Hadiqa Kiani
by Aliya Farrukh Shaikh
‘Main apne aap ko samjh loon thora sa. It takes a lifetime to get to know the world.’
Hadiqa Kiani is constantly searching. She has a settling presence and carries an air of softness, a calmness when she answers questions, discusses her song with the house band, and rehearses her song. Her mind, however, doesn’t sit still — it is always digging and exploring, within herself and around her, for new ideas and ways to perceive the world. “We have a lot stored in us”, she says, “We don’t explore it.” Her eyes light up when she talks about her life, what she has discovered about herself amidst the trials of her career and her personal life, and what she has yet to discover. This is her ultimate destination, she says: to dig up and discover the beautiful stones that exist inside her. She has just scratched the surface but she’s getting there, slowly and steadily.
One of the stones she’s been holding onto is her connection with the universe. “When you find a connection with the universe, you notice that you don’t stay the same from morning to night," she says. “You are constantly changing. Your feelings change, your temperament changes, your energy changes, and your threshold with life changes.” Hadiqa welcomes these changes and flows with them, they make her feel one with the universe.
Hadiqa’s music reflects her personality — it is constantly flowing and changing, evolving as she does. In 2007, she took a chance and released Rough Cut, the first English album by a Pakistani singer. Reminiscing now, she says it was not a commercial success but the process of creation made that album a success for her. “It was so fulfilling for my spirit and my soul”, she says. Hadiqa’s art is nourishment to her, one that sustains her by giving expression to her soul and so her music continues to change and grow with her.
Stepping out of the box and trying new avenues isn’t foreign to Hadiqa, who has been performing since a very young age. When she was a child, her mother enrolled her, along with her siblings, at the Pakistan Council of Arts where Hadiqa first began to take part in musical activities. As a little girl, Hadiqa represented Pakistan on different international levels. Her performances often included songs in foreign languages — she remembers singing a Bulgarian song in Russia in grade 6 and, a few years later, a Turkish song in Turkey. In her own musical career, she’s been known to sing in a range of languages from Chinese, Pushto, and French to Sindhi. Through the course of her career, Hadiqa’s given her audiences pop tunes, folk songs and, more recently, Wajd, an album featuring a more spiritual side to the artist.
A few years ago, on a road trip to Murree with her brother, who she affectionately calls Lala, Hadiqa heard the song Kun Faya Kun. She heard it once, heard it twice and before she knew it, she was in a trance. She played it repeatedly and moved onto Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwalis. “After that I couldn’t listen to anything else. It was as if Sufi music was pulling me towards it and I was pulling it towards me.” A spiritual being first, and then an artist, today Hadiqa wishes to be devoid of any labels. She will sing what speaks to her rooh (spirit) and if, at the moment, it is Sufi music, then so be it.
It may seem as if Hadiqa stumbled upon this path recently, but she has been on this journey since she was a child. Both of Hadiqa’s parents were poets, but after her father died when she was just three years old, Hadiqa’s mother would read his poetry, and her own, to her three children. The poetry, often inspired by Sufi literature, spoke of ideas far greater than their little minds could fathom, but the words stayed with them till much after. For Hadiqa, her most popular songs, Maahi Na Jaane Haal, Ranjhan Labdi Phirran, have glimpses of Sufism in them.
For Hadiqa, the khoj (search) is a lifelong pursuit – a process of digging till the surface begins to glimmer revealing glimpses of the depths below. There is more to come, she says. This path is full of jewels and she hasn’t dug deep enough — She will keep digging till she knows that she has depleted everything inside of her.