The Qawwali Photo Project was started five years ago, but that was not the beginning of my association with qawwals or the history of qawwali. What inspired you to curate this exhibition? Scroll.in spoke to Manjari Chaturvedi about the exhibition and her experience of working with qawwals over the years. The photo project not only documents the qawwals in their work environment with their audiences but also presents glimpses of their lives beyond their performances. It celebrates the art and oral traditions passed through generations while preserving its history through photographs. The exhibition aims to explore the song form “through the power of images, as a means of expression and communication”. To capture practitioners of the song form in action, photographers Dinesh Khanna, Mustafa Quraishi, and Leena Kejriwal travelled to Delhi, Hyderabad, Dewa Sharif, Safipur and beyond. “The present will not value my work but I strongly feel that history will appreciate it,” she said. “When we started the project, many people expressed concern about the futility of the exercise,” said kathak dancer Chaturvedi, the president of Sufi Kathak Foundation. “There are certain things that must be done for the sake of history.” That was Manjari Chaturvedi’s motivation for curating the Qawwali Photo Project, an exhibition of photographs featuring the lives of qawwals across the country, currently on display at Delhi’s India International Centre.
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Kejriwal shares, “This project is important as this community has not gotten due space in history.
And, Kejriwal captured women performers and also the qawwals at the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia. While Khanna’s lens has captured qawwal traditions in the shrines of Delhi, Amritsar, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Ajmer, Quraishi travelled to the prominent Uttar Pradesh shrines of Dewa Sharif, Safipur and Hazrat Salim Chisti. Not only are the lives and performance art of qawwali practitioners photo-documented, but their association with the Sufi shrines, where they perform, are also captured. Years after having embarked upon the extensive project, the dancer-choreographer is now presenting a pioneering exhibition on Qawwali, in the Capital, featuring meticulous photo-documentation of qawwals by three photographers - Dinesh Khanna, Mustafa Quraishi and Leena Kejriwal over the last four years. There would hardly be any kind of photo-documentation,” says Chaturvedi. They’d usually fish out a passport-size photograph and say, “Yeh the”. “Since I’ve been documenting and archiving qawwals for over 20 years, I’d ask the qawwals for photographs of their grandfathers. And this led to the birth of the Qawwali Photo Project in 2011, which aimed to document and conserve this intangible heritage. It was while organising symposiums featuring qawwal voices from across India, that performer Manjari Chaturvedi, who works closely with qawwal singers for her unique dance form Sufi Kathak, realised the sheer lack of visual documentation of qawwal communities.
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