Fatimah Johnson (South24)

---

The music of the Middle East has almost always had Egyptian and Levantine sized shadows hanging over it. The contribution and peculiarities of musical development outside of Egypt and the Levant in the Middle East is significantly less celebrated and less discussed. This though, is happily changing with recent attention rightly being given to the beautiful music tradition in Aden, South Yemen. A review of the late colonial period (1935 – 1960) shows that Aden was part of a musical exchange on both a local and global level. This exchange was technical, commercial and stylistic. The progression of the music tradition in Aden in this period was also important politically and can be said to still have implications in the present day. From the point of view of ethnomusicology, the story of music in Aden in this period becomes even more interesting. 

Aden, founded by the Romans in the 1st century CE, [1] and her past is irrevocably linked to India. The British considered it to be politically, culturally and legally part of imperial India, no matter that it was geographically in South Arabia, for example by virtue of The Interpretation Act of 1889. [2] India in particular as well as Somalia, North Yemen and the hinterland of South Yemen had helped to populate Aden as a settlement of originally less than 1,000 people [3] in 1839 when it was seized by the British Royal Navy following the shipwreck of the barque Daria Dawlat, on voyage from Kolkata/Calcutta to Jeddah, just outside of Aden’s harbour. This was a terrifying incident involving robbery, rape, violent attacks and drowning that took place in 1837. [4] Life as well as death links India to Aden so inevitably, the musical veins of India extended into Aden and had a profound influencing effect. 

The recognition that Indian influence in Aden (whether musical or not) is not a foreign one is long overdue given the debt that Aden owes India and especially so as the over emphasis on post-unification Yemen tends to supress the truth about the very long pre-unification period – that all things Indian became part of what it meant to be an Adenite. The writer has Indian roots herself via Aden (an ancestor is known to have left Kalighat in Kolkata, India for Aden some 200 years ago). Highlighting the multi ethnic character of Aden could help South Yemen in her effort to build a progressive state independent of North Yemen in which rights around race, ethnicity and religion are protected as there is strong precedent for this in the South. Dr. Cemil Aydin of the University of North Carolina has stated that by 1901, 40% of the world’s Muslims were also British which would of course include those permanently resident in Aden. [5] Use of the historical method can also demonstrate how the past influence of Aden’s music scene extends to East Africa and the states of the [Arabian] Gulf. [6]

Due to the strong connection between India and Aden, Indian song recordings, films and instruments were regularly imported. For example, the Shree Ranjit Movietone company in Mumbai/Bombay would import the latest Indian films to Aden. According to an article published in September 1942 from the first independent newspaper on the Arabian Peninsula, Fatat Al Jazira (The Peninsula’s Maiden), it was very common in Aden for Indian musical instruments like the Harmonium (a stringed instrument made of various materials existing inside a wooden box) to be played alongside Arab instruments like the Daf (a circular drum) by Adeni residents of both Arab and Indian ethnicity. These music groups were called jamat. Artists in Aden would write poetry in Arabic based on musical themes from Indian films. Bi-lingual poems in Hindi or Urdu and Arabic were written and Arabic poems would be sung to Indian music. A 1943 Indian film called Duniya Diwani (The World is Mad) is said to have been particularly influential on Adeni music. There were four “talkie” cinemas in Aden, of which at least two (M. C. C Talkies and New Theatre) featured Indian as well as Arabic films. [7]

Aden became a magnet for hybrid artists like Ahmad and Muhammad Jumah Khan who were Hadhramis musicians of Punjabi lineage who worked with the jamat groups in Aden. Not only did Aden soak up cultural influences and draw diverse artists, it also created artists who took their knowledge and competency of Adeni music styles to recording studios in mainly South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Arabian Gulf. This included countries such as Kuwait, Indonesia, India and Pakistan. In relation to Pakistan, you will note in the title picture the late Indian actor Yusuf Khan more commonly known as Dilip Kumar, whose family were from Peshawar which fell eventually to Pakistani sovereignty. [8] He was the Shahrukh Khan of his day and he is seen here on a visit to Crater Aden in the 1961s due to the massive popularity of Mumbai made films in Aden. 

A Parisian ethnomusicologist, Jean Lambert and the Director of the Yemen Musical Heritage Centre, Rafik al-Akouri, completed an innovative and important survey in 2020 of Aden’s recording industry from 1935 to 1960. The survey reveals that Aden had the honour of being the site at which the first commercial recordings of Yemeni music were made within the borders (though disputed) of modern Yemen. Records were initially made by the German company Parlophon and then another German company, Odeon, in Aden, India, Germany and Britain. These records were flat disc records in paper or cardboard sleeves called 78rpm or just 78s. 78s played at a speed of 78 revolutions per minute and were made out of shellac, a resin secreted by a lac insect! They had been invented by Emile Berliner, a German American. At the time this was seen as a superior technology to Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder phonographs partly due to reasons of practicality. Some of the great singers known in Aden under the aegis of Odeon were Fadl Muhammad al Lahji who sang in the Lahji style and Umar Mahfuz Gabba who sang in the Adani style. Interestingly, Odeon ceased production in Aden when the Nazis took over the company in 1936 and it is very likely that in the case of Parlophon, yet another German company's presence could not be tolerated on what was then British territory, once the two nations went to war. [9] 

After Parlophon and Odeon, the invaluable survey shows that local companies in Aden began to publish records, these being: Aden Crown, Jafferphon, Tahaphon, Kayaphon, Arabian South and Azaziphon. Aden Crown (Al Tag Al Adani) is noted in Lambert and al-Akouri’s survey as being a prolific company responsible for 1,220 records made in Aden. It began operating in 1937/1938 though its activities were halted by 1940 due to the Second World War. Aden Crown’s office was located in “Rue Zafaran”, Saffron Street, in Crater Aden also notable for being Aden’s Jewish Quarter. Both Aden Crown and Jafferphon were active in the selling of electric phonographs (an electrically run record player or turntable) and 78s which required electricity for their production. Aden had enjoyed electrification since 1925. Electrification made the commercial distribution of records made in Aden and from Aden on a global and local level possible. [10]

Hindi or muhannad as it is also known, is one of the distinct styles of music that came out of Adeni music production and marketing. This is described by Lambert and al-Akouri as: “Indian, Indianized”, which corresponds not to a region [of South or North Yemen], but to a cultural influence exerted mainly by the music of Indian films from the 1930s”. Lambert and al-Akouri detail that there were eight other styles that appeared on Adeni 78s: Yafii, Sihri, Hadrami, Adani, Sawahili, Lahji, Sanani and Somali. Significantly, the survey argues that the different music styles were interpreted in a political manner to underscore and heighten the geopolitical separation between South and North Yemen, particularly the Lahji and Sanani styles: 

…it must be understood that this emerging record market was the first to give these regions, through these musical forms, the opportunity to confront each other in a public arena in the modern sense. This is one of the reasons why these records from the 1930s are so important for the history of Yemen. [11]

Reaction to the Hindi style was also politicized. The founder of Fatat al Jazira, Muhammad Ali Luqman (also a lawyer), criticized the substantial influence of Indian popular music in a 1943 article called Adeni Music and Song. He described Adeni music as petty and claimed that it expressed nothing because in his view Aden did not know who she was. He further reflected negatively on the practice of borrowing themes from Indian films to guide Arabic poetry writing and appeared to favor the Lahji style of music that had emerged via Fadl Muhammad al Lahji (who sang poems written by the Prince of Lahj, Ahmad Fadhl al Abdali), on the grounds that it was locally grown whereas Adeni music arrangements reflected the outcome of cultural assemblage. These criticisms were made despite the fact that Luqman was an Adenite and had even received his education in law in Mumbai, India. [12] The much loved late Adeni singer/composer/writer Muhammad Murshid Naji (1929 – 2013) also decried the influence of Indian music in Aden. Naji was an important artist who enjoyed great fame in the Middle East from 1954 onwards, his songs playing on Radio Aden from that point. [13] Naji is said to have described the influence of Indian music in Aden as Indian colonization. [14] There was also nervousness expressed by Naji about the implications of other potent musical influences in Aden, those of the Kuwaiti and the Egyptian, in a book he wrote in 1959 called Our Popular Songs. In the introduction to the book, written by Muhammad Said Miswat, the Lahji style is promoted as being that which is “genuinely” of South Yemen and could even act to cement the North and South together. [15] This attitude is in contrast to the adversarial way in which the lahgi style was employed by some as mentioned above and the contempt expressed for the sanani style which came to represent North Yemen: “Nous n’en avons pas besoin (We do not need it)”. [16]

As we have seen, Aden’s high-ranking status in the British Empire was imperative to it becoming musically innovative in a reciprocal way – it took from the Empire and it gave. Musical archaeology into the impact of Indian music helps to unmute a suppressed part of Aden’s history and not just in respect of culture. The historian John M Willis argues that: “The history of the Yemeni south was staged in South Asia as well as in Arabia,….” [17] The use, production and sale of 78rpm technology in the manner conducted in Aden could have only happened in Aden according to Lambert and al-Akouri. [18] Thus, Aden was instrumental in the development of modern art in the 20th century. In regard to the Hindi music style being seen for a time by some as not authentic in the Yemeni context possibly even a symbol of disunity, it is interesting to note that when the time of colonization ended there was no unification with the North and South Yemen looked not to any state in the Middle East to anchor herself to but instead to the Soviet Union. On a personal note, the writer keenly remembers stories from family members about how popular Indian movie songs that featured actors like Yusuf Khan, Raj Kapoor, Nargis and Dev Anand would play endlessly in Aden, in a mixed Arab-Indian home. This is a practice we continued in the UK. India never felt like a foreign place, it was always understood to be a part of Aden’s soul.