October 2025 marked the 700th urs (death anniversary) of Amir Khusro. The revered disciple of the Chishti saint Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya, he is believed to have developed qawwali, a form of mystical poetry performed in sama (concert), through dhikr (rhythmic repetition) of revered religious names. Sama originated among eighth-century Sufi renunciants of Baghdad against severe condemnation from the Sunni orthodoxy. The tradition evolved through contestations and interactions between different groups, mainstream and fringe, within the Sufi fold. Early Sufi renunciants were split between the more orthodox “sober” Sufis and the openly transgressive “intoxicated” ones. Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya, a female mystic from Basra, initiated the ‘disinterested’ divine love for God, ‘for the sake of love itself.’ But later hagiographies recorded her as a man, as women were generally excluded from Sufi practices and histories (Hoffman-Ladd 1992).
Nevertheless, Sufism evolved through Manṣūr al-Hallāj’s ‘intoxicated’ utterance of Ana’l-Ḥaqq (I am Truth)—leading to his execution in 922 CE—to the eroticisation of love by Ahmad Ghazali, Farīduddīn Aṭṭar and Ibn Arabī. Their interpretations of mystical love expanded its semantic field from the more polite and divine ‘hubb’ to the erotic, human and secular ‘ishq’. Khanqahs (monasteries) and dargahs (shrines) institutionalised Sufi tutorship networks, bringing the pir (guide) and murshid (pupil) closer. The divine bond between the Sufi and God was now mediated by a human pir, who also became the object of the poet’s desire, with Rumi and Shams-i-Tabrizi, Khusro and Nizamuddin Auliya and Bulleh Shah and Shah Inayat Qadiri becoming examples. Hence, ishq was equally erotic and transcendental.
Khanqahs became spaces of male homosocial intimacy through the exclusion of women, strictness in adab (courtesy), sama, and practices like nazar ila l-mard (ritualised gazing of beardless young men as a means to access divine beauty through human beauty). Numerous studies have explored tenets and lived experiences of sexuality and community-building in Sufi texts and spaces (Anjum 2015; Hoffman-Ladd 1992; Kasmani 2022). In this context, androgyny and homosociality complemented the eroticism of ishq, as qawwali emerged by incorporating Indic Bhakti motifs such as the virahini (bride in separation) and raslila (divine play). Though qawwali and ghazal have often been differentiated as the former being divine and the latter secular, it is more a distinction of form than content, as qawwals often blend the two during performances, while respecting contextual propriety. The mediating pir became the subject of erotic love in many qawwali songs, as God was often depicted as the matchmaker, initiating a genderfluid, pluralistic and libidinal tradition of love. The negotiation of Sufism between Islam and local traditions and qawwali’s rich and radical history was later sanitised and desexualised both by Indian scholars and elite Muslims, as Manuel (2008) and Vanita and Kidwai (2000) note. This continued onto the contemporary cinematic representations of qawwali. Qawwali has been deradicalized from its original contexts of religious harmony, genderfluid love and androgynous self-fashioning and its attacks on caste, organised religion and the political elite, into a monolithic symbol of Islamic culture, producing a binary of the good, Sufi Islam and a bad, orthodox Islam. Consequently, ‘filmi’ qawwali has been in decline in the era of ultranationalist Indian cinema.
The history of qawwali is of blending, of the union of multiplicities, guided by the Sufi principle of wahdat-al-wujud (unity of being). Amir Khusro perfected his lyrical idiom by blending Persian, Hindavi and Braj Bhasha and also Islamic and Bhakti mysticism with folklore. Bulleh Shah and Shah Husseyn continued to poeticise an erotic, transcendental ‘ishq’ that challenged religious, gender and caste norms and attacked orthodoxy and the elite. Their works and lives upheld radical expressions of love that have been retroactively sanitised by later scholars, consequently producing a desexualised and deradicalized image of qawwali in contemporary media. The hybridity of different religious and linguistic cultures in the period makes it erroneous to compartmentalise qawwali as either entirely religious or erotic. The tradition simultaneously occupies and transcends multiple forms through an almost Derridean ‘play’ or what is traditionally considered ‘lila’ in Indian aesthetics.
Khusro’s famed kalam ‘Chaap tilak sab cheeni re mose naina milaikay’ (When our eyes met, you took away my tilak), features the speaker as a girl who loses her entire self on exchanging glances with ‘Nizam’. Khusro used the Hindavi female grammatical gender, unavailable in Persian, to poeticise his ishq for his pir through the Sufi idea of fana (annihilation of self). The speaker is depicted as a girl who wears the chaap and tilak (ornamental mark on the forehead) and churiyan (bangles), while the beloved is addressed by Nizamuddin’s epithet, Mahbub-e-Ilahi (Beloved of God), and as man-mohan (allurer of hearts), also an epithet of Krishna. Yet, instead of spotting the evident religious syncretism and androgyny, far-right groups have attacked the poem anachronistically as glorifying forced religious conversations through ‘love jihad’.
The kalam in reality furthers mystical love from divinity into the erotic by celebrating Nizam’s surat (face) and murat (form) and his naina (glance), which annihilates all markers of the speaker’s self and identity as she becomes Nizam’s ‘bride’ and ‘matchless servant’. Saleem Kidwai offers an exemplary queer translation with a biographical analysis in Vanita and Kidwai (2000). The female speaker’s voice in the kalam is grounded in Khusro’s self through the insertion of takhallus (nom de plume). When read against Khusro’s biography, qawwali transcends the confines of religiosity and even the proprieties of faith, as God becomes a matchmaker for the Lover and his Beloved, and the poet-lover loses all markers of self and identity. God is not abandoned, but regarded as an intimate friend and darling, referenced often as ‘yaar’ (Persian for friend) from Rumi to Khusro, as He manifests Himself in the human form of the Beloved.
Early Sufi scholars like Bāyazīd al-Bisṭāmī and Ibn ‘Arabī have termed Sufi saints as the ‘bride of God’, as gender was relational and contextual (Anjum 2015; Hoffmann-Ladd 1992), but the motif of ‘bridal mysticism’ was perfected in qawwali by Bulleh Shah and Shah Husseyn. Khusro also used marital symbols often to denote both union and separation in mystical love. Bulleh Shah’s famous Punjabi kafi ‘Mera piya ghar aaya’ (My beloved has come home) celebrates the virahini’s ecstatic reunion with her beloved. He references ‘Lal’, both the red bridal attire and La’l Shahbaz Qalandar, the ‘intoxicated’ saint famed for dancing in red clothes and bangles, also the subject of Shah’s equally renowned ‘Dama dam mast qalandar’. The poem also celebrates Bulleh Shah’s love for his pir Shah Inayat. He used the female voice of the pining Hir (from the tragic folktale of Hir-Ranjha), praising Allah for reuniting her with Ranjha. God, the original object of ishq, became a matchmaker between the poet and his beloved. The human beloved thus becomes the human manifestation of God. In desperate longing, the speaker breaks all codes of gender and propriety, dressed in red and adorned with bangles, anklets and dyes, like a bride, approaching the tavern:
“Bhul gaya vazu namaaz dogaana. Mad pyaala de hun kalaal ji”
(Ablutions, prayers are all forgotten. O Bartender, hand me a drink!)
Unlike Khusro and Bulleh Shah, Shah Husseyn’s love was not for a mentor, but his disciple, a young Hindu boy named Madho Lal. Husseyn is popularly known as Shah ‘Madho Lal’ Husseyn. Their bodies were buried next to each other in what is today a shrine, open to his devotees as well as members of the local transgender community, as Anjum (2015) observed. Husseyn and Madho’s homoerotic love is elaborated in the biography ‘Haqiqat al-Fuqara’ (The Truth of Those Impoverished by Love) by Sheikh Mahmud ibn Muhammad Pir, son of Husseyn’s close confidant. Vanita and Kidwai (2000) cite Husseyn’s ‘spirituality of play’ expressed through ‘playful’ intimacy between the lovers, resembling Krishna’s ‘lila’, while also celebrating homoerotic love.
Kugle (2007) notes that while it may not be appropriate to seek biographical information within poetry, the poet mediates the relationship between the poem and the performance within their own social, sexual and political lives. Ishq was attached not just to a formless infinite, but also to the physicality of a human beloved. The biographies of these poets complement the androgyny in their poetry. Khusro is believed to have met and fallen in love with Nizamuddin Auliya when Khusro’s father gave him refuge in his house, depicted in the kalam ‘Aaj rung hai maa’ (Colour lights up the world today, mother). Khusro and Bulleh Shah were known to have danced in female attire to please and placate their masters. Bulleh Shah was also ostracised for his relationship with his pir, Inayat Qadiri, a member of the lower Arain clan. Since he openly denounced institutionalised religion and transgressed gender norms, he was denied a burial at the cemetery. Shah Husseyn’s biography details an important scene where he was arrested and threatened with anal rape by the Lahore police chief for exchanging glances with his son. Husseyn was described as wearing red clothes, drinking and singing aloud publicly in the company of young men. But finally, it was the chief himself who was punished by the court through anal rape for disrespecting Husseyn. These instances inform us on the complex history of transgression and self-fashioning within the Bhakti-Sufi tradition.
Male homoerotic relationships were not uncommon at the time. Disturbing religious and caste boundaries was more transgressive. As a musician, soldier and royal advisor in the court of Alauddin Khilji, Khusro’s androgynous love was thus more palatable than Bulleh Shah and Shah Husseyn’s. Yet all three poets expressed ishq in ways that destabilised conventions of gender, faith and propriety. This does not negate religion or gender; it inspires a unity that comes from transcending and transgressing all boundaries. The boundaries of God and human, Bhakti and Sufi, man and woman, sacred and profane are all transcended by a unity induced by love, exemplified by Sachal Sarmast’s verse:
“Aadmi ban aaya re Dhola, kaisa naach nachaya re Dhola”
(The Beloved’s taken the human form,
He’s got us dancing to his tunes!)
‘Dhola’ here at once refers to God, the human manifestation and Prince Dhola from the Rajasthani folktale of Dhola-Maru. The kalam unites religious, secular and folktale understandings of love with a single address. Sarmast refers to the object of love as the bhatti (brewery), madghar (tavern) and hoth ka laala (bartender), striking parallels with Rumi:
“Khud kooza-o, khud koozagar-o, khud gil-e-kuza Khud rind-e-subu kash”
(He was the potter, the clay, the crafted cup,
He was the drunk who drained the cup.)
Renowned qawwals Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad of the Qawwal bachchon ka gharana, founded by Khusro himself, explain the Sufi idea of wahdat-al-wujud while performing the songs. The object of love is at once the poet’s deen (faith), imaan (religion), masjid (mosque), minbar (minaret), mus’hab (scripture) and Qur’an. Hence, qawwali transcends all boundaries to find unity in love, without negating the broader contexts of religion and culture, but negotiating with them through love and play. There are also expressions of frustration with religion in the tradition, for instance, in Mirza Ghalib’s ghazal ‘Bazeecha-e-itfal hai duniya meray aage’ (The world is a children’s playground before me), where the speaker, perturbed by temptations, scoffs at the tales of Solomon and Christ:
“Imaan mujhe roke hai jo kheenche hai mujhe kufrKaaba mere peechhe hai kalisa meray aage”
(Faith keeps pulling me back, while unbelief tempts me
The Ka’aba pulls me in one direction, the Church in the other).
This pluralistic history of negotiation and transgression within Sufism and qawwali manifests materially in the lived experiences of dargah communities and qawwali performances. With modernity and colonial Orientalism, many Muslim elites have condemned ‘effeminate’ elements such as qawwali as contributing to the post-Mughal decline of Muslim power (Petievich 2007; Qureshi 1999). From La’l Shahbaz to Khusro, transgressive figures were retroactively tamed into religious and national symbols. But recent scholarship has initiated ‘queer-readings’ (Kugle 2007; Vanita and Kidwai 2000) into qawwali, while they also invite criticism for ‘queer-jacketing’ religion and reproducing the problematic binary of a queer-bodied, sex-positive ‘good’ Islam and sexuality-repressing ‘bad’ Islam (Kasmani 2022). The ethnographic studies of Anjum (2015) and Kasmani (2022) destabilise the simplistic binaries imposed on Islam, later reproduced in contemporary cinema and culture. They reveal multiple accounts of androgyny and genderfluidity in the dargah context, like Shaykh Musa ‘Sada Suhag’ (eternal bride), the 15th-century saint who, moved by the memory of Khusro’s dance for Nizam, adopted the red bridal attire and insisted on being buried with them. Musa’s present-day followers wear the same attire to commemorate him, and his shrine has welcomed local transgender communities. Similarly, Kasmani cites a female faqir at La’l Shahbaz’s shrine at Sehwan, Pakistan, who called herself ‘mard-e-Qalandar’ (man of Qalandar). Shahbaz lives on through simultaneous genealogies in multiple faith systems as avatars of Muhammad, Ali, and Ram. Yet Kasmani notes that transgender and interfaith solidarity in Sufi spaces conflict with their marginalisation of women by naturalising male homosociality, celibacy and female domesticity. The relational gender scheme in Sufism allows women into Sufi spaces sans their femininity, adhering to the Sufi ideal of the jawanmard (man), regardless of biological sex.
Qawwali as performative art also enables androgynous gender performances. The ‘Queen of Qawwali’, Abida Parveen, conquered the hitherto male-dominated genealogy of qawwals through deliberate negotiation by her ‘modest’ and ‘masculine’ self-fashioning (Shroff 2022). In an interview with BBC, she declared herself as be-khud (without self) and removed of gender mid-performance. Her masculine, yet religiously appropriate attire and her deep baritone voice aid her in transgressing gender codes while positioning her within the spiritual genealogy of qawwals. Additionally, though orthodox institutions may condemn Sufi practices like qawwali, the form follows religious propriety during performances through protocols like hamd (praise of Allah) and nat (praise of Muhammad), depending on the setting and context. Khusro’s ‘Man kunto maula, fahaza Ali un-maula’ (To whoever I am a master, Ali is also his master) is a prominent religious qawwali often performed to open concerts. Hence, simultaneous transgressions of different cultural and religious codes and negotiations of androgynous and interfaith solidarities give nuance to Sufism as a hybrid of multiple traditions, continuing in qawwali.
Several scholars have noted that qawwali has attained a deeply religious and desexualised image with modernity (Manuel 2008; Petievich 2007; Qureshi 1999; Vanita and Kidwai 2000). Despite its pluralistic history, qawwali has been firmly insulated within Islamic ecologies. The general aesthetic of qawwali is ‘androgynous’ for Sara Shroff, while it is essentially Islamic for Regula Qureshi. Qureshi argues that the 20th-century gramophone culture modified qawwali as an aestheticized Islamic commodity and a cultural asset of the Urdu-speaking urban elite Muslims, while much of its androgynous and interfaith radicality was lost. But the strict situating of qawwali within Islam would be reinforced through its representation in Indian cinema.
Qawwali was introduced in early Muslim social films like Zeenat (1945) and Barsaat Ki Raat (1960). Both films featured original songs introducing female backup singers, which was traditionally forbidden. Gharana (1961) visualised female singers performing Kamil Shuttari’s famous qawwali ‘Mere banne ki baat na poocho’ (Do not ask me of my Love) in a wedding scene. This visualisation of female qawwals democratised qawwali from both female exclusion in dargah performances as well as from 20th-century elitist commodification. ‘Filmi qawwali’ featured popular singers like Manna Dey and Muhammad Rafi, unlike trained qawwals from qawwal gharanas (lineages). Crooning replaced the chest-based vocals typical of qawwali, while unconventional instruments, such as the rabab, were also increasingly used by composers to produce what Anna Morcom dubbed a certain ‘Muslim-ness’.
‘Filmi qawwali’ became simultaneously religious and secular in the late 1970s, although removed from its androgynous contexts, to depict heterosexual love. They nevertheless reproduced the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary with qawwali, as the stereotypical spoilsport, orthodox Muslim became foils to the acceptable qawwali-enjoying Muslim. Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) featured popular devotional and romantic qawwalis where the ‘good’ qawwali-singing Akbar was juxtaposed against the ‘bad’ orthodox Tayyib Ali, subject of the song ‘Tayyib Ali pyaar ka dushman’ (Tayyib Ali enemy of love). ‘Mein Tulsi Teri Aangan Ki’ (1978) reimagined ‘Chaap Tilak’ in a non-Islamic setting, but also swabbed of all androgynous references in the lyrics. This secularisation of qawwali came at the cost of substituting its original syncretic and androgynous quality. As Kumar (2013) notes, Muslimness in Bollywood was constantly gauged against questions of terrorism, patriotism, as well as a seductive masculinity, used to deceive young Hindu women. These representational tropes manipulated qawwali to produce new binaries, while ‘item-numberesque’ qawwali iterations like ‘Mera piya ghar aaya’ in Yaarana (1995) further problematised the same binary. The rendition substituted the word ‘O Laalni’ in the original with ‘O Raamji’, stripping Bulleh Shah’s kafi of its context.
According to Sundar (2017), these representations problematised the gender politics of qawwali by signifying women as visual objects of male desire. She also observes the emergence of popular ‘dargah qawwali’ songs in the 2000s, which strongly framed qawwali within Muslim, masculine cinematic ecologies. Borrowing Mukul Kesavan’s term ‘Islamicate’, she posits that these visualisations in the dargah setting reproduced cinematic symbols of Islamicate culture. Images of Sufi dargahs with qawwali music created spaces of both Muslim sociality and interfaith interactions. The syncretic power of these shrines became the backdrop for protagonists, Muslims or non-Muslims, to mature within the narrative. Films like Fiza (2000), Kurbaan (2009), and My Name Is Khan (2010) portrayed Muslim protagonists either tempted by terrorism or forced to prove their national allegiance against accusations of terrorism. Here, qawwali-style music used the binary of the good and bad Islam to produce seemingly ‘secular’ yet communal and typecast representations of the Muslim community, constantly connected to charges of terrorism. The danger lies in appreciating the ‘good’ Islam, represented by qawwali, at the cost of reproducing and apprehending the other.
Conversely, Rockstar (2011), Delhi-6 (2006) and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) featured examples of popular dargah qawwalis that visualised non-Muslim protagonists deriving spiritual and social maturation in the dargah environment. Oftentimes, actual dargahs were selected as locations, and their domes or minars would be captured as the establishing shot, situating the music within a predesigned Islamic setting. The reductive imitation of qawwali extended to such degrees that words like ‘Maula’, ‘Khuda’ or ‘Fanaa’ were for long frivolously used to induce ‘Sufi-ness’. This meant that Urdu as a language and qawwali as a form of music were now restricted to a particular religious setting, which in fact made it convenient to erase them altogether over time, as is evident with the recent waning of Urdu vocabulary in Bollywood film titles and songs.
Drawing from Bollywood, South Indian films have also visualised qawwali-style songs with overt images of a qawwali ensemble or a group of whirling dervishes, to firmly position the music and narrative within Islamic aesthetics. Tu badi mashallah (His Highness Abdullah, 1990) is an early Malayalam example, while songs like Kannalane (Bombay, 1995), Mehrubha Mehrubha (Perumazhakkalam, 2004), Kizhakku Pookkum (Anwar, 2010) and Rasoolallah (Salala Mobiles, 2014) featured wedding scenes where the lovers meet or interact. Subhanallah (Ustaad Hotel, 2012), featured whirling dervishes, even when it was spatiotemporally unfitting, unlike in Khwaja Mere Khwaja (Jodhaa Akbar, 2008). Yet both songs interestingly created a demand for dervishes in event management since, particularly weddings. Allahu Akbar (Gangster, 2013) derived much from the Bollywood trope of the dargah as a character-building space, where the protagonist reflects on his past and regains wisdom and energy for the remainder of the narrative. These visualisations reproduced problematic binaries while simultaneously functioning as sites of intercommunal and even cross-national sympathy. The music, if nothing else, had the ability to move people beyond religious and national boundaries.
Qawwali continues to be revered by people across South Asia, while continuing to disappear from Indian cinema. Even the general parlance of Bollywood cinema seems to lack the qawwali register or zubaan. Post-2014 Bollywood cinema, especially after the second term of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, has seen a massive spike in Islamophobic representation in cinema, with an equal decline in filmi qawwali and positive representations of the Muslim community. Yet, in 2023, the BJP announced qawwali performances in Uttar Pradesh in Sufi dargahs as part of their outreach program called ‘Sufi Samvad Maha Abhiyan’ (Great Sufi Dialogue Campaign), once again reinforcing the good/bad Islam binary. Filmi qawwali has created spaces of communal syncretism even when Bollywood remained prone to Islamophobia, but the decline of qawwali in Bollywood cinema helps us trace how its totalising use has ultimately produced a singular package of Islamicate register which could be entirely eradicated, replaced by today’s monolithic Islamophobic representations. Nevertheless, songs like ‘Jamal Kudu’ (Animal, 2023) and Bahraini artist Flipperachi’s ‘Fa9La’ and references to the filmi qawwali ‘Na To Karvaan Ki Talash Hai’ (Barsaat Ki Raat, 1960) in ‘Ishq Jalakar-Karvaan’ (Dhurandhar, 2025), show how ‘Muslim-ness’ is still manoeuvred to style parasitic and reductive appropriations that ultimately perpetuate Islamophobic cinematic representations.
As discourses surround today’s ‘bleeding’ Bollywood industry, the receding presence of qawwali and nuance and diversity in Bollywood cinema could indicate a decline in its creative and social quality, as films rely on hate-mongering for commercial success. Qawwali has left mainstream cinema, but continues to be appreciated in platforms like Coke Studio, ajab shahar and Dream Journey on YouTube, featuring modern master qawwals like Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammed, among others. The ensemble conducted a fusion performance of qawwali and gospel, titled ‘For the Love of God’ with Damien Sneed and his Chorale le Chateau in New York on October 30, 2025. Such collaborative and creative efforts sustain hopes of new and radical forms to celebrate qawwali, but also run the risk of commodifying the ‘Sufi’ label. Though, Qawwali has also been sidelined in research and popular discourse under the weight of classical art, commendable initiatives like the Delhi Queer Heritage Walks help reradicalize the history of qawwali and Sufism in India, its spiritual tradition of interfaith and genderfluid love, to cultivate the creative empathy and ishq we desperately need as diverse peoples today.
Note: Translations to the songs and poems are cited from Same-Sex Love in India (Vanita and Kidwai 2000), and from qawwali performances published on YouTube by ajab shahar-kabir project and Dream Journey, with translations by Shabnam Virmani and Musab bin Noor respectively.
References:
Anjum, Tanvir (2015): “Androgyny as a Metaphorical Practice in South Asian Sufi Culture” Journal of Asian Civilizations, Vol 38, No 1, pp. 91-112.
Hoffman-Ladd, Valerie J (1992): “Mysticism and Sexuality in Sufi Thought and Life.” Mystics Quarterly Vol 18, No 3, pp. 82–93.
Kasmani, Omar (2022): Queer Companions. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Kugle, Scott (2007): “Poem and Sung Lyric, Or . . . How a Ghazal Lives.” The Muslim World, Vol 97, pp. 571-610.
Manuel, Peter (2008): “North Indian Sufi Popular Music in the Age of Hindu and Muslim Fundamentalism.” Ethnomusicology, Vol 52, No 3, pp. 378–400.
Petievich, Carla (2007): When Men Speak as Women: Vocal Masquerade in Indo-Muslim Poetry. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp.1-30
Qureshi, Regula (1999): “His Master’s Voice? Exploring Qawwali and ‘Gramophone Culture’ in South Asia.” Popular Music, Vol 18, No 1, pp. 63–98.
Shroff, Sara (2022): “Fashioning Sufi: Body Politics of Androgynous Sacred Aesthetics.” Feminist Theory, Vol 23, No 3, 407–19.
Sundar, Pavitra (2017). “Romance, Piety, and Fun: The Transformation of Qawwali and Islamicate Culture in Hindi Cinema.” South Asian Popular Culture, Vol 15, No 2–3: pp. 139–53.
Vanita, Ruth, and Saleem Kidwai, eds. (2000). Same-Sex Love in India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.
Akhil Faizal is a student in the Integrated MA program in English Studies in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras. His interests lie in the intersections of cinema, art culture and memory.