Part V.VIII : Pakistani Gharanas and Post-Partition Branches

Partition in 1947 cut the gharana map in two. Lahore, Multan and the Punjab courts had been integral to the tradition, and the migrations of 1947–50 carried whole lineages across: Patiala’s leading family, the Delhi gharana’s qawwals, Kirana’s greatest woman singer, the Talwandi dhrupad house and the Delhi sarangi khandan all passed into the new state. There, classical patronage was thinner, religious attitudes to music were contested, and Radio Pakistan, the All Pakistan Music Conference (founded in 1959 by Hayat Ahmad Khan of Lahore) and later EMI-Pakistan and Coke Studio became the substitute patrons. Khayal contracted; ghazal, kafi and qawwali, the genres nearer to popular devotion, flourished. The studies of Virinder Kalra and Regula Qureshi frame this divergence.

The Sham Chaurasia Gharana: The Art of the Duet

The Sham Chaurasia gharana dates by tradition to the sixteenth century, to Miyan Chand Khan and Suraj Khan, said to have been contemporaries of Tansen in the village of Sham Chaurasi, Hoshiarpur, in east Punjab; the family migrated to Lahore in 1947. Its style is a dhrupad-rooted jugalbandi, which makes the duet itself an art-form of two voices in braided counterpoint, and later a full khayal gayaki of severe raga discipline. Its exponents include Ustad Nazakat Ali Khan and Ustad Salamat Ali Khan, the supreme vocal duo of twentieth-century Pakistan; Salamat’s sons Sharafat Ali Khan and Shafqat Salamat Ali Khan; the allied Ustad Hussain Bakhsh Gullu; and Niaz Hussain Shami, who represented the house at the All Pakistan Music Conference of 1961. It is Pakistan’s flagship khayal gharana, and its younger generation works in Lahore and abroad.

Among the living voices of 2026, Ustad Shafqat Salamat Ali Khan sustains the house’s khayal tradition on world stages. Its women hold it too: Riffat Sultana, Salamat Ali Khan’s daughter, sings the family repertoire from her base in California; and the gharana’s greatest gift to the world’s ears may be its disciple Abida Parveen (b. 1954), trained by her father Ghulam Haider and by Ustad Salamat Ali Khan, today the reigning voice of Sufi kafi across the subcontinent.

The Kasur-Patiala Gharana: Pakistan’s Most Visible Classical Lineage

The Kasur-Patiala gharana is the Pakistan branch of Patiala. It descends from the Patiala line of Ali Bakhsh Khan through Bade Ghulam Ali Khan’s family of Kasur, and from the parallel Patiala house of Akhtar Hussain Khan, son of Fateh Ali ‘Alia’ and father of Amanat Ali and Fateh Ali Khan. Bade Ghulam Ali Khan himself passed his last decades in India, returning in 1957 sponsored by Bombay’s film world and, famously, by the personal intervention of admirers up to Nehru. In Pakistan the gharana’s voice was the duo Amanat Ali and Bade Fateh Ali Khan, then Asad Amanat Ali, Hamid Ali Khan and the crossover star Shafqat Amanat Ali, while the ghazal master Ghulam Ali of Kasur-Patiala carried its idiom to the widest South Asian audience. It is the most publicly visible classical lineage in Pakistan.

Among the living voices of 2026, Ustad Hamid Ali Khan and his sons, the crossover star Shafqat Amanat Ali, the Raga Boyz, and the ghazal legend Ghulam Ali remain active. No roll of this gharana is complete without its women: Mukhtar Begum (c. 1901–1982), the Patiala-trained singing star of the gramophone and early film age; her younger sister Farida Khanum (b. 1934), disciple of Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan of Patiala and Pakistan’s living Malika-e-Ghazal, honoured with the Hilal-e-Imtiaz and revered still in her tenth decade; Malika Pukhraj (1912–2004), reckoned among the Patiala line’s pupils; Zahida Parveen (1925–1975), the Patiala-schooled ‘Queen of Kafi’; and Zahida’s daughter Shahida Parveen (1953–2003), trained by Ustad Akhtar Hussain Khan. Above them all in fame stands Malika-e-Tarannum Noor Jehan (1926–2000): born at Kasur into a family of musicians and schooled in the Patiala idiom, tradition recording her training under Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan himself, she carried the gharana’s ang into thousands of film songs and became the most beloved voice Pakistan has produced.

The Qawwal Bachchon ka Gharana: The Delhi Gharana in Karachi

The Qawwal Bachchon ka Gharana is the Delhi gharana as it survived in Karachi. Its lineage is that of the hereditary qawwals of Delhi, traced to Amir Khusrau’s circle, by tradition to Miyan Samat bin Ibrahim, and custodians of the qaul-qalbana repertoire; the leading family migrated to Karachi at Partition. Its exponents include Ustad Munshi Raziuddin (1912–2003) and Ustad Bahauddin Khan; today it is represented by Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad, the most learned qawwali ensemble alive, and by Ustad Naseeruddin Saami (b. 1946), whose khayal and surti microtonal art preserves the Delhi vocal gharana proper, with his sons the Saami Brothers, Muhammad Rauf Saami and Muhammad Urooj Saami. The art is superb, and Coke Studio and global touring have renewed its economy; Naseeruddin Saami’s Glitterbeat albums, produced by the Grammy-winning Ian Brennan, brought him an international following, and he was honoured at the Aga Khan Music Awards in 2025.

Among the living voices of 2026, Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad tour globally alongside the Saami family. The Delhi gharana’s training also formed two of Pakistan’s greatest women: Iqbal Bano (1935–2009), schooled in the Delhi gayaki before Partition and remembered above all for her defiant singing of Faiz’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’ in Lahore during the Zia years; and Suraiya Multanikar (b. 1940), disciple of Ghulam Nabi ‘Fauji’ Khan of the Delhi line, the kafi queen of Multan and a Sitara-i-Imtiaz laureate, whose daughter Rahat Bano Multanikar continues the legacy.

The Qawwali Lineage of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

A Jalandhar hereditary qawwal family six hundred years old by the family’s own reckoning, resettled in Faisalabad, with Ustad Fateh Ali Khan and Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan as its post-Partition pillars. Its exponents include Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948–1997), who wedded gharana-grade vocal command to qawwali and became a world figure through Peter Gabriel’s Real World, WOMAD and film scores; Ustad Rahat Fateh Ali Khan continues the house. The lineage is globally dominant within its genre. Among the living voices of 2026, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan remains among the most widely heard voices in South Asia.

Kirana in Pakistan: Roshan Ara Begum

Roshan Ara Begum (1917–1982), daughter of Abdul Haq Khan and disciple of Abdul Karim Khan, migrated at Partition and settled at Lalamusa. Known as ‘Malika-e-Mausiqi’, the queen of Pakistani khayal, she was the Kirana gayaki’s standard-bearer in the new state. Her death left the branch without a comparable heir, and stands as the emblem of Pakistani khayal’s patronage crisis. The Kirana line survived elsewhere in Pakistan through the jugalbandi brothers Fayyaz Ahmed Khan and Niyaz Ahmed Khan, sons of Bashir Ahmed Khan; through Niaz Ahmed (1946–2019), Ashique Ali Khan (1948–1999) and Mubarak Ali Khan of Lahore (1937–2021); and through the sarangi player Hafizullah Khan (b. 1946).

The Talwandi Dhrupad House and the Gwalior Circle of Lahore

The Talwandi gharana, the one major dhrupad house that went to Pakistan, its living representatives are the Talwandi Brothers, Ali Hafeez Khan and Labrez Afzal Khan. In khayal, Ustad Badaruzzaman and the Gwalior-trained Lahore circle held the Gwalior tradition in place: Baba Sindhe Khan (1885–1950), Qasim Afghan (b. 1878), Umeed Ali Khan (1910–1979), Manzoor Ali Khan (1922–1980), Ustad Ghulam Hassan Shaggan (1928–2015), and today Ustad Fateh Ali Khan (b. 1948). The Bandanawazi musicians sometimes listed with this circle, Qurban Hussain Khan (1901–1970), his son Iqbal Hussain Khan Bandanawazi (1942–2010) and his grandson Ustad Ateeq Hussain Khan (b. 1980), belong on the Indian side of the border: theirs is a seventh-generation Gwalior line settled at Hyderabad.

Kalawant Ghazal and the Instrumental Houses in Pakistan

In kalawant ghazal, Mehdi Hassan (1927–2012), born at Luna in Rajasthan into a kalawant gharana of dhrupad singers and a migrant of 1947, rebuilt the family art as raga-based ghazal and became ‘Shahanshah-e-Ghazal’: proof that gharana knowledge could survive by changing genre.

In the instrumental art, the Punjab tabla house of Lahore (Miyan Qadir Bakhsh’s line, through Ustad Shaukat Hussain Khan and Ustad Tari Khan, with Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain representing its Indian branch, and with Ustad Altaf Hussain ‘Tafu’ until his death in 2024) and Lahore’s sarangi tradition both carried their practice across the border; in the latter stand Ustad Bundu Khan of the Delhi gharana, who migrated to Karachi in 1947 and played on Radio Pakistan until his death in 1955, his son Ustad Umrao Bundu Khan, and Ustad Nathu Khan of Lahore and his successors, now nearly extinct. The Indore-Mewati beenkar sitar line reached Pakistan through Ustad Rais Khan (1939–2017), who migrated in 1986 and received the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in the year of his death; his sons Sohail, Farhan and Huzoor Hasnain Khan continue it in Karachi.

Its institutions include Radio Pakistan’s classical programming, the All Pakistan Music Conference (Lahore, 1959), the Sanjan Nagar Institute, NAPA Karachi (founded in 2005 under Zia Mohyeddin), and Coke Studio (2008), which returned qawwali, kafi and classical voices to mass audiences. Among the further women of Pakistani song are Nayyara Noor (1950–2022) in ghazal; and, still singing, Tahira Syed (daughter of Malika Pukhraj), Tina Sani and Munni Begum; while of the Coke Studio generation, Sanam Marvi and Zeb Bangash have carried kafi and folk-classical repertoire to new millions. In dhrupad, Aliya Rasheed of Lahore, trained in the Dagar-vani at Bhopal, teaches at the National College of Arts and at the Sanjan Nagar institute, and is the first Pakistani woman to master and transmit the form.

The Rising Generation, and the Platform on Which It Is Found

A survey that closes the Pakistani chapter with Shafqat Amanat Ali and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan will conclude that khayal in Pakistan is dying, and the conclusion would be false. It is false because the young classical musicians of that country are nearly invisible to the ordinary apparatus by which musicians become known. They make few commercial records; they are largely absent from film and from the Coke Studio franchise, which draws on the classical world for texture rather than for repertoire; and they work in a state whose broadcasting, which once made Roshan Ara Begum a household voice, has all but withdrawn from the raga. They are to be found instead upon one platform above all others, the annual festival of the All Pakistan Music Conference, founded at Lahore in 1959 by Hayat Ahmad Khan and sustained now by its Karachi chapter, which stages the festival at the National Academy of Performing Arts: the twenty-second in April 2025, the twenty-third in April 2026. What the reference works cannot supply, the festival programme and the archive of its recordings can, and the names that follow are drawn from them. The reader should know the evidentiary position exactly: almost none of these musicians has a recorded date of birth, and their standing here rests upon performance and upon lineage rather than upon discography.

Akbar Ali is the most considerable khayaliya of this generation and the clearest case of the difficulty just described. He was trained by his uncle, Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan of Lahore (1937 – 8 April 2021), Pride of Performance 2007 and a lifetime laureate of the All Pakistan Music Conference, and the lineage deserves stating precisely because it is unorthodox. The family came out of the Jalandhar district as hereditary qawwals; Mubarak Ali Khan received his first instruction from his paternal uncle Ghazanfar Ali Khan, turned from qawwali to khayal under the spell of Ustad Amir Khan’s records, and called Amir Khan his roohani ustad, a spiritual master he never met, so that the Kirana affiliation under which he was listed for five decades was held by devotion and practice rather than by initiation. Akbar Ali inherits that position, singing khayal, thumri and kafi, with archive recordings running from 2007 to 2024 in Aiman, Bihag, Champakali, Puriya Kalyan, Hans Dhun and a thumri in Sindhi Bhairavi, and appearing regularly at the All Pakistan Music Conference and at the Lahore Music Forum, often beside his uncle while the latter lived. What the classical listener hears is the Amir Khan inheritance transmitted through a qawwal’s throat: vilambit taken at a tempo that is slow in fact and not merely in name, the raga opened phrase by phrase in the lower register before any display is permitted, ornament kept deliberately sparse, and taan reserved for late and structural use. His route to notice is itself the argument of this section. A clip posted online carried him to an Indian television talent programme, and he has said plainly that his success is owed in great part to his time in India, and that with YouTube then blocked at home a Pakistani musician had nowhere at all to be seen.

Beside him stand the inheritors of the Lahore Gwalior circle described above. Muslim Shaggan is the grandson and disciple of Ustad Ghulam Hassan Shaggan (1928–2015), taken into taleem at seven, and his album Asar gathers khayal, ghazal, thumri and kafi recorded in a room, a courtyard and a park, which is a deliberate restoration of the baithak to music that the concert hall had begun to formalise; he has lately carried the Gwalior gayaki to British platforms. Izzat Fateh Ali Khan, son of Ustad Fateh Ali Khan of the same circle, sang Puriya Kalyan at the twenty-second festival and Puriya Dhanashree at the twenty-third, which is a young singer choosing the evening Poorvi ragas that leave nowhere to hide. Salman Haider of Shikarpur, likewise of the Gwalior line, brought Parameshwari, a raga of the Todi family that scarcely anybody programmes. The brothers Karam Abbas and Ali Waseem Abbas, sons of the late Ustad Ahmed Ali Khan, were brought forward by the Conference at the Karachi Arts Council as the young voices of that same Gwalior descent. And Mehak Rashid, who opened the twenty-third festival with Bhimpalasi, is the rarest thing on a Pakistani classical platform, a young woman singing khayal, in a country whose last undisputed queen of that form died in 1982.

The instrumental side is thinner and more interesting, because there the young are not inheriting houses so much as rebuilding them. Shahzad Hussain, son of the late Ustad Sajid Hussain, holds the Jaipur-Senia sitar line and played the twenty-third festival with Waqas Gulab on tabla. Zohaib Hassan matters more than his years would suggest, since the sarangi in Pakistan had been left nearly extinct by the decline of the Delhi khandan of Bundu Khan and of Nathu Khan’s Lahore succession: he belongs to the Amritsari sarangi gharana, reckoned three centuries old, is the grandson of Ustad Hussain Bakhsh Amritsari, took taleem at sixteen from the late Ustad Khawar Hussain, has performed solo since 2006 and now teaches at the Alhamra academy in Lahore, having carried the instrument to Washington and across Europe and survived childhood polio to do it. The sarod, which had no Pakistani lineage whatever, has been acquired twice over from outside: by Asad Qizilbash (b. 1963), son of the violinist K. H. Qizilbash, who turned to the instrument after hearing Amjad Ali Khan and was accepted by him as a ganda-band shagird at Delhi in 1997, and by the younger Muzamil, presented at the 2025 festival as the only sarod player in the country, and one who learned the instrument from Indian teachers over the internet. To these should be added Liaquat Homayoun, who brought the rubab onto the classical platform with Yaman at his first public performance, his father seated in the hall, and, in the senior bracket that these musicians look up to, Ustad Ashraf Sharif Khan of the Poonch sitar house, now based in Berlin, and Ustad Farhan Raees Khan of the line of Rais Khan.

Qawwali’s young line is the securest of all, it descends by blood and therefore does not depend upon institutions. The Saami brothers, Muhammad Rauf and Muhammad Urooj, hold their father’s microtonal art at Karachi, and Hamza Akram with his brothers Taimoor and Abdul, grandsons of Ustad Munshi Raziuddin, trained by Ustad Naseeruddin Saami and by their uncle Fareed Ayaz, now tour Europe and the United States as the twenty-sixth generation of the Qawwal Bachchon ka Gharana. Taken together these careers describe a transfer of function that is the real news of Pakistani classical music in this century. Where the court and then the radio station once carried transmission, it is carried now by the festival, by the academy and by the network: the All Pakistan Music Conference and its archive, NAPA at Karachi since 2005, the Sanjan Nagar institute and the Alhamra academy at Lahore, the diaspora platform, and the internet, which has quietly restored to Pakistani musicians the Indian teaching that Partition severed. Two cautions belong with the list. The sample is what one festival makes visible, and there will be musicians at Multan, Peshawar and Quetta whom no register records; and a tradition whose young generation must be sought in a festival programme rather than in a catalogue is not yet secure, however fine its singing.

Mufaddal Idris Khumri

September 27, 2026