New Delhi, April 2: One of the few women to have sung at Ajmer Sharif, Naaz Warsi has been a qawaal for the last 25 years.

There’s a lot about Naaz Warsi’s art that can makes one feel small in the right way. This 42-year-old from Etawah in Uttar Pradesh, now based in Delhi, has been a qawaali exponent for over 25 years.
 
She sings exceedingly well, works hard at it and makes very little money. ‘‘Samajh nahi aata paise kamaane ke liye kya kiya jae. Ab main mini skirt pahan ke music video toh shoot kar nahee saktee! (Don’t know what I should do to make money. After all, I can’t wear a mini skirt and shoot a music video!) says the singer.

Naaz belongs to the Warsi Silsila of Deve-Shareef and began learning Hindustani classical at the age of eight under the tutelage of Prof Hilal Ahmed Khan. A few years later she began learning qawaali from Prof Nizam Raagi. She remembers her first public performance at the age of fourteen. It was for an Iranian delegation at Delhi’s Aiwan-e-Ghalib and she sang in Persian. The compere at that event introduced her as Baby Naaz, a filmi title that stuck. Soon after, she became one of the few women artists to sing at Ajmer Sharif.

But over the years she has seen the demand for qawaali dwindling. Now she doesn’t get to perform more than two or three times a month. ‘‘Today’s generation shows very little interest in qawaali. They only seem to want music to which they can dance. I believe if they were exposed to qawaali—its rhythm, pulse and beauty would enrapture them. Also qawaali often sums up life’s philosophy in a simple way. Qawaali mein josh hai, jazba hai aur falsafa bhee. (Qawaali has energy, emotion and philosophy.)

Punjabi pop’s popularity is another cause for qawaali’s decline. ‘‘People are blindly aping each other. I think Punjabi pop is great fun but our culture has other types of music as well. Its become a status symbol to have a DJ at a party. An even bigger status symbol is to have film stars dance at a wedding. Earlier it was almost customary to have qawaals.’’

Government patronage is not enough either. ‘‘The government occasionally organises events. The budget allocated for the function is decent but the agents take their cut and very little reaches us. Then as a female artist there are other social constraints. People think if you are single you are game for anything.’’

All these handicaps have not prevented Naaz from giving it all she’s got. Living in her small Noida home with her ill mother and teenaged daughter, she spends a couple of hours every day doing riyaaz. But she doesn’t want her daughter to follow in her footsteps. ‘‘I don’t want her to be crushed by the cycle of hope and rejection. Usually after a performance at a private party a lot of people ask me for my number. They promise to organise a qawaali night. They never call.’