{"id":307146,"date":"2026-02-27T07:10:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T12:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=307146"},"modified":"2026-03-10T13:09:45","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T17:09:45","slug":"the-music-of-nusrat-fateh-ali-khan-pulled-me-through-the-grief-of-family-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/the-music-of-nusrat-fateh-ali-khan-pulled-me-through-the-grief-of-family-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"The Music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Pulled Me Through The Grief of Family Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The following things happen in my body when I think about writing this story: my chest tightens, my breathing gets quicker, shallow; a tingling sensation covers my arms; the skin on my forehead seems to tighten itself around my brain. I mostly think of the story in the shower where nothing but a stream of water can distract me. Sometimes, I have to rush out so I can lie down and catch my breath. My therapist tells me my entire body seems to be protesting against putting these words to paper. She suggests I call it an emotional journal instead of a story, which I immediately think is corny, but just as instantaneously find myself comforted by. I have all the facts, I just need to arrange them, <\/em>I keep telling her. Yet, through five months and three drafts, I have made no progress. Forget the story, <\/em>she urges, Tell me: why is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan so important to you?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a question I am asked frequently, and invariably respond to by narrating the same episode. It was 2023 and my Nanu was dying in the hospital: room 36, last one on the left. I remember the rain refusing to stop for days on end, a growing sense of suffocation as the greyness enveloped us. The silence in the car after Papa dropped Mamma to the hospital for the night. Nani and Chhoti Nani, who had spent the day with Nanu, sat in the car to be dropped back home. Slumped in the middle seat, I watched the rain forcefully hit the windshield. There was a vacantness in all our eyes, a veil between us and our immediate surroundings. None of us were really in that car at all. That morning, I\u2019d finished Albert Camus\u2019 The Stranger<\/a><\/em> and was thinking abouthow it would likely be the last book I ever read with Nanu still alive. The book had made no sense to me;, when I googled its themes, meaninglessness of life <\/em>had been the first one to come up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1990, over a decade before I was even born, American singer Jeff Buckley discovered a qawwali by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: a sixteen minute-long composition of “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai,” the song that\u2013he confessed to the Pakistani singer a year before both their untimely deaths\u2013saved his life. \u201cIf you let yourself listen with the whole of yourself, you will have the pure feeling of flight while firmly rooted to the ground,\u201d Buckley wrote about Khan\u2019s music. \u201cYour soul can fly outward stringed to your ribcage like a shimmering kite in the shape of an open hand. Be still and listen to the evidence of your own holiness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was lifted up, above myself, above everything, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the years since Nanu\u2019s passing, I have repeatedly failed to describe what exactly happened to me\u2014to us<\/em>\u2014in that moment when the song on the car radio changed. Buckley\u2019s words, written over three decades ago, best encapsulate the near-spiritual experience. I was lifted up, above myself, above everything, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang. Then, just as gently, I was returned to the world. I straightened up, looked around: had anyone else felt the shift? For one second, I thought I was alone\u2014until I noticed the expression on my sister\u2019s face slowly transform, my Chhoti Nani starting to hum softly. \u201cWhat song is this?\u201d Deeti asked, and Nani named the first qawwali Buckley had ever listened to, the one that had saved him, that was now proving to me that life was not in fact in fact meaningless despite what Camus said, that there was more to it all than just death, than hospital room 36, last one on the left. The veil had disappeared; through the greyness, a thin shaft of light had entered.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Two years after Nanu\u2019s death, clearing up a spare room in his home, we found a tattered, yellowing piece of paper: a certificate of registration issued to him in July 1948 by the Government of Bombay. He must have been nine years old. “Name of refugee,” it demanded, followed by “address before evacuation,” “present address” and “name of head of family.” Under “identification marks,” someone had scrawled: “Left eye has.” I do not recall any marks by his left eye. I remember a small mole above his lip and the pale grey of his eyes, something I forever secretly hoped my own children would inherit. Even these details come to me now vaguely: I know as if by muscle memory that they were there but it feels almost like fiction. No image comes to mind when I think of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve always believed I\u2019ve done a good job of grieving Nanu, of leaving him behind like you\u2019re meant to leave the dead. Of wringing the sadness out of me in the weeks following his passing, when I\u2019d find myself lying drunk on the bedroom floor, desperately calling every number on my phone so I could talk to someone, anyone <\/em>about the gaping hole in my chest. At parties, imitating Shalom Harlow\u2019s catwalk would suddenly turn into sobbing on the bathroom floor after vomiting every sip of Old Monk I\u2019d gulped down earlier. Friends would drop me to my doorstep. Once inside, I\u2019d scream at my father about how Nanu had<\/em> suffered, was suffering, would forever be suffering, and everyone who claimed he\u2019d died peacefully was only lying to console themselves. I screamed over the red marks the oxygen mask had left on his forehead, over how the last thing he had ever said to me was that he couldn\u2019t breathe. Alone in my bedroom, when all my incessant phone calls went unanswered because it was past two in the morning, I would dissolve into tears, then type “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai” onto Spotify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The night Nanu passed away, his body was taken home, laid out in the hall in a steel freezer.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It was not rare for Khan to sing about alcoholism, lost love, a mohabbat<\/em> so powerful it transforms into devotion. These themes were especially resonant in my life once Nanu was gone. It was, as Philippe Ari\u00e8s wrote in his book Western Attitudes Towards Death<\/a><\/em>: \u201cA single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.\u201d Except Khan did. In “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai,” he sings to his beloved in Urdu: \u201cI blame your gaze for this perpetual intoxication \/ For teaching me to drink wine.\u201d In “Intoxicated”\u2014from his collaborative album Night Song <\/em>(1996) with Canadian musician Michael Brook\u2014he croons: \u201cWhy does the cloud sway? \/ Maybe it is a drunkard, too \/ With a carefree gait \/ and rose-coloured eyes.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I found in Khan, thus, was not just the feeling of flight Buckley described but also compassion, an understanding of the agony it takes to drive one to addiction. Less than a month after Nanu\u2019s death, I found myself in the hospital with two IV tubes jammed into the back of my hand to replenish my electrolytes. I had mild alcohol poisoning; I had a faint memory of kissing a stranger at a nightclub, then sobbing inconsolably as I told him I\u2019d recently lost my grandfather. It was only two years later\u2014by this point I\u2019d grown used to sobriety\u2014that I learnt that Khan\u2019s references to alcoholism were metaphors, that qawwali lyrics are rife with these forbidden references as allegories for devotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps because I\u2019ve let it all out but more likely because I cautiously avoid any thoughts of him, I can now discuss Nanu without displaying any emotion, so much so that I find myself surprised whenever my voice cracks or a previously unexplored regret formulates itself. I always tell people I found Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at the perfect time, that he assuaged the pain of losing my grandfather. Never before have I allowed myself to think about how his music could have been something we shared: a bridge between two generations in a time when we otherwise scrambled to find things in common to talk about. In his final months, Nanu would beckon my sister and I to sit next to him, then ask if we could play him some songs on our phone. With him peering into our screens to watch the accompanying music video on YouTube\u2014usually from Baiju Bawra<\/em> (1952) or Mughal-E-Azam<\/em> (1960), black-and-white films he hadn\u2019t fully watched in years\u2014my sister Deeti and I listened to these tunes so much that we learnt the lyrics by heart. The night Nanu passed away, his body was taken home, laid out in the hall in a steel freezer. Seated next to it\u2014on the same navy blue sofa-cum-bed Deeti and I had slept on as children exhilarated at the prospect of sleeping over at our grandparents\u2019 home\u2014I breathlessly created a playlist of all the songs he loved. It was on YouTube because many of the songs weren\u2019t available on Spotify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was another thing Nanu longed to see on our smartphones, through which, he now realised, he had access to the entire world: the city of Dera Ghazi Khan in Pakistan. Again and again, he would ask us to look up this place that seemed to have reappeared in his memory now that he was an old man. On my web browser, I would pull up image after image of the dusty city; on YouTube, we\u2019d watch travel vlogs with no more than a hundred thousand views of men there simply going about their daily routines, driving around or eating street food. The city was ordinary and unremarkable in almost every way if it wasn\u2019t for the fact that my grandfather had once been a boy here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1948\u2014three months before Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born in Faisalabad and a year after the British initiated the Partition which split India and Pakistan into two separate states\u2014Nanu and his family migrated to present-day India. It was here, in Mumbai, that he lived the majority of his life: here that he got married, had a daughter, saw his parents die, his two granddaughters excitedly pull open the navy blue sofa-cum-bed for sleepovers, the same sofa-cum-bed they would sit on the night of his death. Yet it was Dera Ghazi Khan he remembered as he slipped away. His childhood, his hometown, the winters in a country that would no longer permit him entry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We lost Nanu\u2019s refugee certificate the same day that we found it. Who had it last, who kept it where, in which folder; none of us could understand where it was gone. Kneeling on the concrete in the afternoon sun, Deeti and I spent an hour rummaging through two bags of trash from the residential complex, tearing open envelopes, rifling through spam mail, papers and cardboard, trying to find the tattered, yellowing document. When we failed, I tried to comfort myself by repeating that it was only a piece of paper, that I still had a photograph of it I\u2019d sent to my friends, that a mere document could not sum up Nanu\u2019s life; we had not <\/em>killed him again. But the truth of it was that we had lost tangible evidence not only of Nanu\u2019s existence but of his suffering, his displacement, the very memories that haunted him in his final years. The feelings from his life\u2014the yearning for home, the way he tightly grasped my hand every time we watched vlogs of Dera Ghazi Khan\u2014remained, but the facts were gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, what this story comes down to is facts and feelings. I have all the facts of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan\u2019s life, as I tell my therapist. I am aware that only this objective information is believed and taken seriously. Statistics, numbers, neutral, verified accounts are quoted in arguments, considered truer than the lived experiences of thousands. Yet it is my feelings that threaten to spill out: the many emotions surrounding Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and by extension, the death of my grandfather, that I am unable to confront and articulate. In her 1998 book The Other Side of Silence<\/a>, <\/em>Urvashi Butalia documents oral testimonies and personal chronicles from the 1947 Partition, placing people rather than high politics at the centre. \u201cThe \u2018history\u2019 of Partition seemed to lie only in the political developments that had led up to it,\u201d she writes in reference to the books she had read so far on the subject. \u201cThese other aspects\u2013what had happened to the millions of people who had to live through this time, what we might call the \u2018human dimensions\u2019 of this history\u2013somehow seemed to have a \u2018lesser\u2019 status in it. Perhaps this was because they had to do with difficult things: loss and sharing, friendship and enmity, grief and joy, with a painful regret and nostalgia for loss of home, country and friends, and with an equally strong determination to create them afresh. These were difficult things to capture \u2018factually.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the 7th of May, 2025, India launched missile strikes against Pakistan in a military campaign codenamed Operation Sindoor. To write this, I had to look up the date on Wikipedia. The facts of the conflict\u2013dates, month, who attacked whom first, when a ceasefire was declared, then violated\u2013escape me entirely, no matter how much I try to remember. What I do remember is how it felt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our fates lay in the hands of a few powerful men with their own ulterior motives.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I remember the cold panic that washed over me when my sister burst into our bedroom with the news. The realisation that every mundane ritual we had taken for granted\u2014a trip to the mall, a Friday night at the club, a simple plan made days in advance\u2014was now a thing of the past. A sense of dread permanently stalked me; I felt as though I was walking through a haze. It was raining again, giving everything the quality of a bad dream, a repetition of the past, a nightmare we just couldn\u2019t shake off. I flinched at every small sound: air strikes? Bombs? Near my father\u2019s office, the police conducted a mock drill. There were rumours of a city-wide blackout scheduled for that afternoon. I remember repeatedly asking my parents, every stranger, every shopkeeper I met what they thought was going to happen despite knowing that they didn\u2019t have any more information than I did. I refreshed the news frantically every few minutes. My main question was: could my sister and I still throw the house party we\u2019d been planning for days?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the party, I got drunk for the first time since Nanu\u2019s death. Kept melting into tears the same way I had three years ago. It was inconceivable to me that every minute detail of our lives which had before seemed so fixed, could be transformed entirely by something so outside our control; worse, that our fates lay in the hands of a few powerful men with their own ulterior motives. In my first therapy session, I fretted over how helpless I felt, how intent I was on throwing this party because it was the only thing currently in my power. I panicked about Khan\u2019s music being banned, despaired over the hopelessness that I was beginning to feel at the thought of not being able to hear his voice. What I really wanted was not to throw a house party or listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. What I really wanted was to know that I still had the freedom to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson describes the nation as \u201can imagined community\u201d, positing that the idea of this community is appealing to so many because \u201cregardless of the inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1947 Partition led to two such imagined communities: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, more manmade borders, the British\u2019s parting gift. \u201cNever before or since have so many people exchanged their homes and countries so quickly. In the space of a few months, about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan,\u201d notes Butalia. \u201cSlaughter sometimes accompanied and sometimes prompted their movement; many others died from malnutrition and contagious disease. Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted. As always there was widespread sexual savagery: about 75,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). Thousands of families were divided, homes were destroyed, crops left to rot, villages abandoned.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the political landscape that Khan was born into, in the newly formed Pakistan. Watching his interviews, I am often surprised by his gentleness\u2014so different from the emotional violence of his music\u2014by the way he talks about India and Pakistan as if they never separated and continue to be singular. Because I was born over fifty years after the Partition, after the idea of these two dominion states had long seeped into public consciousness, India and Pakistan seemed, to me, two fixed entities, permanently divided, as if they had existed as separate nations since the dawn of time and would continue to eternally. But Khan\u2014like my grandparents\u2014seemed to speak of this division as a mere blip in many thousand years of history, a phenomenon he couldn\u2019t quite understand, a fresh, temporary idea that at any time could be undone. In interviews, he frequently mentioned India alongside Pakistan, citing the shared cultural heritage of qawwali, which was created in 13th century Delhi by musician Amir Khusro. The purpose of qawwali is not just entertainment, he told The New York Times<\/em>, but to spread “the universal message of love and understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to other ritualistic practices like whirling and sama, qawwali is a part of Sufi tradition, which Khan followed. Sufism, which falls under the umbrella of Islam, is a mystic body of practice characterised by its values of spirituality, tolerance and peace. Khan epitomised these beliefs in his advocacy for a friendship between India and Pakistan. He spoke mournfully of his attempts and failures to persuade the government of his nation to launch diplomatic initiatives welcoming Indian musicians, of how there should never be restrictions on art (\u201cAn artist belongs to everyone\u201d). Months before his death in August 1997, the 48 year-old singer gifted a song titled “Gurus of Peace” to Indian composer A.R. Rahman\u2019s album Vande Mataram <\/em>(1997) which celebrated fifty years of India\u2019s independence. This was amongst his last recordings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

In the final days of the 2025 conflict between India and Pakistan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan\u2019s official Instagram account became unavailable in India, as did the accounts of other Pakistani musicians such as Ali Sethi and Atif Aslam. \u201cThis is because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content,\u201d the social media site states. Audio streaming platforms in India initiated the process of removing works by Pakistani artistes from their libraries. Television shows created in our neighbouring nation were pulled down across channels in India. The imagined community, I realised, is not just united for <\/em>a cause but against <\/em>one: a common enemy, the neighbour who becomes even more remote from us, more otherised and demonised, when we are unable to engage with their art, their stories, reckon with their humanity. \u201cSometimes,\u201d Butalia writes. \u201cState power can be called into the service of suppressing memory\u2026 The opening-up of the field of memory, the entry of artists, musicians and others into it, is not something that serves the interests of a right-wing government which would like to build  a majoritarian nation and therefore memory work that references Partition is now often labelled anti-national, and attempts to cross our borders are seen as betrayals and as anti-patriotic.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To censor is to kill\u2014or at the least, to desensitise one group to the murder of another. On social media, I saw a cousin in his thirties celebrating missile strikes that had led to civilian casualties in Pakistan, writing on his Instagram story: \u201cTake that, Porkies.\u201d I received a video of another cousin, only five, euphorically chanting, \u201cDeath to Pakistanis.\u201d Thousands of Indians called for war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is stories, feelings, memories, that make up a life, a generation, a history.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Three of my grandparents migrated across the border during the Partition, so I grew up on oral histories like the ones Butalia documents, on tales that seemed almost mythical, from a time and land far, far away. There was my Dadi\u2019s cousin who was stabbed multiple times on her journey to India but survived, there was her family desperately hunting for food every time the train stopped at a railway station. Trains sped past piles of human bones. There was Chhote Dadu, whose voice still cracks when he remembers the years he was forced to spend away from his father and siblings because none of their relatives in India could afford to care for the entire family together, the years he pretended to dislike milk because he knew his family couldn\u2019t afford it. There is Chhote Dadu, now in his eighties, perfectly drawing the layout of his Lahore home that he had to abandon at the age of five.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The truth is that no matter how many facts and statistics we hear\u2013how many dead, raped, displaced, lynched\u2013it is ultimately the stories, the art, the narratives that touch us, that let us understand another nation, another religion, another way of life. \u201cWhat a ban does,\u201d writes<\/a> Anuradha Banerji, \u201cis deny you the chance to weigh the record for yourself. It turns a citizen into an audience by severing your ability to compare accounts, test claims and decide where you stand\u2026 They train a public to prefer echo over argument.\u201d If these narratives, this art, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan\u2019s attempts to reach for peace, are censored, then the Partition is not just a tragic event that took place in 1947. It is something that has continued to happen ever since, that happens now, that will forever be happening. Because it is stories, feelings, memories, that make up a life, a generation, a history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growing up, I knew my Nanu to be the quietest, gentlest of us all. While my other grandparents\u2019 personal histories poured out as I lay in their laps and listened intently, Nanu remained tight-lipped, only answering questions about his childhood upon our insistence. Consequently, I was cautious when I asked him these questions, framing them tentatively because it seemed as though his pain was always too close to the surface, that it would brim over if we poked or prodded too much. The few stories he told us were laced with an ache I could never understand the depth of, that I perhaps only felt a fraction of when I lost him.  Butalia stresses \u201cthe importance of remembering a violent history, for the sake of those who lived through it and died, and equally the sake of those who lived through it and survived.\u201d  
Nanu came from a land I may never get a chance to see, spoke an Afghani dialect of Punjabi I never got to hear because only his parents and brother understood it, because his family suppressed, eliminated this language in an attempt to fit into what would be their new home for the rest of their lives. I never fully understood Nanu\u2019s suffering, his isolation, which has perhaps made me even more sensitive to it, more apprehensive of writing this story, more fearful of what we lose when we lose art, music, stories from beyond borders. What we lose is not just a language, a culture, the potential of a more expansive brotherhood that goes beyond the limits of manmade boundaries. What we lose is something more intrinsic: our kindness, our empathy, our humanity. The memory that this was once a shared history and even today, continues to be. We lose the ability to look at someone, who may, at first glance, seem completely alien to us\u2014a 48 year-old Muslim qawwali singer from a newly-created Pakistan, for instance\u2014and realise: I see parts of myself in you.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written at The Art Farm Residency in November 2025, Goa.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following things happen in my body when I think about writing this story: my chest tightens, my breathing gets quicker, shallow; a tingling sensation covers my arms; the skin on my forehead seems to tighten itself around my brain. 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