Ragini Festival curates its annual night at Joe’s Pub of South Asian inspired sound, a night– “raat” in which we might participate in a collective haunting of mood tones, couplets and “rang” or color of raga - melodic imprints of “that which colors the mind” in the lineage ghazals, khyal and qawwali. In the lineage of icons Mehndi Hassan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Pankaj Udas. Ustad Salamat Ali Khan leads a classical and ghazal infused set along with poets Adeeba Shahid Talukder, For our second set, sarangi exponent & ethnomusicologist, Suhail Yusuf Khan, grandson of Ustad Sabri Khan will explore intersections of raga and folk music with guitar player Henry Hodder and tabla player, Roshni Samlal.
Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani and Bengali-American poet, vocalist, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved (Tupelo Press, 2020), winner of the 2017 Kundiman Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Washington Square Review, Gulf Coast, World Literature Today, Aleph Review, The Margins, Words Without Borders, and various other publications. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and has received fellowships from Kundiman and Poets House. She is currently training in Hindustani classical music under Ustad Salamat Ali and is the recipient of a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.
Salamat Ali Khan was born in Lahore, Pakistan, to a family of renowned musicians. He commenced his formal training under his father Ustad Sharif Khan’s tutelage and studied classical music with him until the age of 16. He went on to study with the late ghazal maestro, Mehdi Hasan, developing a particular interest in the genres of thumri and ghazal. In 1971, he made his debut with Radio Pakistan, Karachi. In the coming decades, Ustad Salamat Ali performed frequently on Karachi Radio and Pakistani television, releasing 13 albums and touring internationally alongside his wife Azra Riaz. Ustad Salamat Ali has composed melodies for ghazals of modern Urdu poets including Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ahmad Faraz, Nasir Kazmi, Parveen Shakir, and classical poets such as Mirza Ghalib and Momin Khan Momin, among others. He spent 7 years teaching at the National Academy of Performing Arts while in Lahore, and has continued to teach widely. He has been living in New York since 2012.
Malvika Jolly is a South Asian poet, translator, and author of the chaplet Ardeshir Godrej Dreams of Wild Dogs, forthcoming from Belladonna Press. Her poems have been featured in Four Way Review, Mizna, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, The Seventh Wave, The Best Small Fictions Anthology 2023, and elsewhere. She has performed in programs for Barbès, Brooklyn Poets, The Brooklyn Rail, Governors Island, Invisible Dog Art Center, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Method Bandra, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Poetry Society of New York, Queens College, South Street Seaport Museum, and others. She is Assistant Managing Editor of Washington Square Review, and runs The New Third World, a poetry reading series inspired by the Non-Aligned Movement.
Suhail Yusuf (stage name: Suhail Yusuf Khan) received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University ’24. His dissertation, “Bridge Overtones: Lessons from the Sarangi” is the first in-depth ethnomusicological study of the North Indian bowed instrument tradition by a hereditary sarangi player. He brings together expertise from a performance career that has extended over twenty-five years and academic research to explore issues of gender, castes, ethnicity, and exclusion as they pertain to the performance, circulation, and reception of music. Suhail’s project at the ISM, “The Sonic Resonance of Interfaith, Identity, and Inclusion Practices in Contemporary Music Making” aims to examine the diverse transnational dialogues between musicians of different faiths, ethnicities, and genders in the United States. It focuses on the events and relationships between Western and Indian musicians exploring musical forms including Qawwālī (South Asian Sufi Songs), Khyāl (pre-modern Indian classical songs), Ashkenazi Jewish liturgical nusach (music style or tradition), Bhajan (Hindu devotional songs), and music by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). Suhail comes to Yale from the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of music, dance, and theatre where he taught and designed curriculum as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History (2021-2024)