Sheikh Saqlain

    Fifteen years ago, when my grandfather, a musicologist, despairingly hung his Santoor on the wall, little did I realise what our Kashmir, the Valley of Sufis, had lost. It is only now, when I have grown up, that I realise the hauntingly mesmerizing melodies of Sufiyana Mosiqi (music of sufis), which Sheikh Abdul Aziz, my Lala, preserved by devoting his entire life, are rarely heard.
    Kashmir has been a conflict zone for the past 30 years. The bullets and the bombs killed thousands. Those who escaped lived, but their spirits were torn apart, nothing to help, nothing to heal. After all, what could? The soul-soothing, mystic tunes of Sufiyana Mosiqi, voice of god, were nowhere to be found.
    Sufiyana Mosiqi, a style of choral music performed by four to five musicians, each playing an instrument and singing, came to Kashmir from Central Asia. Having learnt the divine secrets, the mystics of Kashmir then molded them into their own tune, nurtured the art and passed it on for hundreds of years until the beginning of the 20th century, when royal patronage began to fade away.
    Since 1947, when Indian rule over Kashmir began, the neglect faced by Sufiyana Mosiqi has only reached new heights. As of today, Kashmir’s Sufiyana Mosiqui has lost 138 of the 180 ragas or melodies mentioned in ancient scripts, as well as some dances of antiquity. The tradition of verbally passing down melodies from generation to generation, too, contributed to the near extinction of this music form, like many other forms of art.
    But, before his death in 2005, my Lala preserved the surviving 42 melodies before by notating them. Lala would tell me about his travels to remote villages and towns of Kashmir, of meeting old musicians and music-lovers, in search of Sufiyana ragas for his four-volume monumental musical notation, Kashur Sargam. “He fought this battle almost alone,” wrote Kashmir’s leading journalist, late Shujaat Bukhari in The Hindu newspaper.

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