Rather, I want to consider how the sound of their music pushes me to rethink my own fixation with queerness, elsewhere, South Asianness and communities of sound, what Gayatri Gopinath calls “queer audiotopias”. Rather, I want to push further and work through the many uneven translations of what Nadia Ellis calls “territories of the soul” to hear, listen and attend to sexuality differently. I choose to study Parveen and Pathak not as a way to “queer” Islam or “queer” South Asia. While both Parveen and Pathak can be said to represent traditions within Sufi and Hindi music, respectively, and each notoriously dresses in androgynous/masculine-presenting ways, I do not want to read Parveen and Pathak as simply national or religious musicians or to superimpose the mostly Western identity of “queer” or “butch” onto them, as that would be a disservice to us and disrespectful to them. To me, they offer us a way to undo the (ontological) dualities of mind and body, spirit and desire. Their visual and aural aesthetic representations challenge how we come to construct, hear and resist sexuality and the sacred in South Asia.
Parveen and Pathak are recognised across South Asia and its diasporas with different degrees of potency: pop music, cultural memory, nostalgic nodes of being, cathartic release, Islamic spirituality, Hindu dance, divine submission, and as soundtracks for the quotidian. By centering Abida Parveen and Falguni Pathak, two iconic South Asian musicians, I want to open up a conversation about sound, sexuality, desire, and the divine feminine. Building on theories in Sound Studies by critics such as Josh Kun and Jennifer Stoever, I want to attend to sacred sounds emanating from South Asian traditions to think about how sound racialises, genders, and sexualises. Sounds, in various iterations, disturb, inflict, challenge, heal, torment, arouse, invite and archive, at times all at once. Sound creates worlds in strikingly layered, different and definite ways.
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