How the qawwali became the Hindi film industry's favourite emotion

A qawwali is a specific thing: a party of singers, a lead, handclaps on a particular subdivision, and a text that is usually addressed to God and only appears to be addressed to a person. Hindi cinema took the sound and kept the ambiguity, which turned out to be the useful part. A song can be sung to a lover and to something larger at the same time, and the film gets to choose which one the scene means.

Chhap Tilak is the source text, seven hundred years old, Amir Khusro writing about surrendering an identity. Laxmikant-Pyarelal set it almost straight in 1978 and the film around it barely matters.

Kun Faya Kun is the modern argument for the form. Rahman recorded it at the Nizamuddin dargah with the qawwali party's own structure intact - it runs nearly nine minutes and takes three of them to arrive - and it became a hit anyway, at a moment when everything else on the radio was three and a half minutes long.

Bulleya shows what happens when the form is used as an intensity setting rather than a genre: the handclap pattern and the invocation are there, the devotion is not, and it works commercially precisely because it borrows the shape of something sacred for something that is not.

Bol Na Halke Halke takes the other route - Rahat Fateh Ali Khan singing something quiet - and Kabira reaches back past the qawwali to the nirgun bhajan, which is where a lot of this came from before the shrines got it.

सूफ़ी collects them.