Delight, devotion, and the music of the monsoon at the court of Emperor Shah Alam II

TY - CHAP

T1 - Delight, devotion, and the music of the monsoon at the court of Emperor Shah Alam II

AU - Schofield, Katherine Ruth

AU - Lunn, David

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - What happened to rāga gauṇḍ? The immense popularity of this musical mode through the course of the 18th and 19th centuries is attested by its profuse appearance in several major poetical/lyrical collections, most notably the Nādirāt-e shāhī, a compendium of the "choicest examples" of the multilingual poetry of the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II ‘Aftāb’ (Delhi, 1797). Yet, by the 20th century, gauṇḍ seems to have been confined to the Sikh tradition, preserved especially in its scriptural home, the Guru granth sahib. This is a puzzle.Yet tracing the history of rāga gauṇḍ is not merely an exercise in recovering a lost, modified, or discarded musical mode. The association of the rāga with the monsoon allows us to examine the particular associations of this mode with emotions and performance practices during the intellectual and cultural transition through colonialism in modern India—and in particular its place at the court of the Emperor Shah Alam II. In doing so, this paper will posit an argument for the necessity of examining multiple artistic forms—and their somewhat distinct but overlapping and inter-related genealogies of knowledge—, and doing so across languages, to obtaining anything close to a nuanced picture of the intellectual and cultural endeavours that were ongoing in the transition from late Mughal to early colonial North India.

AB - What happened to rāga gauṇḍ? The immense popularity of this musical mode through the course of the 18th and 19th centuries is attested by its profuse appearance in several major poetical/lyrical collections, most notably the Nādirāt-e shāhī, a compendium of the "choicest examples" of the multilingual poetry of the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II ‘Aftāb’ (Delhi, 1797). Yet, by the 20th century, gauṇḍ seems to have been confined to the Sikh tradition, preserved especially in its scriptural home, the Guru granth sahib. This is a puzzle.Yet tracing the history of rāga gauṇḍ is not merely an exercise in recovering a lost, modified, or discarded musical mode. The association of the rāga with the monsoon allows us to examine the particular associations of this mode with emotions and performance practices during the intellectual and cultural transition through colonialism in modern India—and in particular its place at the court of the Emperor Shah Alam II. In doing so, this paper will posit an argument for the necessity of examining multiple artistic forms—and their somewhat distinct but overlapping and inter-related genealogies of knowledge—, and doing so across languages, to obtaining anything close to a nuanced picture of the intellectual and cultural endeavours that were ongoing in the transition from late Mughal to early colonial North India.

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9789386906472

BT - Monsoon feelings

A2 - Rajamani, Imke

A2 - Pernau, Margrit

A2 - Schofield, Katherine Butler

PB - Niyogi

CY - New Delhi

ER -