So Near, So Far: Kabuls Music in Exile

John Baily
Based on fieldwork conducted in 2000, this paper examines the role of music in two sites
of Afghan settlement in exile, Peshawar (Pakistan) and Fremont (California).
Interpreting the data in terms of recent research on music and migration the paper
argues that Afghan music in Peshawar serves to maintain links with the past, while in
Fremont there is the emergence of a new kind of modernized Afghan music, which is
bound up with the construction of a new Afghan-American identity. The new music is
now feeding back to Afghanistan itself, showing that new cultural performances created
and constructed in exile may end up as models shaping cultural practices at home.
Keywords: Afghanistan; California; Migration; Refugee; Identity; Creativity
Fremont, California: An Afghan mother picked up the phone: Is Mo there? the
caller asks. The mother says, No, you have the wrong number. Her son was lying
down. Mom, who was it? he says in English. Somebody has a wrong number.
What did he say? he says. Is Mo there? Mom, thats me! Why kid, why is
your name Mo? He says, Because Mom, my name is Mohammad, but some
people are very prejudiced, so I just dont feel good to have my full name as
Mohammad. So I just have it as Mo.
1
This paper examines Afghan music culture after the communist coup of 1978.
Specifically, it looks at issues of continuity and change in two cities with significant
Afghan refugee populations, Peshawar in Pakistan and Fremont in California. The
comparison allows one to factor in a number of variables which affect what happens
to music culture and its performance in the migration situation, such as: geographical
distance between countries of origin and settlement; cultural similarity in terms of
language, religion and other attributes; and prospects for the future in terms of
security, employment and eventual integration in the host society. These factors are
John Baily is Professor of Ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has been working
on the music of Afghanistan since 1973, and his research covers many areas, such as: music history, musical
ethnography, changes in the dutar (long-necked lute) of Herat 1950/65, the human/musical instrument
interface, musical cognition, Afghan perceptions of birdsong, musical enculturation, performance, social status
of musicians, music and Islam, censorship, musical regeneration in the post-Taliban era, music and migration,
ethnographic film making. Email: j.baily@gold.ac.uk
ISSN 1741-1912 (print)/ISSN 1741-1920 (online) # 2005 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17411910500329658
Ethnomusicology Forum
Vol. 14, No. 2, November 2005, pp. 213/233
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likely to have relevance for many migrant communities, but they are exacerbated and
acquire a new significance when the migrants are refugees from a major civil war,
which led to several million people being forced into exile.
2
Afghan Music before the War
During 40 years of rule under Zahir Shah (1933/73) the people of Afghanistan
enjoyed a period of relative political stability and calm, in a gradually modernizing
neutral country, optimistically described as the potential Switzerland of Asia (Caroe
1965, 550). In this period the people of Afghanistan had a rich and diverse music
culture. In the 1970s, before the onset of the 23 years war which has more or less
destroyed the country, I spent two years conducting ethnomusicological fieldwork in
Afghanistan. The life of music and the cultural performances of music (and dance) I
observed in Herat and Kabul at that time constitute a baseline against which to view
the situation in 2000, when the research described here was conducted. Here are some
key facts about music in Afghanistan at that time.
1. In the 1970s Afghanistan was a relatively stable multi-ethnic country. The two
principal ethnicities were Pashtuns and Tajiks, speakers respectively of Pashto
and Dari (Afghan Persian). We may distinguish three main types of music at
that time (Baily 1981). First, there was a plethora of regional folk music styles
characteristic of various ethnic groups inhabiting different part of the country,
sung in Pashto and Dari, and a number of other languages.
3
Second, there were
genres of popular music created at and disseminated by Afghanistans only
radio station, Radio Afghanistan. Third, there was the art music cultivated in
Kabuls Kucheh Kharabat (the musicians quarter in the old city). This included
Hindustani vocal and instrumental genres imported from India, and more
distinctively Afghan genres such as ghazal and naghma-ye kashal (Baily 1988,
60/80; 1997). In the 1930s the art music practised in Kabul was adopted in
other cities, such as Herat, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. In this paper we are
concerned mainly with the popular and art music genres as performed by
musicians from Kabul.
2. As Muslims, people in Afghanistan engaged in the common discourse about the
value of music in social life. On one hand, attitudes against music were
relatively weak in the 1970s, and there was plenty of musical activity; one could
say that Afghans were a nation of music lovers at that time. On the other hand,
music was not fully accepted. It was not part of the school curriculum; there
was no proper conservatory in the capital and no department of music in Kabul
University.
3. There was an important social distinction between professional and amateur
musician status, noted by Slobin (1976), Sakata (2002 [1983]) and Baily (1988).
The contrast here is between kesbi and shauqi . Professional (kesbi ) musicians
usually came from hereditary musician families, and were known as sazandeh.
214 J. Baily
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Several hundred hereditary musicians lived in the Kucheh Kharabat, the
musicians quarter in the old city area of Kabul. Those most skilled in the
performance of art music were honoured with the title of ustad (master).
Amateur (shauqi ) musicians made a great show of being from a different
background. With more liberal attitudes towards music, there had been a trend
for amateurs, often from educated middle-class and even upper-class families,
to become professional musicians. The radio station in Kabul had an important
role in this respect. Its modernity, and physical and social separation of
performer and audience, bestowed a new respectability on amateur-turned-
professional performers, including some very significant women singers. Radio
broadcasting was also important in the gradual development of an Afghan
national identity (Slobin 1974; Baily 1994).
4. A further contested area between hereditary professionals and amateurs-
turned-professional concerned control of the music business. The hereditary
professionals considered playing music to be their rightful traditional
occupation (maslak), and the knowledge of (Indian) music theory and special
performance techniques for particular instruments their special domain. In
their view, these amateurs were self-taught upstarts who lacked any real
knowledge of music, either as theorists or as performers.
5. While what one could broadly term Afghan music in general conformed to
the monophonic models and concepts of melodic mode and metrical cycle
associated with the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian Sub-Continent,
there was some imprint of Western music, especially in Kabul. There had been
Turkish bandmasters teaching military band music, a few musicians had
become fluent in Western staff notation, there were players of Western
instruments at the radio station (Baily 1981, 110/11), and Kabuls first, and
perhaps only, rock festival took place in 1975. The new style of popular music
was personified by Ahmad Zahir, Afghanistans superstar (and son of a
former Afghan prime minister), who used Western instruments such as electric
organ, electric guitar and drum kit in his band. During the communist era of
the 1980s, under Soviet influence, popular music in Kabul became increasingly
Westernized and modernized. The Music High School in Kabul trained a
number of young musicians in Western music, most notably Khaled Arman,
who later studied classical guitar at the Prague Conservatory and now leads the
Afghan world music group Ensemble Kaboul, which is based in Geneva.
Music and Migration
In order to highlight the contrasts between Peshawar and Fremont it is also
appropriate to review briefly some of the research into music and migration. The
study of this area owes much to the innovative work of Adeleida Reyes, who was
teaching at Columbia University, New York, at a time when much postgraduate
ethnomusicological research was directed towards minorities in that city. Overall, this
Ethnomusicology Forum 215
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body of research shows that many things can happen to, with and through music in
the migration situation. Reyes emphasized the theoretical importance of studying the
music of refugee populations: the disruption and loss of control, the traumas of
escape, and the trying circumstances surrounding survival in a new and possibly
hostile environment impede the usual channels through which traditions pass from
one generation to the next . . . [this] could lead to a better understanding of tradition
in general (1986, 91). Her own work has focused on Vietnamese refugees; her
monograph Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free (Reyes 1999) traces the performance
of music in the typical Vietnamese refugees journey: from Puerto Princesa, a camp of
first arrival in Palawan, to the Bataan Processing Center (both in Philippines), to
initial resettlement in the Jersey City-Hoboken area of New Jersey, and eventually to
Little Saigon in Orange County, California. This was a well-organized and carefully
devised process for turning Vietnamese refugees into American citizens. At each stage
Reyes considers, among other matters, the incidence and significance of music
making among the migrants. The ethnography is complicated and some of the
musical practices described were shaped by factors specific to the Vietnamese case.
Music in South Vietnam was strongly Westernized long before the fall of Saigon in
1975 and Vietnamese in exile regarded a wide range of musics as Vietnamese,
including dance forms such as the tango, as well as traditional genres. More
Westernized music was performed in public spaces, when the Vietnamese in exile
were displaying the Westernized aspects of their culture to non-Vietnamese, while
more traditional genres were kept more for private performance within the
community in exile.
Music is bound up with identity and memory in a special way, for music is not
only a ready means for the identification of different ethnic or social groups, it has
potent emotional connotations and can be used to assert and negotiate identity in a
particularly powerful manner (Baily 1994, 48). The argument which links music and
identity is often put forward to explain why immigrant groups in large multi-cultural
cities such as New York often cling tenaciously to their so-called traditional musics
/ they are maintaining group identity in a multi-ethnic society, as Allen and Groce
(1988, 4) put it in their introduction to a volume on Folk and Traditional Music in
New York State. The role of music in connecting with the individuals past was
described long ago by Alan Lomax in the following terms:
the primary effect of music is to give the listener a feeling of security, for it
symbolizes the place where he was born, his earliest childhood satisfactions, his
religious experience, his pleasure in community doings, his courtship and his work
/ any or all of these personality shaping experiences. (Lomax 1959, 929)
Reyes account of the Vietnamese experience in Palawan, the camp for new arrivals,
highly traumatized by their escape (usually by boat) and desperately anxious about
the future, would seem to illustrate this role for music in refugee life, with an
emphasis on the performance of sad songs and love songs from the past. And at the
other end of the journey, in Orange County, California, there seems to have been a
216 J. Baily
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notable lack of composition of new songs, and the continual recycling of old ones in
new performance styles. As one informant put it, They never come up with anything
new because they are trying to keep the memory of home alive so they use the same
songs (ibid., 143). One might argue that this ritualized repetition can lead to
cultural stagnation.
If music and dance can be used to maintain aspects of a former cultural identity,
they can also be used to create new forms which are indicative of the issues facing the
immigrant, and which help in dealing with a new life in the place of settlement and in
the articulation of new identities. A good example is provided by the creation of
modern bhangra music in the UK, as discussed by Sabita Banerji. The bhangra
repertoire derives from Punjabi folk songs, modernized and Westernized by the
addition of elements derived from Western popular music. For young British-born
Asians, Banerji writes:
It was, above all, their own / neither imitative of the West nor pandering to the
tastes of an older generation; neither exclusively Indian, like film music, nor
exclusively Western like pop . . . . Bhangra heralded the coming of age of the new
generation and gave them a voice with which to tell their white compatriots who
they were and what they were . . . the new generation of British South Asians has
finally found its voice; a vibrant, youthful and modern voice which acknowledges
the two polarities of their cultures and reconciles them. (Banerji, 1988, 211/12)
A second set of music and migration factors concerns the audience for cultural
performances in exile, and points out a contrast between inward-directed and
outward-directed performances. Su de San Zhengs (1990) study of Chinese migrant
communities in the USA reveals both tendencies. She contrasts the voluntary
economic migrants who came in the mid-19th century to California, and the later
involuntary migrants of the 1940s and 50s, who were mainly university students,
academics and other intellectuals already in the USA, who were cut off from China by
the 1949 revolution. The economic and educational backgrounds of the two groups
were very different, as were their experiences as exiles in the USA. The early,
voluntary, migrants had suffered all sorts of discriminatory practices and had become
a very encapsulated community. Their music making was inward-directed, they
organized few public performances, their music was enjoyed among themselves. The
later, involuntary, migrants suffered little discrimination, and were eager to reach out
to the wider (anti-communist) United States society. Their musical activities were
much more outward-directed. They sought by public performances to gain a wider
and deeper understanding from the larger society, and used Chinese music to flag
their identity to others. They selected their repertory carefully, rejected the use of
Western instruments, did not play pieces that sounded too Western, not only on the
basis of their own perception of what constitutes Chinese music, but also on their
assumptions about what the American public perceived as Chinese music. Their
approach contrasts with that of the Vietnamese in exile, described earlier, who used
music to display their Western-ness to Western others.
Ethnomusicology Forum 217
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With these contrasts in mind we are now in a position to look at music in Peshawar
and Fremont.
4
Afghans in Peshawar
In 1893 the Governments of India and Afghanistan negotiated the Durrand Line,
effectively dividing the Pashtun population / many millions of people / into two,
half of them in Afghanistan, and the rest in the North West Frontier Province
(NWFP) of what was then India, and in 1947 became Pakistan.
5
The walled city of
Peshawar was an important centre of military control over the unruly and
independent Pashtun frontier tribes. Cultural links between Pashtuns in Pakistan
and Afghanistan are very close. After the communist coup detat of 1978 there was a
flood of Afghans into Pakistan, and in due course several million had gone into exile.
Most of them were relocated under canvas in large refugee camps under the control of
the various Mujahideen parties fighting the communists. Several of the parties were
strongly fundamentalist, such as Hekmatyars Hezb-i Islami , and a strong ethos of
fundamentalism pervaded Peshawar. There was limited protection of freedom of
speech, and critics of the Mujahideen were liable to be assassinated, like the
outstanding Afghan academic Professor Majrooh, who was gunned down in his own
house in Peshawar in 1987.
Pakistan was not only geographically next door to Afghanistan, it was culturally
close in terms of language, religion, dress codes (especially concerning the veiling of
women) and material culture. There were also links of kinship between Afghan and
Pakistani Pashtuns. Some Afghan refugees, especially those whose first language was
Pashto, may have felt at home in Peshawar, but they faced other kinds of problem
in addition to the traumas of escape and the loss of their homes and possessions, not
to speak of the death of family members. Dari speakers felt less welcome, for their
language had no official place in Pakistan. The residential status of many Afghan
citizens was precarious, and they were subject to abuse and harassment by the
Pakistani authorities. The pressure on them later to return to Afghanistan shows that
there was never an undertaking to offer permanent settlement, their residence was to
be temporary. Nevertheless, the readiness with which Pakistan agreed to accept this
unprecedented influx of refugees must be commended.
To middle-class educated people from Kabul, Peshawar must have felt distinctly
provincial. Kabul was a capital city, and relatively cosmopolitan. Many women felt
free to appear in public unveiled or with just a headscarf. Peshawar was distinctly old
fashioned in these matters, and few women appeared in public unveiled. And in the
field of music there were big differences. Live music in NWFP was provided almost
exclusively by hereditary professional musicians from a low-ranking ethnic group
called dom. While dom musicians spoke Pashto as their first language they were not
considered to be part of the elaborate Pashtun tribal system. They were not Pashtuns
but clients of Pashtuns. The pattern of amateur musicians becoming professional,
which was common in Kabul (as discussed above), was not replicated in NWFP, and
218 J. Baily
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for the son of a former prime minister to became a professional singer, like Ahmad
Zahir, was a very unlikely outcome in Peshawar.
Music in Peshawar
In 1985 I spent three months in Peshawar, researching and shooting the film Amir: An
Afghan refugee musicians life in Peshawar, Pakistan (Baily 1985). As I had anticipated,
there were a number of musicians among the refugee population. Music was not
permitted by the fundamentalist parties in the refugee camps under their control,
where many people were mourning the loss of family members. Musicians who
wanted to follow their occupation had to keep their work secret or live outside the
camp environment. Most of the Afghan musicians in exile at that time were Pashto
speakers from south-eastern Afghanistan, especially from the city of Laghman, which
is halfway between Kabul and Peshawar. These musicians had moved in on the
Peshawar music scene, and had acquired business premises in two areas of Peshawar
where Pakistani musicians were based, Dubgari Road and Qesakhani Bazaar. Here
they encountered the deira system for organizing the music business. Each band
occupied a room (deira) which served as their office, where prospective patrons
would come to visit, to listen to different groups, talk to musicians and negotiate
prices, hiring musicians for their wedding parties or other musical events. Musicians
might on occasion sleep in their deira after returning from a late engagement, but
they did not live there. Afghan musicians took over many of these rooms, which were
usually upstairs, above small open-fronted shops which had no connection with the
music business.
I worked particularly with the band of the Pashto singer Shah Wali Khan, the most
successful of the Afghan singers in exile, who had become a star of local radio and
television. He was from Laghman but came to Pakistan from Kabul, where he had a
connection with the radio and television station. Musicians in Afghanistan were well
looked after during the communist era, music being seen as a sign of the modern
secular society the communists sought to establish. Shah Wali left Kabul after
disagreements about singing political songs in support of the regime.
The Afghan musicians in Peshawar performed mainly Pashtun music; their songs
were in Pashto, accompanied by harmonium, tabla drums, rubab and sometimes
other instruments. It was a style characterized by the use of fast instrumental sections
and dramatic rhythmic cadences, and was very popular in NWFP at the time. In part
their Pakistani patrons may have been expressing political solidarity when they hired
such bands for their wedding parties, but the Afghans also had some stylistic
advantages over the Pakistanis. The dance music of the Logar Valley in Afghanistan
enjoyed a vogue of popularity, and Shah Wali Khan himself was said to sing with a
rather more classical style. The songs they were required to perform for their
Pakistani patrons were mainly romantic songs suitable for wedding celebrations,
rather than political songs that commented on the war or political events in
Afghanistan. Political songs certainly existed but were recorded on cassette, often with
Ethnomusicology Forum 219
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the sounds of gunfire mixed in, or imitated on the tabla drums. Shah Walis band
travelled widely in Pakistan, playing engagements in cities such as Islamabad, Lahore
and Karachi. They were under religious pressure to give up their tainted profession
(see Baily 2001, 29 for an example of mullahs interfering with music at a wedding
party) but held on to their profession and in some cases at least made quite a good
living.
In 1992 I made another visit to Peshawar. By this time the jihad was ostensibly
over, the Soviet forces had withdrawn and the last communist government had fallen,
with its ex-president, Dr Najibullah, given asylum in a UN compound. A fragmented
coalition of Mujahideen parties was now in power in Kabul, and fighting among
themselves for control of the city. Up to this time Kabul had survived the war more or
less intact, but large areas of the city were reduced to rubble in the internecine
fighting. In particular, the Kucheh Kharabat, the musicians quarter, was repeatedly
hit by rockets. Many musicians in Kabul moved to other parts of the city, such as
Khair Khana, and a number went to Pakistan, to Peshawar and Quetta. I met a
number of them in 1992. They did not fit into the music scene in NWFP quite as well
as the previous wave of exiled musicians. They were not Pashto speakers, and they
were more orientated to the art music end of the business, with the singing of ghazal s
in Dari.
In early 2000 I visited Peshawar once more. There had been dramatic political
developments in Afghanistan. The Taliban were now in control of most of the
country, and musical instruments and almost all forms of music associated with
instruments were banned.
6
When the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996 most of the
musicians from the Kucheh Kharabat who had remained in the capital were forced,
for economic and political reasons, to leave. They could no longer make a living from
music and were in danger of severe punishment (such as being flogged with a whip
improvised from a heavy duty electric cable) if exposed as former musicians. Many of
them moved to Peshawar and set up new business premises in Khalil House, a
modern apartment block on University Road, Peshawar. Between 30 and 40 bands
were located in this one building. As in the other music business areas of Peshawar
(Dubgari Road and Qesakhani Bazaar), the musicians did not live in Khalil House
but each apartment, essentially a single large room, became the office of a group of
musicians. Some offices were modern in style, with Western sofas and arm chairs, and
telephones. Others were more traditional, with people sitting on carpets. Here their
patrons would come to hire musicians for their wedding parties or other musical
events. On the outside of Khalil House, facing the main road, were large billboards
advertising some of the famous musicians with rooms in the building.
7
Near Khalil House were shops selling everything needed for a wedding (such as
wedding dresses and accessories), videographers businesses to record the events and
banqueting rooms where large wedding receptions could be held, with separate
parties for men and women. Afghan musicians in Peshawar earned their living
playing mainly for weddings, music being a crucial part of that most normative of
human activities, getting married according to custom. Not only did good music
220 J. Baily
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confer prestige, a long concert of music was important for structuring the wedding
party as an event and certain ritual songs had to be performed. At womens wedding
parties the music would be supplied by recordings or by bands of young pre-
pubescent boys from the musician families. The music business in Peshawar was very
much in the hands of hereditary professional musicians and there was little or no
place for amateurs-turned-professional in Pakistan. The sazandeh asserted their old
rights to the music business.
Khalil House, as a sort of artists colony, was a hotbed of musical activity. There
was a lot of teaching and practice going on, and informal music sessions where young
musicians competed in turn to show off their virtuosity and technical skills were
common. Some of the musicians in Khalil House ran private music schools in their
music offices. Overall, the instrumentarium did not change much. Harmonium,
rubab and tabla remained the principal instruments, used to accompany singing. The
hereditary musicians were expert in the performance of Afghan art music, vocal and
instrumental, and they were also conversant with North Indian music theory and
terminology, the sargam system of note names / Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa / and
the mnemonics used by tabla players / Na, Ta, Ge, Dha, Dhin, Kat , Tirikiti ,
DhereDhere and so forth. Such musicians also played popular music and dance music
when they went to play at wedding parties. Spending so much time together in Khalil
House enabled the musicians from Kabul to maintain and even develop key skills.
And it allowed them to maintain something of the social organization and social
hierarchy of the Kucheh Kharabat intact.
An important aspect of life in the Kucheh Kharabat had been the connection with
Chishti Sufism, a form of mystical Islam which is especially strong in India and
Pakistan, and which uses real music in its ritual. Qawwali , as this genre is called,
became well-known on the world music concert circuit in the West, with celebrated
singers such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. In Kabul there was a Chishti khanaqah (place
for holding Sufi spiritual concerts) just off Sang Taroshi, a main street near to the
Kucheh Kharabat, where many musicians would go on Thursday evenings for all-
night music sessions in which they would take turns to perform. The musical
instruments of this khanaqah were destroyed by the Taliban. In Peshawar in 2000 an
Afghan khanaqah-in-exile had been established. It used to meet on Thursday
afternoons, and begin proceedings with a two-hour discussion of the poetry of Bedill
and other Persian language poets,
8
followed by a concert where the musicians from
Khalil House, and others, would perform. It had something of the air of a gentlemans
club; many who attended were former professional men now struggling to survive in
exile. The music was predominantly the performance of mystical poetry in the ghazal
style of Kabul, with an occasional vocal rag or instrumental piece. The instruments
were those associated with the Kharabat, harmonium, rubab and tabla, with the
addition of stone clappers (qairaq) and jingling tongs (chimta).
What I saw and heard in Peshawar in 2000 was very much the Kucheh Kharabat in
exile in Khalil House. The rooms of Afghan hereditary musicians from outside
Ethnomusicology Forum 221
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Kabul could be found in Dubgari Road and Qaisakhani. Most of the music I heard in
Khalil House was stylistically similar to how it had been in Afghanistan, singing
accompanied by harmonium, rubab and tabla, sometimes dutar, tanbur, sarinda,
delruba, dholak and clarinet. But there were also modern Afghan bands based in
Khalil House, such as the Daud Hanif group, made up of seven brothers, grandsons
of the Kabuli singer Ustad Nabi Gol. Daud Hanif sang and played keyboard, and his
brothers played electric guitar, electric bass, saxophone, congas, drum kit and drum
pads. I had never seen this sort of line-up before in Afghanistan, though it was the
logical extension of the Ahmad Zahir approach. But overall, the general picture of
Afghan music in Peshawar was one of minimal change.
Afghans in Fremont
If Peshawar was very close to Afghanistan, Fremont was the new home to one of the
most distant Afghan refugee communities. I carried out six weeks of fieldwork there
in 2000. There were about 15,000/20,000 Afghans living in the Tri-cities area of
Fremont, Union City and Hayward in the San Francisco Bay Area. I use the term
Fremont to include all three. There were very few Afghans living in the San
Francisco Bay Area before the communist takeover of Kabul in 1978. The first Afghan
exiles arrived in the early 1980s. They gravitated to California because of its reputed
warm and usually dry climate, and to Fremont because at that time rents there were
low. As is often the case with migrant communities, the first arrivals formed a
bridgehead to which others were attracted. These exiles were predominantly educated
people from the principal cities of Afghanistan, but especially Kabul, and were mostly
Pashto and/or Dari speakers.
9
Many who were granted political asylum in the USA
had formerly worked for Western diplomatic, educational, cultural or aid agencies
before the communist coup of 1978. This was a very different section of the
population from that which settled in exile in Pakistan. Tensions between Pashto and
Dari speakers evident in Afghanistan were to some extent replicated in Fremont.
Fremont was culturally distant from Afghanistan. The dominant languages were
English and Spanish. Social organization, customs and laws were very different; the
prevailing religion was Christianity, in a variety of forms. There were very important
differences in the status and role of women. Afghan women had acquired new rights
in the USA. The Afghan community in Fremont did not live in fear of forcible
repatriation; to the Californian authorities the Afghans were (presumably) just
another group of immigrants to be eventually integrated into mainstream American
society. During the time of my visit the Afghan community was in the final stages of
building the large Hazrat Abu-Bakr Mosque, with elaborate tilework created by a
master ceramicist from Afghanistan. Islam in Fremont appeared, to my limited
knowledge, moderate in character. Women were not usually veiled, and dress codes
for women were very Westernized. Dr Farid Younos, with a PhD in anthropology and
education, described himself as reformist. He had had a regular programme on
222 J. Baily
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Afghan community TV in Fremont for seven years in which he discussed Islam in the
modern world. He told me:
According to time things change, there are some rules and regulations, without
touching the Koran or the sunna of The Prophet we could make some
modifications in our interpretations according to time . . . . I have written more
than 30 articles about research on Islamic values. For example, time management.
Does anything exist about time management within Islam? Because now they are
teaching time management in the universities. I brought some verses from Koran
and then interpreted them according to time management. (interview 29 March
2000)
Fremont was a low-rise small-time Californian city. The visitor who looked for a
postcard of Fremont to send home searched in vain. It was a city without an image of
itself to project to the outside world. The downtown area, often known to local
Afghans as Little Kabul, had a concentration of Afghan businesses. The
quintessential enterprise was the Afghan Market, a store selling all the necessary
ingredients for Afghan cuisine, including halal meat, often with a bakery at the back.
Besides food, such shops sold traditional Afghan dresses for young girls, books in
Dari, Pashto and Arabic, ornaments, pictures and Afghan music CDs and videos. In
addition to Afghan markets, there were many other kinds of Afghan business, such as
travel agents, insurance agents, car sales, vehicle repair, chiropractors, computer sales,
photocopy, carpet shops and restaurants. After an initial period of economic
hardship, living on welfare, Afghans in Fremont had become relatively successful,
which perhaps indicates the level of education and commercial skills they brought
with them. In any case, Afghan entrepreneurialism was easily grafted onto American
capitalism.
Despite all these successes, Afghans had found it hard to adapt to life in the USA.
There was obviously a great deal of cultural misunderstanding. Afghans were in a
completely new social milieu, which promoted a fear of transgressing unheard-of and
unimagined US laws. They often found themselves dealing with officious social
service agencies, especially those concerned with the welfare of children. One of the
main areas of difficulty for Afghan society in the USA concerned inter-generational
differences. Age is deeply respected in Afghan culture, and being described as a white
beard or as white haired is a mark of respect. The older generation, aged 50/70,
were people who were brought up in pre-war Afghanistan and left from 1980
onwards. They often had had good jobs in Afghanistan: they were government
employees, lawyers, judges, doctors, university lecturers, school teachers, civil
servants or businessmen. They embodied the older values of Afghan culture. As
refugees they were robbed of much of their dignity. They were impoverished, lived on
welfare or had to take on poorly paid and low-status jobs. They suffered a loss of self-
esteem and self-identity, the loss of experiencing oneself as a valuable human being. A
medical survey by Lipson and Omidian (1993) revealed a community with a lot of
stress, depression and other mental problems, and a high mortality rate, the result of
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traumatic experiences in the past, separation from home, the challenge of a new
culture and possibly physical differences in altitude, climate and diet.
Contrast this with the younger generation, if not born at least brought up and
educated in the USA, exposed to an effective and well-designed state education
system. From the point of view of the younger generation the problem was one of
achieving a balance between Afghan and American identities. For obvious reasons,
young Afghans brought up in the American school system tended to lose some of
their fluency in their native languages, Dari and Pashto. One of the first stages of this
process was the loss of ability to read and write these languages in Arabic script. After
this, there was a less than perfect command of the spoken language, with a loss of
articulation of abstract ideas. This led to misunderstandings between children and
parents. They literally no longer spoke the same language. Parents in some families
were keen to combat this process and to preserve the spoken language, and children
were admonished (and even fined) for speaking English. But my observations showed
that by themselves, when the parents were out of the house, young Afghans in
Fremont spoke mainly English to each other, though it was an English with a strong
admixture of Dari words. English was the language in which they achieved a high
level of competence.
Young Afghans had become very Americanized, and this placed them in conflict
with traditional Afghan social structures. The acute form of breakdown was lack of
respect for the older generation. As already stated, age is deeply respected in Afghan
culture, but it was hard for young people to maintain this respect when they had to
mediate with officialdom on behalf of the older generation. They were the ones who
had to discover how the American system worked and how to harness its resources to
their best advantage. There were many aspects of Afghan behaviourial norms that
were discordant with US expectations. For example, in Afghan culture one should
lower the gaze before a senior and avoid direct eye contact. But in the US eye contact
is expected. In the US, directness and bluntness are virtues, but in Afghan culture not
so at all, people are very polite and diplomatic in face-to-face situations and, in other
situations, prone to back biting absent others.
Music in Fremont
What kind of music scene might we expect in such a dynamic and complicated
setting? One very significant difference from Peshawar was that in the USA music was
generally held in high regard. Music was an important part of the school curriculum,
and conservatories, private schools of music and university departments of music
abounded. Furthermore, California was an important centre for cultural innovation,
especially in the field of American popular music. A second important difference
concerned the migration of those with musical ability. While a few ustads from the
Kucheh Kharabat had visited the USA to give concerts, none had settled permanently
in the Bay Area at that time. The Afghan musicians who sought exile in the USAwere
mostly from an educated middle-class or even upper-class urban background, in
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contrast to the musicians in Peshawar, who were from poorly educated hereditary
musician families. These musicians (originally amateurs), most of them singers,
usually had had a strong link with the radio station in Kabul. Some had been big stars
in Afghanistan, such as Khyal (now in New York), Zaland (Los Angeles), Ferida
Mahwash (Bay Area), Shah Wali Wali (New York), Haidar Salim and his sister Salma
(Bay Area). In addition, there were many young Afghan musicians active in Fremont.
In contrast to Peshawar, in Fremont the music business was in the hands of the
shauqi s, the amateurs.
The Afghan community of Fremont had largely lost contact with Kabuls classically
trained musicians, who performed genres such as ghazal . There were opportunities
for studying Indian music in the Bay Area, where some of Indias greatest musicians,
such as Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar, had set up private music schools for the
teaching of Hindustani music. Some young Afghans studied Indian music in this way.
The Kabuli tabla player Ustad Asif, in exile in London, visited Fremont twice for
several months at a time, when he set up a small private music school and taught
tabla and other instruments to young Afghan boys. His first visit was sponsored by
International Immigrant Services, whose Afghan Director believed that great
musicians are dying every day, and if new ones are not trained Afghan music will
disappear. But if only a few learn how to do it now, they can pass it on to others
(Baily 1999, 12). On Ustad Asif s second visit / in 2000 / I helped him with setting
up another music school.
In recent years there had developed the practice of bringing celebrated refugee
musicians over from Pakistan to make protracted concert tours in the US. These were
usually hereditary professional musicians from the Kucheh Kharabat, such as Amir
Mohammad, Rahim Bakhsh and Haji Hamahang, often getting on in years. These
concerts, organized by Afghan businessmen, took place in function rooms like those
of the Radisson Hotel in Fremont, or sometimes in Afghan restaurants. They were
mainly patronized by the older generation of Afghan exiles, who wanted to hear the
traditional music of Kabul. They were old-fashioned in their musical tastes, enjoying
the music they were familiar with when they were young. For them it was apparent
that older music could have something of a therapeutic role.
The positive benefits of such concerts for the local community of Fremont were
recognized by Afghan community leader Sher Ahmad, Director of International
Immigrant Services. He saw music as an integrating force, bringing members of the
community together, serving to maintain Afghan culture and identity. As he told me:
Music brings unity to the people, old and young together, and helps us not to lose
our identity. We Afghans have some differences, but the concerts are the only times
when we forget about everything, all people from different parts, different sects,
different parts, we come and buy our tickets and go to the concerts. (Baily 1999, 12)
But, in 2000, I saw a good instance where quite the opposite occurred. A well-known
husband and wife vocal duo from Afghanistan (they shall be nameless) were brought
to Fremont for a concert at the Holiday House banquet hall (tickets $25 per person),
Ethnomusicology Forum 225
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an event that stirred up some of the rivalries and historic ethnic schisms that many
Bay Area Afghans hoped to leave behind, as a local paper put it. One reason was that
these singers had remained in Kabul during the communist era and were closely
identified with the communist government of the time. A further source of division
arose from the fact that they were essentially performers of Pashtun music. This
appealed particularly to the Pashto speakers in Fremont. The concert was attended by
an enthusiastic Pashto-speaking audience, while Dari speakers boycotted it. In this
case the attempt to bring the community together was thwarted because of the
dichotomy between Pashtuns and Tajiks.
The New Afghan Music
In 2000 distinctive traditional Afghan instruments like rubab, dutar and tanbur were
hard to find in the USA, though two Indian instruments very commonly used in
Afghanistan, the harmonium and tabla, were readily available from certain Indian
music shops in the Bay Area. The younger generation of Afghans, brought up and
educated in the US, and much influenced by American culture, had adopted the
electronic keyboard as a modernized alternative to the harmonium. The keyboard
brought with it some important musical ideas from Western music, literally wired
into its electronic circuitry and the software sold with it.
While a number of young Afghan musicians contributed to this development, such
as Khaled Omar, Khalil Ragheb, Rahim Jahani Sulaiman Hamsada and Abdullah
Qassemi, a key player in the creation of the new Afghan music was Qader Eshpari,
who told me: Theres been a revolution in our music. In 2000 he had just opened a
Figure 1 Singer and Keyboardist Davud Ramish Plays an Engagement Party in Fremont.
226 J. Baily
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music store, where he sold mostly Western instruments like electric guitars, guitar
amplifiers, PA systems, keyboards and other electronic equipment. At the back of the
shop he had a small recording studio, and behind the shop counter he had a mixing
desk and computer which allowed him to carry out much of the work necessary in
producing his own and other artists new CDs when business in the store was slack.
Qader Eshpari told me (in English) that in 1986:
I came up with this keyboard made by Yamaha. The keyboard was capable of
programming your own rhythm, your own bass line and chords. You could do a
show with one keyboard, a one-man-band thing. I programmed that keyboard
rhythm section in Afghani, like 7/8, 3/4, 4/4, Mogholi, Dadra, Kerawa. I
programmed all those rhythms . . . . From there I added the bass line that goes
with the rhythm and also the chords that go with the rhythm. That created the
whole arrangement. You could perform at a big wedding, a big concert, just you,
you didnt need a drummer, a bass player, anything. That was my first step.
Then Panasonic came up with a new keyboard, the Technics 1000, it was a better
keyboard with better programming capabilities. I had more memory to store my
rhythms . . . . And also on the right hand end of the Technics was a section where I
could programme my own sounds. I could have made rubab, not exactly rubab but
something very similar, and I could make my own sound from scratch, adding
different waveforms together, adding filters, I could make my own sounds.
Eshpari kept up with technical developments and new models, moving to the
Technics 2000, then to the Technics 5000. Recently I switched from Technics to Korg
because the sounds are a little more professional, you can do more with it. In his
studio behind the counter of his shop he had a computer and various modules to
generate the sounds of different instruments, such as sitar, tabla, organ, bass, brass
section, string section and a host of other effects. He played me bits of a new song he
was working on. He had the lyrics, composed specially for him, posted on the wall
above the keyboard, and composed the various parts around the lyrics. When I asked
him what was Afghan about the music he created, he said:
I try to keep the originality, a touch, of Afghan music. I dont want to lose that
originality, the flavour of our music, but . . . Im using different tools, different
instruments, electronic instruments to produce the sounds of instruments we dont
have.
[As well as composing new songs] I try to find sometimes older songs, good ones
that our people has good memory from those songs and I try to re-do the whole
song, with new instruments and new way of playing the instrument. I try to make it
more modern.
When I came up with this new idea of electronic music getting involved in our
culture, now I have a lot of followers that they do follow in my footsteps and they
try to sound like me, play the kind of music that I play, or even use the same style
that I have today. And there are a lot of Afghanis out there that have exactly the
same [model of] instrument that I have. For example, Roland makes this unit that
creates the sound of sitar. There are probably a hundred more companies that make
an [equivalent] sound module but they prefer to have one just like mine.
Ethnomusicology Forum 227
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He seems to have been generous in helping other musicians, giving out copies of the
programmes he created for the various Afghan rhythms. Our music compared with
[that of] other countries, we are a little behind in that way . . . I want to help. He
gives advice to customers who want to know how he achieves his sounds, and he can
sell them the necessary modules.
From Eshparis account it seems clear that utilizing the possibilities of the new
technology was an exciting and creative activity. In the new format the central figure
remained the solo singer, now playing keyboard rather than harmonium. Rhythmic
accompaniment was provided by the drum machine built into the keyboard. Very
often in live performance a tabla player would be added, which potentially gave more
rhythmic interest and a symbolic contact with the music of the past, of Kabul. The
musical style had also undergone some degree of Westernization, with the
introduction of simple harmonic principles borrowed from Western music. For
Qader Eshpari, the harmonization of Afghan music came from the chord generator
built into the keyboard he used. But other young Afghan musicians came to
understand something about chords and harmony by taking piano lessons, or
showing Afghan songs to the music teacher at school to get help. They discovered that
three or four chords are usually enough for the average Afghan song.
Perhaps connected with the diminished command of their native languages, the
songs favoured by these new Afghan musicians and their young audiences had fairly
simple texts. Gone was the Sufi ghazal with its ambiguous and inexplicable poetry.
They were either old folk or popular songs or newly composed songs, of which there
were many. Eshpari said of the song on which he was currently working: This is a
Figure 2 Tabla Player Ustad Asif Mahmoud Plays at a Private Party in Fremont.
228 J. Baily
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love song, about this girl, shes pretty, when she walks [down the street] she attracts
everybodys attention. Another change that I detected was to do with rhythmic
structure and tempo. Traditional Afghan music uses rhythm in a rather special way.
There is a tendency towards cyclical increases in tempo in the course of a piece of
music and a heavy emphasis on the use of rhythmic cadences, followed by short
breaks. These are features of Pashtun regional music, the musical style which
underlies much of traditional Afghan music in general. While it would have been
possible to capture these changes in tempo with the electronic keyboard, the young
Afghan musicians did not seem to do this. The new music they played was very much
dance music, with simple repetitive lyrics performed at a fast and steady tempo. It
was the logical extension of initiatives that went back to the 1960s from modern
Afghan singers like Ahmad Zahir, who used Western instruments such as electric
organ, trumpet, bass guitar and drum kit.
The main venue for live music making was the wedding party. Weddings were
expensive affairs, costing $27/30 per guest. A good wedding party, for about 500
guests, cost $20,000/$30,000. It was a modernized version of the Kabuli weddings of
the past, held in a luxurious, usually Afghan-owned, function room, with women and
men mixed together in a single space, everyone smartly dressed in Western clothing.
Live music was sometimes provided by a one-man band, possibly with the addition of
a tabla player. What was so interesting about such events was the overwhelming
emphasis on dance music and dancing. The Afghans in the USA seemed to have
discovered the joys of the social dance, performed in a very free style. This mixed
dancing, perfectly respectable by Western standards, was quite remarkable from an
Afghan viewpoint.
Another very important part of the Afghan music scene in Fremont was the CD
business. They were sold mainly in the Afghan markets described earlier. Most of the
small recording businesses that produced these CDs were based in Alexandria,
Virginia, another centre of Afghan settlement in the USA. The boom in the CD
business may have been stimulated by the suppression of music in Afghanistan by the
Taliban, a compensation for the lack of new recordings from back home. The CDs
released in the USA fell broadly into two categories. First, archive recordings of
Afghanistans famous artists from the past, such as Ustad Sarahang and Ahmad Zahir,
representing two poles of a continuum between art and popular music. Some very
interesting private recordings have come to light through being published as
commercial CDs. Second, there were new recordings of current Afghan musicians,
singers in the main, active in the USA. These CDs were made for an Afghan audience
and were not to be found in world music outlets. This is the same situation as
observed by Reyes for Vietnamese cassettes in Orange County (Reyes 1999, 153/9).
Conclusions
What conclusions can we draw from these data? What are the significant differences
between Peshawar and Fremont and to what extent can they be understood in terms
Ethnomusicology Forum 229
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of the factors mentioned at the beginning of this paper: geographical distance
between countries of origin and settlement; cultural similarity in terms of language,
religion and other attributes; prospects for the future in terms of security,
employment and eventual integration in the host society?
Peshawar and Fremont reveal two contrasting roles for music and identity in the
life of the Afghan exile as it was in the year 2000. Peshawar, spatially and culturally
close to Afghanistan, afforded a temporary safe haven for a refugee population that
would in all likelihood return to Afghanistan. The performance of music here seems
to have been about normalization, reassurance, ticking over, keeping things going
through difficult times in anticipation of going home. It reminded people of their
cultural heritage and gave them a feeling of being connected to a secure past. The
musicians of Khalil House were self-consciously keeping their cultural identity alive
in the place of exile. Their performances were inward-directed, both for themselves
and for their Afghan patrons. Music in this situation had a quasi-therapeutic role.
One might describe this as the classic role for culture in exile.
In Fremont, for various reasons, Afghans realized that they were not going back to
live in Afghanistan, and had got to make the most of the new opportunities they had
in America. For older Afghans in Fremont, those who actually made the long journey
from Kabul in Afghanistan to Little Kabul in California, performing culture had the
same quasi-therapeutic benefits I conclude it had in Peshawar, providing a link with
the past. Again, performance was inward-directed, within the Afghan community.
But music also provided one means through which to create a new identity as
permanent citizens. Musical performances in Fremont addressed the future, using
newly available technical resources in an innovative manner to build a new Afghan-
American popular music which helped to create a new Afghan-American identity.
Afghans in Fremont lived in a cultural milieu which placed a high value on music,
and they had become free from the hereditary professional musicians who had
controlled the music business in the past and who were custodians of musical
traditions they maintained could only be learned sineh be sineh (chest to chest),
through direct one-to-one teaching. As mentioned in the brief review of the literature
on music and migration near the beginning of this paper, Reyes argued that the
difficulties of refugee life impede the usual channels through which traditions pass
from one generation to the next (1986, 91). One could argue that in Fremont young
Afghan musicians were liberated from the strictures of the past. The economic
advantages they enjoyed allowed them to invest in expensive electronic equipment
and they took full advantage of the creative opportunities this provided.
There is another factor here, which I call the Mo Effect, from the anecdote
quoted at the start of this paper, and it helps explain the success of the new Afghan
music. Afghan children needed to accommodate to others in the California school
system. Young Afghans attending high school wanted to have a music that was
congruent with modern American popular music, a music they could share with the
non-Afghan young people with whom they went to school. When the music teacher
asked the students to bring some music to class that represented their various
230 J. Baily
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communities, young Afghans did not want something that sounded too strange. They
wanted something that resonated with the musical culture of their classmates, a
music one could share with ones peers without embarrassment. In that sense cultural
performances of the new music, and here I refer to listening to CDs or watching
videos and DVDs, were not inward-directed, but were used by the younger
generation to signify their American identity to non-Afghan others. This is not
unlike Banerjis interpretation of the situation with bhangra in the UK.
The analysis so far ignores the fact that Peshawar also looked to the future in its
music, as in performances by groups like the Daud Hanif band. I explain this in the
following way. Westernized popular music already existed in Kabul in the 1970s,
though its dissemination was very limited. In Peshawar the traditional musicians still
dominated the scene, but younger musicians from the hereditary musician families of
the Kucheh Kharabat were also involved with more modern forms of expression,
continuing a trend that began with Ahmad Zahir in the 1970s, and also aware of new
trends in Afghan music in North America and Europe. Today, in the post-Taliban
period, the new Afghan music from the USA, Westernized and modernized, seems to
be feeding back into Afghanistan. A good example is depicted in my film A Kabul
Music Diary, shot in Kabul in October 2002, where a student band plays in Kabul
University, with singer accompanied by keyboard, electric guitar, electric bass and
drum kit, the instruments provided by the Goethe Institute (Baily 2003). This new
music is much in demand in Kabul today, especially for wedding parties, with their
strong emphasis on dancing. The community in exile in the West has become a
dynamic centre for cultural innovation and change. And this may turn out to be a
common feature of other migrant communities, when, as Robin Cohen has put it,
the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in host countries with a
tolerance for pluralism exists (1997, 26).
New cultural performances created and constructed in exile often end up as models
shaping cultural practices at home.
Notes
[1] Quoted with minor changes from an interview with the social scientist Dr Farid Younos,
Fremont, 29 March 2000.
[2] Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont (1988) offer some important comments on the self-
identity of Afghans in Pakistan. They were refugees as dened by the Convention of the
United Nations of 1951, with all the negative connotations of that word: powerless,
traumatized, pathetic. They were also guests , being offered protective hospitality by their
kinsmen across the border according to the pashtunwali code of honour as practised by
Pashtuns. And, third and most importantly, they were mohajer, following the example of
Prophet Mohammads ight from Mecca to Medina, taking voluntary exile to avoid religious
persecution.
[3] Some of the other language groups living in Afghanistan are Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kazakhs,
Aimaq, Pashai and Nuristanis.
[4] The research described in this paper is part of a long-term project on music in the Afghan
transnational community. I visited both Peshawar and Fremont in early 2000. The eldwork
Ethnomusicology Forum 231
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in Fremont was supported by a grant from the British Academy, for which I am most
grateful. The two pieces of eldwork are not fully comparable. In Peshawar (where I had
already worked in 1985 and 1992) I focused on the hereditary musician community from
Kabul, in Fremont I looked more at the community as a whole. I also spent more time in
Fremont, where much of my research was conducted in English. I thank all those musicians
and others in Peshawar and Fremont who helped me with my research, especially Tariq
Mehdavi and his family, Dr Farid Younos and Ustad Asif Mahmoud.
[5] Due to small differences in dialect the language is called Pashto in Afghanistan and Pakhto in
Pakistan; likewise, the people are Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakhtuns in Pakistan.
[6] The one instrument that seems not to have been banned completely was the frame drum
(daireh), an instrument said to have been sanctioned by Prophet Mohammad. In the past it
was used mainly by women for their domestic music making. But the fact that this
instrument may have been permitted certainly did not mean that women were free to sing
and play, for the Taliban were against all forms of merriment.
[7] This system of rooms as business premises for bands of musicians was typical of Peshawar.
Kucheh Kharabat was not like this, it was both a musicians residential area and a place where
patrons would go to hire bands.
[8] The poet Bedill lived in India and wrote in Persian. His mystical poetry was much admired in
Kabul, and the classical singer Ustad Sarahang was regarded as an authority on his work. In
Iran, on the other hand, his poetry is little known.
[9] A lot of educated people from provincial cities had moved to Kabul in the 1950s /60s, where
there were better job opportunities and a more modern life style.
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