Season 3 Episode 8: “Who Are We When No One Is Watching" ft Ali Sethi

Narration: The other day, I was visiting my mother, and I happened to be staring out the window, just thinking. Then, in a sharp interruption to my reverie, my mother said to me, “Meklit, even when you were a little girl, I could always tell when you were somewhere else in your mind, daydreaming, and not listening to me.”

“So I’ve always been like this?”, I asked. She gave a one word answer. “Yes.”

She’s right. I like to daydream. I like to reflect. And what’s normally going through my mind in those quiet moments?

Well, often, I find myself chewing on the same internal questions. Like if a big experience comes to my life, I’ll be staring out a window, thinking to myself, ok Meklit, what actually happened? And what underlying story do I hold about myself that might be shaping how I see this? Whew! Can you tell I’ve been to therapy?

If I see something in the news, I might ask myself, ok what actually happened, and what underlying stories do we collectively hold that might be shaping how we see an event? That’s where my mind has been wandering when my mother sees me daydreaming. But I’m not daydreaming.

Lately in my reveries, I’ve been noticing how binary stories are underneath so much of how this culture sees the world. Things get broken down into heroes and villains, enemies and friends, insiders and outsiders. When you speak it out loud, it almost sounds cartoonish, but these black and white tropes are everywhere. They are in gender, they are in war, they are in political slogans. They have real consequences. So, with so much oversimplification in the air, how do we counterbalance this tendency?

I recently met an artist whose entire body of work is a freedom break from the binary. For Pakistani vocalist-songwriter Ali Sethi, art is his way out.

My name is Meklit and this is Movement. Music and migration, remixed.

When I spoke with Ali at the end of May, the high cost of fixed sides and stories was not far from his mind. Three weeks earlier, war was on the horizon between Pakistan and India before a ceasefire was reached four days into the fighting.

This hostility isn’t fresh. It’s rooted in the decades-long conflict over the region of Kashmir, but beneath the political tension, exists a deep cultural connection.

Ali Sethi: When you grew up in Pakistan or India, you have this country next door that is supposed to be the enemy country, right? That’s what your textbooks tell you, that's what the state run TV channels tell you. That's what you hear sitting with sort of conservative minded older people who have memories of wars, or of the partition, which happened in ‘47 and displaced millions and millions of people who had to overnight leave their homes and cross over to the other country.

So we have this very tense relationship with our neighbor, but it's also a relationship of love and understanding, because we share languages, we share songs, we eat the same food, we look alike. So it’s a very kind of melancholy relationship.

Narration: When Ali was seventeen years old, he left his home in Lahore, Pakistan to attend Harvard University. For his first semester, he was expected to study economics and computer science. That was the plan, but that was not what Ali did.

Ali Sethi: I remember being an undergrad and looking at the course book and thinking, wait a minute, you can take a course on like 18th century gothic architecture in Europe. What? And then my parents would call me and say, are you taking your computer science course? And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, don't worry. You know? And then off I'd go in my little overcoat smoking my secret cigarette, fancying myself an intellectual.

Meklit: I can picture it.

Narration: That first year Ali signed up for a class he thought would be an easy A, mainly to fill a requirement. But it wasn’t what he thought it would be. The class was called Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies and taught by Professor Ali Asani.

Ali Sethi: As soon as I walked into the course, I was just like dazzled because here was a man after my heart. He was saying, well, why don't we look at calligraphy and at, you know, medieval poetry and the patterns on Persian carpets? Why don't we look at the craft of a people as the repository of identity to get a sense of, you know, who they are when no one is watching or when no foreigner is watching.

Narration: The classroom became a portal to his ancient kin. Ancestors made themselves known from within the hidden verses in calligraphy and the images woven into carpets. By studying tradition, Ali learned a new language to understand his own identity.

Craft captured his people’s essence in a way geopolitics could not. Ali moved to the US for Harvard in 2002, and as a Pakistani student in post-9/11 America, he felt another kind of narrative imposed on him, one shaped by suspicion and simplified by fear.

Ali Sethi: I arrived in America soon after 9/11 and these questions were being asked of like, you know, what is a Muslim? What is a Pakistani? Who are you? George W. Bush had famously said, you're either with us or against us as he was waging his war on Iraq and other, places. And my instinct was to say, but do you even know how we dance? Like, do you know how how sing? Like, do you know all these other things? These, like, amazingly playful, supple, mystical, funny, camp, kooky, absurd, magical, philosophical, poetic, like ways in which we conduct our lives 98% of the time when we're not actually having an argument with people like you about whether we're with you or against you.

Narration: The questioning of allegiance wasn't new for Ali. Both his parents are prominent figures in media and publishing in Pakistan and vocal critics of authoritarianism.

Ali’s father, Najam Sethi, is one of Pakistan’s most polarizing journalists whose work often placed him at odds with the state. For Ali, this meant growing up in a household where raids, surveillance and the threat of his father’s detainment were constant.

Ali’s mother, Jugnu Mohsin is also a renowned journalist with a law degree from Cambridge University. When Ali was five years old, Jugnu and Najam founded The Friday Times, where Jugnu wrote a satirical column and championed dissenting voices as an editor.

Ali was influenced both by his family's use of language to fight injustice and by art in all its forms. As a child in Lahore, Ali experienced art as a conduit between ancient and modern culture, just as he would in Professor Asani’s class years later. But first, Ali had to understand what his ancestors left behind for him to discover.

Ali Sethi: The first Sufi mystics who came from Arabia and Persia came and settled in Lahore on the backs of, of the river Ravi. And one of the shrines I grew up around in Lahore is the shrine of a Sufi saint, who lived and died there about a thousand years ago. And I remember music around the shrine.

Meklit: Mmm.

Ali Sethi: People playing, ecstatically, playing the dhol drum, which these instrumental players would wear around their necks. And then there is another shrine of another important poet and Saint, called Shah Hussain, and that shrine is also not far from where I grew up, and has an annual festival of lights called Mela Chiraghan where devotees show up in extraordinary outfits.

The dervishes who wear these all kind, I mean, they're like, they're like tattoo artists I guess they're like the, goth sort of version of Pakistanis. They wear coal under their eyes, the men, and they have long henna dyed beards and they wear these swirling skirts and they dance around in them and they gather sometimes up to a hundred thousand people, you know, at the shrine and dance and sing songs. Songs of whirling and spinning until you are, you have transcended your caste and your creed and your gender.

Narration: Ali's earliest sense of who he was came from these memories around the shrines. Mixed in with the traditional, Ali's childhood was filled with contemporary music coming out of the late 80s and early 90s.

Ali Sethi: Before I knew language, I knew hybrid music before I knew, my address before I had a passport, I was moving my little baby hips to these songs that were, already these amazing amalgams of the confluence of like historical things.

Narration: The very first time Ali remembers singing was to one of these songs he loved dancing to as a toddler.

Ali Sethi: My mother had this like circular glass table in her dressing room. And I would go down, sing around it, as this song would blare from his stereo a song called “Luddi Hai Jamalo”. And it was this song that sort of went [sings]

Narration:  Disco coming out of New York City in the 70s had made its way into South Asian popular music. The combination of genres was catchy, but what really made the song irresistible was the singer's performance.

Ali Sethi: Inside that disco production, right, were these very traditional Punjabi melodies. It was sung by the great diva of Pakistan, Madam Noor Jehan. I mean, she was like the, I would say the Dolly Parton and Edith Piaf and Taylor Swift of like Pakistan. She was the person that young people listened to. She was the person that old people listened to. She was the person that, the rich, the urban, the rural, the poor. Everybody—

Meklit: Wow.

Ali Sethi: —across the board listened to her. She was everybody's muse.

Narration: By the time Ali was a teenager, he studied at a prestigious boarding school for boys in Lahore where his flair for the dramatic didn't get many opportunities to shine through.

Ali Sethi: I remember having to just memorize and rote learn so many things, dates, names, you know, formulas because that's what I needed to do to just get to the next grade.

Meklit: Right.

Ali Sethi: That's how it had been taught to my teachers who were teaching me, you know? And those moments inside that colonial education system of true wonder, of true awe were few and far between.

Narration: It wasn't until his first semester at Harvard that the wonder he'd once felt towards learning resurfaced.

Ali Sethi: Suddenly, the arts began to feel very scientific in a really remarkable way and the sciences began to seem beautiful and artistic. It was a way of also being in community with other people.

Meklit: Right.

Ali Sethi: With fellow students, with people in the cafeteria and the dining hall, with professors. And I think that's what I sort of became addicted to was that salon lecture hall environment.

Narration: By his sophomore year, Ali revisited his childhood love of singing. He signed up for the annual variety show hosted by Harvard's  South Asian Association.

Ali Sethi: Musician was not my identity at that point. I was a student or I was a writer, a thinker or, you know, I don't know. But I wasn't a performer yet in that way. And I took to the stage and I remember, you know, the snow had just melted and it was early spring, and I sang a, a kind of old Bollywood song and, people loved it. And that was my first, moment of not only can I do this, but this is worth pursuing in a real way. You know, instantly I thought to myself, I want to learn this. I don't just want to do it. I want to learn it and do it.

Narration: It had maybe been a year since Ali had taken that life-changing course with Professor Ali Asani,  Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies, and he'd since deepened his interest in ghazal poetry, an artform that is often sung.

Ali Sethi: Ghazals are traditionally performed in these intimate soiree or salon settings and they're written in these kind of coded Sufi puns. So Socialist poets have snuck socialist meanings into their ghazal poems. Queer poets have snuck queer interpretations into their poem. Courtesans have snuck erotic innuendo into their poems, into their ghazal poems. And so it's kind of an archive of all the subcultures in a way that have existed in Muslim societies over time.

Meklit: Wow.

Ali Sethi: And I was inevitably drawn to that form.

Narration: One day, after his variety show performance, Ali visited Professor Asani’s office to run an idea by him.

Ali Sethi: I went to him and I said you know, I want to study ghazal singing. And he said, you must do this, not just because this is something that gives you pleasure, but because this can be something that brings people together. This is something that might bring people together across difference, he said to me.

Narration: While Ali had been drawn to singing, other forms of expression had called to him as well. At Harvard he took a creative writing course with famed novelist Zadie Smith. And in his last years of college, he wrote The Wish Maker, a loosely auto-biographical novel about boy raised in modern-day Pakistan by a family of outspoken women and a  journalist mother.

Ali Sethi: My writing a novel was coming out of this, I think just this anxiety that, that had taken hold in the, in the sort of post 9/11 years of “explain yourself to us”.

Narration: Ali graduated in 2006, with a degree in South Asian Studies, not a computer science. Soon after, his student visa expired and he had to move back to Lahore. And at home, things were complicated in their own way.

Ali Sethi: Once those, those sort of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, it created this very defensive environment in Pakistan where people would look suspiciously at someone say, who was returning from college in America. You know, oh, brainwashed by the west. Oh, you have now become a Western person. Oh, you know, you must now be cleansed of all that propaganda you must have been exposed to about, about your traditions or where you come from.

Narration: Three years after Ali graduated, The Wish Maker was published. And from his desk in Lahore, Ali began to wonder if the conversation his book opened up was one he wanted to continue.

Ali Sethi: Writing in English meant writing mainly for a, non Pakistani audience because English is not the main language in Pakistan. And I was sitting in Lahore and I thought, you know, I don't want to be living here and writing for another country. I want to be, I want to engage also with my peers here in India and Pakistan, in this region. And I want to make art that is in community with my generation and with with my people.

Narration: With a new perspective, Ali came back to this idea of dialogue across difference, and committed to the study of traditional music. He started by apprenticing himself to two gurus of the craft in Pakistan.

Ali Sethi: One is a man called Naseeruddin Saami, who comes from a great storied lineage of Sufi singers, an 800 year family tree. And he is an incredible teacher, and really the last living practitioner of the microtonal singing style of Delhi, which is that he can, he can actually produce with his voice, all the microtones that exist between notes. And it's really an incredible experience to witness. And it's a kind of immersive therapy to kind of just listen to these extraordinary threads of melody that he can hold like silk and gold, over minutes.

Narration: In training under Naseeruddin Saami, Ali couldn't rely on the analytics and theory that got him through Harvard.

Ali Sethi: Every time I would say to him, oh, can you break this down for me? And he would say, “no, do it first, and then think about it later”. You know, which is in some ways a very non-Western way of, of learning.

Meklit: That’s true.

Ali Sethi: You know? Whereas I think in these older sort of modes of learning, you learn through muscle memory.

Meklit: Right.

Ali Sethi: You know, you learn through the body first.

Narration: Ali learned traditional ragas under his teacher. The ragas are sometimes described as a melodic system, but Ali likens them to a melodic being that has to be awakened and kindled each time they’re sung. To sing the ragas, is to embody them. It’s a tradition passed down from breath to breath, where improvisation is key, and the artist and the audience can imagine their own interpretations of the lyrics.

Ali Sethi: I began to kind of weave poetry and narrative and metaphor, especially into the songs I was making from the very beginning. So I think the music became a place, not just for music, but also for literature for me.

Narration: In 2011, Ali traveled to India to work on the set of the film “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” as a translator. In the down time between scenes, Ali would sometimes sing with the cast and crew, and one time, director Mira Nair heard him singing a ghazal, acapella. She was so moved by his rendition, she asked him to record it. The song made it to the film's soundtrack and became Ali's recording debut.

In a few years time, Ali was performing regularly on one of Pakistan's most popular television programs with a big fanbase in Pakistan and India. Ali often performed traditional love songs, with lyrics that could easily be about lovers or countries caught in conflict. The audience was captivated by him. While Ali gained attention on the show, he began training with his second teacher, a legendary Pakistani singer named Farida Khanum, also known as "The Queen of Ghazal".

Ali Sethi: She's considered one of the great, women gurus of the Indian subcontinent, and a great diva of the 20th century. And so she has this very flamboyant style of singing the ragas , where we're sort of ornamentation and I would say more than just intonation, it's about charm and seduction.

Narration: Farida Khanum taught Ali the art of phrase-making, the process of bending words into new musical rhythms. She said this is what gives songs their mesmerizing quality.

Ali Sethi: She would, she would say, “oh, just improvise over the beat, just riff.” You know? And I would say, “but how do I know how to land?” And she would say, “when you know how to fly, you'll know how to land.”

Meklit: Ooh

Ali Sethi: Just go baby, just go. You know? And then the other thing she would say is she would say, she would say, “trust in pleasure. Trust pleasure. Go with pleasure, give yourself pleasure.”

Meklit: Yes!

Ali Sethi: So that others may get pleasure. It's like RuPaul says, “if you don't love yourself, how the hell you're gonna love somebody else?” And sometimes that's the hardest thing to do, is to just trust in your flow.

Narration: Years after his apprenticeships, Ali was driving in Punjab when he got stuck in traffic behind a brightly painted long-haul truck.

Ali Sethi: The trucks are legendary for their art. For the art that they bear, for the, for the sort of, images that are painted onto them. It's got this kind of charming, nomadic literature written all over it, expressing the melancholy of being away from home a lot of the time.

Narration: There was one phrase painted on the truck in particular that caught Ali’s attention.

Ali Sethi: Agg laavaan majboori nu which says, to hell with your compulsions. To hell with your compulsions! So it's sort of like the thing the other woman would say to her boyfriend. I don't care about your wife. Let's not talk about her tonight. It's full of this kind of like, you know, erotic innuendo, but it's also has this existential exhortation in it, right? Which is, what are you waiting for? Live life. Live. All we have is the here and now. Forget about what you gotta do tomorrow or where you gotta be in five minutes, baby. This is all we have.

Narration: In that moment it was as if the message was speaking directly to him.

Ali Sethi: You know, as a queer person who had only indirectly expressed myself up to that point, I felt like I have to fucking say it. I have to, I have to, come out with it. Come on. Like, let's just, you know, why am I sort of, speaking indirectly all the time through metaphor, like, why don't I say it?  You know, that’s one of the things I was saying to myself.

And you know, the other thing I was thinking in my mind was, you know, there was all this tension as usual between India and Pakistan. And I was, I had been asked by this corporation in India that I shall not name, to do a podcast for them. We'd had a month of discussions and I'd worked on the project, and then last minute they were like, well, our governments are currently at war, so we can't really hire you because if we do, some extremists will come and set fire to our building. You know?

Meklit: Oh my goodness!

Ali Sethi: Yeah. And so, I thought to myself, to hell with your compulsions! You know, like, so it was something that was just ringing for me in every which way. And then I wrote it down in my, notes on my phone. And then I forgot about it for several months until I started writing the song. And then I was like, this is gonna be the first line of my song.

Narration:  The song is called Pasoori and came out in 2022. Pasoori is a duet  sung in Urdu and Punjabi by Ali and Pakistani artist Shae Gill. And sure enough, it opens up with the phrase Ali saw on the back of the truck. Its meaning is open for interpretation.

Ali Sethi: I'm gonna express myself, I'm gonna love myself, I'm gonna love my baby. I'm gonna, be who I am. I'm gonna run with it. All of those, all of those expressions that kind of, you know, are contained within, within the feeling of, to hell with it.

Narration:  Pasoori was an instant hit. In 2022, it ended the year as the most-streamed song in Pakistan, the most-streamed Pakistani song globally, and the most Hum-to-Search song in the world according to Google's trend report. Three years later, Pasoori’s music video sits at close to one billion views.

Both in its production and message, Pasoori transcends the binary and gets at a tension that’s had massive popular resonance.

Ali Sethi: It combines these hand claps that are common to so many traditions of the world, right? Like hand claps, which are central to Ali, which is the music of, you know, Sufi mystics in Pakistan or India. But then also flamenco music, right?

Meklit: Right.

Ali Sethi: And when I was writing this song, I had realized I'd actually been living in New York for two years at that point, and listening to reggaeton blaring from every car speaker, that [sings].

Meklit: Mm-hmm..

Ali Sethi: You know, it's so close to the Punjabi beats that I grew up with, you know? So I was hearing the possibility of my beats in these ubiquitous contemporary beats. It could be all of those things simultaneously, not one or the other.

You know that Shakespearean line from Romeo and Juliet, my only love sprung from my only hate. It is that sentiment of star crossed lovers. And that of course is also a very queer metaphor, right? Like forbidden love, right? The idea that like you love someone you're not meant to love. Or you have this secret love for someone that you're not supposed to have, right? And the way that I think a lot of Indians and Pakistanis have for each other, but in wartime dare not express publicly, because they'd be going against the government's narrative or the national narrative, or the prevailing sentiment.

So there were all these layers at work in that song. And you know that whole thing I think spoke to a lot of people without forcing them into any one camp. And I think that that is a miraculous thing in art. I think if art can make you feel housed, seen, licensed, allowed to exist in your full flamboyant self without having to risk losing your community, I think that can be an incredible thing.

Narration:  Ali Sethi's latest album is called Love Language. He describes it as a continuation of the journey started by Pasoori. It’s out now and you can find it wherever you listen to music.

This episode of Movement was produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our senior editor is Megan Tan. Our sound designer and co-founder is Ian Coss. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World and we are distributed by PRX.