IN A BROOKLYN studio, surrounded by her nudes, which are like reflections of her inner state, Schahbaz, who was recently the subject of a retrospective at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, walks me through the day she decided she could no longer live in Pakistan. “I woke up one morning and went to my husband and was like, ‘I’m done,’” she says. “You know, ‘I’m leaving. I’m done with this country.’” Schahbaz was born in Karachi and trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore, and had never imagined living anywhere but Pakistan. When I ask what prompted the change, she gives an answer of comic simplicity: “I paint nudes,” she says. “As a woman living in the Islamic Republic, that’s not going to fly.”
Pakistan is outwardly so much like India, but whereas in India it would have been possible for Schahbaz to display her nudes, or for Toor and Sethi (now a couple) to live together, to do so in Pakistan would be to invite serious danger upon oneself. When paintings of hers were posted online, Schahbaz — like Toor, Sethi and Sadiq, whose film is banned in Punjab — experienced an outpouring of hatred for her artistic and personal choices.
Schahbaz’s subversion is easily grasped. But that same element of protest, which sometimes consists merely of adapting an old form to a new time, is detectable in Aftab’s music too. The ghazal is a Perso-Arabic poetic style that in South Asia is often set to music; what Aftab does is strip it bare of almost all musical accompaniment, so the words seem to rise up as if out of an abyss. Sitting in her favorite Brooklyn cafe on a cold March day, she describes a period in her life that she calls her “teaching era.” This was before she went on to become the first Pakistani artist to win a Grammy Award, for her song “Mohabbat” in 2022. “Nobody wanted to book me,” Aftab says. What she was doing was so radical that she had to teach interviewers and critics, who were often unfamiliar with South Asian music, about the contemporary minimalism she was trying to invent. The pressure to either play jazz or what she then described as yoga music, a meditative Indian sound, was tremendous. Yet Aftab’s voice is possessed of a quality, impossible to feign in Urdu semiclassical singing, called soz. Only certain voices laden with pain, sorrow and experience acquire soz. Billie Holiday, for instance, has soz in spades, but so do South Asian singers like Begum Akhtar, Farida Khanum and Abida Parveen, whose influence lives on in Aftab. Even when she’s being sensual and sexy — as she is in her new Urdu cover with Anish Kumar of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (1983), recorded for the new television show “Bait,” which stars the British Pakistani actors Riz Ahmed and Guz Khan — Aftab’s voice betrays a solitude that’s reminiscent of the happy-sad harlequin figures in Toor’s paintings. “I feel like I’ve been alone for such a long time,” she says, “that I don’t see the diaspora.”
