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Zee Music released a video of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s revolutionary poem Hum Dekhenge from the anti-Muslim film The Kashmir Files, the irony of which was not lost on social media users. Many even called out the producers for "theft". Especially since the film, starring Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, has been termed “the biggest lie of the century” and a work of “historical revisionism” due to its right-wing nature and storyline.

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Zee Music released a video of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's revolutionary poem Hum Dekhenge from the anti-Muslim film The Kashmir Files, the irony of which was not lost on social media users. Many even called out the producers for "theft". Especially since the film, starring Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, has been termed "the biggest lie of the century" and a work of "historical revisionism" due to its right-wing nature and storyline.

The anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan film follows the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus during the Kashmir Insurgency. Screenings of The Kashmir Files in India have led to anti-Muslim chanting in cinemas. It has also been claimed by filmmaker Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri that permission to use the song was sought out. Tweeting in response to allegations of plagiarism, he wrote, "We have officially taken rights of Faiz Sahab's poetry from the Faiz House in Lahore. Please don't spread fake news."

We have officially taken rights of Faiz Sahab's poetry from the Faiz House in Lahore. Please don't spread fake news. https://t.co/TCcS2nBNhY
- Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri (@vivekagnihotri) March 19, 2022

However, many are angry, and rightfully so, that "Even Faiz isn't spared in BJP's bid to distort history to promote this revisionist propaganda," as pointed out by a user.

Faiz must be turning in his grave today. An anti oppression, resistance anthem, used for a propaganda film against the oppressed. Faiz ko tou baksh daitay! 🙏🏼 https://t.co/bx0t4kez8y
- Saman Tariq (@stariq88) March 19, 2022

On the appropriation of the verses, a netizen added, "Orwell's 1984 illustrates how evil can co-opt symbolisms of good like 'war is peace' or [how] Hitler, Nazis used the Swastika, a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Buddhism etc. Absolutely disgusting, an insult to Faiz s ah ab. India needs soul searching."

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four illustrates how evil can co-opt symbolisms of good like 'war is peace' or Hitler, Nazis used the Swastika, a symbol a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Buddhism etc.

Absolutely disgusting, an insult to Faiz shb. India needs soul searching. https://t.co/mpByRG2Dgb
- Mirror of Erised (@dontyousayso77) March 19, 2022

The Kashmir Files sees the revolutionary song being sung by students protesting for freedom in Kashmir, which is portrayed in a negative light. A user tweeted, "This framing of the song as the anthem of the 'enemy' is incredibly vicious and ill-intentioned. And obviously meant to frame the anti-CAA protests as being villainous"

Also this framing of the song as the anthem of the 'enemy' is incredibly vicious and ill-intentioned. And obviously meant to frame the anti-CAA protests as being villainous
- Neerja (@neerjadeodhar) March 17, 2022

In 2020, the poem was used during the protests in India against the communal Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens which aimed to establish a clear bias against the country's Muslim population. It was sung by numerous students outside campuses who refused to follow BJP's decisions. The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur had even constituted a panel to decide whether the revolutionary poem was offensive to Hindu sentiments, NDTV reported.

A user tweeted, "Faiz sahab joined the British Army to fight the Nazis. He was a committed Marxist and the greatest voice against oppression and exploitation. His poem, which is a symbol of resistance against religious fundamentalism with Marxist metaphors is [being] used by neo-Nazis for propaganda."

Faiz sahab joined the British Army to fight the Nazis . He was a committed Marxist and the greatest voice against oppression /exploitation.His poem ,which itself is a symbol of resistance against religious fundamentalism with Marxist metaphors is used by neo-Nazis for propaganda. https://t.co/FS2Yi4HbRi
- Shivam (@shivam_atheist) March 19, 2022

Written, directed by Agnihotri and produced by Zee Studios, the film also stars Darshan Kumar, Mithun Chakraborty and Pallavi Joshi. It was declared tax-free in all the states ruled by Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and has now become a box office success. While the performance of the cast was described as "compelling", particularly that of Kher's, the film has been dubbed a work of "historical revisionism," by many Indian critics as well. Many have acknowledged it as a propaganda aimed at fostering prejudice against Muslims.

While actors like Kangana Ranaut called out Bollywood for not praising The Kashmir Files, Pakistan People's Party (PPP) Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) President Chaudhry Yaseen termed it the biggest lie of the century and an attempt to hoodwink the world on the indigenous struggle of the Kashmiris.

Kangana had maintained, "Please notice the pin drop silence in the film industry about #thekashmirfiles, not just content, even its business is exemplary. It also broke many myths about theatres being exclusive for big budgets, event films or visual/VFX spectacles post pandemic. It is breaking every myth and preconceived notion that was there and bringing back the audiences to the theatres, 6am shows in multiplexes are full, it's unbelievable!" Prior to this, Kangana had also called The Kashmir Files "the most important film of the year."

Chaudhry Yaseen, albeit, stated last week, "Kashmiri Pundits were forced to migrate by the then Governor of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) Jagmohan Malhotra with the intention to do ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Muslims in 1990s. Through the controversial movie, Indian extremist government wants to create hatred against Muslim across India aimed at paving the way for another genocide in future."

Rahul Desai, reviewing for the Film Companion, found The Kashmir Files to be a "fantasy-revisionist rant lacking in clarity, craft, and sense, where every Muslim was a Nazi and every Hindu, a Jew. With an unconvincing screenplay and weak characters, it was propaganda that strove only to tune in with the Hindu Nationalist mood of the nation." Shubhra Gupta of The Indian Express also called it a work of propaganda aligned with BJP's discourse that only aimed to stoke the "deep-seated anger" of Pandits while tapping into the grief of a displaced community.

Videos of Indian cinemas roaring with murderous, anti-Muslim chants after the screening of The Kashmir Files had also surfaced on March 15. Indian journalist Fatima Khan of The Quint tweeted, "The movie is doing exactly what it was meant to. Absolutely terrifying scenes playing out in theatres: murderous chants, hateful sloganeering, calls to stay away from Muslims etc. Sick."

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'The Kashmir Files' use of 'Hum Dekhenge' angers netizens | The Express Tribune

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Zee Music released a video of Faiz Ahmed Faiz's revolutionary poem Hum Dekhenge from the anti-Muslim film The Kashmir Files , the irony of which was not lost on social media users. Many even called out the producers for "theft".

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Why the song titles though?
Lightness. The works do have to do with queerness and immigration and race, and I just didn’t want to drown them with heaviness.

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Last November, Four Friends by Salman Toor reached a new record for the artist at auction, selling for $1.5mn at Sotheby's New York - far above an upper estimate of $400,000. The painting, which shows two men dancing in a New York apartment while two others sit looking on, sipping cocktails, has the elegance of a Watteau painting updated to 21st-century life. It's one reason some have called the Pakistani-American artist's work "Queer Rococo".

Four Friends was a highlight of Toor's breakout 2020 exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum, How Will I Know. He has since had institutional shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art and now at M Woods in Beijing, with the prices rising to match. Londoners will have seen his work in last year's group show My Reflection of You at The Perimeter; next month they can see another in Close at Grimm (4 March to 6 April). "There's something about the intimacy and sensitivity of Toor's paintings that touches me," says The Perimeter's owner Alexander Petalas, who has several in his collection. It's a sentiment echoed by the model Edie Campbell, an early collector of Toor's work. "I find his work very moving... there's a real crackle of energy to it."

Much of this has to do with Toor's reorienting his work toward the personal, celebrating the community he has made his own. Born in Lahore 40 years ago, the young Salman was a brilliant pupil and an excellent draughtsman, but he was also a self-described "sissy", to the dismay of his conservative milieu. He went to Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware, Ohio, to study for a BA in Fine Art in 2002, before heading to New York, in 2006, to do a Masters, and for a while made a living as a painter of more classical, technically proficient paintings until he decided to start making work that spoke directly to and about him. It worked.

Today, Toor lives in New York. He became a naturalised American citizen in 2019; the new status mostly means ease of travel, he says, "although maybe it's starting a family here" too. Currently spending time experimenting in the studio, he has agreed to be interviewed for HTSI on condition that the exchange is done as a Q&A. A droll, laconic talker, he is as happy delving into the state of contemporary Pakistani art as the horrors of Emily in Paris. Also, his dismay at Europe's lack of air-conditioning. "We like to give emissions in the summer!" he jokes.

Poignant portraits of young men recur throughout your work. Did you, as a youngster, imagine the life and career you'd have today?
I didn't anticipate this at all. I'm very lucky. When I started working here in New York, I was able to pay for an apartment through my earlier paintings. I showed in Karachi, I showed in Dubai; and to be honest, I think that it would have been OK to continue doing that. But this was a total surprise. I could never have imagined that I would have the studio that I have right now. I would have died if you had shown me the materials and the space, so it's completely magical.

Your paintings often show moments of fleeting intimacy or connection; there's often a sense of a threshold being crossed. Why do you keep returning to these brief encounters?
I grew up in a homophobic culture; I went to an all-boys' prep school, and I also grew up in a pretty conservative, culturally Muslim family. There was zero visibility of forms of affection in public spaces. So yes, for me to do these paintings is to be on the verge of a threshold. But there's another kind of threshold I've crossed in the near-20 years I've spent in New York. In 2006, when I came here from Ohio, this was a post-9/11 country, so there wasn't any of the Gen Z discussion about gender or misogyny, things like that. The culture changed, and I changed. I felt like I'd been doing paintings that were very, very academic, and I wasn't really interested in contemporary art. But I was skirting around the more meaningful things in my life, which was the struggle to be out, to make connections between the culture in which I was born and the culture that I have adopted, and the friendships that mean everything to me. So I decided to do other work in the studio. It was just bursting out of me.

What were the images that inspired you as a child?
My high-school friend's parents collected art, and had libraries; my parents are not really readers. So I had access to the deliciousness of art monographs - Caravaggio and stuff like that. But my grandmother had a bunch of prints of paintings. She had a portrait of this white woman in a grey dress and grey hair, standing against a stone column; I found out later, when I went to college, that it was The Honourable Mrs Graham by Thomas Gainsborough. I just remember feeling something seeing these artists from Europe: from another part of the world, from a completely different time. There was a sense of this very tragic heroism - of finding both the romantic and the grisly. That was very valuable.

The Doodler shows a child hiding in a bedroom, drawing away; The Game has an ominous father figure standing, tense, over a small boy caught playing with dolls. Does making these pictures help you better face your past?
Yes, for sure. I feel like it gives me ownership. It's a way of communing with people that are otherwise very difficult to commune with; a way of loving and liking things that are difficult to like.

A delicate, elongated nose characterises many of your figures. Why?
It's about a sense of humour. A lot of the time, I might be painting someone really vulnerable, and I feel like if it was a pity party or too sanctimonious, it would just kill the painting. I want it to have a marionette feel: a little bit wooden, but at the same time someone who can be hurt.

Your use of green in your paintings is also distinctive?
The two things about green that really get me going are that, first, it's this very seductive way of looking at the world - a "through a wine bottle" kind of thing. But also, it's got these cartoony, villainous associations I really like. Sort of toxic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or absinthe, or Slytherin, or poisonous gas.

And now creamy, eerie yellows seem to be coming to the fore...
It's a van Gogh palette of sickening colours! Anything that's nauseating is good, because sometimes, if I feel like my paintings are verging on the quaint, I want to undo it. I'm like: "No! Vomit!"

The works are to do with queerness and race, but I didn't want to drown them with heaviness

At London's the Perimeter last year, viewers will have seen your Immigration Men; figures standing with their personal affairs laid out on a table in front of them. It's a composition you return to again and again. Are they political?
I was interested in having both a sense of outer perception and an inner self-portrait. It's about another threshold: that feeling that I still have - coming from one part of the world into this, the English-speaking world, or Europe, or whatever - that those two things are sometimes at war with each other. I guess I want the viewer to become the immigration officer and decide who should be let in - and why.

Apparently, your "intimate paintings are a salve for our isolated times". Would you agree?
No! I would never think of my paintings as salves. I mean, a painting could be a salve for me, maybe, when it's not driving me insane. But: no!

Figurative painting is back in fashion, but for a while it wasn't. Did you feel like you were against the current?
Completely. When I graduated from Ohio and moved to New York, there were only a few artists doing it. But I guess, with the culture changing, from 9/11 all the way to BLM and Gen Z, personal stories have become so much more important. Also, with the rise of social media, everyone has to speak for themselves. Those stories, frankly, have changed the conversation in a way that I never thought it could be changed. That is incredible.

Do you think this change is here for good?
Oh, no, no, no, no...! It's gonna go away. But I'm really enjoying it right now - thanks!

Is your latest museum show, at M Woods, a culmination?
It's a continuation. I have been thinking of doing things like video, so we might see something like that. And I am finishing a graphic novel that I started with a friend seven years ago. I like the medium of painting, but the stories in the painting are equally important to me.

The title of your hit show at the Whitney stole from a Whitney Houston song. Should all exhibition titles be taken from Whitney songs?
No! I had a show in New York called Time after Time, and then I used a Sade title for my show at the Baltimore Museum: No Ordinary Love. I've done Sade, I've done Whitney... Maybe I should do Mariah? Actually, for the Chinese show they wanted me to do another song title, and I said: I'm done. So it's just called New Paintings and Drawings.

Why the song titles though?
Lightness. The works do have to do with queerness and immigration and race, and I just didn't want to drown them with heaviness.

Another feature of your work is your love of things - stocked dressing tables, buckled shoes, candlesticks and so on. Are you fond of arty clutter?
I am an aspirational minimalist, and I fail at it, but I keep trying. I'm a hoarder, but I like to organise. I actually cleaned last night, and I'm in a very organised apartment right now - it's just giving me shivers of pleasure to walk around it.

How do you know if a painting has worked?
Ah - that's simple. I have to refrain from taking a picture of it when a session is over - which takes six to seven hours, at least, because it takes me three hours to just control myself. After that, if I'm into it, I'm like: "I'm just gonna live here, I'm gonna die here in front of it, this is my life! I have nothing else to do." But I don't photograph it. When I come in the next day, I sit in front of it, I open my eyes - and I know.
Salman Toor: New Paintings and Drawings is at M Woods, Beijing, until 9 March

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How Salman Toor became the art name to know

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Last November, Four Friends by Salman Toor reached a new record for the artist at auction, selling for $1.5mn at Sotheby's New York - far above an upper estimate of $400,000. The painting, which shows two men dancing in a New York apartment while two others sit looking on, sipping cocktails, has the elegance of a Watteau painting updated to 21st-century life.

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Salman Toor in conversation with Chitra Ganesh - Whitney Museum of American Art

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Salman Toor in conversation with Chitra Ganesh - Whitney Museum of American Art

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"My work is based on memory, it's figurative and derived from personal fantasies about relationships that define the queer experience, empathy, art history and the perception of difference. It's also about self-love, about having fun, about the art of belonging to a community, while being an outsider, a student of culture, a foreigner, loving but also questioning the idea of American freedom."

...Negotiating family relationships in gendered conservative communities of origin, so these bodies move between recognisable types of people who live in western urban cultures and being unknown strangers from the developing world. Unlike in real life, in painting I like that I can bring these different people together, especially as someone who relates both as a familiar queer boy and a foreign brown man in a post 9/11 world." - Salman Toor

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Salman Toor in conversation with Chitra Ganesh

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If I were trying to make a name for myself, I wouldn’t use this one, and I’d focus more on being loud and clever. But then a part of me would be worried about getting fired or charged with sedition—and who wants to deal with that, especially for poems that may only end up being a rough draft? I’m only partly joking; remember, friends, these are dark times.

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"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness" - Alejandro Jodorowsky

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Two Hundred Poems Later, the No-Name Poet Tries to Explain

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Two Hundred Poems Later, the No-Name Poet Tries to Explain

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After the abrogation,
but before Shaheen Bagh–
the Ayodhya verdict was in the news,
we all sensed a deepening dark.
I think we were in Kolkata–
or maybe I have that wrong;
we were celebrating your love–
I wanted to write you a song.
It might have included lovers
holding hands under tube lights–
maybe dust, or my father’s hair–
I tried, but it didn’t feel right.
My friend, I did not tell you,
but that was the day I decided
to learn how to sing of the dark times,
to banish the censors inside.

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Coke Studio | Season 14 | Pasoori | Ali Sethi x Shae Gill

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I read this short biography of the poet, Tishani Doshi and her last words really left an impact. As she finishes writing about her beginnings as an artist, she notes how far she has come from her beginnings. Interestingly, she is living close to where she was born, but in a home away from her parents. Her words brought a sense of ease, as I sat with them in my parents' home - thinking how much has my freedom changed in this same home since the time I was raised here. I feel more free here than I've felt ever in the past. I like this freedom more than the other kinds of freedoms that this free country offers me.

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The Pop Song That’s Uniting India and Pakistan

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The Pop Song That’s Uniting India and Pakistan

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Sethi began singing Qawwali and ghazals—lyrical poems—in his clear, young voice to impress his parents’ friends. “Song and protest were intertwined for me,” he said. He started to realize that, in a society with so many fault lines—along caste, class, and ideology—folk music made everyone feel welcome and accommodated. Traditional music felt like a safe place to express himself and to explore the dawning awareness of his own queerness.

How did Qawwals go off on mesmerizing riffs, weaving seemingly unplanned patterns of melody and rhythm? And how did they so elegantly address the yearning for an elusive or unreachable beloved—a theme that spoke to him powerfully as a queer person and also as a South Asian migrant in America? And, finally, how could they be so wild and free, which he secretly wanted to be, while remaining rigorous and rule-bound, as society dictated? It was a paradox that he sensed held some kind of key for him.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-pop-song-thats-uniting-india-and-pakistan

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The writer and musician Ali Sethi has created an unconventional hit with "Pasoori."

A few years ago, the musician Ali Sethi was driving through Punjab, behind a jingle truck-the long-haul trucks known in his native Pakistan for their filigreed paint designs-when he spotted a phrase in florid Punjabi calligraphy on its back. "Agg lavaan teriya majbooriya nu," it said-a call to "set fire to your compulsions." It's not uncommon to glimpse bits of verse, or dire warnings-against straying eyes or losing yourself in the big world out there-among the fluorescent parrots and tropical fruit schemes of jingle trucks. But Sethi couldn't stop thinking about that phrase.

It inspired the first line of " Pasoori," the thirty-seven-year-old's latest single, a joyous, dance-fuelled hit that has drawn more than a hundred million views on YouTube since its release three months ago and is playing on the radio everywhere, from the United Arab Emirates to Canada. The song is stealthily subversive: a traditional raga-the classical Indian framework for musical improvisation-has been laid over an infectious beat that sounds South Asian, Middle Eastern, and, improbably, reggaetón, all at once. Even if you don't understand the lyrics, you can tell that it's a song about longing. "If your love is poison, I'll drink it in a flurry," Sethi sings in Punjabi with smooth anguish, in a rousing duet with Shae Gill, a Pakistani singer and Instagram star. "It's my favorite genre," a friend of mine said. "A love song that sounds like a threat."

The idea for the song began when Sethi, who lives in New York, was invited to collaborate on a project in Mumbai, which he had visited many times before for literary festivals and music gigs. But any travel to India for Pakistani nationals is subject to the politics of the moment, and Sethi was told by the producers that he wouldn't be able to work there as a Pakistani artist, because extremists might burn down the studio. The danger of arson reminded Sethi of that line from the jingle truck. "So I did what desi bards have done for ages," he said, referring to South Asian songwriters of yore. "I might not have been able to travel to India, but I knew my music could."

"Pasoori," a Punjabi word that translates roughly to "difficult mess," is about an age-old situation: two people who are forbidden from meeting each other. It's written in the style of a courtesan song, a genre with origins in medieval South Asian poetry that emerged in response to the custom of arranged marriages. (Often the song is about an extramarital affair, and a courtesan is trying to persuade her married paramour to stay the night.) Full of puns and erotic innuendos, courtesan songs typically lament trysts that must take place in secret, meetings that don't materialize, and the oppressiveness of polite society. "Pasoori" is ostensibly about star-crossed lovers, but it's also an apt metaphor for the relationship between two countries in perpetual conflict whose histories and cultural touchstones are entwined.

In early 2021, Sethi sent a voice note with the melody and the first few bars of the lyrics he had in mind to the producer Zulfiqar Khan, who goes by Xulfi. Xulfi had just been brought on to helm the fourteenth season of "Coke Studio," a popular musical TV series in Pakistan produced by the soda company. "I had goosebumps. I wanted to dance," Xulfi said. "I knew that people were going to love it, and that they wouldn't know what hit them." Xulfi found Anushae Gill, a.k.a. Shae Gill-a student of economics whose best friend started posting videos of her singing on Instagram in 2019-and brought her into the project, thinking that her smoky voice would pair nicely with Sethi's rich tenor.

"Pasoori" opens with a series of hand claps, which calls to mind desi musical traditions but also comes straight out of flamenco. "It was very deliberate, the musical hybridization," Sethi said. The track doesn't feature traditional desi instruments. When they needed strings, Xulfi recommended the Turkish bağlama. Abdullah Siddiqui, a twenty-one-year-old music producer and musician who worked with Xulfi on the song, sampled from his library of sounds, using whale calls for what Siddiqui described as their "bendy, deep guttural tones" and a reggaetón beat-"a cousin to our bhangra, if you think about it," Sethi said-to create a sound Sethi has been calling "ragaton."

The video, shot in old-Bollywood, Technicolor style and directed by Kamal Khan, introduces Sethi and Gill, dressed in boho interpretations of traditional outfits-he in a striped kurta pajama in jewel tones and a matching cap, she in a flowing white dress and embroidered vest-as they sing in the courtyard of an ancestral home. Their duet is intercut with glamorous stills-a young man in gem-studded makeup, a woman in elaborate braids. Each character sends a message of inclusion, from Sheema Kermani, the bharata-natyam dancer and activist from Pakistan, who spins slowly between two columns, to Gill, who is from the Christian community, which makes up only 1.59 per cent of the population of Pakistan. A pair of boys performs a delicate jhumar dance, the hems of their kurtas flaring. Like many desi classics, the song operates outside traditional gender roles-here Sethi sings to a man-with the singer in the role of a narrator weaving a tale.

As it happens, I am finishing a memoir about being from Kashmir-that complicated region where India and Pakistan meet-and after I first heard "Pasoori," in March, I kept listening to it on a loop while driving around L.A., where I now live. The song felt at once instantly familiar and thrillingly new, and I was curious to find out more about its creator. I had recently corresponded with Sethi's sister, Mira, through our mutual book editor. Mira, who is also an actress, introduced me to her brother over WhatsApp, the desi messaging app of choice, so that I could find out more about him and how the song came to be.

Sethi was born in Lahore in 1984; his parents are the prominent journalists and publishers Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin. His childhood home was "full of jail-going writers and activists," he told me, over Zoom, from his apartment in New York, and, by middle school, he was taking calls for his parents from Amnesty International, giving rote updates on political dissidents, such as "Habeas corpus has just been filed!" His mother, when not marching for equal rights, played a lot of Qawwali, a genre of Sufi devotional music. Sethi began singing Qawwali and ghazals-lyrical poems-in his clear, young voice to impress his parents' friends. "Song and protest were intertwined for me," he said. He started to realize that, in a society with so many fault lines-along caste, class, and ideology-folk music made everyone feel welcome and accommodated. Traditional music felt like a safe place to express himself and to explore the dawning awareness of his own queerness.

Sethi was an exceptional Ivy-or-bust student at Aitchison College, the prestigious boys' school in Lahore, and he didn't find an outlet for his emerging voice right away, but he remembers singing in the art room, where he made his closest childhood friends, including the painter Salman Toor. After graduating from Harvard, where he majored in South Asian studies, Sethi wrote a novel-" The Wish Maker," a story of contemporary Lahore told through the eyes of a man returning from studies abroad-that was published in 2009, just before he moved back to Lahore. "I was buying time," he said, about writing fiction. Sethi's mother and father were anxious about his job security and glad to have him home while he ostensibly researched his second novel. But Sethi felt hemmed in by the sociopolitical narrative that he thought the world wanted from him as a Pakistani writer in the decade after 9/11. "Thousands of words on Partition," he said, laughing. The thinking from editors was something like "Terrorism-more about that!" he said.

Instead, Sethi found himself drawn back to the creative possibilities in his childhood love of music: How did Qawwals go off on mesmerizing riffs, weaving seemingly unplanned patterns of melody and rhythm? And how did they so elegantly address the yearning for an elusive or unreachable beloved-a theme that spoke to him powerfully as a queer person and also as a South Asian migrant in America? And, finally, how could they be so wild and free, which he secretly wanted to be, while remaining rigorous and rule-bound, as society dictated? It was a paradox that he sensed held some kind of key for him, and he apprenticed himself to the musician Ustad Saami, in 2008.

Saami is based in Karachi, but spends half of each month in Lahore, where he trains a cadre of serious students. He is the last living vocal practitioner of the ancient forty-nine-note microtonal Surti scale and a descendant of Mian Samad bin Ibrahim, a student of the thirteenth-century musician credited with inventing Qawwali in South Asia. "He's a man of the medieval moment," Sethi said, and he found in Saami a kindred spirit. "He makes his own medicines. He goes to the mountains every year in search of roots and elements. He's a linguist who speaks Arabic, Farsi, Sanskrit, Braj Bhasha, but no English." Saami taught Sethi the melody patterns of raga, and how Vedic chants and Turkic and Persian melodies were fused by guilds in medieval India. "And he showed me that, before the encounter with the West, South Asia had its own microtones and its own notations and its own multicultural sense of what a musical scale is. It was much more flexible than what the West imposes," Sethi told me. "Our music is about bending the notes and . . . creating meaning between binaries, which I found just thrilling, because this was the thing I'd been waiting for my whole life-a nonbinary South Asian identity."

In 2012, Sethi recorded Farida Khanum's "Dil Jalaane Ki Baat" ("Talk That Burns the Heart"), for Mira Nair's film "The Reluctant Fundamentalist." The song brought Sethi international recognition as a singer, and, in 2015, when he performed a traditional song, called " Umran Langiyaan " ("Lifetimes Have Passed"), on "Coke Studio"-his first appearance on the show-he cemented his place as an interpreter of classics. In 2016, he also started training with Khanum, affectionately known as the Queen of Ghazal, who taught him "the exquisite art of phrase-making"-how to generate captivating loops and hooks out of ragas. She had performed this art in the courts of rajas and maharajas, where singers like herself were the chief providers of musical entertainment. Sethi credits the playful, seductive-at-all-costs "earworminess" of "Pasoori" to the skills that he learned at her side.

It was partly the emerging wave of Pakistani pop singers such as Siddiqui and Hasan Raheem, who began uploading their sample-heavy songs online in 2019, that nudged Sethi to branch out musically. He brought up Raheem, a twenty-four-year-old singer-songwriter (and doctor), whose song " Joona," an irresistible, poppy guitar-funk track, is accompanied by a charming video, in which Raheem dances his way through a supermarket while shopping for groceries. The lighthearted lyrics are about the small moments, crushes, day-to-day life, instead of the subcontinent's collective cultural burden, and, for Sethi, it represented a shift in post-Internet South Asian music. "Here I am," he said, "trying to perfect these medieval microtones with my throat, thinking, Enough is enough. I want to make a banger."

His "banger" now sits firmly at No. 1 on the Indian music charts, which have traditionally been shaped by the Indian film industry's endless supply of soundtracks. People are streaming "Pasoori" in villages, in cities, in regions where people don't even speak the language but furiously feel the vibe, and Sethi has received love letters from every stripe of diaspora desi who play it to their children every day, in the way that he remembers his mother used to play her Qawwali tapes for him. The week that "Pasoori" hit No. 1 in India-just after Arooj Aftab became the first Pakistani singer to win a Grammy-two Indian teens were arrested in Bareilly, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, for listening to Pakistani music. With communal tensions currently on the rise in India, the headlines weren't necessarily surprising, but they ignore a larger truth: even if they can't cross borders-India and Pakistan do not generally issue visas to each other's civilians-Pakistanis were raised on the same diet of Bollywood movies, and Indian households sit down to their favorite Pakistani soap operas nightly. They have actively sought out culture from each other, through leadership changes and political upheavals.

Like many popular desi songs, "Pasoori" started spreading with a forward on WhatsApp from family members in India, moving through the Middle East, Europe, and Australia, before finally reaching-all of a few weeks later-the United States. Now it's poised to cross over, and so is Sethi. When the possibility came up of attending an Oscar party in Los Angeles that was celebrating South Asian nominees, Sethi, who travels frequently, was game. Because we are desi, with a tendency toward instant overfamiliarity, the first question I asked was about his substantial height (six-three). My follow-up was: "How tall is your little sister?" She's an astonishing five-ten, it turned out. Sethi, in a black-and-orange shirt that showcased a turbaned magician levitating a woman in a sari, made an entrance-not just because he towered over most of the guests but because half of the party had likely been forwarding "Pasoori" around on WhatsApp. "He's so tall!" I heard people murmur around me. "And his sister is five-ten!" I added.

Sethi greeted Tejal Rao, the California restaurant critic for the Times, and shared a warm hug with Riz Ahmed. (Sethi had recorded a song called "Aaja," with Swet Shop Boys, of which Ahmed is a member, in 2016.) He bumped into a childhood friend from Lahore who had just become the managing editor for the Juggernaut, a South Asian culture site, and a sponsor of the party. There was a lot of love for him in the room, and he marvelled at the existence of this group. It was lonely in a way, being a desi artist pre-Internet, he said, and he felt hopeful that so many South Asian actors, artists, and musicians are now able to meet and work together in a way that isn't limited by location or identity. Afterward, at dinner, I asked, now that he's united the people of South Asia with his song, what was next? "More ragaton!" he said. "Think 'Pasoori' the album," with Siddiqui, and a "long-form meditative-raga record," with Noah Georgeson, who has also worked with Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. He was also looking forward to a trip to Fire Island this summer.

Later, Rao texted me that, after the party, she listened to Sethi's music for the entire drive home. "At first I thought I must be listening to the wrong person. His voice is just so beautiful, it sounds like it's from another time."

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The Pop Song That's Uniting India and Pakistan

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The writer and musician Ali Sethi has created an unconventional hit with "Pasoori." A few years ago, the musician Ali Sethi was driving through Punjab, behind a jingle truck-the long-haul trucks known in his native Pakistan for their filigreed paint designs-when he spotted a phrase in florid Punjabi calligraphy on its back.