Journeys of Love: Kashmiris, Music, and the Poetics of Migration

An empathetic and eye-opening portrait of Muslim migrants in England that debunks many misperceptions about their music and poetry.

In Journeys of Love, ethnomusicologist Thomas Hodgson offers a sensitive corrective to harmful portrayals of immigrants--specifically, Pakistanis living in England--as a self-segregating group prohibited from making music, a stereotype that has often resulted in violent Islamophobia. He argues that, in practice, these migrants--many of whom come from the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir--occupy rich musical worlds, full of poetic metaphors, that are central to surviving migration and its attendant losses.

Hodgson shows how Mirpuris in England, as well as those who remain in Pakistan, carry on traditions of reciting a collection of poetry by the nineteenth-century Sufi saint Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, translated by Hodgson here as Journeys of Love. With its themes of remaining true to one’s home, the oppressed being saved, having patience, and keeping faith in God, this work has become the story of movement and displacement in its narrative arc, as well as through the way it provides spiritual and ethical frameworks for settling in new lands. These hidden poetics of migration transform across generations as young Mirpuris develop new expressions of the connections across continents. These poetics reveal the connections between Kashmir’s rural village life and urban centers abroad, offering a sensitive and illuminating portrait of migration and multiculturalism in Britain and beyond.

Thomas Hodgson is assistant professor in the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA, where he teaches and researches music and Islam, South Asia, and music and technology.