If you love a good ear-worm that will inhabit your body for days after you first hear it, you will love Pasoori.
Pasoori is a sneakily-classical Punjabi-Urdu hit single that was released earlier this year on Coke Studio. The lyrics speak to the helplessness and the longing in separation between lovers. The melody inaugurates a genre that “blends raga and reggae.”
But foreigners to the Punjab without a sense of “raga” or “reggae” - like me - also find themselves under Pasoori’s groovy spell. Which is probably why it went viral globally on platforms like Spotify and Youtube within days of its release, and now rubs shoulders with songs by the Glass Animals, Sia, and The Weekend on top of international charts on Amazon’s Prime Music.
The singer-songwriter behind Pasoori is Ali Sethi - author, musician, and all round icon as even the TIME magazine has just realised. Sadly, in my view, the world came to discover Ali five years too late.
To me, Ali - himself a sneakily-classical-yet-entirely-groovy personality - is the hero we need but don’t deserve. Here’s why.
Forging connection, one Lockdown Live at a time…
COVID-19 put us under a nation-wide “lockdown” in India. If we were lucky enough to have balconies or patios, they became our only connection to the outside. We knew little, and we could do little. So my partner and I kept ourselves from becoming bleary-eyed and knotty-stomached by cooking shakshuka, baking banana breads, stirring Dalgona coffees and getting our ducks in a row for the “new normal” - toggling between real and virtual work through night and day in our tiny boxes of isolation.
A week into this life, I chanced upon some pandemic-internet-magic: free-for-all Instagram Lives by South Asian musicians singing to each other while hundreds of others watched in realtime!
Eight-thousand miles away was the man responsible for conjuring up this magic - Ali Sethi. Each morning, bright and early, he logged in and set up an Instagram Live from his New York apartment. He would begin by playing around on his little keyboard. When his guest logged in, he would kick off an intimate conversation about the pandemic, their art, his music, and then invite them to do a little performance. In turn, he sang us tunes - some as recent as contemporary Bollywood, others as old as time itself.
Most special of all was the spark of connection he kindled in us in a pandemic of disconnection. About a week into the lockdown, Ali invited Shilpa Rao, an award-winning Indian musician with hundreds of India’s most popular tunes to her name. In between, Shilpa’s dad popped up on the screen to make a request of Ali. Instantly, Ali obliged him. In that moment, in Ali was each of us who has ever obliged a desi uncle we barely know - a concoction of eager-to-please energy and loving indulgence in equal parts.
When there were no guests, Ali would give us pieces of himself.
Each Live felt like a work of art, but without the artifice of performance. He had this way of dwelling on a key, but then surprised us when, all of a sudden, he let a key carry him along. He revelled in keeping it raw, with multiple takes and retakes - each sounding more delightful than the other - as he tried different ways to reach a note, a lilting meend or a mischievous murki. He was joyful and unabashed.
Between song, he would chat us up about the raga (the melodic frameworks central to the subcontinent’s classical music traditions) or taal (the frameworks for rhythm), the uniqueness of the composition, or the age and social ethos it was made in. He always had one eye on the stream of incoming comments from viewers. He never passed up a chance for repartee, and his whimsy was the wind that sustained the rainbow-flurry of emojis of hearts and flowers.
All his Lives were signature Sethi: earnest and absorbing, like we all knew the same joy, fear, or heartbreak. It made me wonder why this isn’t a model for paid concerts. I would pay top dollar to listen to musicians reflect on their musical traditions, the craft, and their feelings about it all… or was that the desperate yearning for connection that the lockdown had induced in me?!
In a genre that belongs to the other
Ali’s chosen genre is the ghazal.
The ghazal is ostensibly poetry about unrequited love, and has over time, acquired a reputation of being an “auntie-uncle” genre - perhaps because it brims with pathos of the kind that we imagine for the winter of our lives.
But, as Ali tells it, the ghazal was “historically the young person’s genre.” The capacious metaphors that make up the ghazal were written to accommodate multiple perspectives and hold multiple meanings. The poets who wrote the ghazal were society’s “other,” living at the margins of the zeitgeist. And so the ghazal was the poetry of subversion.
Ali’s chosen project is not to make the ghazal cool again. It is to use the ghazal to go into spaces that spark connection between ourselves and the estranged other. Spaces where the other can be seen. Spaces where we can be seen, outside the shackles of social acceptability.
Take his Chandni Raat. The Urdu ghazal was written by Saifuddin Saif, a Poet from the Punjab, back in perhaps the 1940s. The sentiment of a language can seldom be translated even if its words can; nonetheless, this translation by Prachi Chabbra captures the idea:
I’d wished and prayed for this day of our union for the longest time
I had hoped to see this night when we all come together
It has finally happened, after a long wait
I can finally say something, that I always wanted to
This night, full of beautiful moonshine, has come, after all…
Ali notes that this song held so many meanings. In his words, “ …it speaks of separation and union, the society, an individual, about the nation, about loneliness, about community and about love -- and that's the beauty of ghazals, that they speak to all of us.” His point comes through in the accompanying video. Folks of all stripes find themselves moving out of an insular self and opening up to a collective of others, meeting at a liminal place - what always felt to me like a train station to another world. (It would be well worth the investment of your five-and-a-half minutes.)
From a tradition that knows no borders
The ghazal itself belongs to a broader classical tradition in which Ali received his training - Hindustani music. I was no stranger to the tradition myself, having been conscripted into classes for a little over a decade as a child. My parents - bless their hearts - went all out, investing time and money to procure a tabla (the Hindustani percussion instrument), a tanpura (the Hindustani pitch-keeper), their electronic counterparts, and 4 kinds of teachers spanning all kinds of introductions to both raga and taal. Predictably, I neither had the sense nor the soul to appreciate this tradition at the time.
In one of his Lockdown Lives, when more than a thousand of us were watching, Ali began to explore the Hindustani raga Pahaadi. Just as the notes took me back to my childhood - and that sense of safety and simplicity of being at home - Ali helped me see it in a new light.
Pahaadi was a raga of the Northern mountains of the subcontinent. These hills knew no borders, and so this raga knew no borders, he pointed out, like much of Hindustani music. So “…we can’t keep thinking of ourselves as Punjabis, Sikhs, …Hindus, Muslims.. we are forever bound by a single language of love through these songs.. and we need to accept that as well,” Ali mused, in a mix of Hindustani-Punjabi. (That I as a South-Indian had only known Hindustani classical music growing up was testament to this).
A while later, he made a dedication. He said the song was for ‘his friends across the border whom he was now forbidden from meeting’. Wistfully, he sang Jo Wada Kiya - a legendary Hindi number from the late 1960s about two lovers holding each other to a promise to come to the other, no matter what gets in their way. Then, casually, Ali remarked, “And you want to just … divide us up with a circular? … I don’t believe it… don’t hurt my feelings!”
I didn’t know at the time what circular he was talking about. It turned out it was the “total non-cooperation directive” set up after a 2016 conflagration at India’s border with Pakistan; earlier that week, the circular had become the basis of a warning to all Indian musicians against collaborating with Pakistanis… even on the internet.
I suppose I forgot to let on earlier - Ali was raised Pakistani. Many of his guests, like me and hundreds of others watching, were Indian.
In the wake of these warnings, Ali’s Lockdown Lives became fully solo acts.
Music as a bridge for South Asian identity
It’s been two years since.
Ali’s banger, Pasoori, is on top of every music chart in India across platforms. He tells us that the song was born from watching his Indian friends slide out of his Lockdown Lives and back into his DMs - the aftermath of those warnings issued in 2020. So he thought to himself:
“How do I write a love song that is … at once, a queer anthem, but also … undoing this forcible separation between two countries, and that is written in the … traditional language of South Asian metaphors, which is obviously about arranged marriage… which applies to every kind of hot mess situation in the world…”
In true ghazal fashion, Pasoori’s lyrics carry a love-lorn metaphor of separation between the two peoples:
My love, don’t let this distance reign, my love what of this distance…
My love, don’t let this distance reign, don’t let these lovers be in pain
In a chat with Ambassador Nirupama Menon Rao during the 2020 lockdown, Ali remarked that a single landscape of art unites the subcontinent - something he learned through the music of his childhood and the study of South Asian art at Harvard. This helped him sense and create perspectives on South Asian identity, he revealed. You would know it if you have had a chance to check out his novel, his writing (in the New Yorker and the New York Times) or his other music. Given this prolific career, when an interviewer recently exclaimed that there seemed to be little Ali Sethi couldn’t do, pat came his reply:
“Apparently I can’t heal the rift between India & Pakistan, apparently I cannot visit India, apparently I cannot convince my countrymen and diaspora that peace and love is the best way… there’s much that I can’t do, and it keeps me going.”
At least the New Yorker begs to differ. They call Pasoori “The Pop Song That’s Uniting India and Pakistan.”
Many thanks to VG for helping me capture dialogue from the Lockdown Lives accurately, and to Chris, Grant, and Ashley for tremendously thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this piece.
Such a beautiful and interesting piece Malavika! I got chills listening to Ali's music, and the context you provided really added color to the whole experience.
"In that moment, in Ali was each of us who has ever obliged a desi uncle we barely know - a concoction of eager-to-please energy and loving indulgence in equal parts." this also made me laugh, very relatable!