The Fair Woman Lay Upon the Bed: Death, Jubilation, and Juxtaposition in Qawwālī

Abstract

Across India and Pakistan, the death anniversaries (ʿurs) of Sufi saints are celebrated with great festivity, including performances of qawwālī. This festival is called ʿurs, an Arabic word that translates as “wedding,” because the death of a saint is said to represent their wisāl, or unification with God. While most ʿurs festivals include the ritual of washing the grave of the saint, known as gẖusal sharīf (literally, “holy bath”), at the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi, this ritual is carried out on his birth anniversary, rather than his death anniversary.This chapter presents an analysis of two qawwālī performances, discussion of the ʿurs and gẖusal as annual memorialisation rituals, and insight from interviews with qawwāls, listeners, and administrators of the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin. I explore how the juxtaposition of life rituals feeds into a juxtaposition of emotional expression and experience between predominantly positive, but also negative emotions. Further, sacred qawwālī is usually viewed as a means to the end of ecstatic communion with the divine. This often joyful mode of altered consciousness in the celebration of a saint’s union with God seems to expand a conceptualisation of music as ‘words against death’ in Douglas Davies’s terms. When considered in light of literature highlighting the similarity of such music-induced altered states of consciousness with the states of consciousness experienced during near-death experiences, qawwālī seems to enact ‘music against death’ by reorienting listeners from facing away from death as an ultimate end, to facing toward death as a positive future, prefigured in the altered state of hāl.