C OVER STORY
Sabri and the sublime
A
mjad Sabri Qawwal appears to be the darling
of the younger generation. Scanning the sea of
faces that filled the huge rooftop area of a local
club the majority seemed to be in their 20s and 30s. The
boisterous expectancy seemed to gradually to die down
as the clock slowly ticked away to add an hour and 45
minutes to the nine o'clock schedule. When Amjad Sabri
did make his entrance the crowd erupted into thunderous
applause, which continued even after the excuse from
him that there was a technical fault in the sound system.
He then proceeded to invite his family to the front row
and had his three-year-old son brought to his side, making it quite a family affair. Once the programme started,
the long wait became a past tense with the crowd even
forgiving the restless wandering of Sabri's son on the
stage. Beginning with the tarana that is the staple for
all qawwals, Man kunto maula, Sabri deviated from the
original style adding different ragas into it. Qawwali in
its pure form has become rare as ragas have become
popular with the qawwals of today. Wearing beads like
his late father Ghulam Farid Sabri, Amjad proceeded to
sing his father's popular qawwalis, Bhar do jholi meri;
Azaan-i-Bilal; Ali kay saath Zehra ki shaadi; Khawaja ki
Dewani and Chaap tilak. It soon became obvious why
Sabri, who is not very old himself, is popular with the
younger crowd. His humorous bantering and jokes between the qawwalis endear him to them making the sitting an informal one. After some time when someone
came forward to shower money on him as is the tradition
of the qawwali, he quipped “now it seems like a qawwali
atmosphere.” Coming down from the sublime to human
weakness, Sabri sang Sharabi Sharabi adding cheeky
lines of his own to the qawwali and changing the mood
of the listeners. And as is wont on such occasions, requests started pouring in, but as time was running out
the organiser had to step in saying that the rules for the
timing had to be observed, gently rebuking Sabri for arriving late. Taking the hint the qawwal sang a few lines
each of the requests and ended the programme with
Tajdar-i-Haram. Though the programme was enjoyable,
I couldn't help noticing that there were no original qawwalis by Amjad Sabri and his group. One can't survive
for long on popular numbers of other qawwals. What
was also noticeable was the fact that his chorus needs
to practice and improve their style.
10 | BOOM