Long before 6 p.m., the seats of the Harold Prince Theatre were already beginning to fill for the nearly sold-out performance by Sarangi Ustad Dr. Suhail Yusuf Khan.
The three-hour lecture and performance by Dr. Khan, a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was hosted by Penn Live Arts, the University of Pennsylvania’s “home for the performing arts.” Nearly two rows in the front of the auditorium were filled by Swarthmore students and faculty, namely from the college’s kathak (North and East Indian dance) and tabla (North Indian and Pakistani drums) classes.
A blue stage light filtered through the anticipatory air onto the stage’s focal point. An Afghan rug lay in the center, where a sarangi (a South Asian short-necked stringed instrument) and a pair of tabla drums lay, poised for their playing. A podium stood in the right corner of a stage, an afterthought. A massive projector screen hung in the background, frozen on the first slide.
Khan walked onto the stage with the moderator and immediately introduced himself. His microphone still silent, he lingered at the front row, leaning into the eagerly waiting audience, shaking their hands, and exchanging quiet pleasantries. This went on for a couple of minutes until he pulled himself away from the grasp of the audience and up to the podium.
Khan introduced himself first and foremost as part of the Mirasi, a community of Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims from North India and Pakistan who are primarily hereditary musicians, folk artists, and storytellers. The Mirasi community has long been subject to caste discrimination and has experienced low social status. The role of the Mirasi community, Khan explains, was traditionally seen as a “custodian” of Hindustani music. According to Prakash Tandon, in India International Centre Quarterly, “The word Mirasi in the Punjabi language has come to mean witty and funny in an overdone vulgar manner.”
While the majority of the Mirasi community is Muslim, Mirasi culture has had a significant influence on its smaller Hindu and Sikh factions. Founded in 1469, the Sikh faith is India’s youngest religion. Mirasi’s influence on Sikh religious and cultural traditions dates back to the first Sikh guru (divine spiritual guide), Guru Nanak Dev Ji (1469-1539). Shinder Purewal, in Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory notes, “the musicians are constantly in attendance, singing hymns to the rebeck and the lute. These are the Rababis, the descendants of Muhammadan fakir, Mardana Mirasi of Merawat, who loved Nanak, and his hymns to music nearly five hundred years ago.”
Mardana Mirasi of Merawat, affectionately known in the Sikh community as Bhai Mardana Ji (“Ji” an honorific suffix), is regarded as one of the earliest Sikhs. For Sikhs, Mardana Ji’s legacy is defined not only by his devotion to Sikhism’s founder, Guru Nanak, but also by his pioneering of the Sikhs’ Gurmat Sangeet musical tradition. The hymns he played and sang on the Firandia Rababa — created by musician and carpenter Bhai Firanda of Bhairowal — are hallmarks of the Gurmat Sangeet tradition.
Furthermore, the Mirasi community played an important role under the short-lived Sikh Empire (1799–1849), spanning Sindh, Punjab, Kashmir, and bordering the Khyber Pass in present-day Afghanistan under Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s rule. In the Sikh Empire, Mirasis were commissioned as genealogists, bard singers, and marriage negotiators, receiving commissions and patronage for their extensive documentation of social history for various Punjab communities.
Khan, the first Mirasi musician to receive a Ph.D, explored his relationship with his lineage of Mirasi Sarangi players. Shakoor Khan of the Kirana Gharana, Ghulam Jafar Khan of the Rampur-Sahaswana Gharana, and Sabri Khan of the Moradabad Gharana, according to Khan, are the Mirasi masters of the Sarangi. The late Sabri Khan, his maternal grandfather, was a Hindustani Classical Sarangi legend. Although born and brought up in South Delhi, Khan’s maternal lineage traces back to Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Khan spoke of the practice of baithak (sitting) sessions in his own local Mirasi community, where local community members, musicians, and family members would gather to experience live oral performances of music, storytelling, and genealogical history. These were not concerts in the normal sense, but a shared act of remembrance, where sounds transcended time and carried the breath of those who came before into the present moment. Khan then described how his family would host these sessions, but with recordings of the greats on cassette tape.
To draw the audience into this tradition, Khan played an excerpt from a legendary performance by the greats: Shakoor Khan, Ghulam Jafar Khan, and Sabri Khan of the Moradabad Gharana. The audience fell silent as the old recording started playing. Below the sound of the tape hiss, you could hear the three greats playing together, an anomaly given the soloist nature of Hindustani classical music. The three, acutely aware and almost afraid of each other’s greatness, played back and forth in a sort of friendly spar, according to Khan. Khan stood at the podium, eyes closed in focus, inviting the audience to feel the gravity and historical significance of the piece through the scratchy hiss of the recording.
Before beginning the performance, Khan took questions from the audience. When asked about the role of women in the Mirasi community, Khan acknowledged the progress that was yet to occur. During the listening session, he described that the women of the household were upstairs, out of view. Following the Islamic tradition of parda, the women of the household decided not to be present for the listening session due to the presence of outside men (non-family members). He added that Mirasi women — also known as Mirasins — were key stakeholders and decision makers. They decided who from the community would become the next ustad (master) and shape the future of Mirasi music. However, Khan acknowledged that the incorporation of women into the Mirasi Sarangi tradition is still an ongoing process. He hopes to see a change in the coming decades.
After a short break, Khan took his place in front of the sarangi placed on the Afghan rug at the center of the stage. He noted that his unfamiliarity with playing a preset list of compositions was indicated in the program pamphlet. Khan usually plays what comes naturally to him when he sits down to perform.
Accompanied by Swarthmore tabla instructor Aqeel Bhatti, Khan began playing a Khayal in Raag Puriya Kalyan. Puriya Kalyan is an evening raag known for evoking feelings of hope and the transition of darkness to light. The first pluck of the string rendered the audience frozen, hushed. Khan began by setting the mood, playing the signature notes of the raag in a melodic buildup. As the tempo picked up, Bhatti started drumming a soft sixteen-beat rhythm cycle (known as Teen Taal) on the tabla.
The audience was captivated as the melodies of the sarangi wove gracefully, erratically, yet still rhythmically between the beats of the tabla. The ebbs and flows of the music brought the audience up to the sky and crashing back down all in one fell swoop. Khan’s performance felt like the opening of a window in a bright room, like the creeping of the sun against the twilight facade of the sky during the early hours of the morning. Khan brought the Puriya Kalyan Raag to life in his first composition.
Khan transitioned into a non-raag composition in Taal Keherwa (8 beats), written by Bhagat — meaning saint — Kabir. Bhagat Kabir was a renowned devotional mystic and played a pivotal role in discourse among the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities regarding belonging and identity. Bhagat Kabir has ties with all three faiths: he was born to Hindu Brahmin parents, raised by Muslim weavers, and contributed over 500 hymns to the Guru Granth Sahib, the primary Sikh religious scripture. In this composition, Khan performed Jhini Re Jhini, a composition by Bhagat Kabir, loosely based on Raag Desh. The lyrics portray the body as a “white cloth” and describe how colors that stain this cloth are akin to how our identities as humans are stained by those we surround ourselves with throughout our lives: “The body is like a finely woven white cloth and is permeated by the name of god in each breath.” Khan spent over five minutes in the alaap of this piece — the introduction portion that sets the mood of the raag or composition before the piece begins. The audience was entranced. His alaap built up in tempo slowly before accelerating to a fast speed and crescendoing right back down, softly, quietly. The breathing of the audience could be heard before the roar of his bow built the tempo and volume back up to the top again.
Khan ended the performance in a moment of high intensity. Bhatti’s hands moved so fast on the tabla that they seemed a blur. As the sarangi’s bow began to fly, the beats of the pounding tabla thundered in and out of sync with Khan. Just as the force reached a point that felt almost unbearable, the towering wave of sound was abruptly severed. And then, just like that, the audiences were pulled from the world of performance and dropped back in their seats. For a suspended second, the audience sat in stunned silence, and a couple of seconds after, the auditorium erupted into thunderous applause. The window Khan opened and beckoned the audience through slammed shut. The bright afterimage of the blinding light remained, searing the audience’s vision. Khan bowed before the audience before slipping back behind the curtain, leaving the applause lingering where he once stood.
