Khumariyaan means “intoxications.” I mention this because a rubab, a zerbaghali, two guitars and four Pashtun men from the Khyber Pass allegedly in the business of intoxication through music were on campus this Fall Weekend, and I decided to pay a visit. It was quite an evening.
Center Stage, the “public diplomacy initiative” that brings Pakistani band Khumariyaan to the United States, advertises as a project creating “meaningful dialogue.” It is, essentially, a project to combat widespread American ignorance and misconceptions about other countries. At an informal dinner with the band, Rob Richter (who works on the onStage series) talked about this quest for finding the most suitable sound for an American audience that took him to Pakistan. Khumariyaan, he claimed, had set a silent audience dancing in Islamabad. Though skeptical about the Department of State involvement, I was sufficiently intrigued.
On Saturday, the band began with a slow, weaving original score about the point where two rivers meet or a river splits into two (“Bela”). Immediately, I was entranced by the rubab (a word we were told translates “the sound of your soul”). A stringed instrument native to Central Asia, the rubab left a curving reverberation with a much greater persistence than a guitar – a sound that hung in the air and stayed with you after the strings stopped vibrating.
The music was all new. Instead of the building verse, central chorus and low-key bridge characteristic of mainstream commercial music world around, there was a constancy to Khumariyaan’s sound – it seemed without beginning or end, made up entirely of a middle.
After the swaying first piece, the band began to change pace. Lead guitarist Sparlay Rawail talked about the band deciding what they were going to play only after they were onstage, calling the process “organic.” There was certainly a freshness to the performance. It was punctuated by looks and smiles as the artists played off of each other’s ideas; glances to each other’s instruments to understand pace; spontaneous, almost abrupt changes in rhythm that seemed feats of mindreading than of practice. Rawail introduced the ghungroo – a dancer’s belled anklet – into the mix with the faster second piece, bringing in a new metallic sound. I began to understand why Americans had been calling Khumariyaan a “rock” band.
Halfway through the evening (to please the Department of State, I’d imagine), the band took a break to give us a “cultural talk” about their instruments, starting with the origins and physical construction of the rubab. “Now you can make your own,” joked rhythm guitarist Aamer Shafiq when Rawail finished describing nylon and steel strings, a quip that captured beautifully the hilarity of having to de-exotify a culture to such an extent.
Rawail also spoke of the long necked Pashtun sehtar, of how there was just one teacher (Ustad Zainullah of Peshawar) and one student (Farhan Bogra, the band’s rubab player) left. In way of explanation, he mentioned how playing the sehtar paid the Ustad $15 a month. This exposé, likely plugged into the show at the organizers’ request, painted a jarring picture of a culture and a way of life under attack by the very “globalization” so celebrated in the West. The underlying darkness in the improvisation piece Khumariyaan played next seemed to speak of a resistance to such attacks.
As the evening progressed, the atmosphere morphed. The audience, for one, began to be more and more involved with the creation of the music – with claps and “ho!” shouts. Khumariyaan thrived on the engagement. When the first few people began dancing, it was like they were physically pulled out by the music. “Entire front row gets up at once!! They have some sort of magic powers?” read my notes a little further into the show.
It was hard to believe that their music could just coincidentally be so well complemented by people dancing; there were songs that could only be complete with the clapping and stomping of an audience. The timelessness and continuity of this music, music of middles, seemed tailored to evoke the response of dancing crowds, and the band knew this well.
Each song showed in a new way the “East meets West” message that the Department of State must so approve. In songs with Western four chord patterns, the rubab became the central melody, bringing speed, redefining energy, shattering any assumptions about the “exotic” eastern instrument’s inability to get feet tapping. Shiraz Khan’s zerbaghali, played with what my scribbled notes call a “violence and ferocity,” started an actual vibration in the back of my head with its powerful beats. Again, the takeaway seemed clear. Pace and youthful energy were no monopoly of Western music; the age old voices of Pashtun instruments that would evoke reverence and awe in a conventional concert could create hypnotic crowd-pleasers just as well.
The band seemed to respond to pulses in the room, stretching tracks longer in their enthusiasm about all the dancing. “When people dance, we get carried away,” Rawail admitted. But the listeners didn’t seem to mind. By the time the last track (“Tamasha” or drama) came around, almost the entire audience was on its feet – every person interpreting the music in generationally and culturally specific ways, dancing incongruently with the music and each other, the only thing common in their different dances the joyous celebration of something. The pace wild now, the band members joined the dancers in front of the stage. Though dancers were parents and community members as well as students, it seemed a celebration of youth. “This is how,” my notes recall, “by creating a Pashtun music that can be interpreted individually, they preserve culture while not barricading it.”
An experience that is live in its very conception, the Khumariyaan concert brought a sort of performance art to the stage, centered around creating a compulsion that frees up the innate human desire to dance. I left Palmer amazed; the DoS had actually gotten this one right. Khumariyaan had actually been able to cross cultural divides and get at something universal – the sound of a soul. •
