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 rejects the British media's and government's harmful portrayals of Pakistanis as a self-segregating group prohibited from making music, stereotypes that have often resulted in violent Islamophobia. He argues that, in practice, these Pakistani Muslim migrants--particularly those 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. It is this musical life, hidden from public view, that Hodgson describes as the poetics of migration. These poetics reveal the connections between Kashmir's rural village life and urban centers abroad, offering a sensitive and illuminating portrait of Muslim migration and multiculturalism in Britain and beyond.