A Family History

In Shahi Mohalla, at Taxali Gate in the Walled City, you can hear the sound of tablas and dholaks mixed in with the honking of cars and the rattling of rickshaws. The area, also known as Heera Mandi and known for being Lahore’s oldest red-light district, looks much like any other city bazaar during the day. But within its winding streets, side by side with the usual stores selling shoes and earrings and fresh pakoras, you will also find some of the oldest (and some of the last) music shops in the city.
From the Mughal Courts to the Streets of Lahore: “How do you hear your instruments in all this noise?” Muhammad Shafiq Saab, sitting in his shop in the middle of the busy bazaar, looked surprised by the question. “This is how it is,” he shrugged. Shafiq Saab, who builds, repairs and tunes harmoniums, has been working in the area for 42 years now. His relationship with the craft, however, stretches back much farther – 250 years farther, in fact, all the way to the Mughal era. According to Shafiq’s nephew Muhammad Riaz, who is also an instrument craftsman, their family used to make weapons for the Mughal Army. Then, about seven or eight generations ago, one of their forefathers, Habib Saab, was commissioned to assemble a sarangi by a patron who admired his ceiling carvings. “So he made one, and it became very famous,” Riaz explained. “This was in Akbar’s time. Everyone said he had made something really special.” The sarangi, a bow instrument with about three dozen strings, was immensely popular in the Mughal courts along with other classical instruments like the veena. During Akbar’s reign in particular, the production and performance of music really flourished – it is even said that the emperor could not fall asleep at night without the sound of tanpuras being played by his bedside.
The roots of the delicate craft of instrument making were to stretch and spread, over the years, far past the limits of the Mughal empire. By the turn of the 20th century, Riaz and Shafiq’s family had made its way to Delhi and then to Amritsar. “It was there that my uncle, Sher Muhammad, was born,” explained Shafiq Saab. Ustad Sher Muhammad was one of the best sitar makers of his time, as well as a respected musician, and even received the prestigious Pride of Performance award for his work. According to Shafiq, he got the prize for designing a unique kind of veena (a stringed instrument from which the sitar is derived) for the famous veena player Abdul Wahid Khan. “He was simply the best,” said Shafiq of his uncle. “Rikhi Ram, the famous Indian sitar maker, learned the trade from our family.”
When it came Shafiq’s turn to learn the craft, however, he chose to follow his father rather than this uncle and work on harmoniums. “There has always been high demand for this instrument,” he said, adding that today, he is one of the last people still making harmoniums from hand. The harmonium is an innovation on a reed organ, which was invented in France about 200 years ago. This organ was played with both hands, like a piano, and generated sound from foot-pumped bellows. It was a crafstman in India by the name of Khem Singh, Shafiq explained, who came up with the idea to convert it into a floor instrument. “He made the pump a hand-pump, and it became much easier to play,” Shafiq said. “It was a great idea.”
In India today, Shafiq mentioned, factory made harmoniums have become common. “If you order a hand-made one from there now, it will cost you a minimum of 90,000 rupees,” he said. “And if you order a hand-made sitar from Calcutta, it will take at least 6 months. On the other hand, you could just go and buy 100 in a day from the shops – but those are factory-made and poor quality. The right sound only comes from the ones made by hand.”
“The Best Sitar Shop in the Land”: Today, there are still about 10 to 12 harmonium craftsmen in Lahore. Hand-made sitars, however, can now only be found at one place in the entire city: at Ustad Sher Muhammad’s old shop in Bansanwala Bazaar, which he established when the family moved to Lahore during partition. Today, his son Ziauddin continues the family business.
Muhammad Riaz also worked at this shop as a young man, and remembers a time when business was still booming. “It was the most famous music shop in Lahore. We would even get regular orders from other cities across the country – Pindi, Peshawar, Karachi, Multan,” he said. “The shop was right next to Radio Pakistan, and so all the musicians there would come by after they were done with work. They came because of my grandfather. They used to touch his knees as a sign of respect. Since there didn’t use to be so much traffic on the roads, we’d put a charpai in the middle of the street and sit there with everyone.”
Changing Times: The admiration that Riaz’s grandfather enjoyed for his work did not, however, necessarily pass down with his skill. “The truth is, where our shop is, in Gawalmandi, people no longer held us in any respect,” said Riaz. “In fact they looked down on us, and called us names – things like ‘Maraasi dey baal’ (children of Maraasis). Our customers respected us immensely, but the people who lived around us, even some of our relatives, deemed it beneath them to even eat with us.” Maraasi, a word which actually only means ‘inheritance,’ has taken on a derogatory connotation and is associated with low-caste musicians. As Muhammad Hanif, a musician and music teacher at Lahore Grammar School, explained, “There is no respect for musical artists, and no respect for the craft.” Against such harsh circumstances, Riaz decided to leave the job and the discrimination that he had found accompanied it. He spent years doing various other work – driving a rickshaw, making electrical switchboards and more – until he was employed by Sanjan Nagar Institute of Philosophy and Arts (SIPA) 20 years ago.
SIPA is a non-profit organization in Lahore working in the fields of philosophy, musicology, sound engineering and more. Their ‘instrument-making’ department, which aims to explore musical sound in new ways, is now led by Riaz, who works on veenas and other stringed instruments in his workshop. “The work we do here, machines can’t do,” he said. “But times have changed. In the old days, even with a little money you could survive. Now the bills are the size of elephants – and all your craftsmanship be damned, when there are bills to pay.”
Who Will Carry on the Craft? Neither Shafiq nor Riaz have taught the craft to their children, despite their family legacy. “Just like in classical music and singing, only those who invest long hours and a lot of effort can make a name for themselves in this business,” said Shafiq. “Young people today, they don’t have the attention for that.” All of Shafiq’s children are well-educated. For example, one is a doctor finishing her residency, another is doing her masters, and a third just gave her civil service exams. Similarly, Riaz has a daughter completing her masters and a son who has done his BA and is now working in computers. “None of them will come to this work, but me – I have no interest in doing anything else,” said Shafiq. “All I need is two meals a day, and I will keep working.” The question remains, however: who will continue this craft when these last few experts have gone? “To inspire the next generation, those people who already love music should become more conscious about the value of the craft itself,” suggested Hanif. Those who recognize the beauty and treasure that is music, he said, need to extend their understanding to the art behind the instrument too. “Music is God’s creation,” said Shafiq Saab, when asked about the future. “It will always be there, no matter what we do.”