15. Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika

Abstract

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 2015This 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 Illustrations5.1 (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. 5.2 Namdev Performing a Kirtan, folio from a nineteenth-century publication of Mahipati's eighteenth-century biography [1890]. Public Domain. 5.3 Four typical badas or "notebooks" in the collection of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Author's photograph, CC BY. 5.4 Transcript of a kirtan from a Marathi bada, c. eighteenth century.

Bandīś-s in khayāl of Indian classical music: a study of selected song-texts with special reference to the bandīś-s of sadāraṇg in Hindustani music

“…Many dhrupad song-texts deal with music in its theoretical and technical about Sangīt Ratnākar and other musical treatises [19]. The pada-s or texts provide important information on socio-religious background, particularly the Hindu Muslim culture of the Mughal period, with Hindu artists employed in a Muslim court [20].…”

Arabic utterances in a multilingual world: Shāh Walī-Allāh and Qur’anic translatability in North India

“…Among several detailed comparisons, Walī-Allāh refers to the Indian system of musical modes, specifying that the people of India had devised six principal rāgas and elaborated them into rāginīs. This is a system he may have been familiar with through Persian translations of Sanskrit musical treatises and as a repertoire of aesthetic practice cultivated by others in his milieu (Schofield 2015).…”

Emotions in Indian music history: anxiety in late Mughal Hindustan

“…No musician would ever wish to disgust their listeners with bībhatsa rasa, for instance; indeed, in Mughal-era treatises patrons were strictly enjoined not to employ musicians who might disgust their guests. 42 In any case, of far greater importance than the rasas per se to Mughal understandings of the correct emotional effect of each rāga, was the powerful hold over the Mughal imagination of the rāgamālā tradition of painting the six male rāgas and thirty female rāginīs as heroes, heroines, semidivine beings, and deities in standardized but vivid and complex emotional scenarios. 43 These richly layered icons allowed a more expansive range of emotional shades connected with key rasas to be enjoyed through musical listening.…”