PUBLISHED
July 05, 2026
My father was not a sentimental man. He was generous, and expressive through hospitality and wit. What he did every Sunday at Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral, Lawrence Road, was, for anyone paying attention, something worth examining. I still remember the air inside the church smelled of frankincense and myrrh incense, that warm, woody, slightly spicy incense that I have never been able to separate, not in years.
At the end of each service, the choir, mostly, would perform the same closing piece, a Punjabi Zaboor (psalm) set to keyboard, harmonium, and tabla. The congregation would begin to leave quietly, by ones and twos. My father did not move. He stood and sang. Not for anyone, not loudly, but in the absorbed, private way of someone receiving something they had been waiting for all week. He stayed through every verse, every repetition, until the last note. Then he would collect himself and leave.
I asked him once, why. He gave me a smile, one that said the answer exists but won’t be summarised and we walked out together into the heat of Mall Road. I was young. I did not yet have the vocabulary for what I had observed.
I do now. What I was watching was a man in the grip of music that had found him completely. Not music he admired. Music that had located something in him and refused to let go until it had finished. That is a specific and rare experience. Most of us spend our lives occasionally touching the edge of it. My father, it turned out, had a song that reliably took him there. Every week.
The song was Punjabi Zaboor 72, and the tradition it belongs to is one of the strangest, most layered, most underexamined cultural stories Pakistan has.
Punjabi Zaboor is a collection of 150 ancient Biblical books of psalm poems, originally Hebrew, translated into Punjabi verse and set entirely to indigenous raags. The project was completed in 1908. It has been in continuous use since then, across Punjab, Pakistan, and wherever Punjabi communities have settled globally. The Psalter is built almost entirely on Hindustani classical music. The Western missionaries had to abandon their own musical framework and rebuild from the local ground up.
That last fact deserves more attention than it gets. Everywhere Christianity spread through colonialism, it carried its music with it. Congregations sang English hymns to English tunes in local languages. The music architecture of Western worship, its harmonies, its metres, its cadences, circled the globe with the missionaries. Punjab is one of the documented exceptions. It is a place where the Western musical package failed completely, and was replaced root and branch with something indigenous.
The reason it failed is not a simple story about cultural resistance. Punjab was not a musical blank slate awaiting instruction. It was a civilisation with one of the most developed devotional music traditions on earth. Sufi poetry had been set to raag for centuries at shrines across the region. Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, the most significant literary and musical text ever produced in Punjab, is organised entirely by raag; its 1,430 pages structured around 31 modal frameworks. Bhajan, kirtan, qawwali– all raag-based, all carrying centuries of accumulated emotional and aesthetic intelligence. A Presbyterian hymn in 4/4 time, arriving in that landscape, sounded thin. Just foreign. The missionaries, to their credit, eventually registered this and changed course.
What happened next is the part of this story that should be far better known. In 1890, the United Presbyterian Mission in Sialkot placed a newspaper advertisement for a Punjabi poet with deep knowledge of indigenous music. The person they found was Imam-ud-Din Shahbaz, a Muslim Shia convert who signed his verse with the Sufi pen name Shahbaz. He translated all 150 poems into Punjabi verse, working from Hebrew originals and checking against English, Persian, and Urdu renderings. The musical work was done by Radha Kishan, a professional Hindu classical singer, who read each poem with Shahbaz until he felt its rhythm, then searched the Hindustani raag system for the modal framework that matched the text’s emotional register. Three sisters, daughters of a missionary named Samuel Martin, sat with Kishan for hours, hearing melodic phrases repeated until they could transcribe them into Western notation for print. When Shahbaz lost his sight in his final years, a man named Babu Sadiq read every text aloud to him and wrote down what the blind poet dictated.
And then there were the mirasis. Nomadic folk musicians of Punjab, occupying the lowest rungs of social respectability, holding the broadest knowledge of regional melodic tradition. Their tunes entered the collection without their names. They went in anyway, because the project could not have been what it was without them.
A Muslim poet. A Hindu musician. Three women transcribers. A blind man and his scribe. Unnamed folk artists. Published in 1908 as Punjabi Zabur: Desi Raagn Vich [Punjabi Poems in Local Melodies]. This is the authorship of one of the most enduring musical traditions Punjab has produced. Not a single dominant figure. Not a single community. A collaboration born from necessity, achieving something that no more organised or more exclusive effort had managed.
The missionary James Stewart wrote shortly after publication that “scarcely anything else is now sung in our village congregations.” That was 1908. The sentence remains accurate in 2026. Something in this tradition clearly works.
Let me make a case for the raag, because I think this is where the cultural analysis of Punjabi Zaboor has been most consistently underdeveloped and where the most interesting argument lives.
A raag is not a melody. A Western tune delivers notes in a sequence. A raag delivers a world: a time of day, a season, an emotional atmosphere, a specific quality of feeling that the Hindustani classical tradition has, over centuries, identified, named, and refined into a teachable system. Raag Bilawal is the sweetest and most compassionate raag in Indian classical theory, morning mood, deep devotion, carrying the emotional quality of arrival and settled love. Raag Pahari is the mountain raag, ascending, open, its intervallic structure literally evoking altitude and space. Raag Bheempalasi is late afternoon longing, five notes ascending, seven descending, with the emotional gravity of a day you are not ready to end.
When Radha Kishan assigned these raags to specific poems, he was not making decorative choices. He was performing a kind of emotional close reading, identifying the core feeling of each text and selecting the raag whose centuries-old personality best amplified it. The poem about lifting eyes to mountains got raag Pahari. The poem about settled devotion in the face of power got Raag Bilawal. The matching is not accidental. It is interpretive work of a high order, executed in the vocabulary of music rather than literary criticism.
What this means, practically, is that Punjabi Zaboor operates on two simultaneous registers: text and mood. The words make an argument. The raag establishes a feeling before the words begin, and sustains it after they end. For a listener who knows these raags from lifelong exposure, through film music, folk songs, devotional gatherings, ambient sound, the emotional channel is already open before the first line arrives. The music does not illustrate the text. It prepares the listener for it.
This is why these songs reach people in the way they do. Not because of the content alone, and not because of music alone, but because of the specific combination of Punjabi and a centuries-old raag system. When language and raag find each other, the result is neither easily explained nor easily forgotten.
My father could not have articulated any of this. But he knew it. He stood still every Sunday because the song had found the frequency he was on, and he was not willing to change the channel before it finished.
Because the music was built on raag, on a music tradition belonging to the whole civilisation of Punjab, not to any single community within it, it consistently crossed the lines that other things in Pakistan do not cross.
Through much of the 20th century, the most prominent performers of Punjabi Zaboor in Pakistan’s recording and live contexts were Muslim professional musicians, commissioned by communities that lacked a sufficient pool of professional artists of their own. This was documented by Dr Eric Sarwar, who spent two decades researching this tradition and found it a consistent pattern. Muslim studio musicians recorded these albums. Muslim bandleaders learned these songs because their clients requested them at weddings and gatherings noted by Dr Yousaf Sadiq. At a music festival in Karachi, Sarwar documented a vocalist performing one of these pieces alongside a mixed ensemble. The singer was introduced afterward as a hafiz-e-Quran, someone who had memorised the entire Quran in Arabic. He said, simply, that beautiful music is beautiful music.
This is not a feel-good anecdote about interfaith harmony. It is a data point about what happens when music is built from the cultural foundation rather than imposed on top of it. The raag gave the music a home in the shared musical imagination of Punjab. The Punjabi language gave it a home in the shared emotional life of the region. Neither of those homes belonged exclusively to any community. The music followed the logic of the culture it was built from, and the culture turned out to be larger than any single group’s claim on it.
Pakistan contains more of these shared inheritances than its loudest public narratives acknowledge. Punjabi Zaboor is one of them. It has been sitting here for 130 years, doing what shared culture does, crossing lines, finding listeners, persisting, largely without anyone noticing at the national level.
More than 300 of the original 405 songs in the 1908 collection have been lost from living memory. The musicologist, Dr Sarwar discovered this while studying in Gujranwala in the late 1990s and spent the following two decades attempting recovery, founding a school of music, organising national festivals, digitising the original publication. Ernest Mall, a Lahori Gospel musician, recorded these songs in the early 1990s and distributed the cassettes across Pakistan and India, an act of cultural transmission funded apparently by conviction alone.
Subhash Gill, a composer based in the UK, recomposed several songs in the 2000s using different raags, demonstrating that the tradition was not a fixed archive but a living compositional system capable of generating new interpretations from the same original logic. He was not betraying the tradition by choosing a different raags. He was working within it.
The Leo Twins, Haroon and Sharoon Leo, born in Rawalpindi in 1993, learned raags through this music in their youth, and built a career from that foundation. They now perform with Atif Aslam and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. The raag literacy they bring to the mainstream of Pakistani popular music came directly from Punjabi Zaboor in their church choir.
On YouTube, the tradition now lives alongside everything else, traditional arrangements, contemporary recompositions, instrumental meditations. Punjabis around the world open their phones and hear arrangements their grandparents heard in Punjab. Second-generation listeners who barely speak the language learn these songs by ear, exactly as illiterate village communities learned them in 1910. The oral transmission model did not become obsolete. It found a new infrastructure and kept working.
Music does something to people who love it that nothing else reliably does. It arrives in the body before the mind has prepared a response. It locates a frequency the person is already on, something they carry around with them, unnamed, all week and sounds it clearly, so they finally know what it is. That is why people cry at songs they have heard a hundred times. That is why my father stood still while everyone else filed out. The song was not in the background. It was the most precise thing in the room.
What I find significant, as an observer who grew up inside this tradition and has spent years studying it from the outside, is that this precision was not accidental. The people who built Punjabi Zaboor in 1908, the Muslim poet, the Hindu musician, the women transcribers, the nameless folk artists worked with an understanding of how music and language interact in the Punjabi body that no imported system could replicate. They chose raags the way a great writer chooses words: not for decoration, but for precision. They understood that Punjabi, spoken to someone who thinks in Punjabi, operates below the level of decision. They knew that a raag chosen well does not set a mood, it opens a door.
Three hundred songs from that original collection are gone. The ones that remain are still opening doors. My father is gone too, but the song he waited for every Sunday is still sung, in churches and on phones, in Lahore and in living rooms on the other side of the world. Someone, somewhere, is standing still while everyone else leaves.
I think that is worth more than a footnote in Pakistani cultural history. I think it is worth knowing what it is, who built it, and why it still works. Not as heritage. Not as anyone’s exclusive inheritance. As music, as craft. As one of the more remarkable things Punjab has quietly produced and not yet fully reckoned with.
The writer is a music enthusiast and cultural critic. He writes about the intersection of music, society, and the human condition. He can be reached at brian.bassanio@gmail.com
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer