Little Fattah sits in the middle of the group, thrilled, and also overwhelmed. Men around him raise an alaap and seize his attention. His uncle encourages him to join and the look on his face changes. With a deep breath, he renders a raga. Children of his age are already in bed by this time. Five-year-old Fattah, however, is already in a music school whose demands are high.

Fattah is on course to inculcating a tradition that his family has been carrying since qawals began composing tunes, following Amir Khusro. Dilli ke Qawal Bachche, as the gharana has come to be known, are renewing that tradition and bringing it back to the limelight. Leading the group are Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad.

Everyone in the family has started learning qawali very early in their lives. Fareed Ayaz says he was five when he began learning the art from his father who had inherited it from his elders. “I formed a qawali group of my own 35 years ago,” says Ayaz, 62. “It is a discipline that has its own constitution, laws and bylaws. So the routine is always rigorous. But it is also about purity, so you have to stay in the environment. That is how you imbibe the art.”

How did an art that started with Khusro’s 13-century compositions fade into obscurity and only survived as a tradition in some families? Ayaz says history is replete with answers. “Culture and traditions among Muslims of the subcontinent are dispersed since 1947. It was a second cultural shock while Muslims were still recovering from the first one in 1857.”

Ayaz quotes Iqbal to emphasise the point. Mein tujh ko batata hoon taqdeer-i-umam kya hai; shamseer-o-sanaan awwal, taous-o-rabab akher (Come listen to fate of my nation; sword and spear first; zither and lute [music] last). Ayaz says that his journey was a struggle to earn and feed the family while making sure the art was kept alive. As Iqbal said, for the young ones, the priority was swords and spears and not music.

Ayaz’s father, Ustad  Ahmed Khan, knotted skull caps when he had migrated from India. Ayaz was born in 1949 in Pakistan, where he grew up fending for his family and learning music. He was less known as a qawal until Coke Studio invited Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad with their group for an in-studio recording that reflected ‘the depth of musical diversity’ in Pakistan.

And that changed it all. In a matter of days, Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad’s group was playing on laptops and drawing room speakers – people tuned into the Persian lyrics by Amir Khusro. Kangna, one of the qawalis recorded in Coke Studio last year, has over 332,000 hits on Youtube.

Though the group has been performing abroad, especially in Tehran, they lately hit headlines in India and Pakistan when they performed for a peace initiative in Ajmer at the shrine of Khawaja Moinuddin Chishti. The performance was a collaborative effort with their Indian counterparts, Munawwar Masoom’s group.

Since then, the gharana is in the public eye in both countries. Abu Muhammad and Fareed Ayaz believe that these performances have been as entertaining for them as they have been for the audiences. “I am also entertained, by what I learn while performing,” says Ayaz. He says it is a continuing education where the artist is part of the art, and perfection comes simultaneously. “I need to be as clean as the art to reach that level of performance”.

At recent performances, Fareed Ayaz’s group has struggled to do that. Many in the audience have craved for the mix of alaap and sargam that takes them into a trance. Whether Persian as a language is no more in use among the listeners of Qawali, or the art has to perfect itself to translate its essence to the viewer, the qawals will have to live the quest.