Nearly 30 years later, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan finds new stans

Over three decades later, producer Kuljit Bhamra still vividly remembers something that happened while he was working with legendary Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in London. “During our recording session, a fan of his had found out that he was at my studio and telephoned me, insisting on meeting him,” he shares. “I asked Nusrat ji if this was okay. He silently nodded.”

The fan arrived dressed in bright white trousers and a jacket, holding a bouquet of roses. As soon as he spotted Khan, he immediately threw himself onto the floor and lay there prostrate, arms stretched out, hands touching his idol’s feet. “Nusrat sat looking ahead calmly,” Bhamra recalls. “I waited for a full minute that felt like an hour.” Finally, Khan slowly turned his head to look at Bhamra, who leaned forward to lightly tap the man on his back, signalling that his time was up. “He crawled to his feet, bowed, and left. Nusrat turned to me and wiggled his head gently. It was time to continue recording!” Clearly, this experience was in no way unusual for Khan. An oft viral video of him performing shows another man in a suit leaping on stage and dropping his head into the Ustad’s lap. A rarer video sees a fan shower him in rose petals.

But I like to think even he would have been stunned by the response his music continues to elicit today, nearly 30 years after his death on August 16, 1997.

Young Instagrammers announce that they too would have flung themselves at the maestro’s feet had they been lucky enough to witness him sing live. After his nephew Rahat covered ‘Afreen Afreen’ for Coke Studio Pakistan, the track written by Javed Akhtar in the late ’90s has become a Gen Z favourite, featured in at least 20,000 Reels on Instagram. “Only NFAK could save me,” declares Yashi Verma in a video. Indian creators like Imran Chandio and Sant Sharma dissect his layered Urdu lyrics. Clips of Jeff Buckley’s soulful rendition of ‘Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai’ regularly make the rounds online. At a contest he recently judged for Panjab TV, Bhamra was surprised when over 50 per cent of the contestants sang songs by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The singer’s fans now include both: older generations who had watched in real time as he erupted into global stardom, and young millennials and Gen Zers amongst whom the moniker ‘NFAK’ is practically as recognisable as Taylor Swift or Arijit Singh.

In his newest album Konnakol (2026), British singer Zayn Malik pays tribute to Khan in an opening track titled ‘Nusrat’. “I obviously was exposed to Nusrat real young. My dad would play a lot of his music,” he confessed in an interview with Zach Sang. At first glance, the ballad’s lyrics seem unrelated to the Ustad. But Malik explains that he wanted to honour the person whom the song is about—likely a past lover—by naming it after Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, someone he admires so deeply and struggles to let go of.

Across India too, die-hard fans of Khan continue to find ways of keeping him alive. Only two months ago, music curator Sandeep Raman hosted a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan listening session at Middle Room in Bengaluru, where he played three of the singer’s albums. “The response was incredible,” he recalls. “We sold out tickets within a day and our DMs were flooded with people asking to be part of the session, but space was limited.” Interestingly, the audience consisted primarily of millennials and Gen Zers. Last August, Rams Musique Experience, a vintage shop in Bengaluru, also hosted a listening session dedicated to Khan. “It was a full house,” reveals owner Sangeeth Ram. “Some people even bought their own records to listen to with a group of NFAK lovers.” He adds that they’ve always had a tough time stocking Khan’s albums because “they sell out the same week we bring them in”. The most popular are the EP Shahbaaz (1991) and Chain of Light, a lost album rediscovered by an employee in Real World Records’ tape archive and released in 2024. There is also high demand for the Mustt Mustt (Massive Attack Remix), which is usually unavailable. Even on The Revolver Club’s website, a majority of Khan’s vinyls are currently out of stock.

Such fandom is unheard of. Especially because there have been no new Khan records in the last decade or so—except Chain of Light. For NFAK enthusiasts, to be blessed with a new album decades after his passing, to once again hear his hypnotic vocals on devotional tracks, was practically a miracle. A reminder of all the music that could have been, the potential lost with the singer’s untimely death at age 48. Since then, the record has accumulated over 4.8 million streams on Spotify alone.

Meanwhile,  books editor Simar Puneet—who is in the top 1 per cent of NFAK listeners worldwide based on YouTube Music’s calculations—has a small shrine dedicated to him in her Goa home with a 1991 photograph of him performing in Italy. She also got a T-shirt made “in that ’90s rap star collage aesthetic”. My own NFAK T-shirt from Sketch and Rain is perhaps my most prized possession, taken out only on special occasions such as my birthday. It also appears to be one of the indie brand’s more popular designs: a single Reel of it alone has accumulated over 8,000 likes.

Even in Indian literature, Khan remains an ever-present figure: when Deen Dutta, the protagonist in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), accidentally turns on his Bluetooth speaker on a flight to Los Angeles, ‘Allah Hoo’ starts playing, creating an uneasy, tense atmosphere that highlights the Western world’s Islamophobia. In Meena Kandasamy’s newest novel Fieldwork as a Sex Object (2026), “Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan blares breathless” at an intimate house party in London.

“I keep coming across house and lo-fi remixes or edits with his vocals, not just in India but around the world,” says Mumbai-based music journalist Bhanuj Kappal, who can’t pinpoint exactly when he first listened to Khan. “Growing up in the late ’90s in Punjab, he was everywhere. But I think I really started paying attention when I stumbled upon his global collaborations because I didn’t know squat about qawwali back then.”

Amongst the records Kappal loved were the unlikely crossover with American musician Eddie Vedder for the crime thriller Dead Man Walking (1995), the LP Magic Touch (1991) remixed by British-Indian producer Bally Sagoo, and two albums created with Canadian guitarist Michael Brook, out of which the wistful, atmospheric Night Song (1996) seems to be a fan favourite. To south Asian listeners at the time, these collaborations must have appeared as bizarre and unbelievable as Diljit Dosanjh and Ed Sheeran singing ‘Lover’ together on stage or Enrique Iglesias crooning to ‘Heartbeat’ (2011) with Sunidhi Chauhan. “Nusrat’s voice had this raw, ragged soul that embodied deep existential yearning, which is what drew me to grunge and alternative music in the first place,” Kappal explains. “It’s incandescent and pierces through everything like a plasma cutter, whether it’s rock/pop instrumentation or linguistic and cultural barriers.”

While Khan frequently performed impassioned renditions of traditional qawwalis such as Sufi saint Baba Bulleh Shah’s ‘Piya Ghar Aaya’ and ‘Jogi de Naal Jaana’ and Amir Khusro’s ‘Chaap Tilak Cheen Li’ and ‘Aaj Rang Hai’, he also composed and sang catchier romantic melodies tinged with melancholy. “Na namaaz aati hai / na mujhko vazoo aata hai / sajdaa kar leta hu jab saamne tu aata hai,” he belts in ‘Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai’, comparing his lover to God. In many tracks with Michael Brook—the most well-known being ‘Nothing Without You’ and ‘Longing’—he pines for the return of his lover in an uncharacteristically gentle voice. “Despite his mind-blowing vocal acrobatic virtuosity, his choice of Urdu and Punjabi poetry, which could be understood by the ‘common person’, created the perfect vehicle for him to be admired by both chin-scratchy scholars and the less-educated person,” Bhamra observes.

Unfortunately, Khan’s legacy in India today is plagued by divisive politics. Despite the singer being an advocate for peaceful relations between the two neighbouring nations—he even contributed an anthem to AR Rahman’s album that commemorated 50 years of Indian Independence—the official NFAK Instagram page has remained banned in our country for over a year on account of him being Pakistani.

But Bollywood producers continue to reuse and sometimes blatantly plagiarise his compositions: guaranteed templates for success. There’s Viju Shah’s ‘Tu Cheez Badi Hai Mast Mast’ (1994) and Anu Malik’s ‘I Love You’ (1997) that led the usually unruffled singer to wryly remark that both composers deserve the “best copy award”. Madhuri Dixit enthusiastically dances to an upbeat version of ‘Mera Piya Ghar Aaya’. In two separate films, Ajay Devgn spends minutes brooding as ‘Mere Rashqe Qamar’ and ‘Sanu Ek Pal Chain’ play in the background, and in Fanney Khan (2018), Aishwarya Rai falls in love to a pitiful remake of ‘Yeh Jo Halka Halka Surooor Hai’.

The list goes on. Most recently, in a move dripping with irony, the Dhurandhar franchise paid tribute to Khan with a rendition of his qawwali ‘Dil Pe Zakhm Khaate Hai’. This seems counterintuitive, considering the films’ jingoistic narrative. While there is no doubt that Bollywood’s many remakes have introduced Khan to a younger audience, the intention feels somewhat murky, driven by profit rather than true emotion. “If there’s one recent tribute to Nusrat I’d recommend, it’s Rehmat-e-Nusrat, a qawwali tribute act from Kumaon in Uttarakhand,” Kappal adds.

It is some solace to remember that hardcore NFAK fans have found little ways to keep the singer alive, that his music is timeless enough to survive decades of socio-cultural shifts, to fit right into a nightclub somewhere in Europe or an evening of devotional Sufi music in some corner of India. It almost makes up for the fact that he died so young—because there are times when it feels like he never left at all. In the age of limited attention spans, when celebrities find no more than five seconds of fame, soulless AI-generated art consumes the internet and nonchalance is seen as chic, the fact that fans of Khan can spend over 15, 30, even 40 minutes taking in a single qawwali means there is still hope, still an intense hunger for raw, fervent humanity. We are still yearning for a love that transcends time and space. “It’s exhilarating, it’s worship; it makes me feel closer to God,” Puneet says. It seems almost like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan will never die.