निषिद्ध महफ़िल: कैसे 'ज़ीनत' की ऑल-फ़ीमेल क़व्वाली ने सदियों पुरानी सीमा तोड़ी

The qawwali had, for centuries, been a male preserve. In the dargahs of the Chishti saints — at Ajmer, at Nizamuddin, at Kaliyar Sharif — qawwali had developed as a musical form of Sufi devotion performed by male ensembles, the poetry of Amir Khusrau and his successors carried by male voices in a devotional space from

The qawwali had, for centuries, been a male preserve.

In the dargahs of the Chishti saints — at Ajmer, at Nizamuddin, at Kaliyar Sharif — qawwali had developed as a musical form of Sufi devotion performed by male ensembles, the poetry of Amir Khusrau and his successors carried by male voices in a devotional space from which women were frequently excluded. On the concert stage and at wedding celebrations, mixed forms developed, and women sang devotional poetry in their own traditions — but the qawwali as an ensemble form, with its call-and-response between a lead singer and a chorus, its building rhythmic intensity, its rhetorical repetition designed to induce states of spiritual ecstasy — that remained, in practice and in cultural imagination, a men's form.

When Ghulam Haider composed 'Aahen Na Bhareen Shikwe Na Kiye' for Zeenat (1945), with Hafeez Jalandhari's lyric and Noor Jehan leading a female ensemble through its performances, something unprecedented happened in Hindi cinema: a fully realised qawwali — not a diluted folk-song with qawwali trappings, but an actual application of the form's rhetorical architecture — was performed entirely by women.

The choice was not accidental. Ghulam Haider was from Lahore, where the female mehfil (gathering) tradition had its own parallel history alongside the male dargah qawwali — the courtesan-musicians of the Hira Mandi district maintained their own ensemble traditions, and Noor Jehan herself had grown up in that world, trained in it, and had spent years absorbing its performance conventions. The all-female qawwali of Zeenat was not a novelty imposed from outside the tradition but a recognition of a tradition that had always existed alongside the better-documented male form.

What Hafeez Jalandhari wrote for the song was itself a kind of formal reversal: a lyric about a woman who keeps all outward signs of grief suppressed — no sighs, no complaints — communicating only through her eyes. In the qawwali's usual emotional arc, the singer or singers gradually expose their inner world, building to ecstatic revelation. Jalandhari's lyric inverts this: the revelation is the suppression itself, the most powerful emotion the one that cannot be expressed. This gave the female ensemble a particular power — they were performing the form while the lyric insisted on silence.

The recording required assembling multiple female singers in a sustained group performance, unusual for Bombay film production of the period. Noor Jehan anchored the ensemble. The result was among the most technically ambitious film music sequences of the 1940s and became one of the most-discussed recordings in the pre-Partition canon.

Two years later, Partition would separate Noor Jehan (Pakistan), Ghulam Haider (Pakistan), and Hafeez Jalandhari (Pakistan) from the Bombay film world they had helped build. Zeenat's qawwali became, in retrospect, a kind of final gathering — the last time these voices sang together on film.