amritpyala

Amrit Pyala

archiving Sufi and Bhakti poetry and folk music in Pakistan

Amrit Pyala is a film archive of mystic poetry and folk music in Pakistan. We archive devotional traditions of song and poetry in our land, and record and translate the songs of poet-saints like Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai and Meera Bai.

This oral tradition is abundant, endless, and inexhaustible in a country where bhajans and kalaams are sung daily at satsangs and mandirs and mazaars, at festivals and funerals, in rickshaws and qinqis, and at every urs in the country.

Amrit Pyala is a project of paying witness to these practices that hold the stories of our land.

Help us continue this work by donating to our fundraiser.

Sufi and Bhakti oral tradition is a river that cannot be caught—never fully. Our project concerns itself with “chand katre”—some drops of this surging, thrilling, & threatening river. 

We value the power of encountering, and of receiving what is encountered, as opposed to seeking a certain story. We position ourselves as foragers in the poetic landscape, receiving the poetry that comes our way, and collecting it in our carrier bags. We envision our archive as a receptacle–a cup–a pyala. 

One of the most thrilling and threatening things about Sufi and Bhakti poetry is how the metaphors of one tradition slip easily into another. This is not because of accident, but ease: the subcontinent has always been syncretic; Sufi and Bhakti traditions are intertwined, and have always sought to reject the divisions that plague our countries in the form of caste, class, and religious tensions. 

In the face of politics that seek to dispense and displace, there is a living tradition that will always unify, reject division, and honor syncretism. This living tradition of folklore, ritual, and mythology—which survives through metaphor, poetry, and song, lives beyond written texts and locked-away archives; it is embedded in daily practices—be it the raag sung from morning till sunrise at Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai’s darbar, or the Kabir bhajan that everyone knows and hums along to, at a satsang in a village in Sindh. This living tradition cannot be contained by borders, because it exists orally, and what is oral cannot be fixed into time, text, or border. It is its own landscape. 

Amrit Pyala aims to bring forth this ecosystem of cultural practices—rituals, folklore, mythology—embedded in poetry and song. For us, witnessing a land means witnessing its sacred landscape of metaphor and mythology. 

Photos from the road