'Words without songs’: the social history of Hindustani song collections in India's Muslim courts, c.1770-1830

TY - CHAP

T1 - 'Words without songs’

T2 - the social history of Hindustani song collections in India's Muslim courts, c.1770-1830

AU - Schofield, Katherine Butler

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - In his important book on Ottoman song collections, Words without songs, Owen Wright noted that “it is fair to say that such works have failed to receive the attention which the evident popularity of the genre would seem to justify. Reasons for neglect would not be hard to seek: the güfte mecmuası belongs functionally to the realm of music, but the early examples, for which there is little or no access to the accompanying melodies, could now be thought of as primarily literary in relevance as well as content, while for the musicologist the crucial absence of any notation has presumably meant that they have generally been deemed insufficiently informative to warrant detailed investigation.”This could equally be said to be true of research on pre-colonial song collections in North India. In South Asian studies, the song collection as a literary genre has received considerable attention in certain areas of scholarship, most notably in religious studies where collections of sung poetry form the major corpus for the study of bhakti and Sikh traditions. To a more limited extent, written collections of the prestigious courtly genre dhrupad have been mined for their literary implications by Prem Lata Sharma and Nalini Delvoye; and more recently Francesca Orsini has drawn new social history out of the contents of printed miscellanies of Hindi and Urdu songs from the nineteenth century.What has not so far been considered is the musicological and social significance of a significant corpus of collections of lighter courtly songs, predominantly khayal, tappa, ghazal and tarana, that emerged in unprecedented number in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and circulated right across and beyond North India from Bharuch to Calcutta and from Kathmandu to Hyderabad. While many such collections were produced for Muslim elite patrons in courts such as Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, a significant number were written for or purchased by European collectors resident in these locations, including women. In this chapter I will be looking not so much at the song texts contained within these manuscripts, but at the different logics behind the making of such collections c.1780-1820. In doing so, I hope both to elaborate what song collections can tell us musically even in the absence of notation, and to make some preliminary observations about the changing state of patronage in the Indian musical field at a critical moment of transition for Muslim courts towards British political dominance.

AB - In his important book on Ottoman song collections, Words without songs, Owen Wright noted that “it is fair to say that such works have failed to receive the attention which the evident popularity of the genre would seem to justify. Reasons for neglect would not be hard to seek: the güfte mecmuası belongs functionally to the realm of music, but the early examples, for which there is little or no access to the accompanying melodies, could now be thought of as primarily literary in relevance as well as content, while for the musicologist the crucial absence of any notation has presumably meant that they have generally been deemed insufficiently informative to warrant detailed investigation.”This could equally be said to be true of research on pre-colonial song collections in North India. In South Asian studies, the song collection as a literary genre has received considerable attention in certain areas of scholarship, most notably in religious studies where collections of sung poetry form the major corpus for the study of bhakti and Sikh traditions. To a more limited extent, written collections of the prestigious courtly genre dhrupad have been mined for their literary implications by Prem Lata Sharma and Nalini Delvoye; and more recently Francesca Orsini has drawn new social history out of the contents of printed miscellanies of Hindi and Urdu songs from the nineteenth century.What has not so far been considered is the musicological and social significance of a significant corpus of collections of lighter courtly songs, predominantly khayal, tappa, ghazal and tarana, that emerged in unprecedented number in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and circulated right across and beyond North India from Bharuch to Calcutta and from Kathmandu to Hyderabad. While many such collections were produced for Muslim elite patrons in courts such as Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, a significant number were written for or purchased by European collectors resident in these locations, including women. In this chapter I will be looking not so much at the song texts contained within these manuscripts, but at the different logics behind the making of such collections c.1780-1820. In doing so, I hope both to elaborate what song collections can tell us musically even in the absence of notation, and to make some preliminary observations about the changing state of patronage in the Indian musical field at a critical moment of transition for Muslim courts towards British political dominance.

KW - Indian history

KW - Hindustani music

KW - Ethnomusicology

KW - Mughal India

KW - South Asia

KW - Persian Literature

KW - Urdu literature

KW - Hindi literature

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9781138218314

T3 - SOAS Musicology Series

BT - Tuning the past

A2 - Harris, Rachel

A2 - Stokes, Martin

PB - London: Routledge

CY - Abingdon

ER -