There’s more to Khumariyaan than the twangy, accelerating melodies and snappy rhythms that eventually got the audience at Asia Society on its feet and dancing on Sunday night. During the concert Sparlay Rawail, the four-man group’s lead guitarist, matter-of-factly described its repertory as “music of the oppressed.” Khumariyaan means “intoxicators.”

The group’s repertory is not protest songs but instrumentals: Pashtun folk tunes and its own compositions. But in its hometown, Peshawar, a Pakistani provincial capital near the Afghanistan border, Khumariyaan’s music holds a symbolic charge. The concert was part of Khumariyaan’s American tour sponsored by Center Stage, a cultural exchange program of the State Department.

Pashtun folk traditions have been embattled in recent years from two directions: from a modernizing, status-conscious culture that associates the rubab and other folk instruments with the lower classes, and from fundamentalist Islamic opposition to secular music, which has restricted performances and destroyed music shops. Mr. Rawail described Khumariyaan’s approach as an “incremental evolution” to help the music survive. The opening piece was “Bela,” which means a place where two rivers divide or converge.

The center of Khumariyaan’s sound is Farhan Bogra on rubab, a traditional lute with three plucked strings and 11 sympathetic strings; to an American ear it sounds like a sharper-toned banjo. Mr. Bogra is a determined preservationist; he has posted rubab lessons on YouTube. The rubab delivers the melodies in rapid-fire picking with insistent repeated notes, accompanied by hand drumming by Shiraz Khan on the goblet-shaped zerbaghali and by Mr. Rawail and Aamer Shafiq on acoustic guitars. Mr. Rawail also wore an ankle bracelet with jingle bells called ghungroo, a bit of percussion generally used by female dancers.