The human orchestra

There would have been a scratch on side B, somewhere around the eleventh minute, where the reel had been played too many times on a machine that ran slightly fast. 

Nobody minded. In a cassette stall off Nilkhet or Elephant Road, sometime in the early nineties, a young man would ask for the qawwali one, and the shopkeeper, without needing a name, would reach for a plastic case featuring a portly man in kurti, his hand raised as though catching something falling from the sky. 

The music and melody emerging from the speaker afterwards did not sound like anything else on the rack. It was neither ghazal nor film song, nor did it resemble the other qawwals of the era. It sounded like a throat that had decided to become a full orchestra.

That throat belonged to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Technically speaking, the most astonishing aspect of his art was how little physical machinery it required. A single vocal apparatus, trained from early childhood in the khyal classical tradition, produced what listeners across two distinct aesthetic systems—Hindustani classical and Sufi devotional—recognised as sargam: rapid, wordless runs through the notes, Sa Re Ga Ma tumbling over each other faster than the human ear could separate them. 

Then, without a seam, the sargam would open into taan, long, held vowels stretched and bent across registers that most singers use as a ceiling rather than a floor. A single line of a qawwali, something taking four seconds to speak, could take ten minutes to sing, not because Khan was stalling but because he was excavating. 

Each repetition of a phrase went a layer deeper, demanding that the same words yield a different truth every time. Exceptional breath control made this possible: long, unhurried inhalations that let a musical line travel further than the human diaphragm ought to allow, so that the phrase seemed to keep climbing long after an ordinary singer would have needed to stop for air.

None of this technical vocabulary mattered to the listener in the cassette stall. He was hearing a structure being built, dismantled, and rebuilt in real time. A verse became scaffolding for improvisation before folding back into verse. It is precisely why a Nusrat qawwali resists the three-minute logic of commercial radio. 

The physical media barely managed it either…a ninety-minute magnetic tape could hold one side of a single performance and still cut it short.

How those tapes arrived in Dhaka in the first place is a story of global commerce and migration. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s early recordings in Pakistan had made him a legend by the late 1970s, when labels began pressing his father’s old hits—most notably Haq Ali Ali—in Khan’s own rendering. Magnetic tape did what vinyl records never could: it made duplication cheap and portable. 

In Britain, Oriental Star Agencies in Birmingham began releasing his concerts commercially in the early 1980s. Those same tapes, or pirated descendants of them, followed the routes that migrant labour has always cut for culture. Gulf-bound workers carried cassettes home in their luggage, while traders moved stock across the Wagah and Benapole borders via a grey market that always moved faster than customs forms.

Bangladesh, lacking a direct Pakistani cultural pipeline after 1971, absorbed him sideways: through Kolkata dubbing houses, Dubai and Jeddah remittance economies, and London relatives. By the time Western impresarios brought him to international festivals and marketed him as world music, the South Asian cassette economy barely noticed the endorsement. It already possessed him.

State media gave him almost nothing. Bangladesh Betar had neither the licensing appetite nor reason to programme a Pakistani devotional singer for a national broadcaster defining its post-independence identity. What radio neglected, piracy accomplished thoroughly. Television arrived later via the cable boom of the 1990s, when households with dish antennas caught performances on Indian channels and recorded them onto VHS for local distribution. 

Meanwhile, Bollywood executed its own quiet transmission, frequently without credit. A synth-heavy remix of Dam Mast Qalandar featured in a 1994 film soundtrack, introducing a generation to his melody while erasing his name from the label.

In the 2000s, his nephew Rahat Fateh Ali Khan altered transmission once more. Carrying Bollywood ballads into wedding playlists and mobile ringtones, Rahat offered an easier, sweeter instrument built for the concise formats his uncle had ignored. For an entire generation, Rahat’s voice arrived first, with Nusrat’s discovered retroactively as the foundational source material.

Streaming platforms have now completed the shift toward fragmentation. A university student in Dhaka today rarely sits through a fifty-minute devotional epic, encountering instead nine seconds of sargam clipped into a short video loop on a smartphone screen, stripped of context and authorship. Yet something fundamental endures. 

Today’s algorithm cannot explain why a wordless run through notes recorded decades ago continues to stop thumbs mid-scroll. Certain voices require no translation, across cassettes or fibre-optic cables, to be understood as singular forces of nature.

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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer