Source: Karachi Literature Festival — speaker page, “Hamza Akram Qawwal & Brothers” (no date shown on the page; the speaker photo was uploaded February 2019) — https://www.karachiliteraturefestival.com/speakers/hamza-akram-qawwal-brothers/
The Karachi Literature Festival has always made room for music alongside books, and few acts fit that meeting of word and sound as naturally as Hamza Akram Qawwal & Brothers. The festival’s own speaker page introduces them as grandsons of the revered Munshi Raziuddin Qawwal, acclaimed for riveting interpretations of qawwali — and as representatives of the 26th generation of the Qawwal Bachon ka Gharana of Delhi.
That gharana is older than most institutions in South Asia. The festival notes that it was founded seven centuries ago by Saamat bin Ibrahim, the first qawwal of the subcontinent and the principal student of the mystic Amir Khusrau. To perform in that lineage is to carry a repertoire that stretches from 13th-century Persian poetry to contemporary Punjabi and Urdu verse, and the brothers do exactly that. Their performances move between classical Persian and Brij Bhasha kalaams and modern poetry without losing the thread that binds them: the devotional intensity of qawwali itself.
Hamza’s own training is part of the story. He has studied with the renowned Ustad Naseeruddin Saami as well as with his uncle, Farid Ayaz Qawwal, and he performs alongside his brothers Taimoor and Abdul. Together they have toured many countries and played many festivals, taking a tradition that began in Delhi’s Sufi courts into concert halls and literary festivals around the world.
What the festival listing captures, in a few lines, is why the group keeps being invited back to stages like this one. Qawwali is not background music. It is a form built on poetry, improvisation and call-and-response, and it asks its audience to listen the way a reader listens to a poem — closely, and more than once. A literary festival is a fitting place for it, and the brothers’ presence there underlines something the ensemble has always insisted on: the words matter as much as the sound.
For readers discovering them through the festival, this is a good place to start. The brothers are the new generation of a very old family, and their performances — in Karachi and far beyond it — are the latest chapter of a story that began with Amir Khusrau’s first qawwal.
This post is a rephrased summary of the Karachi Literature Festival speaker page for Hamza Akram Qawwal & Brothers. Read the original at the link above.
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