Kamran Sajid on Panjabi folk music

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There’s a marrow language for the unbelievable, for dispositions of mysterious origin, inherited postures. No one told you that integrity solidifies in the stomach. That speaking the truth in calamity has the consequences of abandonment, of marvel and respect. Look, the lonely climes of the stomach sighted, the guiding burden of consummate listeners. Heer: the wailing of the presently rascalised, and the retroactively realised. Is there victory in the singing of the song; that is, the stomach? Injustice tickles and threatens the truth with vomit. But the songs of the integritous settle the stomach. They are the aftermath of calamity, after all. For the song to travel, it must live in the bones.

How many generations does it take for a culture to become native? For the tattoos of names and labels to set in blood, for postures to solidify in bones? By whose volition do the branches of trees become tresses: poets, and dreamers, who claim the language of the stars. The language of this poetry is often luxurious, but the poetry itself is not a luxury. In fact, to truly appreciate it, you’d have to have let every object, everything go, (at least once), as Bulleh Shah or Ghulam Farid, two Panjabi mystics, have said.

I’m addressing the notion of an attachment to one’s native or ethnic culture. A culture itself, in spite of its perceived nativity, was also once born and invented. Is it my perceived nativity of Panjabi folk music that calls me to it? Is it something in the blood and the bones? 

~ 

Summer 2023 in Manchester. I’m at my friend Ràjveer’s house, and we’re celebrating his dad’s birthday by having a mehfil. I’m standing by a laptop with my friend – Spotify open – and he tells me ‘I’ve got a song for you.’ He selects the Punjabi Mehfil Vol. 1 album, plays Ghulam Ali and Afshan’s ‘Methoon Peeche Kyoon’, which isn’t the actual name of the song. ‘These recordings are a mess’, he tells me. That song becomes my most played song of the year.

How did this happen? Before 2023, my Spotify Wrapped would usually be a United Nations meeting of genres; dominated primarily by US rap. In 2024, four of my top five most-listened-to songs were Panjabi folk songs, and they had an average length of 17 minutes and 58 seconds.

One of my top songs was ‘Janda Hoya Das Na Gaya…’ by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Nusrat was one of the most popular South Asian musicians, chiefly a proponent of qawwali music, but also of other religious-musical traditions in the region, as well as Panjabi folk music. In the chorus, Nusrat sings:

Janda hoya das na gaya
chitthi keri watan wal paava.
(He left without telling me where he was going
to which homeland should I send my letter?)

Spotify was just one plot in the digital garden I was cultivating. I have a flowing saved folder on Instagram, growing fast and wide, alongside a TikTok bank and YouTube playlists for more unsung varieties. The YouTube algorithm began recommending songs to me with less than 100 views, many of which would then enter my playlists. I brought together Panjabi geets, qawwalis, shabads, bhajans, naats and filmi songs. I found live stage recordings with camera setups, as well as simple recordings of singers out in nature or in their homes. Naturally, each of these expressions have a different flavour. The stage recordings are usually more planned and grandiose, sometimes lasting for over forty minutes. The recordings from folk singers out in nature, while generally much shorter, are the most memorable for me. They have simultaneously the worst and best video quality; the smallest in pixels, but greatest in heart.

In one of my favourite videos, Sain Bodhi Shah sings verses from one of the most popular and culturally significant poems, Heer. Heer was born in the 18th century, written by poet and mystic Waris Shah. The poem breathes Panjabi culture: the ploughed land, the brazen passion, the floaty faced jogis, the juggernaut hearts. The poem is, in an outward sense, a tragic love story between the characters Heer and Ranjha. Waris Shah, in a move atypical of his time, used the colloquial language of the people to write his story; choosing not to write in respected languages which had an existing poetic reputation such as Farsi. Shah’s story presents a female lead character who breathes with agency, who raises her voice as if it is her birthright. The story and its characters remain symbols of courage today, reinvigorating spirituality in people and reminding them of the beauty and dignity in their culture, the crimson love in their blood.  

As a child of diaspora, it might be redundant to say I grew up dealing with the echoes of another world; sometimes harnessing them, sometimes drowning them out. Music and poetry are so integral to Panjabi culture, where lifetimes of folk songs and annals of poems are widely bestowed the honour of memorisation. Just the evocation of the first beat of a song or poem will inspire a passionate response from many a Panjabi – a turning and raising of the hand, a glowing smile and a headshake, and any combination of ‘aahaa!’, ‘wah!’, ‘Allah!’, ‘Waheguru!’ and ‘kya baat hai!’.

There’s something in the English terms ‘folk song’ or ‘folk music’ that, to me, evoke the archaic or the unpopular. Until very recently, I would have said there’s a stark contrast in the reality of these terms and music in the Panjabi language – but with the growing popularity of musicians such as Diljit Dosanjh and AP Dhillon, you now might have to specify that you mean ‘the classics’ when you want to tell someone you’re into Panjabi folk music. The likes of Diljit Dosanjh and AP Dhillon have found an international audience which includes non-Panjabi speakers, while the audience of the folk music remains predominantly limited to Panjabi speakers.

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Panjabi poems and folk songs can perhaps be characterised by their cutting, undressing honesty – something which, in the past, caused anger to be levelled at writers and singers. Bulleh Shah wrote of delicate and beaming divine connection, yet he criticised the funnels of organised religions that were widely practiced in his time. He writes:

Panj veylay lok, aashiq har veylay
Lok maseethi, aashiq qadma vich.
(Five times, for the people (referring to prayer); the aashiq, all the time.
The people, in the mosque, the aashiq in their footsteps.)

Bulleh Shah challenges the limitation of prayer to a place of worship, suggesting that prayer should be something embodied. The aashiq is one who embodies ishq, a divine, transcendental love, which exists beyond human divisions such as race and religion. Bulleh Shah was chastised in his time for his beliefs by those whose mono-religious edifices could not contain such multiplicity; such horizon-shattering love. His poems have been famously sung by Abida Parveen, who has breathed new life into Bulleh’s poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries. I hope to see her perform live one day.

 ~

Whilst the mehfil in the summer of 2023 was a defining moment, an earlier, equally important moment took place in 2020. I came across a YouTube channel called The Dream Journey, which records live folk music performances across Pakistan. The most popular videos on the channel feature English subtitles – perfect for modern engagement, or for those of us in the diaspora who might not completely understand their mother tongue,I was already writing at that time and was drawn to writing through a perennial or spiritual lens – one that could, as well as satisfy my metaphysical longing, encompass the two cultures I inhabited.

Na fanaa meri, na baqaa meri
(I can claim neither impermanence nor infinite existence)

These words, written by Kabir Das, were sung on the channel by Maulvi Haider Hassan Vehranwale. The video features a whole qawwal party singing together, which included both the young and the old. As a 20-year-old, the majority of my age mates weren’t interested in traditional music and metaphysical topics like that. I’d sometimes feel internally that I was too young to be thinking about all this so deeply, but seeing children in this video, who in some moments sang louder than the lead vocalists without mics, I felt affirmed.

Still, internally, there lingered a feeling that all of this was too serious, and this was not normal early-20’s-occupation. It could be said that this notion of age and time is a Western one, and to a great degree I feel it is. But truthfully, I also faced the surprise of family and peers, who saw me getting into this music and poetry that was “before my time” and doing so “before” the time I was supposedly ready to. Societally, an association has been made between asceticism and age, as well as age with knowledge and wisdom. But I couldn’t rest with this notion.

One of my top songs on Spotify in 2024 was 38:18 minutes long. I’m trying to think of juxtapositional equivalents to short and long songs: A speedboat ride and an excavation, A TV episode and a film. Most of these longer songs are live recordings, and they feature the additions of audience sounds and musical mistakes, which wouldn’t be found in a studio recording. In a world where commitment and an attention span are often deemed hard to come by, or worse,relics of a bygone era,there’s something radical and humbling about engaging with music in this way. More satiating.

What we choose to dedicate our free time to are things we love and care for, right? I would be remiss not to mention that the spirituality of the music, or its appeal to my sense of diasporic dislocation, were not strong enough to take so much of my time and attention. It’s not just the song, it’s the life it is attached to; of the tears I have given to this music, most have been for love. For romantic, platonic, familial, and humanist love. Baba Farid writes:

Tears, also, for a vision of cultural renaissance: the wearing of colours that are seldom worn anymore, the lonely feathers of forgotten, colourful birds. How beautiful to be in their lineage, the mystics, the criminals of conscience; where it is not the equivalence of blood that joins, it’s the equivalence of something else. My friend Ràjveer challenged my idea that for the song to travel, it must live in the bones. ‘If this were true,’ he said, ‘the music would die with people.’ He instead posited the spiritual and metaphysical as a carrier of these songs and stories. If the stirring of this music is afforded only to those who are in the regional lineage of its creators, how humanist is it – how truly transcendental is its love?

Whatever the answer, there’s something in the music that sends jolts of frenzy to my body today, with the faces of an uncanny, reassuring resonance. Jubilant colours can be, will be, worn again, and there’ll always be people of integrity in every generation.

This music should be lived in, then lived out.
Bone should connect to fingertip, blood to your tears.
What will I do with my hands?

Don’t blaspheme the words of poets with their echoes.
Don’t regard the listeners by the words they collected.
Analyse pisiform bones instead.
Observe the echoes of their veins.

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Kamran Sajid is a writer from Nelson, Lancashire. He has read his poetry at Simon Armitage’s ‘Blossomise’ book launch, Manchester International Festival and Aviva Studios. He is a graduate in English and Creative Writing.