Sabir Sain Asif Sain Jag Darshan.

A Film By Iffat Almas RUSH Prints, in the making,

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As I have written many a time on dhol today I want to write about the importance of dance in Sufi or Darvaish culture. Sufi dance is an expression as well as a technique to realize self. When Muhammad PBUH said to Ali "You are of me and I am of you". when he heard this. Ali became ecstatic and started dancing. What else to do. when he looked into the eyes of Ali, wajd must have been created. The transfer beyond the scripture happened. How to receive this. There is no way to receive it except by dancing. It would be impossible not to dance so Ali danced. The beat of dhol here resembles something beyond to grasp from the mind, so it resembles a divine power to compel the dervish to dance. It is not the dervish dance but God keeps dancing in him. Whenever a wave of such divine raptures or such divine happens and strikes the heart of the dervish then it creates great waves in the lake of the inner being of the dervish. He is just acceptable and to say that the dervish is dancing is wrong. The dervish is being danced. Something from the beyond is pouring into him and it starts overflowing in his dancing. He tired himself to become senseless. When all his senses cease to exist here he finds the path. He become almost enlightened. Similarly, we have stressed Indian dhol and music which has a great impact. In terms of understanding sound and using it to influence the human system, I have personally studied this aspect in all my travels. Nowhere else in the world has sound been looked at with the kind of depth as in Hindustani music. Within Indian classical music, there are two basic groups: Carnatic music, which is of the South, and Hindustani, of the North. Hindustani music is more about the sound; Carnatic is based on emotions. It is not that they have no understanding of sounds, definitely they do, but there is more emotion involved. It may not have been so earlier, but in the last four hundred years, Carnatic music has become more emotion-based because of the bhakti movement, the devotion movement that happened in southern India. Most of the existing Carnatic music was written by devotees like Thyagaraja or Purandara Dasa, so a lot of emotion was brought into the music. Hindustani music, however, avoided emotion and simply used sound the way it needs to be used. Within Hindustani there are different segments of music, highlighting the various ways that music can be used. If you really want to appreciate Hindustani music - not to learn, not to perform a concert - you would need at least one or two years of training. This is just to be able to appreciate the intricacies of this form of music. They have used sound in such ways that if you are willing to open up, it can do miraculous things to you. What does sound mean? In the subcontinent, we say Nada Brahma, which means Sound is Divine. This is because the basis of existence is in vibration, which is sound. This can be experienced by every human being. If you enter a certain state within yourself, the whole existence becomes sound. This music evolved out of such an experience and understanding. If you observe people who are deeply involved in classical music, you will see they are naturally meditative. They become sage-like; almost like saints. So, this music was not viewed as entertainment. It was a device for the spiritual process. The ragas were used to evolve a person into higher dimensions of perception, experience, and evolution from within.