Qawwali: “Dum Must Qalandar” – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pakistan
A performative engine of divine agency and social enchantment, where voice, rhythm, and repetition activate the presence of God through sound as causal force
Thinking Through Alfred Gell (1945-1997)’s Art and Agency
Introduction
Qawwali is the devotional music of Sufi Islam, performed predominantly in South Asia. It uses poetry, rhythm, and vocal interplay to invoke divine presence, drawing on the mystical philosophies of Ibn Arabi, Rumi, and Bulleh Shah. The piece “Dum Must Qalandar”—made world-famous by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan—is a Qawwali in praise of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, a 13th-century Sufi saint associated with ecstatic love, freedom from worldly constraint, and the blurring of self and God.
From the framework of Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, this Qawwali is not “music” in the aesthetic sense, but a ritual artifact of divine intentionality. It is a system of sonic enchantment, where rhythmic intensification and poetic repetition do not represent divine experience—they produce it. Gell’s concepts of index, distributed agency, enchantment, and causality are all dynamically at work in this performance tradition.
The Qawwali as Index of Divine Agency
Gell posits that artworks are indexes of agency—traces of intentional action. In Qawwali:
The lyrics index the saints, the prophets, and God—not merely by describing them, but by channeling their presence,
The vocal delivery—rising in intensity, slipping into repetition or variation—is not decoration but a causal tool for transformation,
The performer’s voice becomes an index of both personal devotion and divine invocation.
The performance of “Dum Must Qalandar” becomes a vocal shrine, where the sound itself is a ritual offering and an active agent in inducing haal—the Sufi trance of presence and annihilation.
Distributed Agency: God, Saint, Performer, Listener
Qawwali is never the product of a solo agent. Gell’s concept of distributed agency fits perfectly:
The Sufi saint is present in the song and serves as a mediating agent to the divine,
The lead singer (Nusrat, in this case) may embody the voice of the saint or the seeker,
The chorus and clappers synchronize energy and invite collective merging,
The audience is not passive—they are part of the ritual circuit, clapping, crying, or entering trance.
Agency flows not from performer to listener, but in all directions, facilitated by sound as relational conduit.
Repetition as Sonic Causality
Gell argues that art acts not by representation but by causation. In Qawwali, the repetition of lines like “Dum must Qalandar mast mast” is:
Not poetic indulgence, but incantatory engine,
It builds energy, dissolves ego, aligns hearts with divine rhythm,
Each return to the phrase increases its enchanting power.
The goal is not narrative but effect. Like mantra, the phrase becomes an object of power, not meaning. Gell would argue that this is aesthetic agency at its most causal—where the chant does not refer to God, but enacts contact with God.
The Tabla and Harmonium: Instruments as Agentive Machinery
Instruments in Qawwali are not accompaniment—they are sonic agents:
The tabla and dholak regulate tempo escalations, which Gell would interpret as temporal enchantment—intensifying the urgency of divine arrival,
The harmonium sustains the melodic drone—a symbolic breath of God, always present,
As tempo accelerates, musical structure pulls the audience out of linear time into ritual time—a sacred now where nothing else exists.
Gell would see this as a spatial and temporal artwork, structuring consciousness and organizing collective trance.
The Performer as Threshold Agent
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, as qawwal, does not sing for the audience—he sings through the saint, to the divine. His performance:
Displays technically brilliant vocal control, melisma, and modulation,
Serves not to impress, but to bypass rationality and provoke emotional surrender,
The more “lost” he becomes in the chant, the more powerful the agency becomes.
Gell’s theory applies here: artworks enchant when the gap between agent and object dissolves. The Qawwali becomes a field of agency in which the human voice transforms into divine presence.
Trance, Tears, and the Listener as Co-Agent
Listeners of Qawwali often report:
Tears, bodily trembling, sudden joy or sorrow,
States of mystical absorption (wajd), culminating in swooning or dancing.
In Gellian terms, the listener is not a recipient—they are a participant agent in the artwork’s causal network. The song acts through them, often in unpredictable ways. They are enchanted, not by illusion, but by sonic intensity that bypasses cognitive resistance.
This is not interpretation—it is transformation.
Time as Ritual Intensification
Qawwali unfolds like a spiral, not a line:
Each verse returns, but with more heat,
The performance may last 30 minutes to 3 hours, creating a ritual arc of immersion.
Gell would argue this is art acting on time—bending, stretching, and concentrating it into charged thresholds. The listener exits chronological time and enters divine simultaneity—a time not of clock but of eternal presence.
Conclusion
From Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory, “Dum Must Qalandar” is not a song—it is a ritual field of sonic agency, in which the divine, the historical, the emotional, and the communal are bound by the causality of voice and rhythm.
The Qawwali is not heard—it happens to you. It is a sacred machine, an enchantment engine, and a musical invocation of God’s immediacy. In Gell’s terms, it is an art of intentional causation—not through symbols, but through sound itself as divine act.