Filmi music has embodied romance for nearly a century now, accompanying people through love, loneliness, grief and more. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that most people who grew up listening to Bollywood music formed their understanding and expectations of love around the lyrics.
Each decade of filmi music was defined by its unique themes and styles. From the Rabindra Sangeet and Marathi Bhavgeet influences of the 30s to the frolicky lyrics of the 70s deemed unbecoming by purists, these themes were largely propagated by the lyricists and composers of the respective time periods. So, what happened after the 80s?
The general consensus is that somewhere around the 90s, Bollywood music began to lack the strong personality that the its predecessors of the earlier decades possessed. Was there anything distinct and remarkable about this period apart from the Western influences?
The Sufi wave
The 90s were the days of post-liberalisation in India, and Bollywood was more aspirational than ever. Non-resident Indian Rahuls living in palatial homes in the US and Rani Mukerji’s couture lehengas governed the screens and dreams.
But this era also coincided with two other events:
1. The time Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – one of the most popular Qawwali singers to have ever lived – became a global sensation, popularising the genre outside of South Asia.
2. The arrival of A.R. Rahman, a practising Sufi, in the Bollywood music industry. He is known to have attributed his inspiration to Khan.
It is at this point that khuda, the word popularly used by South Asian Muslims for the almighty, begins to appear commonly in many songs.
Conflation of Khuda and the lover
While the traditional Sufi literature had the poet referring to khuda as the beloved (mashooq) while imagining himself to be a female engaged in worship (aashiq), things changed when the ideology entered popular culture through Hindi cinema.
The theme evolved beyond the confines of the traditional ways of singing it and often equated the beloved with God. It became increasingly common for the poet to address the beloved as baakhuda and rehnuma, where the object of desire is a human being who appears godly to the aashiq, with the act of loving being his chosen path of worship. It is also believed that the ultimate stage of Sufi love, where the aashiq becomes one with his mashooq, is death.
The Sufi genre of qawwali and the concepts of shama and parwana (the flame and the moth that dives into it) have always been popular with Hindi music composers. It is hard to say when exactly Sufi poetry pervaded into the very grammar of Bollywood music but the coming of Rahman serves as a good starting point.
The language of love and yearning in the late 90s and early 00s
Rahman delivered some of his biggest hits of the 90s in collaboration with celebrated urdu poets such as Javed Akhtar and Gulzar. These songs, with their evocative lyrics, became iconic in defining a new era of Bollywood music. Notable examples include Chaiya Chaiya from Dil Se.. (1998), with its poetic lines like “Taweez banaake pehnu usse, Aayat ki tarah mil jaaye kahin,” and Satrangi Re, from the same movie, with lyrics like “Main farsh pe sajde karta hu, kuch hosh mein kuch behoshi se.”
Soon enough, other composers and lyricists like Irshad Kamil and Prasoon Joshi caught on, churning out mass favourites such as Ya Ali, Mast Qalandar, Oh Rangrez and more.
Playlists titled “Bollywood Sufi” always include the same half a dozen songs that everyone unanimously agrees upon. However, the influence of the way love is looked at in Sufi poetry permeated into new ground within Bollywood; these lyrics of Allah Duhai Hai from Race 2 (2013) serve as an example:
Maano ki jeene ka
Yeh matlab hai
Ishq hi ek mazhab hai
Ishq naa ho toh Rab hai rootha
Also read: In Kashmir’s Sufi Shrines, Women Carve a Space For Themselves Through ‘Wanwun’
The language of these songs is not just expressive of crazy passion, but rather a deliriousness in love. This shift in the inspiration, theme and lyrics of Bollywood music is unmistakably Sufi poetry’s gift to Bollywood of the 90s, 00s, and even early 10s, which was struggling to make a mark as clear as the decades preceding them had in terms of filmi sangeet.
Legacy of Sufism in Bollywood music
It is fascinating to think about how individual artists hold the power to influence a couple of generations and shape their idea and vocabulary of love and, by extension, their own selves.
The songs of the late 90s and early 00s not only serve as nostalgia devices but also introduced a whole new language of love, worship and yearning. Songs like Charkha tell us how everyday objects and devices were used to simplify the complex themes of Sufism to the common folk back in the day. The idea of Sufism has, perhaps, never been more popular with the common masses than it is now; whether the audience is aware of it or not is another matter.
Lahari K is an advertising professional.
