Anticipating the listening session and workshop Sada, Sada or Sound/Forever, Forever/Sound on 6 April, multidisciplinary artist Zahra Malkani writes about sound as the primary medium for grief, and the role of shrines in South Asia as spaces for collective mourning. 

Shah Jo Risalo is the poetic compendium of wanderer and mystic Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, whose words echo across time to shape cultural and political life, imagination and resistance, across the Indus River in Pakistan today. Shah Jo Risalo is a book of mourning, an expression of a mystical tradition where it is believed that we come to this world to grieve. In this philosophy, the fundamental condition of this life, of being human, is loss. Love is worship, and separation is the highest, most advanced lesson in love. And so, loss is a sacred invitation to abide, to fulfil love; it’s an initiation into deeper depths of worship and devotion. 

Again and again in Shah Jo Risalo, the whole world comes to life, becomes vibrant, animate, in grief. In almost every story there is a moment when the universe awakens, roused into a mad ritual of collective mourning. Even the stones cry out when they hear the news of a broken heart, the clouds roar in thunderous lament, and the ground trembles in horror, pigeons soar across skies to announce the beloved’s departure and the vultures spread their wings to shelter his corpse from the sun. It is our job now to burn. No loss is left unnoticed. Every lament is everyone’s. To witness the ache of the other is to be possessed by it. The bereft in their homes, the beasts in the jungle, and the angels in heaven all sound together in ecstatic echoes of grief. They find each other in the world of the mourning – that wild ungovernable place to which the dead and the living return again and again to meet. And the lament?

Smear the henna
The colourful henna, oh Shah, the colour of rose!
Smear the henna
Ready us, oh Shah, for this wedding![1]

Watch "Sur Kedaro" by "Amrit Pyala" on https://www.youtube.com/

Here, sound is the primary medium for grief, repetition is the mode, and the shrine is the maqam.[2] In Urdu the word for sound, call or cry is Sada. Sada comes from an Arabic word that means echo. All sound is only echo. When taken from the Sanskrit root, Sada also means eternal. The echo is how sound moves across eternity. Binding bodies across time. The echo is how sound becomes collective. In the reverberations of this echo, an ancient inheritance of grief encounters, is interlaced with, the crises of this historical moment – climate grief, language grief, the grief of displacement, of spectacular loss. Repetition is attunement, and we settle memory into our bodies, into our bones through sound. Sounding together, we become that which we grieve, and in songs of worship and vengeance we attune our bodies to the beat of each other’s burning hearts.

As burial sites, shrines are essentially spaces for the bereaved, spaces that collapse the boundaries between life and death. It is important to note, though, that death and grief here is a festival. Shrines are also, in South Asia, intensely political spaces that have historically been central to the entrenchment of caste, class, and colonial and state power – but also central to the emergence, expansion, and interminglings of working-class and marginalised collectivities. In Sindh, anti-state and ecological defense movements have claimed the shrine, in both mystical and secular ways, as central to the resistance. Shrines have continued throughout time to offer refuge for those cast aside by society: the mad, the sick, the the displaced. They are crucial community centers in a country of widespread institutional collapse. More accessible and hospitable than a hospital or a school, more sacred and joyful than any state or NGO shelter. All of these functions of the shrine are scored by the ceaseless, unbroken transmission of the region’s most ancient musical traditions. Even in the pandemic, when every public space was locked down, the shrine was opened just for the musicians to recite the nightly raag, played then only for an audience of the dead. On a thursday night,[3] as the beat of the nagara possesses every body in the courtyard, it seems this might be the only institution that could survive a coming extinction.

The video above is filmed by Amrit Pyala, an archive project researching Sufi and Bhakti poetry in Pakistan since 2022. This recording is in Bhit Shah, home to the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. Here the raagis recite Sur Kedaro, the Sur in Shah Jo Risalo that tells the story of Karbala.[4] In the laments of Bhit, the instrument, the Tambooro, is the body. The maatam[5] is registered on the surface of the tamboora’s skin. It is a sacred body, devotees reach to graze their fingers or foreheads across it, to be blessed by the tambooro’s ancient touch. Held upright, the instrument becomes an alam,[6] and its five strings represent the Panjtan Pak.[7] The lament is the battle of Karbala. But every lament is the battle of Karbala. Just as every book is the holy book. And all sound is echo. Nothing is unprecedented. Not our laments, not our pain, not the prescriptions. Every cry cuts across time, crumbles walls, and collapses distance, attuning with a relentless choir in a universe of togetherness in loss.

Image: Still from Ragi fakirs of Bhit Shah singing Sur Kedaro of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. The video is part of Amrit Pyala, an archive project researching Sufi and Bhakti poetry in Pakistan since 2022. 

Notes:
[1] Sur Kedaro from Shah jo Risalo, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, as translated by Asad Alvi for Amrit Pyala. Performed here by Ustad Rasool Baksh, Talib Hussain, Ghulam Abbas, Ustad Mehram, Faraz Hussain, and Ayaz Hussain.
[2] A destination, a home, a grave, a sonic system, a rhythm, a mood.
[3] Considered particularly auspicious, Thursday nights are marked in many shrines in Pakistan with expanded rituals of song, dance, possession and prayer.
[4] The battle in 680 AD in which most of the descendants of prophet Muhammad were killed.
[5] A grief ritual that includes the rhythmic beating of one’s chest.
[6] A flag raised to honour the martyrs of Karbala.
[7] Muhammad and his four descendants.

The listening session and workshop Sada, Sada or Sound/Forever, Forever/Sound will take place on Sunday 6 April between 15:30 and 17:30 at Page Not Found. During the session led by Zahra Malkani, a series of field recordings tell the story of ongoing ecological battles as echoes of a long history of water-women kinship in struggle. The listening session is followed by a workshop, slowly moving from listening to echo practice.

Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist from Karachi, Pakistan. Collaboration, research, and pedagogy are at the heart of her practice, exploring sound, dissent, and devotion against militarism and infrastructural violence. Working across media she explores the politics of development, displacement, and dispossession through the lens of dissident ecological knowledges and traditions of environmental resistance. She is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies in relation to struggles around land and water in the city.