Ghulam Ghous Vehranwale

This family belongs to a village in Jalandhar, India, known as Baihran (Wairan in Punjabi). The oldest noticeable exponent of music is Ghulam Ghous, who had three sons: Fazal Din, Ali Bukhsh, and Hussain Bukhsh. Hussain Bukhsh had four sons: Ahmad Hussain (1914-1971), Ahmad Hassan (1920-1968), Hussain Ahmad, and Muhammad Mohsin. Ali Bukhsh had two sons, Abdul Hameed and Muhammad Shafi, who formed a separate qawwal party after partition.

The important thing to notice is that this family did not come from a strictly musical background but from a religious and scholarly background — the ancestors were into preaching Islam and were known as molvis. The lineage connects to Maulana Abdul Quddus Gangohi (1456-1537), a prominent Sheikh of the Sabri order. According to Zamir-ul-Hassan, it was Abdul Quddus Gangohi who advised his forefathers to preach Islam through qawwali. The tradition continued until the later Khalifa Maulana Abdul Rasheed Gangohi (1829-1905) banned preaching Islam through qawwali. It reappeared with Maulana Abdul Qadir Rai Puri (1878-1962), a very famous Deobandi scholar, who advised his followers to continue with qawwali.