It was then that I started talking to photographers and working on this photo project.
For example, the only photo of a legendary qawwal I was in touch with was the one on his ration card. During our seminars with qawwals, I discovered that a treasure trove of oral traditions associated with qawwali was passed down between generations without any visual documentation of the artists. In 2011, I started hosting talks and mehfils on qawwali, and that was the first time qawwali was brought into an academic format. While they may listen to a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan composition and nod their heads to it, they actually have no inkling of what the art form really means. I have been personally associated with qawwali for 25 years as part of my own productions, and over the years, I have realised that people don’t know much about qawwali. I started documenting the lives of qawwals almost a decade ago. The Qawwali Photo Project was started five years ago, but that was not the beginning of my association with qawwals or the history of qawwali. What inspired you to curate this exhibition? Scroll.in spoke to Manjari Chaturvedi about the exhibition and her experience of working with qawwals over the years. The photo project not only documents the qawwals in their work environment with their audiences but also presents glimpses of their lives beyond their performances. It celebrates the art and oral traditions passed through generations while preserving its history through photographs. The exhibition aims to explore the song form “through the power of images, as a means of expression and communication”. To capture practitioners of the song form in action, photographers Dinesh Khanna, Mustafa Quraishi, and Leena Kejriwal travelled to Delhi, Hyderabad, Dewa Sharif, Safipur and beyond. “The present will not value my work but I strongly feel that history will appreciate it,” she said. “When we started the project, many people expressed concern about the futility of the exercise,” said kathak dancer Chaturvedi, the president of Sufi Kathak Foundation. “There are certain things that must be done for the sake of history.” That was Manjari Chaturvedi’s motivation for curating the Qawwali Photo Project, an exhibition of photographs featuring the lives of qawwals across the country, currently on display at Delhi’s India International Centre.
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