Divine fusion: Sufi music with a rock ‘n’ roll soul in Hindi cinema’s Rockstar

Abstract

Abstract Sufi music is a devotional genre of traditional music in South Asia, known for its syncretic blend of literary traditions and musical genres, while rock music, an import from the West, began on the margins of Indian popular music. Early Hindi film, notorious for incorporating popular and traditional musical genres into its pictures, featured both traditional Sufi music (e.g. qawwali) and early rock ‘n’ roll in frequent appearances as ‘item numbers’. Picturizations of Muslims relied on exoticized on-screen representations, while rock bands were often picturized doing spastic dance moves, and plagiarizing hits from bands such as the Beatles. Beginning in the 1990s, however, a new genre of Sufi music diverged from its traditional roots and acquired rock and pop attributes, resulting in a powerful musical entity that allowed the emergence of a new genre of Hindi film song, as well as an independent popular genre of Sufi pop-rock. This article examines how the Sufi song became associated with the sentiments of rock music, despite its devotional nature, and the extent to which Sufi pop-rock influenced and helped establish the rock genre in the soundtrack of films such as Rockstar (Ali, 2011) It looks at the different types of Sufi song, its transformation to a new form of Sufi pop-rock, and how it inspired rock in Hindi film creating a musical prototype that helped normalize and advance rock music as an acceptable musical outlet for a new Zeitgeist.