He’s known for his towering presence and strong baritone voice. Arieb Azhar burst on to the Pakistani music scene with his simple, yet powerful rendition of Husn-i-Haqiqi (lyrics taken from the kalam of Khawaja Ghulam Farid). Since then, he’s been travelling the country, no village or city too small for him and his band of merry men to visit and musically perform the verses of some of the regions’ greatest Sufi poets. Although his appearance in the second and third season of Coke Studio pushed him into the mainstream, he still seems to prefer operating like an underground musician.

Arieb brings his own unique spin to Sufi music (a term he loathes as he feels it’s often abused and misinterpreted by a lot of mainstream artists) with an interesting mix of music and sound. When you dig deeper into his journey as a person and consequently, as a musician, you begin to understand how and why.

When he was 17, Azhar decided to visit the Soviet Union. The young communist thought he would find a very utopian society; instead what he came across was the exact opposite. “I saw exploitation there as well,” he said. “Over there it wasn’t the capitalists or the feudal lords who were sapping the peasants and working class — it’s the communist party that is exploiting everyone else!” Azhar ended up spending four months in the Soviet Union — two in Moscow and two in Belarus — and learned some Russian before returning home.

Disillusioned, he came across a couple involved in film-making from Croatia who frequently visited Pakistan, and they suggested that he continue his studies in Yugoslavia. “According to them, it was the ideal compromise between Eastern and Western Europe, socialism and capitalism, and it’s a beautiful peaceful country where nothing ever happens,” he related.

“While the rest of it was true, the peaceful part wasn’t,” said Arieb. “I went there in 1990 and in 1991 war broke out.” The Balkan Wars were a series of conflicts by nationalist groups in the former Yugoslavia that sought the independence of Croatia, Slovenia and later, Bosnia. It resulted in the breaking up of the entire region.

Azhar was based in Zagreb, the present-day capital of Croatia. According to him, it wasn’t really on the frontlines although a few bombs did fall in the city. Residents of the city, however, could see shelling in the distance and Serbian planes would often fly over them. Most of the other foreign students who had been studying along with Azhar had already left by then. “The few of us who stayed became integrated into society,” he relates.

The closest bomb shelter was a 10-minute walk away and so instead, he and the others would huddle in the basement of the closest building whenever the sirens went off. These shelters or basements were completely plunged in darkness. “At times there were 20 of us cramped in a room with 10 bottles of wine. You could make as much noise as you wanted and so we sang songs. That’s how I learned a lot of the region’s folk songs and music.”

Having survived it, he finally moved back to Pakistan as he had been living abroad for 13 years and needed to come home and spend time with his folks “who were getting on in life”, and also because of his sister who has Down syndrome. Also, Azhar’s brother was in Germany at the time, so one of them had to move back.

But Azhar’s time in the Balkans wasn’t spent idle. He was a part of a fairly successful band called The Shamrock Rollers that remained operational for about seven years. “I quit because I felt I had stopped growing as a musician. I felt my voice sounding harsher to my own ears instead of softer, and I knew I was missing out on something.”

Coming back home was a bit of shock for him in a way. Social and class differences, and discriminatory behaviour based on those differences were things he hadn’t encountered during his stay in the Balkans. “It shocked me and made me wonder: where do I fit in all of this? Who am I communicating to? Who do I want to communicate to? These are questions I sometimes struggle with even today.”

So where does he fit in now? “I fit in anywhere I go. I am as much home in Croatia as I am in Pakistan. My friends in Croatia used to tell me that I’m half-Croatian. I used to respond that by saying, ‘No, I’m a full Croatian and a full Pakistani’.”

Because of his family’s close involvement with PTV, Arieb had grown up listening to folk music and travelling into the interior villages of the country. What one didn’t know was that he was also a child actor in theatre. His father along with Mansoor Saeed (television actor, Sania Saeed’s father) had started a threatre group by the name of Dastak and all of the children’s roles fell upon his and Sania’s shoulders, he laughed. The theatre also saw people belonging to various forms of art and literature engage in all kinds of debate — whether social or political, the forum was open, so to speak. This was the somewhat engaging environment that he grew up in.

When it comes to his journey as a musician, he’s had a very niche following. Has surviving as an artist been hard? “It has and still is,” he said, “Last year we felt we were finally soaring. This year we’re struggling again in terms of getting concerts. Of course, a lot of this has to do with the conditions within Pakistan — bomb blasts, changes in government, security concerns among other things. The music industry in Pakistan is generally non-existent …”

So how has Coke Studio helped? “Not the industry,” he responded, “It helped a lot of musicians, including myself. It got me out of the underground into the mainstream. But what’s needed are venues. Coke Studio is a show on television. We need venues and live music — that’s what’s going to help build up the industry. An industry can’t develop just on TV or on screen. An industry has to be ‘real’.”

Talking about the current socio-political turmoil in the country, increasing intolerance in society and discrimination along ethnic lines, Azhar recalled his experience of having gone through the Balkan wars and the impact it had on its people, “I saw that the moment some people who start identifying themselves exclusive of others (they create a boundary around themselves to ‘protect’ their culture), they actually start destroying it instead. The way I see it, culture functions best when you have no boundaries and when you can bounce off each other,” concludes Azhar.