Devotion to an ancient, rule-bound art form doesn't mean a musician can't create a vibrant 21st-century sound -- not if the vocalist is Kiran Ahluwalia, at least.

As one of North America's premiere interpreters of ghazals, a love-besotted Persian poetic form dating to the 11th century that flourishes today in India and Pakistan, Ahluwalia has developed a repertoire of new songs by searching out Urdu poets in the Indian diaspora and setting their lyrics to music. The result is a startlingly beautiful collection of incantatory ghazals and celebratory, flirtatious Punjabi folk songs that she delivers in her undulating girlish voice.

Ahluwalia makes her Boston debut Wednesday as part of the Museum of Fine Arts' wide-ranging Concerts in the Courtyard summer series, with a quartet featuring electric guitarist Rez Abbasi, Naren Budhakar on tabla, and Ashok Bidaye on harmonium. Ahluwalia is quick to point out that while she has made numerous trips to Hyderabad, India, to study with Vithal Rao, one of the last living ghazal masters, who learned his craft in the era before Indian independence, her music is very much a product of the present day.

''I really hate it when people think I'm singing traditional music," Ahluwalia says by phone from her Toronto home. ''I think I'm singing contemporary music, music that is written and composed today. I'm using contemporary arrangements and instruments. A lot of people who are strict lovers of Indian music think that the introduction of guitar in my music is a fusion, but the guitar has been used in India for the last 30 years. I've just given it a more prominent voice in my arrangements."

While Ahluwalia has gained a fair amount of renown in Canada (her 2003 CD ''Beyond Boundaries" won a Juno award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy, for best world music album), her Boston performance comes at the beginning of her first high-profile North American tour, as she celebrates the release of her first album with US distribution. The self-named disc on Triloka is an anthology drawn from her previous Canadian releases, with two new tracks featuring Cape Breton fiddler Natalie MacMaster.

Born into a Punjabi family in the north Indian state of Bihar and raised mostly in Canada, Ahluwalia grew up attending ghazal concerts with her parents. A rigorous form that usually consists of a series of couplets laced together by a precise rhyme scheme, ghazals (guh-zles) originated in Persia and spread to the Indian subcontinent around the 15th century. The term means ''to talk to women" in Arabic, and not surprisingly the topic of most ghazals is unrequited love, though there are also many that explore mystical themes.

Ahluwalia's compositions hew fairly close to the traditional form, though she has honed a sound that is open to other influences, particularly jazz.

''Kiran has totally influenced my playing and feeling toward Indian music," says Abbasi, a respected jazz figure. ''My father tells me, if only you understood the words, they're so beautiful, but I almost don't need to. The melodic content is so rich, and form-wise, her pieces are more intricate than a lot of the jazz I've played."

While Ahluwalia's parents started her on her musical journey, encouraging her study of classical Indian music, they weren't overjoyed when she decided to drop out of a successful career as a bond trader in Toronto to pursue her music in Bombay.

''But once they accepted that I was going to do this, they have done nothing but help me," she says.

It was a ghazal much loved by her aunt and mother that first inspired the singer to compose music. According to Ahluwalia, family lore has it that her uncle created the sensual poem, which tells the story of a man entranced by a woman. Ahluwalia was so struck when her aunt recited the poem that she promptly wrote down the entire piece and later wrote music for it.

To this day, she says, ''I'm often trying to return to the naivete that I had in composing that very first one."

Unlike the ghazals, Ahluwalia's Punjabi folk songs are uptempo pieces that people can dance to.

"It's a lighter form of poetry," Ahluwalia says, ''like a girl trying to convince her lover to buy her a nose ring."

After many years of study and research in India, Ahluwalia's most important breakthrough was discovering the wealth of ghazals in her own Toronto backyard. A family friend invited her to a recital by a group of poets writing contemporary ghazals in Urdu.

''Instead of looking back to India and Pakistan for lyrics, I discovered that there are South Asian Americans and Canadians writing poems in the ghazal genre," she says. ''Now I'm always on the lookout for poets that are living right here."