team

Amrit Pyala was started in 2022, by two friends, Sadia Khatri and Ahmed Hasan, while recording Shah jo raag with Bisharat Ali Lanjwani, a raagi faqir at Bhit Shah.

Sadia Khatri is a writer, translator, filmmaker, and teacher. Sadia writes about women’s fraught relationship to cities and public spaces, and particularly about her relationship to Karachi as an awaara, badtameez, loitering woman. She is one of the co-founders of Girls at Dhabas (2015-19), which organized for women’s right to pleasure and everyday leisure in the streets, similar to Why Loiter? in Mumbai and BLANK NOISE in Bangalore. 

Sadia is interested in ways that women break the codes of morality and respectability in public space, whether at a street corner or a shrine. Her early essays take place in the city and consider women’s relationship with working class men and the men in their own families. Her recent writing is about women’s relationship to God via public spaces of worship, like shrines and imambargahs. In 2024, Sadia’s essay “the width of the neck” about devotion at Bhit Shah, won Orison Book’s prize for best spiritual nonfiction writing. 

Sadia translates from from Urdu/Hindi, Sindhi, and Braj Bhasha. Her translations of Mustafa Zaidi’s Urdu ghazals have appeared in Society Girl by Saba Imtiaz and Tooba Masood. She is part of ALTA’s 2025 Emerging Translator Mentorship Program, and is working with Arshia Sattar to translate Sur Hindi Barvo into English.

She is from Karachi, and can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected]

Ahmed Hasan is a filmmaker, photographer, writer, and field recordist. He is from Sahiwal, and lives between Punjab and the Hunza Valley. In the summer, he runs Khanabadosh Baithak with his partner Baneen Mirza; a commune space in Gojal with a campsite and cafe at its heart. Khanabadosh comes from “khana” meaning home, and “badosh” meaning on the shoulder. The commune is also a “baithak” or gathering for artists, musicians, dreamers and do-ers. They host art and music residencies, writing workshops, and reading circles.

Khanabadoshi and wandering are central to Ahmed’s writing and research as well. He is writing a collection of essays and travelogues called “Darya Panth” in which he follows the path of the Sindhu (River Indus). He is writing about the community’s plight and survival, looking at the ways that communal memory holds native stories, beliefs, and wisdoms. His writing pays witness to the river’s lore and mythology.

He has spent a lot of time in shrines and temples, following faqirs and folk musicians. It was during these travels that he landed at Bhit Shah, about 10 years ago. There he found his murshid. Listening to the raag at Bhit Shah made Ahmed start Khanabadosh Sound Archive. Among the earliest recordings, there is one of Bisharat Ali’s group singing Sur Hindi Barvo, the raag that opened his world to Bhakti poetry. 

He can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected]

Bisharat Ali Lanjwani is a raagi faqir, political scientist, and translator. He lives in Bhit Shah, Sindh, just a short walk from the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. From a young age, he found himself drawn to the sounds of kalaams echoing through the shrine's courtyard. Like many children in Bhit Shah, he would casually join the musical gatherings held throughout the day at the dargah, where he absorbed the rhythms and melodies of Bhitai's poetry, known locally as Shah jo Raag. His older brother, already an accomplished singer who took Latif’s poetry to audiences across Europe, became his first teacher and guide. It was from him that Bisharat learned to sing and perform Latif’s poetry with precision and feeling.

As a raagi faqir, he has been part of the rotating devotional duties at the shrine. Singing Shah jo Raag is not a performance in the typical sense but a spiritual offering, carried out in the company of other faqirs who gather voluntarily to honor their saint-poet. He recites kalaams accompanied by the dambooro, sustaining a musical tradition that remains central to the devotional life of Bhit Shah.

As the verses of Shah Latif have also traveled far beyond the boundaries of the shrine, Bisharat has become an important interlocutor between these worlds. His education and fluency in several key languages—including Sindhi, Urdu, Siraiki, and English—have allowed him to share this tradition with new listeners, many of whom encounter Latif’s work for the first time through his voice and explanations.

Having pursued a modern education and academic life, Bisharat has worked to bring the poetry and worldview of the Bhit Shah faqiri tradition into his classroom. Bisharat is an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Sindh, Jamshoro. He holds a PhD in political science, and researches labour rights, the rights of indigenous people, peasants’ rights, and folk music. He has written about this Sufi song tradition with an insider's gaze and now continues to explore the links between Islamic spiritual imagery and yogic metaphors that appear in Sindhi poetry.

Bisharat spearheads several translation projects on Bhittai. He has translated over a hundred poems for the official Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai channel on YouTube. At Amrit Pyala, he oversees all of the Sindhi translations, and advises the young translators on the team. Bisharat also has a literary translation practice, and is currently translating the first Sindhi Sufi poet we know of, Qazi Qadan.

Bisharat remains deeply involved in advancing the raag within and outside of Bhit Shah. In the last year, he has hosted satsangs in Karachi, Lahore, and Bhit Shah. He is an advocate for the syncretic traditions of the region, where seekers and visitors come from many different faiths, drawn by the openness and piercing quality of Latif’s kalaams.

He has also started teaching Shah Jo Raag online, on his youtube channel. 

He can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected]

Bhagat Bhoora Lal

Hadi Khatri

Translators

Bisharat Lanjwani
Sadia Khatri

Asad Alvi
Hamraj Singh

Musab Bin Noor
Javeria Hasnain

Sabir Hussain

Zubair Siddiqui
Hadi Khatri
Kaleem Ullah Bashir

Ajab Shahar/The Kabir Project

Previous Team Members

Baneen Mirza, cinematographer
Javeria Kella, cinematographer