Sufis at the Cinema: 50 years of Bollywood Qawwali & Sufi Song 1958-2007

Twenty-five tracks and over 150 minutes of film music at its best, this compilation from Saregama has got to be this season's must-have. At a time when qawwali (the music of the Muslim Sufi mystics, dating from the 13th century) was little-known except to Sufi shrine regulars, Indian film composers had already borrowed and reformulated this rich treasury of song. Given that qawwali lyrics have multiple layers of meaning (referring to devotional as well as romantic love) it proved a foolproof format for forwarding the narrative in the days when Indian films still had something akin to a script. Of course, the numerous adaptations of qawwali for film varied in quality and excellence but the most outstanding of these, ‘Yeh Ishq Ishq hai’ from the 1960 film Barsaat ki Raat was modelled to closely follow the original format of Amir Khusrau (who invented qawwali) format, stood out from the rest and it soon became evident that playback singers Mohammed Rafi, Manna Dey and Asha Bhosle would simply excel at this difficult, semi-classical genre, just as they had done at everything else they touched, and all three went on to be regular voices for film qawwalis. But then the 1980s came and Pakistan's Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan could no longer remain a well-guarded secret within Sufi circles. He was grabbed eagerly by the Indian industry that had, by now, come to be known as Bollywood. But that never prevented Nusrat from still delivering the real thing.

Inevitably, Nusrat's nephew, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, has followed in his uncle's footsteps and provided many more memorable quasi-Sufi numbers for Indian films, and the second CD contains some very representative samples of these. Any compilation drawing from such a rich palette can overlook some important hues: the very first film qawwali, for instance, in the 1942 film Zeenat, which is immensely popular to this day and which provided a much welcome pre-Partition break for playback diva Noor Jehan before she migrated to Pakistan. Nevertheless, this is a superb collection – not only carefully documenting the top film numbers based on Sufi songs but also containing the story of film music itself, as we move from the addictive 1958 number ‘Humen to Loot Liya’, with its impossible-to-keep-still percussion, right down to the synthetic ‘Moula mere Moula’ from 2007. As usual, Iain Scott's liner notes make great, entertaining reading.