Browsing by Subject "Qawwali"

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Rethinking Qawwali: perspectives of Sufism, music, and devotion in north India
(2010-05) Holland, Christopher Paul; Hyder, Syed Akbar; Minault, Gail
Scholarship has tended to focus exclusively on connections of Qawwali, a north Indian devotional practice and musical genre, to religious practice. A focus on the religious degree of the occasion inadequately represents the participant’s active experience and has hindered the discussion of Qawwali in modern practice. Through the examples of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s music and an insightful BBC radio article on gender inequality this thesis explores the fluid musical exchanges of information with other styles of Qawwali performances, and the unchanging nature of an oral tradition that maintains sociopolitical hierarchies and gender relations in Sufi shrine culture. Perceptions of history within shrine culture blend together with social and theological developments, long-standing interactions with society outside of the shrine environment, and an exclusion of the female body in rituals. To better address Qawwali performances and their meanings, I foreground the perspectives of shrine social actors and how their thoughts reflect their community, its music, and gendered spaces.
SAGAR: South Asia Graduate Research Journal, Volume 14
(2005) University of Texas at Austin; Sayers, Matthew R.; Buck, Tracy; Buddharaju, Jyothsna; Byer, Cory; Curtiss, Cary; Rajan, V.G. Julie; Tabor, Nathan; Woolford, Ian
Trans-versing “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar”: how Abida Parveen’s recitation of the qawwali text structures an aural atmosphere of performance and listening
(2023-05-04) Hammad, Mumtaz; Hyder, Syed Akbar
A close reading of the popular spiritual Sufi qawwali “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar” reveals how the spatial, aural and trans-textual dimensions of the qawwali span Urdu poetics, performance studies, affect theory, among other fields of critical translation and theory. Celebrating antinomianism in a trans-ethos, “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar” blurs boundaries between text and sound, written word and body. It explores how perception of and participation in spiritually constructed mehfils involves ongoing interplay with the text of the qawwali, its performers, and its receiving audience. In its exploration, this qawwali allows for ambiguity within a typically gendered performance genre through sound and intervenes in hegemonic spiritual concerns of Sunni succession. Circulated as a ‘living text’ in the subcontinent, “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar'' takes on a transtextual element, especially in its 1990’s performance by acclaimed musician Abida Parveen, transcending rigid boundaries between written and embodied aspects of its own text. In doing so, it complicates distinctions between performer and audience, man and woman, and the inner self with the outer world. Navigating these complex blurrings, this qawwali divulges the aural atmosphere that it emerges from, encouraging participation and reidentification with devotionalism in through its text, as well as its performance. Both the close reading analysis of “Dama Dam Mast Qalandar” and its performance by Abida Parveen reveal broader notions of antinomian spirituality that dialogically undoes normative distinctions and weaves together multiple aspects of performance and texts through the construction of its aural atmosphere.