Sufism

 

Sufi is not music but a serene experience. When the listener surpasses all circumstances and begins to reciprocate the soulfulness of the composition, he is truly listening to Sufi because Sufi aims to magnify the spirituality within a person. The word originates from Arabic lingo, where Sufi refers to fine wool worn by the mystic sages. Therefore, the word in itself radiates warmth and a sense of texture associated with the sense of touch. Sufi advances through a composition of sentiments evoked by the gesture of holding hands while performing, the auditory bliss and the magnificence of language and lyrics. India became a platform that nourished all these traits and therefore Sufi entered its culture swiftly, hand-in-hand with the Delhi Sultanate.

The Indian audience was fixated on the spiritualism that was the core of this genre. It created a whirlpool of emotions in the audience. Sufi demands not just a listener but an audience as it is a hollistic performance. For instance, the Sufi tradition in Morocco highlights chanting and whirling in association with the Gnawa ritual to bring forth the Derdeba or the trance of night. The importance of whirling has been carried on into the music industry of India and propagated as an essential dimension of Sufi performance. We see that, in the visual exhibition of twirling and whirling in "Khwaja Mere Khawaja", composed by A. R. Rahman in 2005.

Interestingly Sufi in India has disguised itself into multitudes of genres namely Qawwali, Qaul, and Qalbana. Apart from this, Ghazals, folks forms in Sindh and Punjab bestow the same spirit of Sufi. Surprisingly, certain Rajasthani tribes merged Sufi and folk and the stirring depth of such a genre was evident in music festivals such as Ruhaniyat. It was popularised in Kashmir with the name of Sufiyana Kalam. However, in all of it Qawwali became the prime successor of the genre. Amir Khusrao Dehlavi (1253-1325), an Indo-Persian singer who lived during the Delhi Sultanate transformed the course of Sufi into a homegrown musical intricacy. The Sufi community have sustained the musical tradition of "Mahfil-e-sama" emphasising on the immaculate experience of a listener and the tradition is still flaunted with grace in the shrines of Sufi saints, namely the Shaikh Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi and Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmer.

Sufi entered Bollywood with Teri mehfil mein kismat (Mughal-e-Azam) in 1960. The old listeners were used to the names of Sabri brothers, Ghulam Farid, Pathaney Khan and the music in shrines. The Sufi genre saw a bloom in its popularity during the era of Nursat Fateh Ali Khan, later in the 1980s.
Owing to his efforts in the 1990s and his album "Night Song", the Sufi had its fair share of fame in the West.

The trajectory however goes downhill because soon after this, Sufi was consumed with a pinch of commercialisation. Sufi did not religiously tend to a particular God and mainly lingered within the aspect of freedom blended with a concept of liberation of a aoul. However, the later times suggested that Sufi was being heard without any prime knowledge about the divine experience or the poetic essence of the Arabic, Persian and Hindi lyrics. The marfat or the union of soul with music was absent in the hubbub of popularity of Sufism in India.