This October, Ali Sethi, a queer Pakistani American singer, songwriter, composer and author known for his unique, experimental fusion of classical poetry, ghazals and Sufism with Western instruments and modern pop sound, will perform at The Ford in Hollywood as part of his North American tour.

“The first 30 years you study, the next 30 years you perform, and the last 30 years you teach … that is the path outlined for musicians in Indian tradition,” Sethi said in an interview with the Daily Trojan. “I don’t know if I will live to 90, but that appetite for deep commitment … is really rare but also so special if you have the privilege of being able to spend your life like that.”

For years, Sethi cut his teeth on the studio performance television series “Coke Studio Pakistan.” His Coke Studio song with Shae Gill, “Pasoori” — a fusion of Punjabi and Urdu-language raga, a type of Indian classical music, and reggaeton hip-hop — became a smash hit in 2022. Hundreds of millions of views and a billion streams later, it still stands as the most-watched Coke Studio video of all time.

“Pasoori,” which loosely translates from Punjabi and Urdu to “difficulty” or “conflict,” garnered popularity on both sides of the India-Pakistan border.

The music video — with its vibrant visuals, beautiful traditional attire and message of inclusion — subtly and subversively invites people to think about the consequences of the Partition, the 1940s division of British India into two countries, India and Pakistan, that displaced 15 million people and killed between a half-million to 2 million people.

Today, Sethi’s music is being restricted by India’s right-wing nationalist government, and vice versa, Indian artists are being restricted in Pakistan. The song became part of the political conversation it sought to amplify, perhaps not by mistake.

Sethi’s interest in challenging the past goes beyond the subject matter of his music — it is also found in the compositions themselves.

“Being literate in a traditional style of music is necessary in order for you to experiment,” Sethi said. “I wouldn’t be messing with it as confidently as I am if I didn’t know the rules that have been in place for centuries.”

Before his traditional musical education, Sethi studied humanities at Harvard back in the early 2000s, where, in a recent interview with New Lines Magazine, he said his worldview was shaped by living amid the binary portrayals of war and religion being imposed through the media by the Bush administration.

“I wrote a novel. I spent a lot of time in the English department. The liberal arts education taught me to question dogma … to not treat knowledge, even ancient knowledge, as sealed off to interpretation or reinterpretation,” Sethi said.

With “Pasoori” skyrocketing him to fame at age 38, Sethi experienced a more uncommon path to celebrity.

“I do think that the timescale is different in the culture that I grew up with,” Sethi said.

Growing up, he said his favorite Pakistani artist was the legendary classical singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. His favorite Western pop artist was Madonna.

“The album that gave me life as a teenager was ‘Ray of Light,’ which she made when she was 40,” Sethi said. “I think this idea that popular musicians have to be very young is a very recent creation of market forces inside Western capitalism. I understand that marketing strategy, but I don’t think it’s a strategy for art.”

Mohammad Aseer Adeeb, a graduate student studying film and television production, said he has been listening to Sethi since his SoundCloud days.

“I’m very glad to see [South Asian] artists who are not westernizing things for the sake of westernizing. It feels way more original because they’re picking up from the worlds that they are a part of. We live in a globalized world, but they have very strong roots,” Adeeb said. “One of [Sethi’s] great strengths is he’s very classically trained.”

Today, Sethi lives in New York, where he has cultivated a community of friends and artists that support one another creatively in all of their pursuits. He said it has helped him greatly in being grounded, nourished and inspired.

“It gives me life to be in conversation with people who are multicultural, like me,” Sethi said. “I’m constantly meeting people who want to … find new pathways of expression. [New York] is a microcosm of art-making and freethinking.”

Masuma Khan, a senior majoring in neuroscience, discovered Sethi’s music while volunteering at a relief organization.

“I love when people are interested in our culture,” Khan said. “[Fusion] eases them in.”

As he prepares to head off on tour, Sethi said audiences can expect more of his fusion flair at his show at The Ford.

“It’s very exciting,” Sethi said. “We have electronic aspects, acoustic aspects, ragas, flamenco, hip-hop. The whole kind of delicious chutney of life.”