Songs from Peshawar: Dicing with death

Suicide attacks and violence are being featured in songs from Peshawar.

PESHAWAR: He sings about peace and hope, but singer Gulzar Alam lives in fear. He has survived three attempts on his life and moves regularly to keep one step ahead of the Taliban.

Once inspired by romance, Alam is part of a growing number of Pakistanis changing the lexicon of the song book, writing less about affairs of the heart and more about the tragedy of suicide attacks and Islamist insurgency. “O Peshawar, I watch helplessly when your lovers’ blood becomes rain. Helplessly, with tears in my eyes, I read their funeral prayer,” he sings in one of his greatest hits in the north-western city on the Afghan border.

Being a singer in one of the most dangerous parts of the world can be lethal. The Taliban think music is ungodly. Music shops are bombed. Dancers have been killed and singers threatened with death.

In 2004, Alam was worried enough to move to Quetta, the then relatively peaceful capital of Balochistan in the south-west. But he was hit by a speeding car, critically injured and now has a rod in his right leg and uses crutches to walk. He blamed militants and returned to Peshawar in 2008. That October, gunmen opened fire on his car on the outskirts of the city. He survived a second time. “I can see tears in people’s eyes, when I sing and I want to create an awareness using my voice,” said Alam.

“We’ve stopped giving musical shows,” he said. “I have received dozens of phone calls and messages threatening me to stop singing.” Peshawar, the largest Pashtun city in the world and once a base for Osama bin Laden during the 1980s’ CIA-sponsored mujahedeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, has been on the frontline of a Taliban insurgency for years.

Meanwhile, another Pashtun singer, Sitara Younus, also played with fire singing risky songs like, “I am a suicide blast, I do everything by force and I rule everywhere”. The song was a track from the Pashtu film Sabar me Tamam Sho (I Have Lost My Patience). It may not have been popular among conservative Pashtuns who criticised it as “vulgar”, but it showed how far violence has permeated popular culture.

On September 19, a motorcycle bomb killed five people and wounded 28 others at a CD market in Peshawar. Traders say hundreds of music shops have been destroyed in recent years. As a result, many artists and singers have retired or preferred to keep a low profile.

Amjad Naveed, a writer and producer of several low-budget Pashtu films, also believes that violence has ushered in a new trend of preaching peace and patience through music. “You see the trend in Pashtu music changing because of the bombings,” he said. “People are dying, children are dying and poets write such things when they see the devastation and singers sing it,” he stated.

However, the trend isn’t limited to the north-west as Ali Azmat, one of Pakistan’s most famous rock stars, also has a hit song “Bomb Phata” (Bomb Exploded) that exposes not just the violence, but the shortages and inflation facing Pakistanis today.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 28^th, 2011.