To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/311 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. Tellings and Texts Music, Literature and Performance in North India Edited by Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield http://www.openbookpublishers.com © Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Orsini, Francesca and Butler Schofield, Katherine (eds.), Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0062 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783741021#copyright All external links were active on 22/09/2015 and archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/web/ Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at http:// www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783741021#resources ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-102-1 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-103-8 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-104-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-105-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9978-1-78374-106-9 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0062 King’s College London has generously contributed to the publication of this volume. Cover image: Late eighteenth-century miniature by Mir Kalan Khan (Awadh, c.1775). Photo by Pernille Klemp. © The David Collection, Copenhagen. Inventory no. 50/1981. All rights reserved. Cover design by Heidi Coburn. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers To Aditya’s memory, once again Contents Acknowledgements ix Note on Transliteration xi Note on Dating Systems xii List of Illustrations xiii Notes on Contributors xv Introduction 1 Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield I. Between Texts and Practices 1. The Example in Dadupanthi Homiletics 31 Monika Horstmann 2. Making it Vernacular in Agra: The Practice of Translation by Seventeenth-Century Jains 61 John E. Cort 3. World Enough and Time: Religious Strategy and Historical Imagination in an Indian Sufi Tale 107 Muzaffar Alam 4. Hearing Mo‘jizat in South Asian Shi‘ism 137 Amy Bard II. Books and Performances, Books for Performance 5. Note to Self: What Marathi Kirtankars ’ Notebooks Suggest about Literacy, Performance, and the Travelling Performer in Pre-Colonial Maharashtra 169 Christian Lee Novetzke 6. A Handbook for Storytellers: The Ṭirāz al-akhbār and the Qissa Genre 185 Pasha M. Khan 7. Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-pur ā ṇa ? 209 John Stratton Hawley 8. Text, Orality, and Performance in Newar Devotional Music 231 Richard Widdess III. Written Clues about Performed Texts 9. Listening for the Context: Tuning in to the Reception of Riti Poetry 249 Allison Busch 10. Reading the Acts and Lives of Performers in Mughal Persian Texts 283 Sunil Sharma 11. Persian Poets on the Streets: The Lore of Indo-Persian Poetic Circles in Late Mughal India 303 Stefano Pellò 12. Texts and Tellings: Kathas in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 327 Francesca Orsini 13. A Curious King, a Psychic Leper, and the Workings of Karma : Bajid’s Entertaining Narratives 359 Imre Bangha IV. Musical Knowledge and Aesthetics 14. Raga in the Early Sixteenth Century 385 Allyn Miner 15. Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika 407 Katherine Butler Schofield 16. Patterns of Composition in the Seventeenth-Century Bengali Literature of Arakan 423 Thibaut d’Hubert 17. The Musical Lives of Texts: Rhythms and Communal Relationships among the Nizamis and Some of Their Neighbours in South and West Asia 445 Richard K. Wolf Glossary 485 Bibliography 493 Index 535 Acknowledgements This volume brings together the papers presented at the third and final conference of the AHRC-funded project “North Indian Literary Culture and History from a Multilingual Perspective: 1450-1650”, which Francesca ran at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) between 2006-2009 and in which Katherine was intimately involved from start to finish. The conference was initially entitled “Tellings, Not Texts”, but over the course of the three days it became clear that texts were very much involved in many of the performance forms and traditions we were discussing, hence the change of title. (The first conference volume, After Timur Left , came out in 2014 from Oxford University Press, New Delhi, co-edited by Francesca and Samira Sheikh.) We would first of all like to thank the AHRC for its generous support. The conference, which took place on 8-10 June 2009, benefited from a British Academy conference support grant, for which we are also grateful, as we are to the European Research Council which supported Katherine’s contributions in the latter stages. We would like here to heartily thank all the contributors for their patience and good humour as we asked for more and more changes. We thank Alessandra Tosi for her enthusiasm and welcome, and Dr David Lunn for careful copy-editing. Our dear friend Aditya Behl helped plan the conference and was supposed to come, but was in the end too ill to travel. He died, tragically young, two months later. We would like to dedicate the volume to him, for he remains in our thoughts and in our love. FO and KBS London and Cambridge, July 2015 Note on Transliteration A volume of this kind inevitably has a large number of transliterated words in several languages. To make the text readable without sacrificing its scholarly appeal, we have chosen to use diacritical marks for book titles and direct quotations, and to keep them to a minimum elsewhere; in some instances, notably where metrical considerations are important, they are used more extensively. For Devanagari, the transliteration used follows R.S. McGregor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), with the exception that nasalised vowels are transliterated with a ṃ instead of ṁ. For Persian words, we have slightly adapted existing systems as below. In spite of our efforts, we have not achieved complete consistency. ا A ب B پ P ت T ث S̱ ج J چ CH ح Ḥ خ KH د D ذ Ẕ ر R ز Z ژ ZH س S ش SH ص Ṣ ض Ż ط Ṭ ظ Ẓ ع ‘ غ GH ف F ق Q ک K گ G ل L م M ن N و W,V, Ū (O only if specified as majhul ) H ه ی Y, Ī (E only if specified as majhul ) short vowels: a, i, u Note on Dating Systems This volume necessarily makes reference to four discrete calendrical systems. Where otherwise unmarked, we use the Common/Christian Era (Anno Domini), denoted “CE”. The Islamic calendar (denoted “AH”: Anno Hegirae, or Hijri year), commenced in the year 622 CE. A lunar calendar, it does not correspond directly to the Gregorian Calendar, and the year 2015 CE is 1436-37 AH. The Vikram Samvat calendar, denoted “VS”, is between 56-57 years ahead of the Common Era, thus 2015 CE covers 2071-72 VS. Finally, the Banggabda or Bengali Calendar, denoted “BA”, is between 593-94 years behind the Common Era, thus 2015 CE is 1421-22 BA. Both VS and BA are solar calendars, but do not begin in January, so there is no precise overlap with CE. List of Illustrations 5.1 (L) Jnaneshwari Stamp, issued in 1990 to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the composition of the Jñāneśvarī ; (R) “Saint Dnyaneshwar” stamp, issued in 1997 in memory of Jnaneswhar/ Jnandev. Public Domain. 171 5.2 Namdev Performing a Kirtan , folio from a nineteenth-century publication of Mahipati’s eighteenth-century biography [1890]. Public Domain. 173 5.3 Four typical badas or “notebooks” in the collection of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Author’s photograph, CC BY. 175 5.4 Transcript of a kirtan from a Marathi bada , c. eighteenth century. Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Author’s photograph, CC BY. 178 5.5 A representative page from Lohiya, K. 1997. Kirtan mārga darśik ā (Pune: Sharada Sahitya), pp. 194-95. All rights reserved. 179 5.6 (L) section is taken from the Śrī Nāmdev g ā thā (1970), p. 343; (R) is taken from the Bhaktavijay 1996 [1762], pp. 164-65. Image by the author, CC BY. 181 8.1 Dapha group performing in Suryamarhi Square, Bhaktapur. September 2007. Author’s photograph, CC BY. 233 8.2 Raga Lalit. Bhaktapur, early seventeenth century. Photograph by Gert-Matthias Wegner, CC BY. 235 8.3 Dapha group performing at the Taleju temple, Kathmandu, in 1664. Detail of a painting now in the Collège de France, Paris. Author’s sketch, CC BY. 237 8.4 Ganamani Dattatreya Navadapha songbook, song no. 63 (fol. 20r-20v). Public Domain. 239 8.5 One side of the Bhairav Navadapha group performing on the first day of Biskah, Tahmarhi Square, Bhaktapur. The chariot of Bhairav is visible behind the singers. April 2003. Author’s photograph, CC BY. 244 Notes on Contributors Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of, among others, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India (1986) and The Languages of Political Islam in India: c.1200-1800 (2004); and, with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, of Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (2011). Imre Bangha is Associate Professor of Hindi at the University of Oxford. He studied Indology in Budapest and holds a PhD in Hindi from Visva- Bharati. His publications include English, Hindi, and Hungarian books and articles on Brajbhasha and other forms of early Hindi with special focus on the poetic works of Anandghan, Thakur, Vishnudas, Tulsidas, Kabir, and Bajid, as well as on Rekhta literature in the Nagari script. Amy Bard teaches Urdu and Hindi language and literature at Harvard University. In addition to her work on Shi’i religiosity, Bard’s current projects include translating contemporary memoirs and autobiographical fiction from Hindi and Urdu to English. Allison Busch is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her expertise is in Hindi literature, and she also has a special interest in Mughal-period court culture. Her recent monograph Poetry of Kings came out from Oxford University Press in 2011. Professor Busch is the editor (with Thomas de Bruijn) of Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India (2014), a collection of essays that explores relationships across literary languages in South Asia. One ongoing research project concerns the historical poetry produced in Rajput kingdoms during the heyday of Mughal rule. She is also working (with xvi Tellings and Texts the art historian Molly Aitken) on a book about aesthetic representations of the Indian heroine across the arts. John E. Cort is Professor of Asian and Comparative Religions at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. He is the author of Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India (2001), Framing the Jina: Narratives of Icons and Idols in Jain History (2010), and, with Lawrence A. Babb and Michael W. Meister, Desert Temples: Sacred Centers of Rajasthan in Historical, Art-Historical and Social Contexts (2008), as well as many articles on the Jains and on religion and culture in western India. He has edited Open Boundaries: Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History (1998) and, with Andrea Luithle-Hardenberg and Leslie C. Orr, the forthcoming Cooperation and Competition, Conflict and Contribution: The Jain Community, British Expansion, and Jainological Scholarship, 1800-1950 Thibaut d’Hubert is assistant professor at the University of Chicago where he teaches Bengali language and literature in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. His main field of research is the literary history of Bengal. His research interests include Indic and Persian poetics, the editing of premodern Bengali texts, the study of scribal practices, South Asian traditional hermeneutics, and the history of translation. He is currently working on a book project on the Bengali poet Alaol (fl.1651- 1671) and the formation of vernacular Muslim literatures around the Bay of Bengal (c. sixteenth–seventeenth centuries). With Alexandre Papas (CNRS/ CETOBAC, Paris), he is preparing a handbook on the reception of the works of the Persian polymath of Herat ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami (1414-1492) based on material presented by various scholars during two conferences held in Chicago (2012) and Paris (2013). John Stratton Hawley —informally, Jack—is Professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. Two books in which he has long been involved have recently appeared from Harvard University Press: Sur’s Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition (with Kenneth E. Bryant), one of the initial volumes in the Murty Classical Library of India, and A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement Monika Horstmann (a.k.a. Monika Boehm-Tettelbach) retired as Head of the Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on early modern North Indian literatures and religious movements and on the interface Notes on Contributors xvii between religion and politics. Recent books include Der Zusammenhang der Welt (2009) and Jaipur 1778: The Making of a King (2013), and a volume co-edited with Heidi R.M. Pauwels, Indian Satire in the Period of First Modernity (2012). Pasha M. Khan is Chair in Urdu Language and Culture and an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Among other subjects, he has written about the shahr-āshob genre of Urdu poetry (in Nationalism in the Vernacular , ed. by Shobna Nijhawan, 2009), and on the line between history and romance in the Shahnamah ( Indian Economic and Social History Review , 2012). At present he is working on a book tentatively entitled The Broken Spell , which deals with the the art of storytelling ( dāst ā n- go’ī ), the lives of storytellers, and the relationship between between Urdu/ Persian stories and histories in India from the beginning of the Mughal era to the twentieth century. Allyn Miner is a Lecturer in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches sitar performance and courses on music and dance. She has a PhD in Musicology from Banaras Hindu University and a PhD in Sanskrit from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests centre on Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit texts related to music and the social history of music in various periods in North India. Her book Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries (1997) is a standard reference work on the history of the sitar. Her translation of the Saṅgītopaniṣatsāroddhāra examines developments in music theory in fourteenth-century Gujarat. Christian Lee Novetzke is Professor of South Asia Studies, Comparative Religion, and International Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work explores the histories, cultures, and religions of South Asia from the medieval period to the modern and contemporary. Novetzke’s work includes three books: Religion and Public Memory (2008 and 2009); The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and Everyday Life in Premodern India (2017); and Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation , written with Andy Rotman and William Elison (2016). Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research spans modern and contemporary Hindi literature ( The Hindi Public Sphere: xviii Tellings and Texts Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, 2002), cultural history (she edited Love in South Asia: A Cultural History , 2006), popular literature and the history of the book ( Print and Pleasure: The Genres of Commercial Publishing in Nineteenth-century North India , 2009), and multilingual literary history ( Hindi and Urdu Before the Divide , 2010; After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-century North India , co-edited with S. Sheikh, 2014). Stefano Pellò is Lecturer in Persian and Indo-Persian studies at the University “Ca’ Foscari” of Venice, and has been Visiting Lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at Columbia University, New York. His main research area is currently the diffusion and reception of Persian linguistic and literary culture in and beyond South Asia, and the related cosmopolitan processes of cultural and aesthetic interaction, particularly in the poetic sphere. He has also published studies on the traditional Persian philological and rhetorical disciplines and works as a literary translator. Among his main publications are Tutiyān-e Hind , a book on the history of Persian grammatical writings ( Dabistan-i Parsi: Una grammatica persiana del XIX secolo , 2003), and the first Italian complete annotated translation of the Divan of Hafez of Shiraz (2005). Katherine Butler Schofield (née Brown) is a historian of music in Mughal India and the colonial Indian Ocean. Working largely with Persian sources for Hindustani music c.1570-1860, she has established music as central to Mughal technologies of sovereignty and selfhood, identified classicisation processes at work in early modern Indian arts, examined the role of connoisseurship in nourishing male friendships, told tales about ill-fated courtesans and overweening ustads , and traced the lineage of the chief musicians to the Mughal emperors from Akbar to Bahadur Shah Zafar. Her current European Research Council project, “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean” (2011- 2015), investigates the ways in which the musical field was transformed in India and the Malay world c.1750-1900 as pre-colonial polities gave way to colonial regimes. As part of this project she is co-writing a book, Hindustani Music Between Empires: Alternative Histories Sunil Sharma is Professor of Persianate and Comparative Literature at Boston University. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of two monographs: Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier: Mas‘ūd Sa‘d Salmān of Lahore (2000) and Amir Khusraw: The Poet of Sultans Notes on Contributors xix and Sufis (2005); two collaborative works: Atiya’s Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain (2010) and In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau (2011); and co-editor of two volumes of essays: Necklace of the Pleiades: Studies in Persian Literature Presented to Heshmat Moayyad on his 80th Birthday (2007) and On the Wonders of Land and Sea: Persianate Travel Writing (2013). He has written numerous articles and co-curated several exhibitions at Harvard University. His research interests are in the areas of Persianate literary and visual cultures, translation, and travel writing. Richard Widdess is Professor of Musicology in the Department of Music, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research and teaching focus on the classical and religious musical traditions of South Asia, with reference to history, theory, ethnography, music analysis, and cognition. He has written three books on South Asian music: on The Rāgas of Early Indian Music (1995), tracing evidence for the development of the raga concept to c.1250; Dhrupad (with Ritwik Sanyal, 2004), on the oldest style of North Indian classical singing; and Dāphā: Sacred Singing in a South Asian City (2013), a study of the music of temple singing groups in Bhaktapur, Nepal. His current research addresses the cognitive and cultural significance of musical structure in contexts of orality. Richard K. Wolf is Professor of Music and South Asian Studies at Harvard University. His books and articles consider musical and social issues of language, emotion, poetics, time, space, and religious experience. Wolf also performs concerts internationally on the South Indian vīṇā . In recent years his field investigations have expanded from South Asia to Central and West Asia. His most recent single-authored book, The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia (2014), is a hybrid ethnomusicological study written in the form of a novel.