The Light In Her

By Veenu Sandhu, *Setting the tone* - Business Standard - New Delhi, India; Saturday, February 26, 2011

This year’s edition of Jahan-e-Khusrau will feature a Toronto-based singer who once lost her voice. Festival director Muzaffar Ali saw the light in her.

On March 11, when Jahan-e-Khusrau returns to Delhi, the voice that will open the annual Sufi music festival will be a voice that was lost for five years. Muzaffar Ali, the man who has been directing Jahan-e-Khusrau since 2001 as a tribute to Sufi poet, scholar and musician Amir Khusrau, chanced upon this voice last year and knew he wanted it in his festival.

Being introduced as the “voice of the East”, 40-year-old Azalea Ray, who is from Canada, says it's a dream come true to sing near the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya, “if not in the dargah” which is not allowed because she’s a woman. And she credits Ali for that. “He sees the light in you, ahead of time, even before you have seen it.”

For Ray, being part of Jahan-e-Khusrau — she’s singing at the festival for the first time — is also a step forward in a bigger journey and a larger struggle. In December 2003, a surgical accident had cut her right vocal tract. “With that, my singing voice, my Lata and Julie Andrews voice, was gone,” she says. Ray, who performed and also taught Hindusthani classical music in her hometown, Toronto, says for the first time in her life she found herself without her companion, music, and without a livelihood.

The next five years were plunged in darkness. Until a group of Pakistani friends told her that she sounded somewhat like Abida Parveen. A thirst for another kind of music developed — from Indian classical to Sufi. “I heard Parveen and Farida Khanum over and over again,” she says. “Khanum became poetry for me.” And then one day, she got the chance to sing to her on the phone, from Toronto. A trip to Pakistan, a stage performance with Khanum sitting next to her holding her hand and then accepting her as her disciple followed. This was exactly five years after the accident, in December 2008.

Next were performances before select audiences in India. This is when Ali heard her on a demo CD singing the poetry of Khusrau, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Bulle Shah. And the film maker-poet-artist, who at one point of time even got Shabana Azmi to sing in his film Anjuman, recognised the power in the voice. “Like every year,” Ali says, “I hope to give something fresh and sensitive to people.” Ray will be singing Khusrau, Bedam Shah Warsi and a fusion of Kamil Hyderabadi’s poetry with baul (Bengali sufi) music.

As the festival’s director and designer, Ali works for weeks on the compositions. “I like to work with a few artistes in depth and arrive at a new repertoire,” he says. “He also designs the venue and often, the artistes’ outfits,” says Ray. The venue, Humayun’s tomb, has been a constant ever since the festival started. “I saw the magic in it and that magic has only grown. I have not yet found a replacement for this venue,” says Ali. “To take forward Khusrau's legacy,” he says this time the festival will also include qawwals from Pakistan and India, and “echoes from Iran”.

“Khusrau’s has been a great contribution to spiritualism and music,” says Hans Raj Hans who will bring “Sufiana from Punjab” to the festival. For Ali, Hans, who will sing for over an hour at Jahan-e-Khusrau, “is one of the few people who are temperamentally Sufi.”

“This year in April, Jahan-e-Khusrau will be going to London for the first time,” says Ali. Ray could be among those who perform in London. It’s a journey she wants to continue. She cannot speak Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu. And the throat in which a tumour keeps recurring sometimes threatens to let her down. But she continues to sing the poetry of the Sufi saints, “connecting the sur to my body, my gut and my heart.”

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