Based in Pakistan, the independent label honiunhoni furnishes the world with not only some of its greatest music but also some of its most charismatic performers. There is the impish and dexterous Ustad Noor Bakhsh, both gleeful and sage-like as he plays his electric benju, a type of zither fitted with a keyboard which is native to Sindhi and Balochi folk music; the elegant vocalist Muslim Shaggan who is trained in the Gwalior gharana, the foundational form of khayal singing known for its clarity and balance, sprightly and romantic without succumbing to decorative excess; and Muhammad Talib who heads up the Talib Trio playing a couple of experimental instruments, a fretted tambooro which is all of his own making and an electric bulbul, a variant of the benju.
While the great Ustad Noor Bakhsh from the Makran coast of Balochistan often appears like a desert mystic and you can see and hear the wind rustling the leaves and buffeting the microphone as Muslim Shaggan moves from an interior room to a small courtyard and an open park, the Talib Trio are for me the soundtrack to a glorious evening, with their album Aap ka number hai? – which loosely translates to ‘Is this your number?’ and serves as Muhammad Talib’s pet phrase or motto – recorded on the rooftop of the Clifton Court Apartments in Karachi under a darkening sky, the noise of the city proving a constant backdrop, adding warmth and bustling character to their belly-deep sound. In the centre of Muhammad Khan on the dholak and Shahid Ali on the harmonium, the leader Muhammad Talib – barefooted, wearing a slick grey jacket and lilac-brown shirt and pants – is utterly captivating and enigmatic, summoning a wonderful tone out of his fretted tambooro, at once transfixed and sympathetic, qualities which are hardly belied by what can sometimes seems like the trace of a sneer.
The small independent honiunhoni now introduces Noreen Afzal, who performs qawwali, a form of Sufi devotional singing which is rooted musically in Hindustani classical raga and tends to steadily build momentum, rising from gentle or noodling preambles to states of heady revery or fever pitch. Over the past three or four years Afzal has garnered a following on social media for her qawwali, performing at home or in and around Punjab and transmitting the results via YouTube, where honiunhoni’s videos and their vibrant colours, shot on location, possess the capacity to burn and blaze through the screen.
Once sung at shrines and meant to encourage a sense of deep introspection – even while their lyrics might abound in amorous sentiments, the pain of heartache and separation or use drinking as a metaphor for spiritual intoxication or the realisation of a divine kind of love – today qawwali as a form has been popularised by artists from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sabri Brothers and Abida Parveen to say to Sanam Marvi or for Western audiences perhaps Arooj Aftab.
Noreen Afzal sings qawwali with a sense of emotional rapture and dramatic fervour, often with a certain comic wryness and sometimes too with a bit of gravel in the back of her throat. From the city of Gujranwala in northeast Punjab – a place known as the ‘City of Wrestlers’, which presumably refers to a kind of grappling beyond that of a singer with a poem or text – she arrives on honiunhoni surrounded by a couple of harmoniums, a tabla and handclap percussion with her six-strong retinue (apparently several of the musicians are her brothers) also providing backing vocals in typical qawwali style.
Her qawwali in this instance draws from the works of the eighteenth-century Punjabi revolutionary and poet Bulleh Shah, who is sometimes known as the ‘Poet of the People’ for his plainspoken language and thoughtful mysticism as well as for his social and political critiques. Renowned for his kafi and proverbs and for being a veritable wellspring of qawwali, his adaptation of the famous ‘Dama Dam Mast Qalander’ has been sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen among countless others. His words as sung by Noreen Afzal in this performance for honiunhoni have been translated for the sake of the video by Musab Bin Noor.
‘My beloved, my sweetheart has not returned’ she begins supported only by the two harmoniums, quickly turning from a tone of romantic longing and spiritual yearning to something more fierce and accusatory as she adds ‘Quit your cawing, O lying crow’. As the harmoniums play a tender melody, she continues to accuse the flighty animal of some kind of deceit or treachery, warning the crow ‘I’ll shoo you away with a clap of my hands’. At the same time ‘If you bring me true tidings of union’ she softens, ‘I’ll feed you sweet breadcrumbs from my own hand’.
If she is going to lose her lover and ‘master’, she pleads for at least some show of fondness or pity lest she wind up crying herself to death. Then after this introductory preamble, both anxious and genuflecting, eager and patiently setting the scene, Afzal sings the refrain of the qawwali which is ‘O Bulleh Shah, what do I know who I am?’ and the tabla and handclap percussion kicks in.
This is at once a quest for knowing and belonging and for all that a show of snarling, lip-smacking defiance as Afzal continues ‘Dogs spend their nights in wakefulness too, surely they’re better than you’. The warp of the tabla drum as it slips and slides between the treble and the bass and the trance-inducing drone of the harmoniums is accompanied not only by handclaps but by the rubbing of hands, whose friction adds another smeared texture to the piece. There is also some call-and-response from the middle section of the composition as Afzal renounces idolatry and expresses the limits of her faith while accepting or even revelling in her flaws.
Probing, confrontational and even fiery, put upon and adopting the role of the dishonourable or the disgraced, Afzal sings ‘I belong neither on land, nor in the sea / I am neither the burning fire, nor the water that extinguishes it’ pressing an identification of herself as pure flesh and bone, then pushing the tempo as she describes the loss of her beloved. This is a rock and roll take on qawwali, rasping and raw as she portrays her ‘abode’ as a ‘house of ill repute’ and in another staggering phrase sings ‘You pride yourself on your laws and your theology / I am one of love’s compulsions’ – a posture and syntax which reminds me of Bjƶrk say on the testily indignant ‘5 Years’ or SjĆ³n collaboration ‘Oceania’.
But if Afzal is an outcast here – betrayed and abandoned by her beloved, forsaken by her old friends – it only makes her more ready to embrace life’s feast. An outsider in temperament as well as social standing, she dances of her own volition and lives by her own ‘lopsided’ rules, thrilling in a certain libertine physicality or materiality, and characterising herself indulgently as she sings ‘I am pure gold, wrought in a furnace / I am musk, extracted from the musk deer’.
Ultimately the singer of this qawwali proves defiant in the face of death, with the familiar refrain ‘O Bulleh Shah, what do I know who I am?’ being joined by a couple of others as the song reaches its climax. ‘Bulleh Shah, I shall never die’ she advises, and with a certain wistfulness as well as that same flash of defiance sings ‘Someone else lies in my grave, not me’. In the end Afzal offers herself in tribute to her ‘spiritual guide’ but the overture seems hardly likely to succeed because the gift is not within her offering. For as though divining her own nature, Afzal is doing things decidedly her own way.
