The grief that kept the raag alive

Growing up, many of my closest friends were Shia. I never sought them out for that reason; it simply kept happening—in college, at university, at work, and later among the musicians and friends who became part of my grown-up life. And every one of them, at some point, without being asked, could sing. Not casually. Properly. They knew where a note sat before they opened their mouths.

During Muharram, some of them would disappear into marsiya khwani, soz khwani, noha reciting, reciting for hours in gatherings. I was invited to these gatherings, but never quite belonged to them. I filed it away for years as a curious coincidence. It wasn't until a teacher of mine, Syeda Arooj Zehra Rizvi, sent me an Instagram post mentioning something called "Hussaini Raag" that I sat down to find out whether the pattern I'd been noticing my whole life had a name, a history, and any truth to it.

Some of that investigation confirms what I suspected. Some of it complicates it in ways I didn't expect and one claim, the one that sent me down this road in the first place, turned out to be more interesting, and less tidy, than the Instagram post suggested.

Let's be honest about what this is. Pakistan's Sunni majority has, broadly, a more ambivalent relationship with music as a devotional or even a public practice, a discomfort with music-as-worship that doesn't map onto Shia liturgical culture in the same way, because Shia mourning practice has, for centuries, built specific, sanctioned vocal forms directly into its ritual calendar. That's not a value judgement about either tradition; it's a structural difference in how each accommodates the act of singing. And when you look at the roll call of Pakistan's classical and semi-classical greats, recorded marsiyas and nohay for Karbala, the Muharram connection is impossible to miss.

But here's the complication I owe upfront, not every one of those names was Shia by formal sect. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan came from a Sunni Sufi qawwali lineage that has always sung in praise of the whole Ahl al-Bayt, Hussain included a devotional inheritance that sits alongside Shia Azadari rather than inside it. His own sectarian identity is, to this day, genuinely disputed among his listeners.

So the more accurate claim isn't "Pakistan's classical musicians are mostly Shia." It's narrower and, I think, more useful, wherever Muharram liturgical practice built a sanctioned, structured, technically demanding vocal form into its ritual life, it created a training ground and a stage and Shia households did this more systematically, and over a longer, more continuous period, than almost any other devotional community in the region. That distinction matters, because it's the one the evidence actually supports.

Soz literally means ‘burning’, the burning of grief. It belongs to a family of elegiac forms, marsiya, noha, salaam, soz — that developed together in Awadh, the Shia-ruled kingdom centred on Lucknow, from the 18th century onward. But marsiya and soz, certainly are not the same thing, and conflating them is the most common mistake people make.

Marsiya is, by classification, a literary genre before it is a musical one, narrative elegiac poetry, often composed in the musaddas stanza form, perfected by the two towering 19th-century Lucknow poets Mir Anees and Mirza Dabeer. It is recited, frequently in a heightened, syllable-by-syllable declamatory style called taht-ul-lafz, without melody in the classical sense.

Soz khwani is the deliberately musical offshoot, a 19th-century refinement that took the emotional content of marsiya and gave it a controlled, unaccompanied melodic treatment. Crucially, it was designed to sound mournful enough, and stripped-down enough, to be considered jayiz (permissible) within a tradition wary of anything resembling entertainment during a period of grief. There's no tabla, no harmonium, as a rule; a soz khwan sings solo while a small group of companions hums a sustained drone beneath him, holding the base note so the lead singer's pitch never wavers. It is, in effect, discipline dressed as simplicity.

And that discipline is the part people underestimate. The musicologist Ashok Ranade, in his dictionary of Hindustani music, records something worth sitting with, soz khwani's rules were so exacting that stalwarts of classical singing – Ustad Faiyaz Khan, Abdul Karim Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan among them – found the form genuinely difficult to master, despite being some of the most accomplished vocalists the subcontinent has produced. That single fact tells you soz khwani was never folk simplicity. It was a specialised branch of classical vocal technique, wearing mourning clothes.

If soz is melody restrained, marsiya khwani is narrative sustained. A skilled marsiya khwan doesn't simply recite; he builds, pacing a multi-hour retelling of Karbala through modulations of volume, breath, and rhythm that function almost like a raga's own architecture: a slow, exploratory opening, a gradual intensification, and a climax timed to land exactly when the audience's collective grief is ready to break. Contemporary ethnographic scholarship on Karachi's Shia oratory, notably the work of researcher Amy Bard on marsiya performance, and Vernon Schubel's earlier fieldwork on 1980s Karachi Muharram practice, treats this pacing as a genuine performance art, inseparable from its religious content but analysable on its own musical terms.

Here is where I have to be careful, because this is the claim that started the whole inquiry, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a satisfying one.

"Hussaini" does exist as a term in Hindustani and Carnatic raag nomenclature. Hussaini Todi and Hussaini Kanada are real, if relatively rare, raags performed by serious classical vocalists; Carnatic music has its own cognate, Huseni, derived from the Raag Kharaharapriya. "Hussaini" to the best of my understanding, refers to a sur-samuha, a specific cluster or turn of notes, a melodic signature-phrase that recurs across several raags and gives them their family name. It's a technical label, closer to calling a chord progression "the Amen cadence" than to naming something after a person.

I could not find credible musicological evidence, from trained ustads, conservatories, or serious ethnomusicological literature, of an established, named canon called "the Hussaini Raags," used specifically and exclusively for Karbala liturgical performance, the way the Instagram post implied. What I found instead is more scattered and, honestly, more true to how living traditions actually work: soz and marsiya khwans draw on whichever raags suit the emotional register of grief in the moment, Bhairavi appears often, so does Raag Des, so do phrases from Kafi and Todi, without those choices congealing into a fixed, textbook-certified set. The Lucknow performer Askari Naqvi, continuing his family's soz khwani lineage today, has performed elegies in raag Des specifically; his forebear Chakki Mian reportedly learned soz khwani directly from the great Ustad Faiyaz Khan, a detail that, again, shows the classical and liturgical worlds sharing teachers, not separate raag systems.

So, no, "Hussaini Raag" as a distinct, codified musical school does not appear to be an established fact of musicology. But the coincidence of the name, and the genuine emotional gravity raags like Bhairavi carry in performance, is very likely why the phrase spread the way it did online, a case of a real technical term (Hussaini as a melodic phrase-name) getting reinterpreted, quite understandably, through the emotional weight of Muharram. I'd rather tell you that plainly than dress up a beautiful misunderstanding as settled theory.

There's a fourth vocal element that rarely gets discussed alongside soz and marsiya, and it deserves to be: khitabat, the sermon-oratory of the zakir who addresses the majlis. It isn't sung. But spend an hour inside a Muharram gathering in Lahore's walled city or Karachi's Nishtar Park and you'll hear something closer to composed music than plain speech – a deliberate architecture of rising and falling cadence, strategic silences, repetition used as refrain, and a controlled crescendo building toward the moment of maatam.

Allama Rasheed Turabi, the towering Karachi orator who addressed the Majlis-i-Shaam-i-Gharibaan on Radio Pakistan from 1951 until his death in 1973, was remembered specifically for a vocal instrument as much as an intellectual one: a voice trained, deliberately, to hold a mass audience the way a singer holds a raag. His broadcasts, and those of his successors, turned into some of the most listened-to annual audio events in the country's history, well before television normalised the idea of a single voice reaching millions.

The through-line from colonial Lucknow to Lahore is not metaphorical; it's a literal migration of families, patronage, and technique. Awadh under its Shia nawabs was where soz khwani was refined into an art form, with the Nawabs famously extending patronage even to women performers of soz for the royal household – a detail historians of the period note as unusually liberal for its time. When Partition redrew the map, that tradition didn't stay behind, it moved with people. Lahore's walled city alone is said to house well over 350 imambargahs, many predating 1947. Nisar Haveli and Mubarak Haveli in Mochi Gate's Mohalla Shian Kashmirian was founded by a family that traced its own migration back through Afghanistan to Azerbaijan. Maatam Siraai, reputedly the oldest in the city at roughly five centuries, took its name from Kashmiri pilgrims who rested there on the long road to Najaf. These weren't just buildings. After 1947, they became the institutional scaffolding a displaced Shia community rebuilt its liturgical and, by extension, its musical life around – brick by brick, in a new country.

Move the lens to Karachi and Sindh and the same instinct produced a different institutional shape. Sindh's own Shia patronage tradition runs back to the Talpur dynasty, and post-Partition Karachi built its Muharram culture around the mass-gathering, radio-and-television-amplified khitabat of figures like Turabi rather than the smaller, family-based haveli culture of Lahore's old city. Karachi's Muharram became, in a real sense, a broadcast phenomenon decades before satellite television, a majlis reaching a national audience through a single microphone. Two cities, two different infrastructures, the same underlying grammar of grief given voice.

Here's the detail that complicates any tidy version of this story, and I think it's the most honest thing I can offer you: the Patiala gharana itself, the family line that gave Pakistan Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Amanat Ali Khan, Asad Amanat Ali Khan, and Shafqat Amanat Ali, carries, by its own family record, a generations-old tradition of performing marsiya, noha, and soz-o-salaam during Muharram, regardless of how any individual member's personal sectarian identity is described. That doesn't erase the observation I started with. It sharpens it. What kept classical technique alive inside Muharram wasn't sectarian identity alone, it was a devotional obligation to Imam Hussain and Ahl al-Bayt that ran wider than formal Shia identity, through Sufi-inflected households as well as strictly Shia ones, all sharing ustads, raags, and stages. Azadari gave that obligation its most demanding, most sanctioned outlet. That's a more interesting story than the simple version, and, I'd argue, a truer one.

The human insight is this: a society that restricts music in general will not stop people from wanting to sing. It will simply redirect that want into whichever channel is left open and the channel that stays open the longest is usually the one wrapped in enough moral seriousness that nobody dares call it entertainment. Grief, in this case, did what a conservatory could not: it gave generations of Pakistani singers a lawful place to train their ear, their breath, and their pitch, at a time and in a milieu where a public music career carried real social cost.

The practical action, if you're a musician, a parent, or simply someone who cares whether classical technique survives another generation in this country, is to stop treating liturgical vocal training as a separate, lesser category from "real" music education. A child who has spent years holding a drone note steady beneath a soz khwan, or pacing a marsiya's rise and fall by ear, has already absorbed technical discipline most conservatory students take years to build. That's a resource, not a footnote.

The writer is a music enthusiast and cultural critic. He writes about the intersection of music, society, and the human condition. He can be reached at brian.bassanio@gmail.com

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