Nusrat: The Voice of Faith

Nusrat: The Voice of Faith PDF Author: Pierre Alain-Baud
Publisher: HarperCollins India
ISBN: 9789351363842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Shahenshah-e-Qawwali, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's voice gripped the imagination of people across the world. A man of deep simplicity, as well as someone truly of his times, he singlehandedly made qawwali a global passion. With hundreds of albums to his credit, and millions of sales, Nusrat had an all-consuming mission: to spread the message of the Sufi poets and mystics. In Pakistan and abroad, he reincarnated the ancient Sufi culture, steeped in mysticism and devotion, with a blazing modernity. This book is a personal account of the great qawwal's life by Pierre-Alain Baud who had intimate access to Nusrat for over a decade. Baud, who was overcome with emotion when he heard Nusrat during his very first concerts in France in 1985, often travelled with the artiste and contributed to organizing numerous shows for him all over the world and in Pakistan, until his untimely death in 1997. This insightful account is replete with anecdotes from those travels and enriched by conversations with the great man's friends, family and collaborators. Nusrat is, in the author's words, the result of 'generous exchanges interrupted by unexpected vocal demonstrations, stunning silences, fiery looks and the magic of his personality, so close yet constantly eluding us'.

Nusrat: The Voice of Faith

Nusrat: The Voice of Faith PDF Author: Pierre Alain-Baud
Publisher: HarperCollins India
ISBN: 9789351363842
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shahenshah-e-Qawwali, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's voice gripped the imagination of people across the world. A man of deep simplicity, as well as someone truly of his times, he singlehandedly made qawwali a global passion. With hundreds of albums to his credit, and millions of sales, Nusrat had an all-consuming mission: to spread the message of the Sufi poets and mystics. In Pakistan and abroad, he reincarnated the ancient Sufi culture, steeped in mysticism and devotion, with a blazing modernity. This book is a personal account of the great qawwal's life by Pierre-Alain Baud who had intimate access to Nusrat for over a decade. Baud, who was overcome with emotion when he heard Nusrat during his very first concerts in France in 1985, often travelled with the artiste and contributed to organizing numerous shows for him all over the world and in Pakistan, until his untimely death in 1997. This insightful account is replete with anecdotes from those travels and enriched by conversations with the great man's friends, family and collaborators. Nusrat is, in the author's words, the result of 'generous exchanges interrupted by unexpected vocal demonstrations, stunning silences, fiery looks and the magic of his personality, so close yet constantly eluding us'.

Indian Cultural Diplomacy

Indian Cultural Diplomacy PDF Author: Paramjit Sahay
Publisher: Vij Books India Pvt Ltd
ISBN: 9388161092
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 645

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Book Description
The Book is a window on Indian cultural diplomacy, which is set against the backdrop of its ethos of 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam' (The World is a Family). It is pivoted to the 'Idea of India' that gets manifested through acceptance of diversity and celebration of pluralism. The Book in 15 chapters under 8 sections provides a comprehensive picture on the concept of cultural diplomacy; its relationship with public diplomacy and soft power; its place in the diplomatic architecture and its growing centrality. Unlike soft power, cultural diplomacy is not in the paradigm of power. The Book also provides an in depth study on the origins and evolution of Indian cultural diplomacy over the years. It reviews the role of the Ministries of Culture and External Affairs and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR). It examines various instrumentalities, such as Cultural Agreements, Festivals of India, Cultural Centres and Chairs of Indian Studies, used by India, to achieve its objectives. The role played by Education, Media and Diaspora, as bridge builders is evaluated. The Book peeps into global cultural hubs, like the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the working of cultural diplomacy at grassroots level at Chandigarh and Chicago. Two chapters in the Book look at the operation of cultural diplomacy in the Indian diplomatic missions and foreign diplomatic missions in India. This adds a practical dimension to the conceptual framework, as seen by practitioners of diplomacy. The final chapter provides an overview on the existing reality. A section on 'The Way Ahead' makes a number of practical recommendations in five clusters, to take cultural diplomacy to a higher plateau. Finally, it raises a set of pertinent issues and points for consideration by theoreticians and practitioners of cultural diplomacy. The Book would serve as a useful reference point for further studies, as it fills the existing void in the literature on cultural diplomacy.

American Dervish

American Dervish PDF Author: Ayad Akhtar
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316192821
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From the author of Homeland Elegies and Pulitzer Prize winner Disgraced, a stirring and explosive novel about an American Muslim family in Wisconsin struggling with faith and belonging in the pre-9/11 world. Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes. American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life.

Punjab Sounds

Punjab Sounds PDF Author: Radha Kapuria
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040228526
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Punjab Sounds nuances our understanding of the region's imbrications with sound. It argues that rather than being territorially bounded, the region only emerges in ‘regioning’, i.e., in words, gestures, objects, and techniques that do the region. Regioning sound reveals the relationship between sound and the region in three interlinked ways: in doing, knowing, and feeling the region through sound. The volume covers several musical genres of the Punjab region, including within its geographical remit the Punjabi diaspora and east and west Punjab. It also provides new understandings of the role that ephemeral cultural expressions, especially music and sound, play in the formulation of Punjabi identity. Featuring contributions from scholars across North America, South Asia, Europe, and the UK, it brings together diverse perspectives. The chapters use a range of different methods, ranging from computational analysis and ethnography to close textual analysis, demonstrating some of the ways in which research on music and sound can be carried out. The chapters will be relevant for anyone working on Punjab’s music, including the Punjabi diaspora, music, and sound in the Global South. Moreover, it will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the following areas: ethnomusicology, cultural studies, film studies, music studies, South Asian studies, Punjab studies, history, and sound studies, among others.

The Lamp of Love

The Lamp of Love PDF Author: Amatullah Armstrong Chishti
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"This book recounts the unfolding of a dream and the journey that took the author from the midst of an Australian bushland paradise to the rapture of devotion at the Shrines of the Great Sufi Saints in Pakistan and India. It is a story of the yearning and searching for the Beloved, a story of love and loneliness." "The book tells of the unfolding of the author's spiritual connection to the Sufi saints of the Indo-Pak subcontinent and to Pakistan's legendary qawwals, the Sabri Brothers. The narrative describes how she followed a dream that led to the discovery of spiritual treasures in both Pakistan and India, and of her direct experience of being engulfed in the ecstatic music of the Sabri Brothers. The author elaborates upon the Sufi spiritual journey, highlighting the abysses and peaks encountered in the continuing search for higher knowledge. She records her impressions of life in Pakistan where she settled in order to immerse herself more deeply in qawwali and the Sufi traditions."--BOOK JACKET.

The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual

The Female Voice in Sufi Ritual PDF Author: Shemeem Burney Abbas
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292784503
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The female voice plays a more central role in Sufi ritual, especially in the singing of devotional poetry, than in almost any other area of Muslim culture. Female singers perform sufiana-kalam, or mystical poetry, at Sufi shrines and in concerts, folk festivals, and domestic life, while male singers assume the female voice when singing the myths of heroines in qawwali and sufiana-kalam. Yet, despite the centrality of the female voice in Sufi practice throughout South Asia and the Middle East, it has received little scholarly attention and is largely unknown in the West. This book presents the first in-depth study of the female voice in Sufi practice in the subcontinent of Pakistan and India. Shemeem Burney Abbas investigates the rituals at the Sufi shrines and looks at women's participation in them, as well as male performers' use of the female voice. The strengths of the book are her use of interviews with both prominent and grassroots female and male musicians and her transliteration of audio- and videotaped performances. Through them, she draws vital connections between oral culture and the written Sufi poetry that the musicians sing for their audiences. This research clarifies why the female voice is so important in Sufi practice and underscores the many contributions of women to Sufism and its rituals.

Listening with a Feminist Ear

Listening with a Feminist Ear PDF Author: Pavitra Sundar
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472903667
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.

Writing British Muslims

Writing British Muslims PDF Author: Rehana Ahmed
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526183765
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The Rushdie affair, September 11 2001 and 7/7 pushed British Muslims into the forefront of increasingly fraught debate about multiculturalism. Stereotyping images have proliferated, reducing a heterogeneous minority group to a series of media soundbites. This book examines contemporary literary representations of Muslims by British writers of South Asian Muslim descent – including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali and Nadeem Aslam – to explore the contribution they make to urgent questions about multicultural politics and the place of Muslims within Britain. By focusing on class, and its intersection with faith, ‘race’ and gender in identity- and community-formation, it challenges the dichotomy of secular freedom versus religious oppression that constrains thinking about British Muslims, and offers a more nuanced perspective on multicultural debates and controversies. Writing British Muslims will appeal to academics and postgraduate and final-year undergraduate students in the fields of postcolonial studies, English studies and cultural studies.

The Voice in the Drum

The Voice in the Drum PDF Author: Richard K. Wolf
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252096509
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Based on extensive field research in India and Pakistan, this new study examines the ways drumming and voices interconnect over vast areas of South Asia and considers what it means for instruments to be voice-like and carry textual messages in particular contexts. Richard K. Wolf employs a hybrid, novelistic form of presentation, in which a fictional protagonist interacts with Wolf's field consultants, to communicate ethnographic and historical realities that transcend the local details of any one person's life. The narrative explores how the themes of South Asian Muslims and their neighbors coming together, moving apart, and relating to God and spiritual intermediaries resonate across ritual and expressive forms such as drumming and dancing. Wolf weaves in the story of a family led by Ahmed Ali Khan, a North Indian ruler who revels in the glories of 19th century life, when many religious communities joined together harmoniously in grand processions. His journalist son Muharram Ali obsessively scours the subcontinent in pursuit of a music he naively hopes will dissolve religious and political barriers. The story charts the breakdown of this naiveté. A daring narrative of music, religion and politics in late twentieth century South Asia, The Voice in the Drum delves into the social and religious principles around which Muslims, Hindus, and others bond, create distinctions, reflect upon one another, or decline to acknowledge differences.

Abdul and Raj

Abdul and Raj PDF Author: Buchi Ramarao Velury
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Raj and Vaidehi, though not a perfect couple, were happy and contented. But their relationship slowly digressed towards an unbridgeable chasm. Vaidehi doubted his fidelity and questioned him often. That night the storm that hit the city also impacted the lives of Raj and Vaidehi. But does Raj go to the extreme of strangulating her? It has been a fortnight since Shabnam contacted Abdul. The operator said, “The number you dialled is out of reach.” Abdul is now worried. He has to risk his lucrative job in Saudi to find the whereabouts of his ladylove with no clue of her address. He is sure Allah, the Compassionate, will find a path for him. But time is running out. Raj is cornered. The Inspector threatens to take him into custody unless he agrees to his outrageous suggestion. What will he do? How does Raj escape arrest? Can Abdul find Shabnam? Does faith and love triumph over greed and deceit?