Parveen’s voice opens up a space to forge a relationality with the sound of an Islam, outside of dominant ideas of hyper-religiosity and Cartesian rationalism. This ecstasy is spiritual, erotic, and sexual. When Abida Parveen sings, Mein Sufi Hoon (I am a Sufi) and Dost (Friend) she takes me to ecstasy. Her vocal and visual aesthetic performance allow me to think about different ways that different bodies move in specific contexts, and how that movement is about pleasure, desire, agency, longing, submission, and suffering. Parveen’s music is central to my spiritual self-making, to my understanding of divinity, and my mapping of desire and love. What is queer about her voice is the look of it.” The look and sound of her voice, together, offer us a new way to think about how gender and sexuality transgresses existing frames while not always being totalising.Ībida Parveen’s music, and qawwalis, more broadly, has been the soundtrack of my daily life since my childhood growing up in and with Pakistan. Pavita Sundar states: “Pathak’s tomboyish appearance so much as the apparent disjuncture between that look and her voice that is key. This is because Pathak, unlike Parveen, is revered as a queer icon in India. Pathak’s hyper-feminine pop sensibility and masculine-presenting clothing might seem mismatched, however, sound studies scholar Pavitra Sundar argues that for Pathak’s audiences, which include avid dandia dancers, garba doers, as well as religious devotees, this was not an incongruity, nor a failure of the artist’s. Pathak is the most desirable soundtrack for this epic battle of divine femininity and feminine power. Dandiya translates to “sword dance” and Garba means “womb” in Sanskrit. Both dandiya and garba are traditional folk dances from Gujarat and Rajasthan. The nine days of devotion include worship rituals, prayers, dandiya and garba.
She gained notoriety as one of the most sought out performers for Navratri, a nine-day Hindu festival that celebrates the divine feminine. They force me to listen in ways I previously imagined impossible.īased in Bombay, India, Falguni Pathak is known as the “Queen of Dandiya” and is mainly seen in masculine-presenting clothing. What does unfastening these rigid registers of reading our world open up, make audible, make possible? So, I begin with the sounds that alter my registers of time, feelings, memory, bodily fluids, frames of longing, movement and futurities. Rather, I want to consider how the sound of their music pushes me to rethink my own fixation with queerness, elsewhere, South Asianness and communities of sound, what Gayatri Gopinath calls “queer audiotopias”. Rather, I want to push further and work through the many uneven translations of what Nadia Ellis calls “territories of the soul” to hear, listen and attend to sexuality differently. I choose to study Parveen and Pathak not as a way to “queer” Islam or “queer” South Asia. While both Parveen and Pathak can be said to represent traditions within Sufi and Hindi music, respectively, and each notoriously dresses in androgynous/masculine-presenting ways, I do not want to read Parveen and Pathak as simply national or religious musicians or to superimpose the mostly Western identity of “queer” or “butch” onto them, as that would be a disservice to us and disrespectful to them. To me, they offer us a way to undo the (ontological) dualities of mind and body, spirit and desire. Their visual and aural aesthetic representations challenge how we come to construct, hear and resist sexuality and the sacred in South Asia.
Parveen and Pathak are recognised across South Asia and its diasporas with different degrees of potency: pop music, cultural memory, nostalgic nodes of being, cathartic release, Islamic spirituality, Hindu dance, divine submission, and as soundtracks for the quotidian. By centering Abida Parveen and Falguni Pathak, two iconic South Asian musicians, I want to open up a conversation about sound, sexuality, desire, and the divine feminine. Building on theories in Sound Studies by critics such as Josh Kun and Jennifer Stoever, I want to attend to sacred sounds emanating from South Asian traditions to think about how sound racialises, genders, and sexualises. Sounds, in various iterations, disturb, inflict, challenge, heal, torment, arouse, invite and archive, at times all at once. Sound creates worlds in strikingly layered, different and definite ways.
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