Let there be love
The 15th edition of the Jahan-e-khusrau Sufi festival reiterates the core message of the syncretic faith, says Veenu Sandhu
The ruins of Arab ki Sarai in the Humayun’s Tomb complex, across the road from Sunder Nursery, are once again reverberating with the sound of Sufi music. The sarai (hostelry, or inn) built in the 1560s by Humayun’s widow Hamida Banu Begum for the 300 Arabs she had brought with her from Mecca, has often been the chosen venue for Jahan-e-khusrau since 2001, when the three-day annual Sufi music festival first began.
Held to commemorate the death anniversary of one of medieval India’s most celebrated poet-musician-scholars, Amir Khusrau, whose resting place in the Nizamuddin dargah is not far from here, this edition (the 15th) of the festival comes with a fitting message for a riot-torn Delhi: “Let Love Reign”. “Each year, it is the same concern for the human predicament seen in the changing light of circumstances,” says filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, the man behind the festival. “With new talent and new verse, we express the oneness of humanity.”
Many of the voices at the festival this year are from Punjab: Gurdas Maan, the Nooran Sisters, Kanwar Grewal, Jasleen Kaur, Mamta Joshi. “Punjab is the strongest pocket of Sufi culture and talent,” says Ali. “Poets like Baba Farid, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah have illumined the world with their message of love.”
Sufism, which is about looking inward, has no one language, no one definition. It transcends sects, disciplines, forms and expressions. “An Ode to Khusrau”, in which Kaushalya Reddy’s disciple, Prakriti Prashant, will translate the expressions of Sufism to Kuchipudi, celebrates this all-encompassing essence. The festival opened yesterday with an “Ode to Rumi”, the 13th century poet and Sufi mystic, presented by Kathak dancer Manjari Chaturvedi and musician Murad Ali.
Each edition, says Muzaffar Ali, is born out of the earlier edition. “There is a continuity of verses and voices. Each time different, yet with a resonance of the earlier one.”
The jagged walls of Arab ki
Sarai have witnessed artists from different parts of the world at this celebration, recreation and interpretation of Khusrau’s world: Iran, Sudan, Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Japan, Israel, USA and, of course, Pakistan. In the last two years, however, the event described as a “world Sufi music festival” has had artists from India alone. Ali describes this as “the growing up process” of Jahan-eKhusrau. “It was discovering its global resonance and finding our own. Today, it has come of age, and enormous talent is emerging on the horizon.”