KHAYAL DARPAN

A Mirror of Imagination: A Documentary Film about Classical Music in Pakistan


In 2005, the Delhi-based filmmaker, Yousuf Saeed, spent more than 6 months in Pakistan as part of a research fellowship where he surveyed the development of khayal and other forms of classical traditions in Pakistan after 1947. After traveling in the 3 main cities of Pakistan – Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad - interviewing musicians and scholars, attending music concerts, and observing the teaching of music in various institutions, Yousuf not only managed to document some of the surviving practitioners and patrons of art music, but also raised many vital questions about cultural identity, nationalism, legitimacy of music in Islam, Pakistan’s popular culture and its affairs with India, and the survival of classical music itself in South Asia. The film features some well-known as well as many lesser known but talented musicians of Pakistan, breaking many stereotypes about the country.

Khayal Darpan, divided into four roughly equal parts, totaling a 105 minutes, starts by exploring Pakistan’s melodic past, especially in Punjab/Lahore where south Asia’s most famous musicians of early 20th century performed in large concerts as well as small baithaks (homely gatherings). It talks about the legendary Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Raushanara Begum, and Nazakat-Salamat Ali, and their discerning local audience who could not be pleased by any substandard music. The partition of India changed the scenario drastically as hundreds of musician families migrated from India to Pakistan, while many Hindu and Sikh patrons of music migrated the other way around. The musicians in the newly formed Pakistan carried on the tradition for a decade or so, on their own strength, since there was hardly any state sponsorship – except radio, to some extent.

The classical music also went through some amount of identity crisis in Pakistan, since, in order to fit into the Islamic national identity, it had to shed its non-Islamic features such as Raga names or song-compositions which referred to Hindu deities and so on. But that was probably a temporary phase since a large number of traditional musicians continued to practice the music in its original form. Nevertheless, Dhrupad and Khayal, the purer forms of music, had to make a larger space for other popular forms such as ghazal, qawwali, folk and even pop music, as many of the musicians, historians and experts in the film talk.

The later half of the film goes into the popular and contemporary trends in the modern times, especially the experiments done by some individuals to popularize the classical music among the lay audience, including Mehdi Hasan, Tufail Niazi, and others. A very interesting story weaved in the film is about a young blind girl from Lahore, Aliya Rasheed, who managed to come to India to learn Dhrupad music from the famous Gundecha brothers in Bhopal (Central India). It is a story of the meeting of two completely different cultures and values through music.

The last portion of the film is about some very serious experimentation being done in the theory and practice of classical music, especially in the field of instrument-making, by a senior lawyer-philosopher- musicologist of Lahore, Raza Kazim. Raza has been developing a string instrument called the Sagar Veena which hopes to be different from most traditional Indian instruments as it separates the resonating chamber and the wiring frame, which remain on the same body in almost all string instruments of the world. Sagar Veena has no frets, but uses as many as 9 strings - each with a different timbre.

While Khayal Darpan informs us of some the hidden talents of Pakistan, it also raises many questions about how the classical music is going to survive in future, not only in Pakistan but in India as well, and whose cultural property it really is. The film is a real tour-de-force for a new generation of South Asians who are bent upon defining their cultural and national identities according to their religion.