Performing Endangerment: Sound, Image and the Staging of Heritage in Indus Blues

Abstract

Pakistani folk music survives in a social landscape where economic strain, shrinking patronage and anxieties around morality make life harder for musicians. These pressures have led to a growing social suspicion of music and have placed many traditional instruments and performers at risk of disappearance. Indus Blues by Jawad Sharif is an honest documentation of this pressure not through abstraction but by closely tracing the living performers whose art endures even as the social worlds sustaining it erode. Nevertheless, even though the film has been widely discussed as a documentary of cultural heritage, almost no scholarship addresses Indus Blues as a performance text on its own. This study addresses that gap by arguing that Indus Blues functions simultaneously as a documentary. Drawing on performance theory, sound studies, and media scholarship, the paper examines how the film produces a mediated sense of liveness and affective urgency. Methodologically, the study combines historiographic analysis with close media-formal analysis, focusing on the film’s use of ambient sound, silence, multilingual voice, camera framing, and spatial composition. The scope of the study is limited to the film’s representational strategies and does not analyze the real communities beyond what the documentary presents. Still, by reading the film closely, the paper offers new insight into how endangered musical cultures are framed, felt, and performed in contemporary Pakistani cinema.