Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam

Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam, the
dominant religious faiths of
Punjab, each
have their distinct musical
repertoires,
functional in character and linked
to a
specific setting. The four divisions
of
Punjab's musical repertoire,
Sufiana
Qalam, qawwali, Gurmatt Sangeet,
bhakti sangeet, are rooted in
religious
experience. The Hindu kirtan, the
Muslim
milad and qawwali and the Sikh
vaar and
shabad kirtan are usually
performed by
trained musicians.
At the same time, a strong secular
tradition also exists in Punjab's folk
music.
Sufiyana Qalam
Although rooted in the classical
traditions
of Islamic mysticism as it
developed in
Arabia and Iran in the ninth and
eleventh
centuries, Sufism found wide
acceptance
in India in turn, the Sufi saints
were
influenced by the cultural traditions
of the
subcontinent.
The mahfil-e-sama, or the
"Assembly for
Listening" is essential to Sufi
practice.
Trained musicians guided by the
sheikh,
sing with the object of creating a
spiritual
bridge to the living spiritual guide,
to
departed saints, and ultimately to
God.
The aim is to achieve a spiritual
experience of intensity and
immediacy
that transcends conscious striving.
Over the centuries, this practice
has
engendered a vast corpus of poetry
articulating the mystical experience
and
the experience of the mystics.
Punjab has a strong Sufi tradition.
In the
four hundred years from the 14th
to the
18th when the Gurus were laying
the
foundations of the Sikh faith, the
Sufi
saints were also teaching. Indeed
the two
religious philosophies
complemented
each other. To this day the Punjab
countryside is dotted with the
mazars and
dargahs of Sufi saints. Typically the
shrines are small white structures
with a
bit of green trim and occasionally
figures
painted on the walls. In many cases
no
written records of the shrine exist
and
one must search out the oldest
inhabitants of a village to hear the
local
tradition of the shrine The local
people,
irrespective of their religion, look
after
these little shrines and constitute
the
following of the saint. Here is a
true
embodiment of the secular nature
of
bhakti.
Qalam means "pen" so Sufiana
Qalam
refers to writings of the Sufis. Their
lyrical
verses, called kafis constitute a
very old
form-perhaps the earliest poetic
composition in Punjabi.
Some schools of thought consider
the kafi
to have a chhand couplet form;
others
maintain that the kafi cannot be
bound in
the rigid format of any given lyrical
order.
The compositions of the Sufi saints
Shah
Hussain and Bullae Shah, are
usually
taken as the definitive model of the
kafi
but many of the varying lyrical
compositions of the Sikh gurus are
also of
the same type. Older non-Sufi
traditional
folk compositions support this
hypothesis.
Kafi is an Arabic word equivalent to
the
Sanskrit sthai, beginning of a song.
The
sthai is taken to be the theme of
the
entire kafi and is repeated over and
over.
This form has come to be
recognised as
the basic identification of the kafi
and sets
it apart from other folk
compositions. In a
kafi, the rahaoo tuk, central idea, is
repeatedly sung while in the
shabad,
hymn, it is sung only once and not
repeated. This repetition
distinguishes
the kafi from the shabad but in
terms of
content and basic musical form the
kafi
and the shabad are very similar.
In the earliest Sufi majlis gathering,
the
saint would lead his followers in
chanting
litanies in praise of God. The
versicle
would be sung by the saint and the
followers would return the one-line
response which constituted the
theme of
the composition. This repetition of
the
theme gave it the name kafi. A
typical
kafi is composed of several verses;
there
are no restrictions to the number
of
verses or their format.