Pathaney Khan: The compassionate minstrel

Pathaney Khan, who died on 9 March 2000, was one of the most popular singers of Pakistan, a flagbearer of a tradition going back a thousand years. During his lifetime, he was the best exponent of the poetry of the Sufia saints, especially Khawaja Fareed, who lived and died in the 19th century on the edge of a sprawling desert in western Punjab, not far from the birthplace of Pathaney Khan himself. But Fareed's was not the only verses Pathaney Khan sang; his repertoire prominently featured other Punjabi Sufi poets.

Pathaney Khan belonged to the tradition of the roving minstrels who performed over the centuries at religious and secular festivals all over the northern half of the Subcontinent. Accompanied initially by the iktara and later by other instruments, the audience was wafted into a world of music and poetry. The dominant poetical form in Punjabi and Sindhi has been the Kafi. It has been sung from a very early time, though in the absence of any documentary evidence, it is difficult to say how Kafi developed its musical form. In the poetical text of Shah Hussain, a 16th century poet, raags mentioned in the footnotes for each Kafi more than suggest that Kafis were meant to be sung. The written text of Hussain's Kafis was discovered and reclaimed from Sindh, while the same Kafis had been transmitted orally from generation to generation in the Punjab by the large community of singers.