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British Asian singer Susheela Raman and guitarist/producer Sam Mills are bringing the Mian Mir Qawals, the Sufi powerhouses of Lahore, to London for the Southbank Centre’s Alchemy Festival. The Qawals, who are known for their ecstatic devotional singing, will perform live on stage with Susheela’s band, which also includes two master musicians from Rajasthan, Nathulal Solanki and Kutle Khan on April 16.

London-born Susheela has spent the past two years in Pakistan and India researching devotional music and developing her relationship with these Sufi musicians. She has performed with them in both countries and has been rapturously received by Muslim and Hindu audiences alike – but this is the first time they’ve performed together in the UK.

Since being nominated for a Mercury Music prize in 2005, Susheela, whose parents are from Tamil Nadu, has established her place as one of the Indian diaspora’s most creative musical talents. Renowned for creating collaborations across musical boundaries, she has become emblematic of the Alchemy Festival’s aims.

The Alchemy Festival performance is part of a project titled ‘The Language of Love’, which is being funded by the Southbank Centre and the British Council. The project aims to explore the way that ecstatic, spiritually charged music transcends divisions, such as those between Muslims and Hindus across South Asia and the West, and how that music can connect audiences world-wide.

Susheela says: “Ever since hearing the inspirational Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, I’ve wanted to create music collaborations that cross cultural boundaries and reach out to audiences globally. Sufi music is the language of love so it’s something that everyone can understand.”

“In the last few years, I have been exposed and connected to the soul-stirring musicians of Lahore, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Bengal. The ecstatic energies they transmit with such urgent intensity, their poetic skill, humility and generosity of spirit have really changed my whole approach to music.

“People in the West often see Pakistan stereotyped as a place of bombs, terror and jihad but with this performance we hope to show the positive and beautiful music that expresses the people’s positivity and cultural richness. It is a very compelling country to visit and the warmth of people in Pakistan makes it unforgettable.”

The need to share this style of music has never been more poignant. Sufi music has traditionally been sung by devotees of saints at shrines in Pakistan and the Mian Mir Qawals have performed at a shrine in Lahore for generations; it’s a tradition that has been handed down from father to son – until now. Recently, the Pakistan government has been forced to ban these public performances on safety grounds after a number of Sufi shrines were bombed by Islamist extremists. So the Sufi singers are only able to perform privately.

Susheela and Sam first heard the Mian Mir Qawals by chance as they came out of a concert in Lahore. “They were performing outside at a private party. We fell in love with them; there is something so beautiful and transcendent about their singing, it is music with an immense spiritual energy.”

She has recently been back out to Pakistan for a month conducting research for the Language of Love project, talking to Sufi musicians, rehearsing and filming a 30 min short documentary. The film, also titled ‘The Language of Love’, features the Mian Mir Qawals as well as other acclaimed Sufi singers Sain Zahoor and Sher Mian Dad as they rehearse for a performance at the city’s famous Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop.

Susheela will be showing and discussing this film at Asia House on April 11th at a private invitation only event.

In the second year of the project, they aim to return to Pakistan to develop their research and broaden the range of musicians they work with. They are also hoping to make a longer documentary about Sufi music and its role in helping to bring together people across South Asia. There are also plans to release an album featuring these Sufi collaborations in 2013.

Here, Susheela Raman, talks about their trip to Pakistan and why preserving this ancient devotional form of singing is so important.

‘A Month in Lahore’

“Everybody thinks we are a terrorists” our friend and driver Asif is saying, ‘that’s why there are no tourists here these days, but look around you, nobody is bothering you, people are happy that you are here”

We are sitting at a street restaurant in the old city of Lahore, near the astonishing Mughal citadel of the Lahore fort and the Badshasi mosque, ordering bowl after bowl of utterly delicious chickpeas stewed in a chicken and coriander stock, served with nan bread fresh baked in their clay oven.  Lahore surely has some of the worlds great street food, often served by one-dish restaurants, which the famously epicurean inhabitants of the city will traverse the city to sample. The food is not always for the faint-hearted; before we settle on the chickpea joint, we are taken as a treat to a restaurant where we are offered the three bovine options on the menu: brain, hoof or tongue.

Alongside its culinary arts, Lahore’s other cultural treasure is its music, which is why we are here. Qawali is a kind of Muslim mystic, Sufi, music with roots going back seven centuries. The great Qawal Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn who died in 1997 was based in Lahore and the city is full of musicians of all sorts.  Sam and I are here from London to connect with this deeply rooted form of devotional music and develop collaborations with Sufi musicians for the South Bank’s Alchemy festival.  It’s part of a project, The Language of Love, which the South Bank and British Council are helping us to fund. It aims to show how musicians from India, Pakistan and the West can develop collaborations which transcend boundaries, whether religious, cultural or national by sharing our music live on stage.

Lahore is the capital of the Pakistani Panjab, which we reach by crossing the border on foot after a short drive from Amritsar. The two cities are only 50 kilometres apart. Crossing the India-Pakistan border has a feeling of transgression. At first we are nervous to move around but after two days of swivel-eyed paranoia we start to relax. Nobody is hassling us. People are just getting on with their lives. Some women tell me the are more self-conscious these days about what they wear in public, but I find I can sit outdoors in Old Lahore, head uncovered, smoking a cigarette. Nobody seems troubled.  It is a strange feeling to walk around the city’s atmospheric backstreets and breath-taking monuments without legions of camera toting tourists for company.

Lahore is a compelling place to visit. Once you experience the food, music and warmth you have to return.  This is our second visit and more are planned. For musicians like us who work with music from the subcontinent it is like connecting to a source.  In 2009, after a performance at the Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop, we walked out into a courtyard and happened upon an outdoor performance by the Mian Miri Qawals.  We fell in love with their music.

Sufism is often celebrated as, by comparison with radical Islam, the softer face of Muslim culture; warm, devotional and embracing. When the Qawal singers gather their voices into a one huge unison note and the driving tabla and hand-clapping start, it’s impossible not to be swept away on the tide of their emotion.  Celebrating the union of Sufi saints with the divine, Qawali is designed to create an ecstatic trance mood and has the musical virtue of getting straight to the point. Qawali came to attention in the West because of the impact of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who Sam was lucky enough to see perform at the Hackney Empire, London, in 1988. I heard him on the magnificent albums he made for Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records and saw his videos on YouTube. Nusrat typified how Qawali is performed with such passion that you sense the singer trying to tear away the veil of separation between himself and the ‘beloved.’

Sufism has many facets and many different styles and penetrates every level of Pakistani society. Even the Qawals vary. The Mian Mir are a group of working class Qawals who for centuries have performed at an 18th century shrine in praise of the Sufi saint Mian Mir. Fresh rose petals and green cloths are laid on the tomb around which people sitting in states of prayer. Around the shrine, there is heavy security as there have been bombs at other Sufi gathering places. Popular Sufism is anathema for some Salafist Muslims who regard the traditional South Asian reverence for Saints and even for the Prophet as a kind of polytheism. As a result the Qawals can no longer sing in at the Mian Miri shrine, except for once a year, because of Government fears for public safety. This is heartbreaking for the Qawals who have all grown up with the community of music making at the shrine. Mehboob Khan, the lead vocalist, says he learned to sing alongside his father who sung here every Thursday night for twenty-five years. It is a family tradition has been passed down for generations.

While in Lahore, we perform together at the Rafi Peer auditorium to 700 invited guests..Playing music with the Mian Miri Qawals we experience their openness: The exciting thing is that they welcome collaborations, be that from a woman standing up and emoting onstage with them or by Sam and I fusing their music with my own, much of which is Hindu and reflects my own Tamil background. We start practicing together. Our songs and sounds mix and merge. I sing in Tamil, English and Bengali and have been working with musicians from London and across the different regions of India (Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan) developing a repertoire the draws on the power and persuasion of Indian roots music. The interaction with the Qawals is very intense. These guys have great stamina. Used to performing for several hours at a time, their singing draws in a column of air from their middle to throw their voices out at maximum pitch and volume. In between songs they chain smoke and drink tea. We join in. Together we are building a connection between London and Lahore, which feels as though it can become a great platform in years to come. It feels exciting to be creating something different and exhilarating. The audience give us a standing ovation, loving the fusion.

“Next time it will be 5000!” we are told. The people’s desire for Sufi music may yet be stronger than the political divisions.

One recent phenomenon is the success of the ‘Coke Studios’ TV show in Pakistan, which has grown due to the public demand for Sufi music that they can no longer hear at the shrines. Combining traditional Sufi soul voices with a cracking house band, the Coke Studios programme also arrived at a time when people are staying in more, and was a welcome ‘live’ musical experience. Songs from this Pakistani programme were also huge hits in India, showing how music itself reached right across both the absurdities and the realities of partition. Both Indians and Pakistanis know that music acts on shared sensibilities and heritages that run deep, regardless of political divisions, and brings hope of a positive future with friendly neighborly relations.

Music can be a powerful medium, encapsulating so much shared emotion and togetherness and speaking straight to our hearts as human beings. We filmed our trip to Lahore, the people we met, our rehearsals and performance with the Qawalis, and hope to show this as part of the Language of Love project. The aim of the our collaboration and the live show in London at the Queen Elizabeth Hall is to celebrate this coming together, bringing artists from the UK, Pakistan and India onto the same stage. The music we will be creating on April 16th will be genuine Alchemy.