Tanvi Jadwani

This Foundation Project, implemented by IFA, seeks to explore the landscape of Qawwali singing in India through the artistic lives of Muslim women performers, along with their journeys from art practice to performance, and how they navigate and negotiate between desire and devotion, career and honour, visibility and containment, and selective loving of a culture and tradition. The project employs a visual ethnographic approach, combining participant observation, interviews, documentation, and archival research. Tanvi Jadwani is the Coordinator of this project.

Tanvi Jadwani is a researcher, filmmaker, and multimedia artist working at the intersection of storytelling, education, and community practice. With a background in English Literature from Shri Venkateswara College (DU) and Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, she moved away from mainstream media to explore alternative forms of engagement. She founded the Children’s Art Association to bring long-term arts education to government schools in Rajasthan, an initiative incubated at IIM Bangalore. Her short film Dil Dariya Khwab Samander was screened at several major Indian film festivals. She has also received grants from CREA and IFA to document the voices of women performers of mystic traditions. Given her experience across storytelling, community engagement, and arts education, she is best placed to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The idea for the project took root in a Songs of Resistance workshop when Fatima asked, “What about me, a Muslim woman who has been kept away from music all my life? How am I supposed to resist through song like all of you?” This project seeks to reclaim qawwali not only as the music of mystics, but also as the music of those who have always lived at the edge - surrendering, uttering, and refusing to disappear. Building on encounters with performers such as Ariba Hussain Warsi, Anjum Banno, and Naseema ji, the research asks how female Qawwali singers navigate tensions between spiritual devotion, gendered prohibitions, and public performance; how singing becomes a site for negotiating desire, honour, and social respectability; and what histories and support structures shape the possibilities and limits for women today.

The project will take shape as a visual ethnographic documentary, combining participant observation at Urs festivals, wedding performances, and other informal gatherings where women qawwals perform; interviews and conversations with Qawwalan and their families, tracing oral histories, memories of songs, and modes of teaching and learning; documentation of performances on stage and rehearsals during riyaaz; and archival research on traditions, women’s histories of Qawwali, and the gendered geographies of devotional practices of Islam.

The outcome of this project will be a short documentary film that captures the stories and performance journeys of at least two qawwalan at different stages in their careers, along with songs contributed by them. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA, along with the final reports, will include the documentary film and Sufi songs sung by the artists and contributors.

This project suitably addresses the framework of IFA’s Arts Research programme by positioning singing and sound itself as a site of knowledge production and critical inquiry. Through the voices of women singers of qawwali and the ethic of fakiri, it examines surrender not as passivity but as an embodied discipline that becomes utterance- where repetition, voice, and the letting go of ego generate meaning. Rooted in a feminist and reflective perspective, the project treats tradition as contested and performative, using sound and embodiment to challenge exclusion and reimagine cultural inheritance.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees. 

This project is part-supported by BNP Paribas India.