Her first audience was the sheep and horses she herded in rural Pakistan, but she became a national hero. So why is this folk music icon reduced to living in a makeshift house?
Aina J. Khan
In a bootleg video from the 1990s, an entire audience of Pakistani men in shalwar kameezes stare transfixed as the steely voice of Zarsanga – the renowned Pakistani Pashtun folk musician – thunders through the air.
For more than five decades, the illiterate village girl who metamorphosed into the beloved “nightingale of Peshawar” has sung folk songs like this, of yearning lovers turning to sand, of old Pashtun tribes and their reverence for ancestral lands, of tribal jewellery hanging from the necks of Pashtun women, and of leaving darkness behind. With a scarf draped over her expressionless face, Zarsanga resembles almost a saint-like figure. Her voice often induces a delirium in some of the audience members who burst into a variation of the Attan, a gracious, circular dance said to be used by Pashtun warriors to intimidate the soldiers of Alexander the Great.
“Some people weep, some shower me with rupees,” says the elegant, rather reticent 77-year-old, who I meet on the outskirts of Kohat, a town about an hour’s drive from Peshawar. “I am thankful to God for my voice.”.
That voice was ubiquitous for years in Pakistan, but as the golden eras of the cassette and DVD faded and newer genres of music emerged, Zarsanga’s music was seen as a relic of an agrarian past. In 2018, she won back her following thanks to Coke Studio – the Coca-Cola-sponsored Pakistani music TV show – broadcasting a modern rendition of one of her classics, Rasha Mama (or Come Uncle), which received more than 10m views on YouTube. In 2021, she was chosen as one of Malala Yousafzai’s Desert Island Discs, and was named one of the recipients of the globally prestigious triennial Aga Khan award for music in 2022, sharing a $500,000 prize along with 15 other laureates….
After the truth-shower 