When Vedi Sinha from The Aahvaan Project starts singing “Bhala hua meri matki phoot gayee/ Main to paneeyan bharan se chhoot gayee” (Thank God my pitcher broke; I’m finally free from hauling water) audiences do a double take. Her voice is husky, commanding. It moves effortlessly from earthy folk to full-throated rock, as Sumant Balakrishnan’s bluesy guitar riffs coil around the melody. The percussionist Makrand Sanon switches effortlessly between the drums, the cajon, the djembe and sea rattles. Their sound feels unmistakably now, but the words are not. Kabir wrote them in the 15th century. The pitcher symbolises worldly attachment; its breaking, liberation. After a decade of noise, this kind of Sufi music feels like a reset.
“There’s been a lot of confusion around Sufism,” says Sonam Kalra, an award-winning artist who has performed with Abida Parveen and Coke Studio and has her own band, The Sufi Gospel Project. In a decade full of Sufi nights at clubs, Bollywood’s rehashes of Mast Qalandar, and adding Maula or Allah Hoo to make songs feel ‘sufiana’, something got lost. “Sufism isn’t a genre or a brand,” Kalra says. “It comes from deep spiritual inquiry.”
Now, a new generation is reviving the modern mehfil, without hollowing it out. Sufi flows through djembe, cajon, banjo, blues guitar, jazz riffs, techno beats and Carnatic phrasing, carried by voices that shift, stretch and refuse to stay in one box.
Stick a folk in it
The Aahvaan Project
The band of three doesn’t work within the traditional toolkit of Indian folk or Sufi music. There’s no harmonium, no tabla. The video of their 2025 track Daud features the band in sharp suits and John Lennon-style sunglasses, while the music leans into chilled, Jack Johnson–esque acoustic rock. The lyrics question the grind mindset, asking: What, exactly, are we running from? Aadhi Gagri, another track, moves just as freely, slipping from gentle guitar riffs, Indian classical music to rock, its lyrics embracing imperfection.
“We stay rooted in Sufi philosophy,” says Sinha, 33. “But we change the stories, the song structures, even the language.” Sinha often writes her own lyrics, and draws from Malwa and Rajasthani traditions of Kabir, the Nirgun philosophy, and the writings of mystics such as Kashmiri poet Lal Ded and Bengali spiritual thinker Lalon Fakir. Guitarist Balakrishnan brings a background in rock and blues. Percussionist Sanon, “can make music out of salt shakers and sachets,” says Sinha, laughing.
Sinha first encountered Sufi music in her twenties, after watching Padma Shri Prahlad Singh Tipanya perform at Kabir Yatra in Bikaner. She wept through the set. “It felt like I had taken my first breath in years,” she says. Kabir led her to Meera, Meera to Shams, Shams to Daoism. “Conscious, grounded people across histories and geographies seem to arrive at the same truths.”
The freedom to experiment with the music took time. Early on, Sinha admits, she attached to the sari, the ektara, “the quietness I thought was expected of a woman carrying philosophy.” She’s loosened up, since. “The fluidity is the point of nirgun and Sufi love.”
Loud and clear
Aanchal Shrivastava
The qawwali format typically includes the tabla, the dholak and the harmonium. But Shrivastava’s crew also rolls with the keyboard, acoustic and electric guitar, and drums. It’s less fusion, more physics. “To reach a larger audience, you need more sound. When I sing sa, you need to feel it. So even the electric guitar is just for amplification.”
Their live shows feel like modern-day mehfils — cosy, intimate yet electric. Shrivastava’s perfectly raspy voice commands the room, even while singing centuries-old Bulleh Shah kalams. The tempo never crosses 100bpm, and yet audiences tend to be visibly moved to tears. “People cry not because I sing well, but because they rediscover a feeling they’d forgotten. We’re surrounded by clutter and forget who we are.” The crowds span people in their 20s and go all the way to those in their 60s. “In Delhi, we even introduced student discounts after I got DMs requests from younger folks.”
Shrivastava has sung with Coke Studio Pakistan artists and went viral in 2023 with her Din Shagna Da rendition for Four More Shots. She’s been in bands since 2014, back when she was also working at a Mumbai PR agency. They sang everything. Bollywood, English pop, whatever stuck. She had assumed classical music wouldn’t travel far. But her first English gig bombed. “I failed miserably! Someone politely asked me what I was even singing, but added, ‘at least your voice is nice’.” The band kept trying on new sounds and names. But in 2023, she discovered qawwali. “That’s when everything fell into place — my sur, my saaz, my instrumentation, my stage, my audience, my voice, the songs.”
10/10 new notes
Jasleen Aulakh
Aulakh grew up in Chandigarh, listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen and the Wadali brothers, but also Boney M, Blondie and Jim Reeves. It all shows. Her sound sits somewhere between Sufi, folk and soft rock — and refuses to stay put. On stage, she’s just as fluid, pulling in instruments such as Tibetan meditation bowls, derbuka, djembe, cajon, xylophone, morchang (a jaw harp), storm drums… Or whatever feels right at the moment.
Her biggest influence is her mother, Polly. “I started out singing English covers,” Aulakh says. But in her 20s, she stumbled upon Shukna, her mother’s poem imagining a more just world for women. It occurred to her that she could blend the homegrown verses with traditional kalams to make the philosophy feel closer, more lived-in. Her 2023 track is based on her mother’s poem Bhaanti Bhaanti Ki Chidiya, which is about a bird who learns about arrogance and prejudice from humans. It ends with Kabir’s kalam, which is a reminder that pride is pointless, and in the end, we all return to dust.
Aulakh is aware that she doesn’t fit the stereotype of a Sufi artist. “I was brought up by my mother and grandmother. I watched them defy norms. They did all the things men traditionally would. They handled all finances, changed light bulbs and oversaw the construction of our house. That pushed me to be a little radical, to fight for space. Sufi philosophy offers a way to do that with softness and depth.”
Her audience cuts across ages and borders. “I hear from listeners in India, Pakistan, Canada, the UK.” Once, while travelling, she met a woman from Hungary in a cafe who asked when she could hear her perform live. Aulakh sang to her on the spot. The kalam was about searching for Ranjha, finding God instead, and rejecting him because he wasn’t Ranjha. When she finished, the woman asked, “Have you found your Ranjha yet?” She hadn’t understood the words, but she’d understood everything.
Trance-continental
Mishra
Watching the UK-based band Mishra take on qawwali feels delightfully unreal. You don’t often see international musicians attempt Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But their Akhiyaan Udeek Diyaan slips seamlessly into an Irish reel (Rathlin Island), with banjo, tabla, low whistle and clarinet all chiming in.
The band comprises primarily UK-based musicians — folk artists Kate Griffin and Ford Collier, tabla and santoor player John Ball, jazz double bassist Joss Mann-Hazell and Western classical clarinettist Alex Lyon. They had already covered UK, Irish and Americana folk, and classical Indian music before meeting Indian fusion and Sufi vocalist Deepa Shakthi. “We took to Sufi music like kids in a sweet shop,” says Collier. The result: Turn O Spinning Wheel (2025), an album that combines their international folk styles with qawwali’s hypnotic grooves.
The challenge, Collier admits, was restraint. “With five musicians, things can get messy fast.” So Bari Bari leans into bass and bass clarinet grooves, while Akhiyaan Udeek Diyaan stays airy, led by whistle and five-string banjo. Most of their audience is new to Sufi, and often surprised by its intensity. “When it hits the fever pitch,” Collier says, “you can feel the euphoria in the room.”
BOX: Something old, new and borrowed
Los Angeles–based Carnatic vocalist and composer Aditya Prakash is fluent in musical code-switching. Trained in South Indian classical music, he folds jazz, funk and rock into his work — and keeps circling back to Sufi poetry. Why? “It’s rooted in love and humanity, and the audience has an immediate visceral emotional connection with the music.” In 2019, his ensemble reimagined Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Tumhain Dillagi Bhool, drifting away from qawwali into something more orchestral, with violins, saxophone, the piano and trumpets. In his solo show ROOM-i-Nation, he performs Lagta Nahi with frenzied music, and haunting video projections from history and of people dancing at a feverish pace. He’s now taken on another classic, Damadum Mast Qalandar, for an upcoming film by Riz Ahmed and Aneil Karia.
Meanwhile in Delhi, DJ-producer Sartek has sampled Tumhain Dillagi Bhool for his folk-house track Sufi Tech. His rule is simple: Don’t tamper with the soul. “You have to leave the voice and the core emotions untouched — the pauses, the cracks, the raw delivery. I won’t flip something sacred just to make it club-friendly.” Qawwali already has repetition, call and response, and long builds that put you in a trance. “Electronic music just gives me the tools to amplify that feeling,” he says.
From HT Brunch, January 31, 2026
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