Stories are always powerful, they are fragments of the self that we give wings to. They can be born as art, musical scores, film, poem or performance, as an outpouring of all that has gestated, sometimes it means peeling of scabs to heal, even freeing a trapped spirit. It is on the pin-heads of creativity that pain lives and leaves.

Ta’alluq, an evening organized by Dugdugi Collective at T2F, curated by Sameeta Ahmed with Imran Mushter Nafees was an amorphous form that brought together music, poetry and movements to create a map of emotions. Dedicated to Karachi, Ta’alluq began with brash sounds of the city, transporting you to the street with bus conductor calls, horns, vehicular rush and the cacophony of languages and then slowly it began to taper into spontaneous sounds of the guitar, tabla, flute, organ, saxophone and drums. With these creative gestures, the raw reality of the everyday, was eclipsed temporarily. As it progressed, there emerged a silhouette of painful moments of surviving alone and yet walking together, in a tough city.

Poet after poet covered the audience with a shroud of dark verses, in the end the audience began to walk with them, feeling their wounds and brokenness. Maulana Rum’s poem came alive on the screen and a live dancing shadow accompanied it. The interplay of images with narration evoked the poignant story of how a mere reed takes the shape of a melodious flute and in the process forever separated from the reed bed. Throughout the evening, live reed flute music accompanied the poems and performed stories of otherness, and forced un-belonging.

Song, music, art and movement have long existed in folk traditions of our region. In the Patua tradition of Bengal, religious myths, romance and risqué tales were illustrated on huge paper scrolls by artists. They usually traveled with narrators and musicians, across the rural landscape, stopping often at melas and religious festivals. Minstrels and fakirs with their ik-tara (single string instrument) sang songs of Bulleh Shah, Shah Latif and Sachal Sarmast, embedded in the oral tradition they spread wisdom of the land. The bhaands, usually a duo of standup comics, entertained the population with jokes and stories of tales like Raja Rasalu, a popular protagonist in Punjab and Mullah Nasruddin in Northern India. Popular at courts and village baithaks alike, they were known for their wit and one-liners that they embellished their skits with. Sometimes a dhol or chimta player would accompany them to entertain at bigger gatherings.

Ta’alluq can be seen as a decolonial moment that, with its experimental format, created a new relationship between art and Urdu verse. Introducing the baansuri and tabla among other instruments, further enriched the soundscape that supported the narrations. To reverse the epistemic damage of stolen stories, their orientalist distortion and erasure, creative reclaiming like Ta’alluq can be an empowering act. Maulana Rum as he is known in our tradition gained popularity in the West in the twentieth century; and today is a much-quoted poet. A deeper look by scholars reveals how Maulana Rum’s original texts with their strong link to Islamic spirituality, had been systematically changed for Western publications to make them palatable to the non-Islamic world. This act of erasures by changing his lens also robbed it of the possibility of an interfaith dialogue through the poet’s message of universal love. A lot in this matter can be learnt from the Sufi saints of our land who have been celebrated over centuries, with verse, music and dhamal by their followers that belong to diverse religions and ethnicities.