzi’s Fawa’id al-Fu’ad, which places him at Nizamuddin’s assemblies. Almost every specific musical invention credited to him, however, rests on later oral tradition and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musicological texts rather than on contemporary evidence. The attributions of the sitar and the tabla to him are anachronistic and are rejected by modern organology, since both instruments emerge much later; the attribution of khayal is contested and generally rejected; and the six or nine song-forms credited to him are, at best, undocumented. The honest position is that Khusrau is a real and towering historical figure to whom a great deal has been retrospectively attached.

The same distinction governs the qawwal bachche, the “children of the qawwals”. Tradition holds that Khusrau, at Nizamuddin’s instruction, personally trained twelve boys, of whom the senior was Mian Samat bin Ibrahim, and that from them the hereditary line descends. The twelve-boy story is legend. But the existence of a distinct hereditary occupational community of that name, attached to the Delhi Chishti shrines and functioning as a musical lineage, is well attested in Mughal-era sources. The community is historical; the founding narrative is not. Holding those two statements apart is what allows a survey to take the lineage seriously without endorsing the myth, and the same discipline should govern every gharana genealogy in this book.

What made qawwali possible at all was the Chishti doctrine of sama, meaning spiritual listening: music heard as a means to wajd, ecstasy, and hal, the mystical state, rather than as entertainment. Music was contested in Islamic law but never uniformly forbidden by explicit text, and the synthesis that made sama defensible in the mainstream is al-Ghazali’s, whose Ihya’ ’Ulum al-Din devotes a book to it. Among the Indian orders the Chishtis made sama central to their method; the Suhrawardis permitted it under tighter restriction; the Naqshbandis and some Qadiri branches rejected instrumental sama outright in favour of silent dhikr. Nizamuddin Auliya was himself summoned to defend the practice before the ulama, and Khwaja Fakhr al-din Zarradi, his contemporary, wrote the juristic defence.

The classical rules set three conditions, still cited by practitioners. Makan, the place, must be fitting: a khanqah or dargah, not a market. Zaman, the time, must be fitting, which is why the classical shrine assembly is held between maghrib and isha. Ikhwan, the company, must be fitting: fellow seekers under a shaykh’s supervision, spiritually prepared to listen. Beyond these, the content must be legitimate, though the ghazal’s erotic surface is read allegorically, a doctrinal move on which qawwali’s entire repertoire depends; ecstasy must be genuine, since feigned tawajud is disapproved and involuntary wajd is the goal; and instruments are restricted. The strictest Chishti position permits the unaccompanied voice and hand-clapping only, tolerates percussion more widely, and condemns stringed instruments for their association with courtly and secular music. That last rule has a living consequence, discussed below: the sarangi is forbidden in the original qawwal bachche practice, and the harmonium, being a nineteenth-century European import, arrived too late to need any theological accommodation and simply slipped in.

One caveat should be entered against all of this. The field literature stresses that the treatise ideal of a controlled elite audition is not what happens at a busy popular shrine, where the audience is heterogeneous, imperfectly segregated and includes non-Muslims. The doctrinal rules describe a prototype, not modern practice.

The Forms, and Which of Them Survive

Eight of the forms credited to Khusrau can be followed as performance genres, and their survival rates differ sharply. The qaul, from the Arabic for “utterance”, is a setting of a hadith and is the genre-defining form, the word qawwali deriving from the same root; it is fully alive, and the canonical qaul, “Man kunto Maula”, on the Ghadir Khumm hadith, opens every orthodox assembly. The rang, meaning “colour”, is the celebratory piece marking the disciple’s illumination on meeting his master; it is likewise fully alive, and the canonical rang, “Aaj rang hai”, in which Khusrau addresses his mother and deliberately blurs seeker, beloved, master and God, closes the assembly. The tarana survives fully but as a Hindustani classical form absorbed into khayal practice rather than as a qawwali item. The qalbana, a rhythmic-syllabic form akin to tarana, and the paired naqsh and gul, on Persian texts, survive only marginally, as heritage items in the qawwal bachche repertoire. The basit and the sohla are effectively extinct and known by name alone. That the fully orthodox assembly is still bracketed by qaul at the opening and rang at the close, in essentially the same form at Nizamuddin in Delhi and among the qawwal bachche of Karachi, is the strongest evidence of continuity the tradition possesses.

How Qawwali Works

A qawwali ensemble is a party, in Urdu a humnawa, “those who share a voice”. The standard formation is eight or nine men, the fuller traditional one twelve, all male, seated on the floor in two rows facing the assembly.

The lead singer is the mohri: the senior member, usually the eldest brother or the father, seated front-centre and normally playing harmonium himself. He alone decides the raga, the tempo, the sequence of items, when to insert a girah, when to repeat, when to accelerate and when to stop. He is musician and assembly manager at once, and Regula Burckhardt Qureshi’s central insight, in Sufi Music of India and Pakistan, is that his musical decisions are responses to the audience’s spiritual state, read moment by moment. Flanking him sit one or two side singers, often the second brother, who may play the second harmonium, take alternate lines, answer the lead and share the solo work; in a two-lead party such as Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad, the Sabri Brothers or Rizwan-Muazzam, this position is co-equal. Behind them is the chorus proper, four to six men who repeat the refrain, sustain the takrar and perform the hand-clapping. Positions in the chorus are hereditary and are the training ground: a boy enters at the back clapping at seven and moves forward over decades.

Two hand-pumped harmoniums normally sit in the front row, one doubling the vocal line and playing the prelude, the other filling and droning. Percussion is the dholak, the older and, in shrine practice, more characteristic instrument, or the tabla, which is the more classicised option; many modern parties use both, the dholak carrying the drive and the tabla the articulation. The archaic ghara, a large earthenware pot played with anklets and iron rings on the fingers, is still occasionally seen. And there is taali, the hand-clapping, which is not decoration: it is the tradition’s own doctrinally legitimated percussion, admissible where instruments were suspect. It reinforces the theka at volumes the drum alone cannot carry, marks the accelerando physically, draws the assembly into participation as listeners begin to clap, and supplies the sharp dry transient that gives qawwali its characteristic attack.

A single qawwali follows a standard architecture. It opens with the naghma, an instrumental prelude on harmonium over drum which establishes raga and tala before a word is sung and lets the assembly settle. There follows a short alap, free in rhythm with the drums silent, and then an introductory verse also in free rhythm, a Persian ruba’i or a Punjabi dohra, delivered as solo recitative: the mohri’s statement of intent, framing the theme and testing the room. The drums then enter and the composition proper begins, strophic and in the North Indian two-part convention, with an asthai in the lower and middle register carrying the refrain and an antara rising into the upper register before descending.

Intensity is then built by an interlocking set of devices, all under the mohri’s control: takrar, the repetition of a line, phrase or single word many times over with slight variation until it saturates, which is the primary ecstatic engine; girah-bandi, described below; a registral ascent through successive verses; and an accelerando that is characteristically continuous and unmarked rather than stepped, and which can double the tempo across a fifteen-minute item. The chorus enters more fully, the clapping intensifies, and the harmonium fills thicken. Crucially, the mohri reads the assembly: the arrival of nazrana, the money offerings, and the sight of listeners rising in wajd tell him to sustain, extend or repeat the passage that produced them. This is the point at which the form becomes genuinely improvisatory. A qawwali has no fixed length; it ends when the mohri judges the assembly’s state complete, or when the presiding shaykh signals.

Girah-bandi

Girah means “knot”, and girah-bandi is “tying the knot”: the insertion, mid-performance, of a couplet drawn from a different poem by a different poet into the body of the main text, at the seam between repetitions of the refrain. It is the technical heart of qawwali and the thing that most distinguishes it from every other South Asian genre.

Mechanically, the mohri has just sung the refrain. Instead of proceeding to the next verse of the composed text, he sings an outside couplet: a sher from Ghalib, a line of Bulleh Shah, a Khusrau doha, a Persian hemistich from Rumi or Hafiz, sometimes a verse of his own. The inserted couplet’s final phrase must dovetail semantically and metrically into the refrain, so that when the chorus crashes back in the refrain is heard as the answer, the punchline or the proof of what has just been said. The knot is tied at the join. Repeated girahs over a single refrain progressively re-illuminate the same line from different angles, and a skilled qawwal can sustain one refrain for twenty minutes, each girah giving it a new meaning.

It is the qawwal’s chief improvisational skill, and the field literature identifies it as the mark distinguishing an experienced qawwal from a merely competent one. Musical command of the voice is comparatively cheap; girah-bandi requires a memorised poetic corpus running to thousands of couplets across Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, Braj and Arabic, plus the ability to retrieve the right one in real time for a specific assembly’s mood. It is audience-responsive in the most literal sense: if a listener shows signs of hal, the qawwal will find the couplet that intensifies that particular state, often a verse relating to the saint whose shrine it is. The highest form of the art is a girah that is metrically compatible with the refrain, is in a different language from it and still lands, is not in common circulation, and is chosen for one specific person in the room. Aziz Mian and Fareed Ayaz are the modern exemplars.

Raga, Rhythm and the Classical Apparatus

Almost all qawwalis are based on a raga from the Hindustani classical tradition, but raga usage is looser than in khayal. The qawwal bachche are explicitly noted for approaching ragdari with more freedom than the dhrupad-informed gharanas, prioritising bhav over grammatical strictness, and mishra treatments are normal. Raga is chosen for affect and for the time of the assembly rather than for exposition. Because assemblies run from maghrib to isha, the evening ragas dominate for structural reasons: Bhairavi overwhelmingly, as the all-purpose closing raga and the default for high-emotion material; Yaman and Yaman Kalyan, the classic naat ragas; Darbari Kanada for gravity and lament; and, frequently, Bhimpalasi, Bageshri, Kafi, Khamaj, Pilu, Malkauns for the darkest material and Puriya Dhanashri at dusk. Raga purity should not be overstated: many popular qawwalis are effectively in mishra Bhairavi or in folk-derived tunes with raga colouring, and the Punjabi parties draw on Punjabi folk melody as much as on raga.

Four classical techniques operate inside the form. Taan-bazi, literally taan-fighting, is the trading of rapid melismatic runs between the two leads, each answering and topping the other; it is the most obvious point of contact with khayal, and in a two-lead party it becomes an explicit duel. Sargam interpolation, singing the solfège syllables in place of text at the intensity peak, permits pure melodic elaboration without violating the primacy of text and lets the singer demonstrate raga command. Bol-taan elaborates melismatically on the words themselves rather than on sargam, and is the more text-respectful and therefore more traditional device. Bol-bant, the rhythmic redistribution of the words across the tala, is imported directly from khayal and is named as such in Pakistani critical writing, alongside girah-bandi, as one of the two techniques by which the form became increasingly sophisticated.

Rhythmically the genre’s identity is an eight-beat cycle, keherwa, in a heavy, driving, dholak-idiomatic form often called simply the qawwali theka, with the emphasis on the first and fifth beats and designed to be doubled by clapping. Dadra, of six beats, serves lighter and more lyrical items. Slower and more composed material may begin in fourteen- or sixteen-beat cycles, Deepchandi being the thumri-derived option for the most ghazal-like items, but such an item will often be transformed into keherwa as the tempo rises, the metric compression being itself a device for building intensity. Within the hereditary families, training runs rhythm first, then poetry, then melody, an ordering that says a good deal about the genre’s priorities.

The assembly proceeds through a thematic sequence running roughly from God to Prophet to saints to the mystical path. After the opening qaul come the hamd, in praise of Allah; the na’at, in praise of the Prophet, of which Tajdar-e-Haram is the most famous modern example; the manqabat, in praise of Imam Ali or of the shrine’s own saint; the marsiya, lamenting Imam Husain at Karbala, in grave ragas and belonging to the Muharram repertoire; the munajat, a direct supplicatory address to God, often in Persian; the ghazal, in Persian or Urdu, which is the single largest body of qawwali text and the chief source of girah material; and the kafi, the mystical poem in Punjabi, Seraiki or Sindhi drawn from Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain, Sultan Bahu, Sachal Sarmast or Shah Abdul Latif. The assembly closes with the rang.

The language mix is essential rather than incidental. A single item moves between Persian, the prestige and Chishti-devotional layer and Khusrau’s own; Arabic, for Qur’anic phrases and hadith; Hindavi and Braj, the oldest Indic stratum and the language of “Aaj rang hai”; Urdu, the modern lingua franca and the language of the ghazal; and Punjabi, Seraiki or Sindhi for the kafi tradition. Girah-bandi deliberately exploits this, and to move from a Persian hemistich to a Punjabi refrain in a single breath is a feat of the first order. The mix is the tradition’s claim to be a synthesis.

Set against khayal, then, qawwali differs at almost every point. Its purpose is ritual rather than aesthetic, inducing hal in a listening assembly rather than presenting an art object. Its primary material is text, with music serving poetry, where khayal’s primary material is raga and the text a vehicle for melody. It is a group form with chorus and clapping against khayal’s soloist with tanpura. Its improvisation is textual first and melodic second, where khayal’s is melodic. Its raga treatment is free and its tala vocabulary narrow but continuously accelerating, where khayal holds a fixed laya and plays against it. Its duration is set by the assembly’s state, not by the raga’s exposition. And the sarangi, khayal’s standard accompaniment, is forbidden to it. Against sung ghazal the contrast is sharper still: ghazal-gayaki is solo, intimate and restrained, aimed at appreciation of the couplet, and has no chorus, no clapping, no accelerando and no girah-bandi. Qawwali contains ghazals but treats them by repetition and acceleration where the ghazal singer works by pause and nuance. And against kafi, which is both a poetic genre and a plainer, folk-rooted solo style, qawwali performs kafis but reframes them with choral refrain, theka, acceleration and girah. The distinction matters practically: Abida Parveen sings kafi and sufiyana kalam, not qawwali, and the Western press’s habit of calling her a qawwal is simply an error.

 

The Qawwal Bachchon ka Gharana: Delhi, Hyderabad, Karachi

This is the senior lineage, and the only qawwali family that is also a recognised classical gharana. It traces itself from Khusrau through Mian Samat bin Ibrahim, an unbroken hereditary line, and Tanras Khan, chief musician to Bahadur Shah Zafar and founder of the Delhi khayal gharana; after 1857 the family scattered, one branch going to Hyderabad, and thence after 1948 to Karachi. The family’s own formulation is an unbroken tradition of nearly seven hundred years across twenty-six generations, which is arithmetically consistent at about twenty-seven years to a generation. It is contested nonetheless, because the documented genealogy is secure only to Tanras Khan in the nineteenth century and everything earlier is family tradition. The gharana holds to the prohibition on the sarangi, and that prohibition remains a live marker of identity: the instrument carried the taint of the courtesan’s salon, and to exclude it is to assert the ritual purity of the shrine ensemble.

The structural fact that governs the modern history is that the guild was severed at Partition. The more virtuosic, classically trained wing went to Karachi; the shrine-service wing stayed in Delhi. India kept the shrine and Pakistan kept the taleem. That is an argument rather than a settled finding, but it is defensible and it explains a great deal.

The Karachi Branch

Ustad Munshi Raziuddin Ahmed Khan (1912–2003) performed at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad and migrated to Karachi after 1948. In 1956 he formed a joint party with his cousins Bahauddin Khan and Manzoor Ahmed Niazi which ran until 1966, after which he led his own. He received the Pride of Performance in 1967, and a street in Saddar Town, Karachi, “Qawwali Gali”, is named for him. Of the Karachi qawwals he was the most austerely classical: heavy Persian and Arabic repertoire, strict khanqahi manner, spare raga treatment and the least possible concession to popular taste. He trained his sons Fareed Ayaz, Abu Muhammad, Ghulam Akram and Ali Akbar.

Ustad Qawwal Bahauddin Khan (15 June 1934 – 2 February 2006) was born in Hyderabad State, son of Suleman Khan and maternal nephew of Ustad Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi, the great Hyderabad qawwal treated below. He migrated to Karachi in 1956, sang in Urdu, Persian and Arabic, toured Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia, and was a Radio Pakistan mainstay; his honours ran from Nunhay Raagi in 1947 and Nunhay Hind Raagi in 1951, conferred by the Indian Prime Minister, to the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz in 1999 and the title of Ustad with a gold medal in 2002. His five sons, Najmuddin (b. 1967), Saifuddin Mehmood (b. 1971), Zafeeruddin Ahmed (b. 1977), Mughisuddin Hassan (b. 1979) and Ehtishamuddin Hussain (b. 1981), perform as the Najmuddin Saifuddin Qawwal Brothers, among the most internationally active traditional parties, and they keep the Persian and Arabic repertoire, the strict raga discipline and the archaic Khusrau forms. A note on nomenclature is needed here: Bahauddin Qutbuddin is the party billing under which Bahauddin Khan performed with Qutbuddin Khan, not the name of a single person, exactly as Fareed Ayaz Abu Muhammad and Mehr Ali Sher Ali are billings rather than individuals.

Ustad Manzoor Ahmed Khan Niazi (1922 – 9 April 2013) was born in Delhi, founded his own party in 1937, joined the 1956 combination, was titled Bulbul-e-Deccan by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, received the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz in 2006, and was described in his last years as the senior-most qawwal in the subcontinent. His sons Abdullah Manzoor Niazi and Masroor Ahmed Niazi, and his grandson Habib Niazi, continue; Abdullah Manzoor Niazi leads the line today and is a rigorous traditionalist as well as a Coke Studio regular.

Ustad Fareed Ayaz (b. 13 November 1952) and Abu Muhammad, sons of Munshi Raziuddin, lead the most classically equipped party in Pakistan. They perform dhrupad, khayal, tarana, thumri and dadra alongside qawwali, and work dadra, thumri and folk material into qawwali items; their repertoire runs very heavy in Persian and Arabic, their girah-bandi is formidable, and they retain the archaic Khusrau forms, the qaul, qalbana, naqsh, gul and rang, that almost no other party keeps. Fareed Ayaz received the Pride of Performance in 2006 and Abu Muhammad separately some years later. They have appeared across multiple seasons of Coke Studio Pakistan and toured more than thirty countries, and Abu Muhammad has publicly argued that qawwali has been vulgarised and requires institutional preservation.

Belonging to the same Tanras Khan line, though not a qawwal, is Ustad Naseeruddin Saami (b. 1946, Delhi), the khayal and surti singer. He is the living proof of the qawwali-khayal link: the sole practitioner of a forty-nine-microtone system he traces to Khusrau, whose records God Is Not a Terrorist (2019) and Pakistan Is for the Peaceful (2020) brought him international notice. A family that produces, in one generation, both the most learned qawwali party alive and a khayal singer of that rarity is the best single answer to anyone who supposes the genres to be separate things.

The Delhi Branch

At Nizamuddin the hereditary families remained, holding ritual office. Their apical ancestor is the same Samat bin Ibrahim, and the same evidentiary caution applies: no fourteenth-century source names the qawwal bachche as an institution, and the story functions exactly as gharana foundation myths do, legitimating a present occupational monopoly by projecting it back onto a canonical ancestor. What is attested is continuity from the late Mughal period, with families naming ancestors who served as shahi gawayya at Bahadur Shah Zafar’s court. The lineage is documentable to about 1800 and plausible but unproven before that.

Ustad Meraj Ahmed Nizami (1927 – 18 October 2015) is the best-documented qawwal in the English-language literature, Indian or Pakistani, because Qureshi’s entire ethnography is built on his repertoire and performances. He lived and died in a one-room house in Nizamuddin Basti. His great-great-grandfather was a court singer to Bahadur Shah Zafar. He led the ensemble Nizami Khusro Bandhu with his sons, and was the outstanding classical qawwal of late twentieth-century Delhi: rare in his fluency in Persian, able to render Rumi’s Masnavi in the original, which almost no Indian qawwal can do, and a supreme master of girah. He was doctrinally strict, holding that qawwali is prayer and not entertainment, and refused the film and stage idiom. He received no award of national rank, which is a finding in itself: the most scholarly documented Indian qawwal, and the last fluent Persian-singing qawwal bachcha, was honoured chiefly by ethnomusicologists and died poor. His sons Sibtain and Saqlain Nizami still sing at the dargah in 2026.

At least five separately branded hereditary groups now sing at the same shrine, all of them using variants of the same name, and precision is required. The Nizami Bandhu, the group heard in Rockstar, is today Ustad Chand Nizami with his nephews Shadab Faridi Nizami and Sohrab Faridi Nizami, sons of Ghulam Farid Nizami (1965–2003); their documented chain runs Aashaq Khan (1865–1946) to Mushtaq Khan Nizami (1887–1965) to Mahmood Nizami (1909–1992) to Ghulam Farid, a four-generation descent to 1865. Nizami Khusro Bandhu is Meraj Ahmed’s line, and the most classically serious. The Khas Qawwal line of Azam Nizami (b. c. 1997), Nazim Nizami and Mohammad Ali Nizami runs Rafiq Ahmad Nizami to Shafiq Ahmed to Khalil Ahmed, and has been attached to the dargah only since 1946–47, as the family says openly. The Niazi line of Usman Niazi has the strongest documented kinship to the Karachi qawwal bachche. And the younger commercial “Nizami Brothers” work the wedding and YouTube circuit. The Nizami Bandhu hold the Thursday mehfil at the dargah, and their landmark screen appearance is “Kun Faya Kun” from Rockstar (2011), composed by A. R. Rahman and filmed at the shrine itself, in which they appear but do not sing, which converted a hereditary shrine group into a national brand.

One further observation, unflattering to the gharana thesis, should be recorded. Azam Nizami describes transmission at the shrine as immersive rather than pedagogic: children get associated with the singers early and learn as a baby fish learns to swim, without formal taleem, without a riyaz regime, without a palta and sargam curriculum. This is occupational-hereditary transmission, not gharana taleem, and the distinction must be drawn explicitly, because it is precisely what separates the Delhi shrine families from the Warsis and the Badaun household described below.

The Hyderabad Warsis, and the Best-Documented Classical Qawwals in India

Ustad Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi (dates unconfirmed, usually given as 1910–1992) was the major Deccani qawwal of the twentieth century and, with Jafar Hussain Khan Badauni, one of the two most classically grounded qawwals India has produced. His silsila is the Chishti-Warsi, from Haji Waris Ali Shah of Dewa Sharif in Barabanki, an Awadhi and Deccani axis distinct from the Delhi and Punjab Nizami and Sabri lines. His descent runs from Muhammed Siddique Khan, a singer in the Mughal durbar who moved to the Nizam’s court in 1857 and became a royal singer under Mir Mahbub Ali Khan. The family’s own account goes further and states that Siddique Khan was the nephew of Mian Tanras Khan himself, who also relocated to Hyderabad after 1857. That kinship is contested, and the family additionally asserts a nine-hundred-year descent from disciples trained by Khusrau, which is legend. But the 1857 court migration is historically solid and Tanras Khan’s own move to Hyderabad is independently attested in the Delhi gharana literature, and if the kinship holds it makes the Hyderabad Warsis a qawwali branch of the Delhi khayal gharana proper.

The Nizam’s establishment underwrote classical training as no shrine economy could, and the Warsi household was frequented by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Birju Maharaj. The family self-identifies as Delhi gharana, and its repertoire encompasses khayal-derived material, thumri, ghazal, tarana and bhajan as well as sufiana qawwali: a qawwal household that also functioned as a classical vocal household. Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi received the Padma Shri, reportedly the first qawwal ever so honoured.

The Warsi Brothers, Naseer Ahmed Khan Warsi and Nazeer Ahmed Khan Warsi, are his grandsons, sons of Zaheer Ahmed Khan Warsi, and were trained directly by their grandfather: a named, two-step, documented transmission. They are living and active in 2026, based in Hyderabad with their ritual seat at the Dargah Yousufain at Nampally, where the family has held the Thursday midnight mehfil for over a century. They received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2014, the most important Indian state recognition of qawwali as a traditional art, and were Aga Khan Music Award laureates in 2025, cited for their preservation and transmission of the musical legacy of Amir Khusrau. They describe themselves as bearers of the gayeki of the Delhi gharana, and their handling of a bandish is raga-based melodic elaboration rather than the shrine’s more formulaic tune-set. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture calls them among the finest living custodians of traditional qawwali in the subcontinent, and on the evidence that is right.

Ustad Jafar Hussain Khan Badauni (1931–1998) of Badaun in Uttar Pradesh is the single most important figure in this Part, because his classical training is documented and specific. He learned raga music from his uncle, Ustad Mushtaq Hussain Khan of the Rampur-Sahaswan gharana, one of the outstanding khayaliyas of the century, Padma Bhushan and the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s first music awardee; sitar from Ustad Wahid Khan; and qawwali proper from Ustad Ghulam Ahmad and Ustad Bande Hussain. He was trained, in other words, as a classical vocalist first and a qawwal second, the exact inversion of the qawwal bachche pattern. The European concert literature described him as the greatest qawwal in India of recent decades, representing an old and very traditional style, raga-disciplined and carrying the vocal weight of a khayal singer rather than the declamatory attack of the commercial qawwals. His key document is Kawwali: Chant soufi de l’Uttar Pradesh, issued by Inédit and the Maison des Cultures du Monde in France in 1985, following his first European tour in 1981; further issues followed in Germany, Japan and Holland, and the widely circulated The Best of Qawwali couples his party with the Warsi Brothers, which confirms that these two were regarded as the classical end of Indian qawwali. No Padma award to him is verifiable and none should be asserted.

The Badaun household is the book’s best material, because it is intermarried with, and trained by, the Rampur-Sahaswan khayal house. Wajahat Hussain Khan (d. April 2014) was Jafar Hussain Khan’s grandnephew and simultaneously the grandson and disciple of Ustad Nisar Hussain Khan (1906–1993) of Rampur-Sahaswan, and he sang second voice in Jafar’s party: a man who was at once a Rampur-Sahaswan khayal shagird and a working qawwal. Danish Hussain Badayuni, living at Budaun in 2026, is Nisar Hussain Khan’s grandson and the late Ustad Rashid Khan’s cousin. He belongs to the Rampur-Sahaswan gharana by descent but, by his own account, took no formal classical instruction and developed as a qawwal; he runs his own party, performs at Sufi shrines across India and for diaspora audiences, and is on record about the declining interest of younger listeners in devotional qawwali. He is the living end of the most classically pedigreed qawwali line in India, and he is classically untrained. Note also that Nisar Hussain Khan taught Rashid Khan in the traditional manner at his own residence in Badaun before the ITC years: Badaun is a khayal town as well as a qawwali town, and the two households are the same household.

The comparative sting is worth stating plainly. The most classically formidable members of the shared Delhi qawwal bachche guild, Munshi Raziuddin, Manzoor Ahmed Niazi, Bahauddin Khan and now Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad, went to Pakistan in 1947. India’s classically trained qawwals, Jafar Hussain Khan and the Warsis, were not qawwal bachche at all: they came from khayal households that took up qawwali rather than from the hereditary shrine guild. India’s classical qawwali is gharana-descended; India’s hereditary qawwali is not classically trained. That is the chapter’s central irony.

One further Indian claimant should be recorded with caution. Ateeq Hussain Khan (b. 1980, Hyderabad), who leads Bandanawazi Qawwal, asserts simultaneously a seventh-generation Gwalior descent through Haddu and Hassu Khan, great-grandsonship of Ustad Faiyaz Khan of Agra, the Delhi gharana through his maternal grandfather Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi, and nephewhood of Jafar Hussain Khan Badauni. All four at once is a maximal claim and should not be reproduced uncritically; the Warsi maternal link is the best-supported element. His training from the age of five by his father, Ustad Iqbal Hussain Khan Bandanawazi, in Hindustani classical vocal is real, and the Bandanawazi name attaches the family to Khwaja Bandenawaz Gesudaraz of Gulbarga, the only living thread this survey could trace to that shrine.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the Punjab Stream

Two hereditary streams dominate Pakistani qawwali, and a survey that treats them as one thing will misdescribe both. The Delhi and Deccan stream, the Qawwal Bachchon ka Gharana in Karachi, is Persianate, classical, dargahi, raga-disciplined, sarangi-forbidden, and holds to the archaic Khusrau forms. The Punjab stream, the Faisalabad, Jalandhar and Lahore lines, is Punjabi in language, kafi-heavy, folk-inflected, higher in energy, more melodically extroverted and readier to fuse. The Karachi stream is the one that belongs in a book about gharanas; the Punjab stream is where the form’s mass audience and its international standing were made.

Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (13 October 1948 – 16 August 1997) is the single most consequential qawwal of the twentieth century. He was born at Lyallpur, now Faisalabad, into a family of hereditary qawwals of Jalandhar who had come there from Afghanistan and resettled after Partition, and whose own reckoning is that the tradition has descended for almost six hundred years. His father was Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, who died in 1964; his uncles were Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan and Ustad Salamat Ali Khan, the latter not to be confused with the Sham Chaurasia khayal singer of the same name. His father had intended him for medicine and at first refused to train him, and his first public performance was at his father’s chehlum in 1964, when he was fifteen or sixteen. He became lead singer of the family party under Mubarak Ali Khan and took it over outright in 1971.

Signed by Oriental Star Agencies in Birmingham in the early 1980s, he made his breakthrough Western appearance at WOMAD in London in 1985. Peter Gabriel set his voice into the soundtrack of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, which led to a contract with Real World Records; five traditional qawwali albums followed, together with the two landmark crossover records Mustt Mustt (1990) and Night Song (1996), both produced by Michael Brook, the Massive Attack remix of the former becoming a club hit. He worked on Dead Man Walking (1995) with Eddie Vedder and on Natural Born Killers (1994), and holds the Guinness record for most qawwali recordings, at over a hundred and twenty-five albums. He received the Pride of Performance in 1987 and the UNESCO Music Prize in 1995, and two posthumous Grammy nominations in 1997. He died at the Cromwell Hospital in London on 16 August 1997, aged forty-eight, of cardiac arrest following kidney and liver failure, en route to Los Angeles for a transplant, and lies buried at Faisalabad. The title Shahenshah-e-Qawwali is his in common usage, though Aziz Mian claimed it too.

What he changed can be stated precisely. He moved qawwali from the shrine assembly to the concert stage, from an interactive ritual before a spiritually prepared audience to a presentational performance before a paying and often non-Urdu-speaking one; since Qureshi’s model of audience-responsive girah-bandi cannot operate at WOMAD, he shifted qawwali’s centre of gravity from text to sound. He enlarged the alap immensely, importing the scale and gravity of khayal’s melodic exposition into a form that had used alap as a brief tuning-in. He made sargam the centrepiece, his extended sequences traded antiphonally with the chorus at mounting tempo becoming qawwali’s most recognisable modern gesture, and he pioneered a phonemic play that broke text into parcels of conjoined phonemes, sacrificing semantic content for sonic ecstasy: precisely the trade the concert stage demanded. He drew the accelerando and the climax into far longer arcs than shrine practice required. He introduced a soloistic virtuosity, with an exceptional range and stamina and a timbral clarity that carried over amplification. And he legitimated fusion, so that everything from Coke Studio to Bollywood Sufi pop descends from Mustt Mustt.

The costs should be stated too. Traditionalists, the qawwal bachche among them, regard the shift as a loss of adaab and of girah-bandi’s primacy, and the field scholarship notes pointedly that no listener has ever achieved hal by listening to a recording. Nusrat globalised qawwali by partially uncoupling it from the ritual that gave it meaning. Both halves of that sentence are true.

Rahat Fateh Ali Khan (b. 9 December 1974) is his nephew, son of Farrukh Fateh Ali Khan and grandson of Fateh Ali Khan; Nusrat treated him as a son and named him his musical heir, trained him from the age of seven, and carried him in the touring party from fifteen. Playback has dominated his career: “Mann Ki Lagan” in Paap (2003), “Zaroori Tha” (2014), “Afreen Afreen” with Momina Mustehsan for Coke Studio in 2016, five seasons of Coke Studio Pakistan, and in 2014 the first Pakistani performance at a Nobel Peace Prize Concert. He is the commercially dominant inheritor, but he is principally a playback and ghazal-inflected singer who performs qawwali rather than a shrine qawwal; the traditional apparatus of girah-bandi, the full assembly sequence and the Persian and Arabic repertoire is largely absent from his public work.

Rizwan and Muazzam Mujahid Ali Khan, the Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali Group, are also Nusrat’s nephews, grandsons of Mubarak Ali Khan, trained by their father Mujahid Mubarak Ali Khan (d. 1996) and afterwards mentored by Nusrat. They have performed as a unit since the late 1990s, their first major concert being at WOMAD Rivermead in 1998, and their Real World discography includes Sacrifice to Love, A Better Destiny, Day of Colours, People’s Colony No. 1 with Temple of Sound, Attish: The Hidden Fire and, most recently, At the Feet of the Beloved (2025). Two leads, five secondary singers, vigorous clapping, two harmoniums and one tabla: they are the most traditionalist of the Nusrat descendants, keeping the party format, the Punjabi and Persian repertoire and the choral drive, and declining deliberately to follow Rahat into playback. If a living example of Nusrat-lineage qawwali as qawwali is wanted, it is theirs.

The Sabri Brothers and Aziz Mian

Ghulam Farid Sabri (1930, Kalyana, East Punjab, now in Haryana – 5 April 1994, Karachi) and Maqbool Ahmed Sabri (12 October 1945, Kalyana – 21 September 2011, South Africa) were trained by their father Ustad Inayat Hussain Sabri in qawwali and in Hindustani classical music. The family claims descent from Mian Tansen, which is tradition without documentation, and affiliation to the Chishti-Sabri branch of the order, after Makhdoom Ala-ud-Din Ali Ahmed Sabir of Kaliyar Sharif, which is real and is the source of the surname. They migrated to Karachi at Partition, and their first record for EMI Pakistan, Mera Koi Nahin Hai Tere Siwa (1958), was an immediate hit.

They were the first qawwali party to tour the West, and the landmark event of that tour was their Carnegie Hall concert of 1975, issued as Qawwali: Sufi Music from Pakistan on Nonesuch Explorer. Their signature recordings, Tajdar-e-Haram and Bhar Do Jholi Meri Ya Muhammad, are the two most famous naats in the Pakistani repertoire, and to them belong also O Sharabi Chhod De Peena, Khwaja Ki Deewani and Savere Savere. They received the Pride of Performance in 1978. Theirs is the grand, monumental, sonorous style: enormous choral weight, slow and majestic tempi in the naats, extremely long build-ups and a preference for sustained rather than fast-moving intensity. Where Nusrat drives, the Sabris swell. Their two-lead format, Ghulam Farid’s darker and heavier voice set against Maqbool’s higher and more penetrating one, is the model for every subsequent two-lead Pakistani party, and they professionalised the qawwali concert, with international touring, LP releases and formal programmes, a decade before Nusrat did.

Amjad Sabri (23 December 1976 – 22 June 2016), son of Ghulam Farid, inherited the party and made his father’s Bhar Do Jholi his own. On 22 June 2016, during Ramadan, two gunmen on a motorcycle opened fire on his car in Liaquatabad Town, Karachi, after he left a morning television programme; he was shot in the head and died at Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, aged thirty-nine. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility, citing blasphemy. His killing is the single most important recent event in Pakistani qawwali’s political history and should be treated as such, alongside the 2010 Data Darbar and 2016 Shah Noorani shrine bombings: evidence of the form’s exposure to takfiri violence. He had recorded Aaj Rang Hai for Coke Studio with Rahat Fateh Ali Khan shortly before his death, and his voice appears on Coldplay’s “Church” (2019). He received the Sitara-i-Imtiaz posthumously in 2018. Kaukab Sabri, brother of Ghulam Farid and Maqbool, was a party member; Sarwar Hussain Sabri and Amjad’s sons continue the family.

Aziz Mian Qawwal, born Abdul Aziz (27 July 1942 – 6 December 2000, Tehran, of liver failure while on tour, buried at Multan), is the tradition’s great irregular. His education is genuinely unusual for a qawwal: he matriculated with distinction and took two master’s degrees from the University of the Punjab, in Urdu Literature and in Islamic Studies and Philosophy, sixteen years of formal study, and no other major qawwal has comparable academic training. Decisively, he was the only prominent qawwal to write his own lyrics. Every other qawwal interprets a received poetic canon; Aziz Mian was a poet performing his own verse, which inverts qawwali’s normal relation between performer and text and is why his girah-bandi is so unusual, since he could compose the knot on the spot.

His landmark recordings are Teri Soorat; Main Sharabi, in which the wine trope of Persian mysticism is pressed to a scandalous literalism; and Hashr Ke Roz Yeh Poochhunga, which at just over a hundred and fifteen minutes is the longest commercially released qawwali recording and is a sustained argumentative interrogation of God. He received a gold medal from the Shah of Iran in 1967 and the Pride of Performance in 1989. His style is confrontational in a way nobody else’s is: a rasping, hoarse, deliberately unbeautiful voice, the opposite of Nusrat’s clarity, weaponising roughness; a manner argumentative rather than devotional, disputing with God, with the orthodox and with the audience, which sits within the legitimate Sufi traditions of the shath and the Persian shikwa but is pushed further than anyone else has taken them in performance; and a rhetorical, oratorical delivery in which he speaks as much as he sings. His rivalry with the Sabri Brothers was conducted in verse, his Main Sharabi against their O Sharabi Chhod De Peena. He rejected the entertainment turn outright, which makes him at once the most transgressive and the most doctrinally serious of the popular qawwals.

The Other Pakistani Parties

Bakhshi Salamat Qawwal was the Punjabi party of the mid-twentieth century, an EMI Pakistan and Radio Pakistan mainstay from the 1950s to the 1970s and among the first Pakistani qawwals to record extensively; raw and folk-inflected in delivery, heavy in kafi repertoire, and important as the bridge between village Punjabi qawwali and the recording industry. The line continues as Bakhshi Javed Salamat Qawwal. They matter also as teachers, since Sher Ali trained under them. A disambiguation is required: Bakhshi Wazir is a Lahore film-music composer duo, not a qawwali party, and search engines conflate the two.

Mehr Ali Sher Ali, brothers, are among the most respected traditional parties of the post-Nusrat generation, shrine-based at Data Darbar in Lahore and other Punjab shrines. Mehr Ali trained under Muhammad Ali Fareed Qawwal and Sher Ali under Bakhshi Salamat, so this is a taught rather than a purely hereditary partnership, which is unusual and worth recording. Their tradition runs back through Patiala princely patronage and the Halwara Talwandi line of Ustad Maula Buksh Khan and Ustad Syed Ali Khan Sarmast, whose specialism was dhrupad and raagdari, so the party carries a genuinely classical pedigree. Their repertoire is heavily Punjabi kafi and naat, and their manner unadorned and without crossover ambition.

Badar Miandad Khan (17 February 1962 – 2 March 2007) was the son of Ustad Rasheed Miandad and grandson of Ustad Din Muhammad Qawwal, and both cousin and brother-in-law to Nusrat; his brother Sher Miandad Khan is also a leading qawwal. He followed Nusrat into remix and fusion, composed for Pakistani film, and his “Raataan Kaaliyaan” was used in Breaking Bad; his idiom is lighter, more melodic and more pop-permeable. Faiz Ali Faiz (b. 1962, Sharaqpur), from seven generations of qawwals and working largely out of France, is the leading qawwal of the European festival circuit, twice nominated for the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award and notable for the cross-genre projects Qawwali Flamenco and Jaadu: Magic with Titi Robin. Asif Ali Khan Santoo, son of Ustad Santoo Khan Qawwal of Lahore and a Nusrat student, leads a vigorous, high-energy Punjabi party with Real World and WOMAD exposure; Santoo Khan and Asif Ali Khan are father and son, not two unrelated names. Shahbaz Fayyaz Qawwal is a contemporary Lahore party of the popular register. And Dildar Hussain, Nusrat’s tabla player for decades, is a named artist in his own right and the source of the modern Punjabi qawwali theka.

India Beyond the Shrine: the Outsiders

Two Indian careers demonstrate, better than any argument, exactly where qawwali’s boundary lay.

Habib Painter (1915 – 22 February 1987) was born at Aligarh and worked as a billboard painter, which is how he came by his name. The patron Rais Mirza heard him singing at a poetry gathering, brought him to Delhi and set him up with a party; the career that followed ran fifty years. He had no hereditary or gharana lineage whatever, describing himself as a disciple of the saint Hazrat Nizamuddin, which is a spiritual and not a musical claim. His style was nasal and high-pitched, folk-hymn in delivery, and he interpolated his own spoken philosophical asides into the poem, a popular-register cousin of girah. His repertoire included Khusrau’s “Bahut kathin hai dagar panghat ki” and “Fana itna to ho jaaun”, and his commercial discography is large. Nehru titled him Bulbul-e-Hind after he sang to troops in the 1962 war, and a park in Aligarh is named for him. He received no Padma or Akademi award. His son Anees Painter succeeded him.

Shankar and Shambhu, the Shankar-Shambhu Qawwal, were a Hindu qawwali duo, described in the Indian press as the only Hindu qawwals in the subcontinent, which overstates the case but registers how singular they seemed. Shankar died in a road accident in 1984 and Shambhu of a heart attack in 1989. They rose in the post-Partition period, which is itself the point, since they filled the gap left by the qawwal families who had migrated. Their origin story, hagiographic and to be flagged as such, is that having been denied permission to perform at Ajmer Sharif, Shankar undertook a three-day fast at the shrine until the khadims relented; their performance moved the audience, among them the film-maker Mehboob Khan, who brought them into Bombay cinema. They were titled Khwaja Pasand, “approved of Khwaja”, conferred within the Ajmer establishment itself, and Qaumi Ekta Ke Pratik, Symbol of National Unity. Their capital was linguistic and poetic rather than musical-technical: total command of Urdu and a memorised stock of thousands of couplets of heavily Islamic content, delivered by Hindu singers to Muslim shrine audiences. They had no hereditary lineage and no documented classical training. Their sons Ram Shanker and Rakesh Shambhu continue at much reduced prominence.

Together these two careers establish the shape of the boundary. Qawwali’s gatekeeping was confessionally permeable but genealogically impermeable. A Hindu could be admitted to the shrine circuit and even honoured by it; neither Shankar and Shambhu nor Habib Painter could ever become qawwal bachche. Birth into the guild, and not religion, was the line that held.

Beside them stand the commercial recording qawwals, whose fame the gramophone and then the cassette manufactured outside any lineage at all. Ismail Azad Qawwal, whose biography is essentially undocumented, is remembered for one record, “Hamein To Loot Liya Milke Husn Walon Ne” from the film Al Hilal, still the most-covered Indian qawwali ever made; Yusuf Azad Qawwal was his contemporary and co-recording artist, the shared “Azad” appearing to be a Bombay recording-scene convention rather than a kinship marker. Aslam Sabri of Delhi carries a Chishti-Sabri affiliation by discipleship and not descent; he is often named as Rais Sabri’s teacher, though the link is undocumented; Rais Anis Sabri (b. 25 September 1993), Rais Sabri’s son, is the commercially dominant Indian qawwal of the last fifteen years, with some thirty-five albums since 2003 by his own account and millions of streams, working in what is frankly a studio-and-stage idiom with no documented classical grounding. Chhote Majid Shola, Sharif Parwaz, Anwar Hussain Khan and Rashid Ahmed Fareedi belong to the same contemporary commercial stratum, and no verifiable classical lineage exists for any of them, which should be said rather than glossed. The Qutbi Brothers, Haji Mohammad Idris and Arshad Qutbi, attached to the Dargah of Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki at Mehrauli and claiming a 750-year tradition, are the exception among the moderns in institutional terms: they are Top Grade artists of All India Radio and empanelled with the ICCR, and AIR Top Grade is a genuine juried classification.

Aziz Nazan (born Abdul Aziz Kunji Markar, 7 May 1938 – 8 October 1992) is the largest single omission from any account of Indian qawwali that stops at the shrine door, and he belongs here rather than among the hereditary parties because his entire career is an argument about what qawwali could become once it left them. He was born in Bombay into a Malabar Muslim family of Kerala origin, his father Kunji Markar and his mother Khadija Kunji Markar, the surname a Mappila one; the family disapproved of music, and he lost his father at nine. His schooling in Bombay was in the Gujarati medium. He began in an orchestra, and then as a chorus singer in Ismail Azad Qawwal’s party, which is the sum total of his lineage. He came up through the Bombay recording scene and not through a khandan, and he never claimed otherwise. He learned Urdu prosody from the poet Sadiq Nizami and wrote a good deal of his own verse, which places him with Aziz Mian in the very small class of qawwals who are also their own poets. Family and press accounts credit him with classical training under Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Mohammed Ibrahim Khan (contested; undocumented), and the Patiala half of that claim should not be taken at face value; what is audible on the records, and is unusual on the commercial side, is a real raga discipline in the slow openings and a singer’s command of the sustained low register. The Gramophone Company signed him in 1958, and his first success came with “Jiya Nahin Maana” in 1962.

His two great records altered the reach of the form. “Jhoom Barabar Jhoom Sharabi” held the top ten of Binaca Geetmala for twenty consecutive weeks, a run no qawwali had achieved before, with sources dating its peak variously to 1970 and to 1975 (contested); and “Chadhta Sooraj Dheere Dheere Dhalta Hai, Dhal Jayega”, issued by HMV in the early 1980s and dated to 1982 by the one account that dates it at all, is his masterpiece and the most widely known non-film qawwali ever made in India, a sustained meditation on mortality and vanity that has been sung back to him by two generations and was taken up in Pakistan by Mehdi Hassan. What he did technically was more consequential still, and more contested: he brought Western instruments and rhythm sections into a texture that had used harmonium, dholak and taali and nothing else, adding mandolin, bass guitar, congas and bongos and, later, electronic sound. Every commercial Indian qawwali party of the following forty years works inside the sound he built, and the shrine families’ complaint that the popular qawwali had stopped being qawwali is, in practice, a complaint about him. He was billed as Baaghi Qawwal, the rebel qawwal, and the title was earned in both senses. He also worked in film, singing and composing across the 1970s, with credits including Rafoo Chakkar, Laila Majnu (1976) and Qurbani, and the score of Pyaar Ke Raahi, and he recorded alongside Mohammed Rafi, Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle, most securely for Kalyanji-Anandji, whose “Qurbani Qurbani” of 1980 carries his voice beside Kishore Kumar’s. He died in Bombay on 8 October 1992, aged fifty-four, and is buried in the Bada Qabrastan at Marine Lines. He held no Padma or Akademi award, which is a comment on the awards rather than on him. His son Mujtaba Aziz Naza carries the name and the idiom, singing qawwali for the film industry in Bajirao Mastani (2015), Indu Sarkar, Padmaavat (2018) and Marjaavaan (2019): a two-generation succession within a family, which is what a gharana looks like at its very beginning, and which in this case began outside the guild and has stayed there.

One point of nomenclature must be made explicit, because the error is common and serious. “Sabri” in an Indian qawwal’s name signals order-affiliation or commercial branding, not descent, and Indian performers of that name have no kinship whatever with the Karachi Sabri Brothers.

Women and Qawwali

There is no traditional women’s qawwali, and the exclusion is structural rather than incidental: women have no part in qawwali performance at any stage. Two independent mechanisms enforce it. The first is doctrinal, resting on interpretations which hold a woman’s singing voice before unrelated men to be a source of fitna; since qawwali’s own defence rests on the already precarious legitimacy of sama, the tradition has been unwilling to expose itself at a further point of juristic vulnerability. The second, and by far the weightier, is hereditary and occupational. Qawwali passes patrilineally within the khandan, positions in the party descend from father to son, and a boy enters the back row clapping at seven and moves forward across decades. There is no route by which a woman enters the party at all, because the party is the male line. That is why the exclusion has outlasted the doctrinal argument, and why from the inside it does not look like a prohibition. A search of the public record of the Karachi khandans for a statement on the subject yields nothing: no qawwal of the Fareed Ayaz, Niazi or Saami families has been recorded objecting to women singing qawwali, and none has been recorded teaching one. The exclusion operates by non-transmission rather than by prohibition. Nobody forbids; nobody teaches.

The distinction that follows is the one on which everything in this section turns. Women have never been barred from qawwali as sound. They have been barred from qawwali as hereditary office. The moment the repertoire is detached from the office, which is to say the moment it appears on a film soundtrack, a gramophone record, a concert platform or a television studio floor, women enter it at once and without recorded controversy. What they cannot enter is the party at the shrine.

Access to the shrines is separately restricted and varies enormously. The Nizamuddin dargah bars women from the tomb chamber, and a sign at the entrance has read “No Women Allowed in Shrine”; the shrines of Baba Farid at Pakpattan, Bulleh Shah at Kasur and Shah Hussain at Lahore bar women from the inner sanctuary, the caretakers’ stated reason being ritual purity. The irony is not lost on the journalists who report it: Bulleh Shah and Shah Hussain wrote in a female poetic voice, as the bride awaiting the Beloved, at shrines that will not admit actual women to the grave. Many other Pakistani shrines admit women to a segregated enclosure, and Sehwan Sharif is the great exception, discussed below.

The Three Side Doors: the Screen, the Record and the Stage

Because the dargah was closed, the women who sang qawwali in the twentieth century came in by three other entrances, and their careers bear the shape those entrances gave them.

The first was the screen. Jaddanbai (1 April 1892, Benares, some sources 1908 – 8 April 1949, Bombay), the courtesan-lineage singer trained under Shrimant Ganpat Rao and later under Moujuddin Khan, Ustad Chaddu Khan, Ustad Laab Khan and Barkat Ali Khan, is credited with being the first music director to carry the qawwali into Indian film in the 1930s, though no recording of that work survives. The first surviving landmark is Zeenat (1945) and its qawwali “Aahen na bharin, shikwe na kiye”, sung by Noor Jehan, Zohrabai Ambalewali and Kalyani, music by Hafiz Khan, lyrics by Nakhshab: an all-female qawwali party, filmed as such, thirty years before any woman is documented attempting the form at a shrine. Film, and not the dargah, invented the women’s qawwali party. Yousuf Saeed’s Cinema Qawwali Archive has since identified over nine hundred film qawwalis from the 1930s onward, peaking at a hundred and thirty-one in the 1960s and a hundred and fifty-six in the 1970s, with Asha Bhosle and Mohammed Rafi the two most recorded voices in the whole corpus.

The second was the record, and specifically the muqabla disc, treated below.

The third was the secular concert stage: the festival, the government cultural tour and, latterly, the television music programme. Every Indian and Pakistani woman named in this section reached her audience through one or more of the three, and not one of them reached it through hereditary appointment at a shrine.

Shakeela Bano Bhopali, the First Public Career

Shakeela Bano Bhopali (1942 – 16 December 2002) is the figure through whom the whole phenomenon becomes visible. She was born in Bhopal, into a family with no musical lineage of any kind: no qawwal bachche descent, no mirasi or dhadhi line, no named ustad, and by every account active family opposition, her mother reportedly tying her hands and feet to frighten her out of singing before eventually learning the harmonium in order to accompany her. The birth date is contested, given variously as 9 May and 15 October 1942, and no primary document has surfaced; the year and the city are secure.

Her formation was theatrical rather than musical. At about the age of nine she sang at the palace of the deposed Nawab of Bhopal, acting out the lyric as she sang, and the acting was her signature from the beginning; she then took lead roles at Bhopal’s Variety Theatre. The origin story she told interviewers is that B. R. Chopra’s unit, on location near Bhopal for Naya Daur (1957) and rained off, heard her sing at a mehfil, and that Dilip Kumar told her she was not Bhopal material and should come to Bombay. She did.

What she then built has no precedent among Indian women. She led her own party instead of singing inside someone else’s, headlined the muqabla circuit as a principal, and turned the competitive qawwali into a lavish staged entertainment with backdrop, orchestra, action and dance. She appeared in some twenty-seven films, among them Jageer (1957), Jungle Princess (1958), Badshah (1964), Raaka (1965) and Dastak (1970), and trade lore holds that producers rescued failing films by inserting a Shakeela Bano qawwali into them, though no source names the films. For years she refused recording offers, on the argument that her art lay in delivery and presence rather than in the voice alone, and HMV issued her first record only in 1971, after which her fame went national; she toured England, Africa and Kuwait. She wrote poetry under the takhallus “Bano” and published a collection, Ek Ghazal Aur.

She was in Bhopal on the night of 2 and 3 December 1984 and was exposed to methyl isocyanate in the gas disaster. The formula in which it is usually stated, that she lost her voice, compresses what the fuller accounts describe as progressive respiratory disability, together with eye damage and diabetes, from which she never recovered. Her performing career ended. She lived a further eighteen years, in and out of hospital, with limited public assistance, and died of cardiac arrest at St George Hospital, Bombay, on 16 December 2002, aged sixty, largely forgotten by the industry she had served.

She is routinely called India’s first woman qawwal. Read literally the claim is untenable, since women had recorded qawwali items commercially before her. Read as a claim about a career it is defensible and has no counterexample: she was the first woman in India to lead her own qawwali party as a national touring and recording act, billed as a qawwal rather than as a singer of something else.

Prabha Bharti, and the Hindu Women of the Circuit

Prabha Bharti, active from the 1960s to the 1990s and at her height in the 1970s and 1980s in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, is the more consequential figure for this book’s combined argument about community and gender, because she crossed both boundaries at once: a Hindu woman qawwal in a Muslim devotional form. She entered it, by her own account, more as a novelty than as a principal, and became a formidable competitor, winning muqable against male qawwals including Ustad Chhote Ussaf, Nazir Bharati, Afzal Iqbal and Imam Khan. She organised benefit concerts for Indian soldiers during the war of 1971 and toured Dubai, Kuwait, Damascus, Abu Dhabi and Muscat in 1980 under official auspices for the Republic Day celebrations. Her landmark record is Rang-e-Qawwali (1978), issued not by a major but by the S.V.M. Recording Company of Delhi as SVM-50002, its six tracks running from Khusrau’s “Chhap Tilak Sab Chhini” through a Punjabi lyric to light qawwali, with music by Pandit Shiv Pershad and words by Khusrau, Amrita Pritam, B. K. Puri and Shaad Fiddai. An HMV disc, Prabha Bharti Ghazal & Qawali, composed by Kesar Singh Narula, followed or preceded it; the year is not established.

Her profile is the exact photographic negative of a gharana musician’s. She has no recorded birth date, no birthplace, no named teacher, no silsila, no initiation and no award; the sources positively suggest she had no ustad at all and learned by memorisation. What she has instead is a competition record, four named male opponents defeated, a record of state patronage, and a commercial record. That is the alternative architecture of career which the muqabla circuit made available to women, and it is precisely the architecture that gharana historiography has no means of recording. She died in Andheri, Bombay, at a date no source establishes, and no obituary written for her.

She was not unique in her community either. Rani Rooplata, a second Hindu woman qawwal, appears on a Muqabla disc of 1967 alongside Yusuf Azad and Kalandar Azad, and again on HMV’s Muqabila-Ashiqana Qawwali of 1974; a trade directory still lists a Rani Rooplata qawwal party in Dongri, in the Muslim quarter of south Bombay. Nothing else about her is documented at all.

One caution about the name. “Bharti” in this circuit is a party name and not a family name, functioning exactly as “Sabri”, “Niazi” and “Warsi” do. Prabha Bharti’s own reported opponent was a Nazir Bharati, and the present-day qawwala Chanchal Bharti’s accompanists include Taj Bharti, Naseem Bharti and Aman Bharti. No kinship should be inferred between any of them.

The Women of the Muqabla Record

The most productive way to find these women is not biography but discography, and what the record catalogues yield is a roster of professional women qawwals audible on commercial discs and almost wholly absent from written history. The industry even coined a feminine term for them: the labels print Qawwala, as in “Arzoo Banu Qawwala” and “Rani Shahin Qawwalla”, which is trade usage rather than a classical category but is evidence that a distinct female professional slot was recognised by the 1970s.

The most prolific of them is Rashida Khatoon, almost always credited jointly with Yusuf Azad Qawwal, the pairing itself surviving as a single artist entity on the streaming platforms. Her Muqabila-e-Rashida Khatoon-o-Yusuf Azad (1972) is the cleanest artefact of the form in existence: Angel EKDA 10036 in Pakistan, with an Indian HMV pressing reported as 7EPE 1538, one contestant to a side, her “Pyar Ka Naam Na Le Pyar Bura Hota Hai” on side A and his answer “Kisne Kaha Pyar Bura Hota Hai” on side B, words by Zafar Gorakhpuri. She also cut devotional discs, among them the manqabat Karamat-e-Hazrat Ali (1974) and the widely circulated naat “Humko Madina Bulalo”, sang on HMV’s six-voice Muqabila-Ashiqana Qawwali (1974), appeared on the 1979 LP Muqabila, Nasihat, Naat, whose title packages contest, homily and praise of the Prophet as three saleable modes, and acted and sang in the films Putlibai (1972) and Noor-e-Elahi (1976). She has no recorded birth date, no death date, no established birthplace and no named teacher, while her male partner has all four.

Around her stands a whole professional stratum that exists only as label credits. Nayab Bano and Razia Bano sing on the 1974 and 1967 discs respectively. Shaheda Bano Jaipuri and Tabassum Bano share HMV 7EPE 4218 (Aashiqana Qawwali, 1977), which is an all-female contest disc with no male voice on it at all, and an associated release pairs Shaheda Bano Jaipuri with Nurjahan Begum Jaipuri, the strongest surviving hint of an all-woman qawwali party, based at Jaipur, in the 1970s. Arzoo Banu Qawwala cut Muqabla with Kalandar Azad in 1979 and appears also on Pee Le Sharabi alongside Aziz Nazan. Rani Shahin Qawwalla and Zameer Hussain Qawwal recorded Shama-Parwana (Muqabla) in 1980, the title making the woman the candle and the man the moth who burns in it. Mehlka Banu and Kalandar Azad cut Muqabla: Disco Qawwali in 1983. Saira Khan answered Aslam Sabri on Darwaza Khula Rakhna in 1993. By 2000 the female lead on Aaja Meri Rani (Muqabla-e-Qawwali) is billed as “Baby Disco”. For every one of these women there is no birth date, no death date, no teacher, no biography and no interview.

That chronology, running from 1967 to 2000 and peaking in the vinyl years between about 1972 and 1983, tells the essential story. The muqabla was the loophole. It is qawwali stripped of its sama function and recast as competitive entertainment; because it is not ritual, the ritual objection does not bite; and because it is a contest, it requires an opposing voice, and the commercially most interesting opposing voice was a woman’s. The record industry discovered that man against woman sold, and manufactured a category in which to sell it. But the price of that door was prestige. The same commercial logic that admitted women drove the form steadily toward the ashiqana register and thence into the double-meaning cassette circuit that survives on the video platforms today. Not one of these women received a national award, and almost none of them has a recorded date of birth. That is why a gharana-centred history of Hindustani music has nothing whatever to say about them, and it is the sharpest irony this survey has to offer.

The Living Indian Women

The clearest present-day case of an Indian woman fronting a full qawwali party is Chanchal Bharti, of Banaras and now East Delhi, whose career reaches back some four decades. She trained in classical music under the late Pandit Shyam Lal Mishra and took her qawwali repertoire from Iqbal Afzal Sabri; the “Banaras qawwali gharana” attributed to her teacher in her own publicity is not a designation the standard literature recognises, and it should be quoted rather than endorsed. She closed the Basant Utsav of the Chandigarh Sangeet Natak Akademi at the Tagore Theatre in February 2016, billed as a qawwali maestro, singing Khusrau, sufiana kalam and qawwali-numa ghazals; her party on that occasion was named in the press: Taj Bharti and Naseem Bharti on harmonium, Zaved and Ghanshyam on tabla, Aman Bharti on dholak, and Tajjudin in vocal support. It is a full qawwal party under a woman’s name and, in its personnel, a mixed Hindu and Muslim one. Her birth date is attested nowhere and she holds no award.

Two of the best-documented Indian women qawwals come, unexpectedly, from Kerala. Nisa Azeezi holds the Ganabhooshanam in Carnatic vocal from the Chembai Memorial Government Music College at Palakkad under K. G. Marar, a Hindustani vocal diploma from the Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal, and gurukula training under A. E. Vincent Master, Sarat Chandra Maratte, Umer Bhai, Ustad Faiyaz Khan of the Kirana gharana and currently Ustad Rafique Khan of the Dharwad line; she held a Junior Fellowship of the Ministry of Culture from 2000 for a study of the ghazal tradition of Malabar, recorded Ethra Madhuramaay Padunnu Nee in 2010, performs with her sister Thabassunneesa, directed the music department of a school at Tirur for twenty years, and received the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Award in 2023, a state and not the national akademi honour. She is the only woman in this section whose documented, named, multi-gharana classical training is applied directly to qawwali. Shabnam Riyaz, from Ochira, leads an all-woman qawwali ensemble called Layali Sufiya, teaches Sufi music, and traces her descent to a great-grandfather, Vavaasan, who sang qawwali at Kollam; the source for her is a single regional outlet, and the detail should be treated as reported rather than established. That the two clearest living cases come from a state with no hereditary dargah qawwali establishment is the most economical evidence available for the argument of this whole section: where there is no hereditary gatekeeping, women qawwals appear.

Beside them stand two figures who are frequently called qawwals and are more precisely something else. The Nooran Sisters, Sultana (b. 14 June 1992) and Jyoti (b. 24 February 1994) of Jalandhar, carry the strongest lineage claim among Indian women in this idiom, and the lineage is worth stating correctly: their great-grandmother Bibi Noora of Lyallpur; their grandmother Swarn Noora, trained not by her mother but by her husband Sohan Lal, whom she called her real ustad; and their father and sole teacher Ustad Gulshan Mir. That is a four-generation singing khandan in which the performers of the first, second and fourth generations are women. The family’s affiliation to the Sham Chaurasi gharana is a claim of tradition rather than a documented descent from the Salamat Ali line, and should be written as claimed. Their vehicles were television and film rather than the shrine: MTV Sound Trippin in 2012 with “Tung Tung”, A. R. Rahman’s “Patakha Guddi” for Highway in 2014, two Mirchi Music Awards in 2015 and a Filmfare Punjabi award in 2017. What they sing is Punjabi Sufi kalam in a duo format with harmonium, dholak and taali; there is no qaul, no liturgical sequence and no sama function, and the honest description is Sufi devotional singing in a qawwali-derived idiom rather than a qawwal party. Punjabi press reports of a separation between the sisters in 2023 are unconfirmed by mainstream reporting, and their present status is unresolved.

Zila Khan, daughter of Ustad Vilayat Khan of the Imdadkhani gharana, matters here for another reason. She was formally made her father’s gandabandh shagird and taught by him at length, and is described as the first woman of that family in seven generations to sing in public; her Sufi repertoire is said to include the properly Khusrauvian forms of qaul, qalbana and gul, a stronger claim than most singers billed as Sufi can make. But she performs as a solo concert vocalist and not as the leader of a party, and the frequent billing of her as India’s first woman Sufi singer is disproved by every name in the two preceding sections. She is the one woman in this account with an unambiguous hereditary initiation, and it is an initiation into a sitar gharana, not into a qawwal khandan.

Against all of this must be set the two women whose only appearance in the literature is as evidence of the barrier. Naz Warsi and Baby Taj are recorded, in Christopher Holland’s fieldwork and through Benson Rajan’s article, as women who sought to perform at dargahs and were told by those who had inherited the space that neither women nor any other uninherited performer could do so. No biography, discography or interview of either has been found, and the Warsi in the first name is a Sufi-order nisba and not evidence of membership of the Hyderabad qawwal family. There is no documented case of a woman leading a qawwal party in sama inside a major Indian Chishti dargah. At Ajmer the hereditary male khandan holds the office; at Nizamuddin the photographic record of Basant Panchami shows the women seated apart from the platform, out in the courtyard.

Recovery of this history is only now beginning, and it is a generation late. The Kathak dancer Manjari Chaturvedi, through her Sufi Kathak Foundation, mounted The Qawwali Photo Project at the India International Centre in 2021 and at Museo Camera, Gurgaon, in 2022, documenting more than four hundred qawwals across Awadh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Delhi and Hyderabad, with Leena Kejriwal photographing the women and Chanchal Bharti among the named subjects. In February 2026 Chaturvedi stated that fourteen years of research had identified fifty-one female qawwals whose place in the tradition has been written out. None of the fifty-one has been named in print. Her own diagnosis is that qawwali is treated as a casual art form, that it has effectively no academic literature, and that only one scholarly book on it exists. Her working estimate that women have been singing qawwali for twenty-five years or so is itself telling, since it means the muqabla generation of the 1960s to the 1980s is invisible even to those now doing the recovery.

Pakistan: the Route Through Radio

In Pakistan the same structural fact produced a different set of careers, because the principal door was the state broadcaster rather than the record industry.

Zahida Parveen (1925 – May 1975) is the crucial pre-Abida case and is now nearly forgotten. Born at Amritsar and orphaned early, raised by an elder sister, Peeran Ditti, she came from a peerni rather than a courtesan family, which was the precondition of a respectable public career; she migrated to Lahore at Partition. Unlike almost every other woman in this section she had a real lineage: early training from the sarangi players Baba Taj of Kapurthala and Hussain Bakhsh Khan of Amritsar, and from 1948 formal shagirdi in Lahore under Ustad Ashiq Hussain Khan of the Patiala gharana. She was Malika-e-Kafi, the queen of the kafi, and above all of the Multani kafi, and she was called into the film studios when a playback singer could not manage the passagework, since her taans were of a difficulty the industry could not otherwise supply. She sang khayal, thumri, ghazal and geet besides, in Punjabi, Siraiki, Urdu, Sindhi and Hindi, recorded for HMV and left a large Radio Pakistan Lahore archive, and took the gold medal of the All Pakistan Music Conference in 1964. Her daughter Shahida Parveen, whom she had trained under Ustad Akhtar Hussain Khan of Patiala, became a classical singer and died in 2003. Her death date is itself contested, given as 15 May by one standard reference and as 7 May by Radio Pakistan’s own annual commemoration. She is forgotten for reasons structural rather than musical: she worked through radio rather than the film industry’s social circuits and so built no patronage network; she died young, just as Abida Parveen was emerging into the same slot; and kafi in Punjabi and Siraiki was a provincial rather than a national-prestige genre.

Reshma (c. 1947 – 3 November 2013) is the limit case at the other end. Born into a nomadic Banjara household at Loha in Churu district, Rajasthan, the daughter of a camel and horse trader, and carried to Karachi at Partition when she was about a month old, she had no training of any kind, no literacy, no schooling and no lineage whatever. She sang at Sindhi shrines as a child and was heard at about twelve at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan Sharif by the Radio Pakistan producer Saleem Gilani. Her 1968 recording of the Qalandari dhamaal “Lal Meri Pat Rakhio”, better known as “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar”, made her nationally famous overnight; “Lambi Judai”, used in the Indian film Hero in 1983, made her one of the first Pakistani singers to become a mass favourite in India. She received the Pride of Performance in 1982 and the Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 2008, and died of the throat cancer that had recurred since the 1980s. She never sang qawwali in party format, and the point of her career is that the alternative route for women ran through folk practice and state radio, and through no khandan at all.

Abida Parveen, and the Repertoire Without the Institution

Abida Parveen (b. 20 February 1954, Ali Goharabad, Larkana) is the central case and the hardest. Her father, Ustad Ghulam Haider, ran a music school at Larkana that took male pupils only, and made his daughter rather than either of his two sons his musical heir; the account, which comes from her own interviews rather than from independent documentation but has held consistent across decades, is that she sang a complete kalam at about the age of three and that she was never pushed. Her apprenticeship was served singing at the dargahs of Sindh beside her father, and that is the substantive difference between her formation and a khayal singer’s: she was trained in the shrine performance context rather than in a gharana’s practice room. She is generally said to have received further guidance from Ustad Salamat Ali Khan of the Sham Chaurasi gharana, but no formal initiation is documented, and the careful sources say mentorship rather than shagirdi. Properly speaking she has no gharana, and she neither claims one nor is claimed by one; her authority is shrine-derived and charismatic rather than lineal, which is exactly why she is a hard case for a survey organised by lineage.

She married Ghulam Hussain Sheikh, a senior producer at Radio Pakistan and by several accounts her cousin, in 1975, and he subordinated his own career to act as her manager, producer and gatekeeper. That arrangement is worth naming precisely, because it is structural rather than incidental: a male relative interposed between the woman and the market performed, for her, the function that a khandan performs for a hereditary male qawwal. He died of a heart attack on an international flight in the early 2000s; no source establishes the year. Management passed to their daughter Maryam, and her greatest global visibility came after his death, not before. She suffered a heart attack while performing in Lahore in 2010 and continued.

Her repertoire is kafi above all, from the Shah jo Risalo of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai and from Bulleh Shah, together with ghazal, thumri, naat, some khayal and the modern Urdu poets. But it takes in the qawwali repertoire proper as well: “Chaap Tilak”, “Aaj Rang Hai”, “Man Kunto Maula”. What it does not take in is the institution. She sits alone with a harmonium, her accompanists are employees rather than a khandan, there is no hamnawa row and no taali, no liturgical order from hamd to rang, no attachment to a silsila as a licensed functionary, and no assembly presided over by a shaikh. She sings for an audience in a concert frame, not at a mahfil-e-sama as its musical servant. The exact and defensible position is that she is a sufiana kalam and kafi singer whose repertoire overlaps with qawwali, and not a qawwal; the scholarship says so in as many words. What she did do, and it is the larger fact, is described best by Sonia Gaind-Krishnan: she “de-linked embodied gender and access to this genre”, giving other women permission to take on the qawwali repertoire, and, singing in a deep alto in a field that expected women to be high and light, permission to sing low. She took the repertoire without taking the office, and in doing so proved that the two could be separated at all.

She holds the Pride of Performance (1984), the Sitara-e-Imtiaz (2005), the Hilal-e-Imtiaz (2012) and, in March 2021, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, Pakistan’s highest civil honour, which almost no musician holds. She has no Padma award; her principal Indian recognition is the Begum Akhtar Academy’s lifetime award of 2012. She has repeatedly declined Bollywood offers, including from A. R. Rahman, citing her Sufi commitments.

 

Riffat Sultana, and the Woman Born Inside the Khandan

For a survey of gharanas the sharpest Pakistani case is not Abida Parveen but Riffat Sultana, daughter of Ustad Salamat Ali Khan of the Sham Chaurasi gharana and sister of Sukhawat Ali Khan and Shafqat Salamat Ali Khan. She is described as the first woman to sing in public in a family lineage of eleven generations, and she was excluded from the formal talim given to her brothers, gathering what she could by listening in at the door. Her own account is unsparing: “Pakistan is not too liberal for woman, they not respect much. That’s why my brother and my dad not allow me to sing in Pakistan,” and “This opportunity America gave me. If I don’t came to America, I don’t get to sing.” She toured Europe and North America with her father in 1990 and 1991 and remained in the United States; she sang semi-privately in Pakistani-American gatherings, married the guitarist Richard Michos in 1996, and in time obtained her father’s permission to sing professionally. She formed the Ali Khan Band in 1995 and the electro-acoustic project Shabaz, and recorded Tawsir (1998), Zindagi (2000) and Sufi Folk and Love Songs (2005) from the San Francisco Bay Area. She adds, of the effect: “Now my cousins see me and a few more of them are starting this career, they stand for themself.” Hers is the mechanism the doctrinal literature describes structurally, set down in the singer’s own words: exclusion from talim rather than from talent, and emigration as the only exit.

The Parties That Are Not Quite Parties

Two Pakistani ensembles are routinely described in print as female qawwali groups. In both cases the description wants qualifying.

The Manwa Sisters, three sisters named Saba, Fauzia and Zille Huma, from Faisalabad and resident in Lahore since about 2015, are the group usually called Pakistan’s first female qawwal party. They come out of a qawwali-singing family, their grand-uncle or grandfather, the sources disagree, being the composer Rashid Faridi Qawwal; they studied with several teachers of Hindustani classical music and qawwali and took a vocal course at the Alhamra Arts Council. Their first original composition, “Allah Janey”, appeared in 2016, and they were featured on Mekaal Hasan’s Rivayat series in 2023. Their own account of the obstacle is the most useful thing about them, and it confirms everything argued above: they cannot afford to hire a full qawwal ensemble, meaning tabla, dholak, second harmonium and a row of hamnawa, and they receive no support from the established gharanas; they teach schoolchildren privately to make up the income. No birth dates are published for any of them and no coverage after 2023 has been found. A second group, the “Shaheen qawwal group”, is named in one scholarly article and is otherwise entirely undocumented: no city, no members, no recordings, no dates.

The Sabri Sisters, Sanam and Anamta of Karachi, are the genuinely hereditary case, described as nieces of the murdered Amjad Sabri and descendants of the Sabri Brothers, though the exact genealogical link is not stated in the sources. They are also, in performance, a two-voice act with session backing rather than a qawwali party: “Meri Zindagi Hai Tu” with Asim Azhar, released in November 2025 as the title song of the television drama of that name, is an OST pop item, and “Maghron La” on Coke Studio’s fifteenth season in April 2024 is a festive Punjabi number with qawwali colour. They were placed on a Spotify EQUAL billboard in Times Square in June 2026 and toured the United Kingdom that summer. They are the strongest existing case of women of a qawwal khandan performing publicly under its name, and what they perform is not qawwali in the hereditary sense. The male line’s party continues separately.

Zeb Bangash, and the One Crack in the Wall

The single genuinely new development lies not in qawwali at all but in the khayal taught alongside it. Zeb Bangash (b. 1981), of a Bangash family of Kohat, educated at Smith College and known first as half of Zeb and Haniya, has studied khayal for about a decade under Ustad Naseeruddin Saami, of the Qawwal Bachchon ka Gharana, and is named with Ali Sethi as one of his two notable outside students. Since 2023 she has run Healing Khayal, a four-month residency placing six beginners with Ustad Saami, with Homayra Ziad of Johns Hopkins researching its effects, and she has produced and presented his concerts in Karachi and Chicago. A woman is therefore now both a shagird of a qawwal-bachche ustad and the principal institutional patron of his transmission. The precise shape of this matters: the khandan’s khayal pedagogy has opened to a woman; its qawwali office has not. It is the strongest counter-example available to the flat claim that women stand wholly outside the khandan system, and it is still not an entry into the party.

The Shrine, the Dhamaal, and Where Women May Stand

Where women may physically stand determines what they can ever be socialised into, and the picture is not one of steady liberalisation.

The permissive exception is Sehwan Sharif, where women take part openly in the dhamaal, the ecstatic drum-driven dance of the courtyard, spinning and chanting with veils slipping and hair loosened, and where a specifically female variant, the Zainabi dhamaal, is danced with open hair in memory of Bibi Zainab’s captivity after Karbala. It is the clearest institutionally recognised female ritual role anywhere in Pakistani shrine practice, and it is wholly collective: no individual woman dancer at Sehwan is named anywhere in the literature. The female malang or faqira exists as a recognised type and is thinly documented; the most concrete case is not Sehwan but the shrine of Mai Noorun Nisa Begum at Dhoke Sahi near Dina, in Jhelum district, which is staffed and managed entirely by women, its named caretakers Mai Hameeda and Mai Rashida guiding visitors, and which houses destitute women as faqiras in the saint’s service. Women’s ritual authority in Pakistan gathers, in other words, at the shrines of female saints, such as Bibi Pak Daman at Lahore, rather than at the great Chishti dargahs.

Against that stand two events. On the eve of Muharram 9 in September 2018, during the 776th urs of Baba Farid at Pakpattan, two senior officials, Dr Farah Masood, Commissioner of Sahiwal, and Mariya Mahmood, District Police Officer, performed the ceremonial passage of the Bahishti Darwaza that is conventionally assigned to the commissioner or regional police officer. The custodial Dewan family objected publicly, the shrine was shut for some forty minutes while a male caretaker ritually relocked and reopened the door, and the custodians stated that no woman had passed the gate in seven hundred years. The officials’ defence, that they went through as office-holders and not as women, is exactly the manoeuvre these singers make musically: access is granted to a role, never to a gender. And after the suicide bombing at Sehwan on 16 February 2017, which killed at least eighty-eight people and struck in effect at the dhamaal itself, the Karachi dancer and activist Sheema Kermani travelled to the shrine within days and danced the dhamaal there, whereupon local women rose and joined her. Her line was that to counter hatred and death, dance and music work as therapy and as a bridge. The counter-movement is larger: the Thursday dhamaal at Baba Shah Jamal in Lahore, for decades the most famous urban dhamaal in Pakistan, stopped entirely in 2017 on security grounds and has not resumed. The net movement at Punjabi urban shrines between 2015 and 2026 has been restriction rather than opening, and it has been driven by counter-terrorism rather than by doctrine.

The Studio Door: Film and Coke Studio

Everything women have gained in qawwali they have gained in mediated space, and the film qawwali was the first of those spaces. Its landmark items are almost all female or partly so. Zeenat (1945) gave Hindi cinema its all-female qawwali. Mughal-e-Azam (1960) staged an explicit woman against woman muqabla at court in “Teri Mehfil Mein Qismat Aazma Kar”, Shamshad Begum answered by Lata Mangeshkar, composed by Naushad to Shakeel Badayuni’s words, which predates the earliest female muqabla disc by seven years. Barsaat Ki Raat (1960) put Asha Bhosle and Sudha Malhotra into the competitive sequences beside Rafi and Manna Dey. Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960) set Asha Bhosle against Shamshad Begum. Dil Hi To Hai (1963) gave Asha Bhosle “Nigahen Milane Ko Ji Chahta Hai” alone. In Pakistan, Mehtab (1962) carried an all-female film qawwali sung by Naseem Begum and Mala, music by Manzoor and Ashraf and words by Shabab Kiranvi, half a century before the Manwa Sisters and with no recorded controversy at all. The proportions, however, remain what they are: a content analysis of a decade of Hindi film songs found sixty-six qawwali tracks in six thousand six hundred and sixty-four songs, of which only twenty-two carried a female voice, and forty-four per cent of those paired the woman with a male lead rather than giving her the number. On the branded streaming platforms the proportion is better, women contributing about thirty-eight per cent of Sufi-based songs and about forty per cent of those on Coke Studio, which measures how completely the mediated space and the ritual space have parted company.

Coke Studio Pakistan, running since 2008, is the film qawwali’s direct successor and the largest single vector by which Pakistani women have come to sing qawwali repertoire in public, precisely because it decouples the repertoire from the party: a woman can sing Khusrau on it without shrine, silsila, khandan or licence. Abida Parveen appeared from the third season in 2010; Sanam Marvi (b. 17 April 1986, Hyderabad, Sindh, trained by her father the shrine singer Faqeer Ghulam Rasool, holder of the Latif Award in 2011 and the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz in 2020) across the third to sixth; Tina Sani, trained under Ustad Nizamuddin Khan, son of Ustad Ramzan Khan of the Delhi gharana, set the opening of Rumi’s Masnavi in Urdu in 2011; Hadiqa Kiani sang Bulleh Shah’s “Kamli” in 2012 and later covered Nusrat’s qawwali “Jani Door Gaye” in 2023; Farida Khanum, of the Patiala gharana through Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan, sang her signature ghazal at eighty-one in 2015. Three items matter especially. In 2014 Abida Parveen and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan traded verses of “Chaap Tilak” as equals, a woman and a hereditary qawwal exchanging a core Khusrau text antiphonally. In January 2022 “Tu Jhoom” paired Abida Parveen with Naseebo Lal (b. 10 January 1970), a singer from the low-status professional-entertainer stratum with no training, no gharana and no schooling, and became the season’s breakout; the controversy that followed was a plagiarism claim by the young Sindhi singer Nirmala Maghani and had nothing to do with gender. And in March 2022 Quratulain Balouch fronted the Zain Zohaib Qawwals on “Thagyan”, the rare documented case of a woman standing at the head of an actual qawwal party, in a television studio.

The Indian equivalents are the playback singers with real classical training who work in the Sufi register without ever entering a party: Rekha Bhardwaj, trained under Pandit Amarnath of the Indore lineage and, by her own account, taught repertoire directly by the Sabri Brothers and by Shankar and Shambhu, which is a rare documented case of a woman taking material from qawwals; Harshdeep Kaur (b. 16 December 1986), trained in Hindustani classical under Tejpal Singh of the Singh Brothers and mentored on television by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan; Kavita Seth (b. 14 September 1970) of the Karwaan group, whose album Sufiana (2008) sets Rumi; and Richa Sharma (b. 29 August 1974), trained under Pandit Aaskaran Sharma, whose “Sajda” for My Name Is Khan (2010) took a Zee Cine Award and whose is the most convincingly qawwali-capable voice among the contemporary playback women. None of them leads a qawwali party either.

What the Evidence Supports

Set out together, the material yields a conclusion sharper than the one usually offered. Qawwali is the one major branch of this tradition organised by descent rather than discipleship. Khayal is organised by shagirdi, and a woman can be initiated into it, which is why Kesarbai, Mogubai, Hirabai, Gangubai and Kishori Amonkar exist; the qawwal party is a khandan, entry is by birth, and no amount of ability creates a place in it. Women therefore entered qawwali through the screen, the record and the concert stage, never through the dargah; the muqabla was the specific mechanism, because a contest requires an opposing voice and a commercial contest is not a ritual; and the price of that door was the prestige of the form itself, so that the women who came through it left almost no biographical trace and received no honours at all. Meanwhile the most female-voiced repertoire in the entire Chishti canon, the rang, the basant, the bridal suhaag, the soul as a bride going to her lord, is sung at Nizamuddin and Ajmer in a woman’s voice by men, while the women sit apart in the courtyard. That is the paradox in its most compact form, and Shemeem Burney Abbas’s formulation is the sharpest available statement of it: the female voice pervades Sufi ritual precisely where actual women are absent.

 

The Film Qawwali

The filmi qawwali crystallised in 1960 with Barsaat Ki Raat and its long climactic muqabla, “Na To Carvan Ki Talash Hai”, composed by Roshan to lyrics by Sahir Ludhianvi and sung by Mohammed Rafi, Manna Dey, Asha Bhosle, Sudha Malhotra and S. D. Batish. It remains the genre-defining track.

What film qawwali preserves is the competitive muqabla frame of two parties answering each other, the handclap-and-dholak texture, and a genuinely literary Urdu ghazal register offered to a mass audience. What it discards is almost everything ritually essential: the assembly sequence from qaul to rang, girah, the Persian and Braj strata, the spiritual hierarchy of the audience, and above all the purpose, since Meraj Ahmed Nizami’s insistence that qawwali is prayer and not entertainment cannot survive the transfer. It secularises the addressee, converting what practitioners call sufi sama into permanent aashiqana sama, and by the 1970s the film qawwali is a courtship or a comic set-piece. Its economic effect cut both ways: it created a national audience and a cassette market into which hereditary families could sell, and Habib Painter, Ismail Azad, Yusuf Azad, Aziz Nazan and Shankar-Shambhu all lived off it, while establishing a non-hereditary and non-classical performance norm against which the shrine families then had to compete at weddings and on stage.

Of the composers, Roshan (Roshan Lal Nagrath, 1917–1967) was the master of the form, and his classical training was formal and first-rank: the Marris College of Music at Lucknow under Pandit S. N. Ratanjankar, and sarod under Ustad Allauddin Khan of Maihar, which is stronger training than most of the qawwals in this Part possessed. Naushad Ali (1919–2006) wrote his qawwalis in a self-consciously classical Awadhi idiom and was deeply raga-literate though largely self-taught. Ravi (1926–2012), who wrote “Sharma Ke Ye Kyon Sab” for Chaudhvin Ka Chand, had no formal classical training whatever, which is evidence that the film qawwali is a compositional idiom not requiring raga literacy; and Laxmikant-Pyarelal, Kalyanji-Anandji and R. D. Burman carried the form into the 1970s largely as a rhythmic and comic device. A. R. Rahman’s significance is different in kind, and it needs stating precisely, because the popular account of it is wrong. He put the Nizami Bandhu on screen at Nizamuddin for “Kun Faya Kun” in Rockstar (2011), but the recorded vocals on that track are Rahman’s, Javed Ali’s and Mohit Chauhan’s, and Chand Nizami has said so plainly: they were seen singing it and did not sing it. “Khwaja Mere Khwaja” from Jodhaa Akbar (2008) was likewise sung by Rahman himself. The hereditary party’s own recorded film appearance is the Khusrau bandish “Aaj Rang Hai” in Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015). The staging and that recording together are still the most important recent bridge between the film industry and the dargah lineage, but the bridge is narrower than it is usually said to be.

Among the singers, Mohammed Rafi (1924–1980), trained under Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan of Kirana, is the definitive film-qawwali voice, and Manna Dey (1919–2013), trained under Ustad Aman Ali Khan of Bhendibazaar and Ustad Abdul Rahman Khan, was the classically heaviest of them, called on when a sequence needed real raga weight. Asha Bhosle, Shamshad Begum, Sudha Malhotra and S. D. Batish carried the rest, alongside genuine qawwals drawn into the film economy such as Ismail Azad, Yusuf Azad and Jaani Babu Qawwal, who had no classical lineage.

The Present State

In Pakistan the tradition is intact but stratified. The Karachi qawwal bachche continue in three parties, those of Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad, the Najmuddin Saifuddin Brothers and Abdullah Manzoor Niazi, all of them holding to the Persian and Arabic repertoire and the archaic forms; the Nusrat line continues traditionally in Rizwan-Muazzam and commercially in Rahat Fateh Ali Khan; the Sabri and Miandad families continue; and Faiz Ali Faiz, Mehr Ali Sher Ali and Asif Ali Khan Santoo work the shrine and festival circuits. Against that stands the political vulnerability that Amjad Sabri’s assassination in 2016 made undeniable.

In India the picture is harder. The Warsi Brothers at Hyderabad are alive, active and internationally honoured, and are documenting their repertoire and training the next generation; the Nizami Bandhu, the Nizami Khusro Bandhu, the Khas Qawwal and Niazi lines and Imran Nizami’s haapul branch all still sing at Nizamuddin; the Qutbi Brothers tour heavily; Ateeq Hussain Khan is active at Hyderabad; and Danish Hussain Badayuni holds the surviving Badaun line. But shrine service no longer supports the hereditary Delhi families. The reported pattern is a split household income, one brother staying for the ritual Thursday duty, paid in offerings that are unreliable and shared among the party, while another travels for concerts, weddings and corporate Sufi nights; households of six in a single room are normal in the basti. The closure of the shrines in 2020 and 2021 stopped the offering economy entirely, and wedding and concert work recovered faster than shrine income, accelerating the drift from ritual to commercial performance. The chief qawwal of the Salim Chishti dargah at Fatehpur Sikri, Mohammad Azeez Chishti, trained by his father Noor Mohammad Qawwal and with some fifty years of service behind him, is in poor health and openly unwilling to pass the tradition to his children because it cannot feed them. That is the most consequential single fact in this section, because hereditary occupations end when the incumbents stop recruiting rather than when audiences stop listening.

The counter-trend is prestige without money. The Sangeet Natak Akademi Award of 2014, the Aga Khan Music Award of 2025, festival and diaspora touring, streaming reach and the Rockstar effect have raised the ceiling for a handful of exportable groups while the floor, meaning the ordinary shrine qawwal, has fallen. A winner-take-all economy is displacing a guild economy, and that is precisely what dissolves a gharana.

Two losses stand out. Meraj Ahmed Nizami died in 2015 with no successor of comparable command, and with him went the last Persian-fluent, girah-centred practice at Nizamuddin. Jafar Hussain Khan Badauni died in 1998, and the khayal taleem of his line broke at Wajahat Hussain Khan’s death in April 2014 and was not taken up. A gharana is not a bloodline but a transmission, and it ends the moment the transmission stops, however impeccable the descent that remains.

 

Mufaddal Idris Khumri

September 30, 2026