Cinema Qawwali

An Online Archive of Qawwali Songs in Bombay Cinema
Curated by Yousuf Saeed, 2021

Supported by India Foundation for the Arts, Bangalore 
under its Arts Research Programme

This project plans to chart the boundaries of India’s cinema qawwalis as a genre different from other song types by listing and documenting songs from Bombay cinema that could be called qawwalis, analyzing how the industry used them to tell its stories as well as entertain the masses often subverting the ‘traditional’ qawwali beyond its norms. One also hopes to find out whether the cinema influenced the performance of traditional Sufi qawwalis in any way by talking to its practitioners. The project’s findings would be made available on this multimedia platform featuring video recordings and a long write-up.