Music, Lyrics, and the Bengali Book: Hindustani Musicology in Calcutta, 1818–1905

Abstract

Grateful thanks are extended to Katherine Butler Schofield, Richard Widdess, Francis Robinson, and the journal's anonymous peer reviewers for their comments and suggestions. 1 'Hindustani' here refers to the language (loosely, the predecessor of modern Hindi and Urdu) and culture of Hindustança region of central northern Indiaçassociated predominantly with Delhi and Lucknow. 2 Clearly music publishing continued after this period, but increasingly with a different set of priorities relating to the advance of gramophone recording, which are beyond the purview of the current discussion. 1818 and 1905 were the years of publication of the earliest and latest works discussed in this essay. 3 While the Mughal Empire (1526^1857) spread across the subcontinent, the cultural heartlands of the Empire were in the north, especially in Hindustan. The Empire continued until the suppression of the so-called 'Sepoy Mutiny' and Uprising (1857), but had been in a state of decline and collapse from the early 18th c. 4 While Anglophone scholarship conventionally employs 'musicology' as a translation of the 19th-c. concept Musikwissenschaft, in this article the term refers to the systematic and canonical epistemology of music that developed in the South Asian context. On the ethnocentrism and exclusionary consequences of Western music historiography, see

“There is no modesty or shame in this city”: What Bengalis Heard in Colonial Burma, c. 1900

“…However, following in the wake of South Asian soldiers and workers from the subcontinent, by the 1880s, singers, nautch girls, and theater companies from the subcontinent were routinely visiting Rangoon to perform in temporary theaters or the compounds of wealthy merchants (Singer 1995b, 121-23). Dancing girls and courtesans from northern India also settled in the city for longer periods of time, and while the anti-nautch campaign stormed in South Asia (Williams 2017;Morcom 2013), British administrators in Rangoon continued to assess the blurred lines between sex work and musical labor: writing about the 1920s, Andrew noted many South Asian women would pose as dancing girls or singers but are really prostitutes. There is another class who are really dancers and singers.…”

“…Here the beloved robs them of their life-what magic this is! (Ali 1903b, 12) Misogyny aside, it is striking how Najir Ali associates a woman's seductive power with her singing voice, a motif that circulated in Bengal and north India in the same period in discussions about courtesans and their techniques (Williams 2017). This verse also indicates how Parsi Theatre performers performed a multilingual repertoire: perhaps that evening they had noted the number of Bengalis in attendance, and had specifically chosen to sing in Bengali to appeal to the "local" audience from faraway Chittagong.…”

Playing the Spinal Chord: Tantric Musicology and Bengali Songs in the Nineteenth Century

“…When Aghornāth Tattvanidhi described how he had consulted music connoisseurs on the preparation of the song texts for printing, he could have been referring to different kinds of expertise: the applied knowledge of the court singer (gāýak) but also of the informed and appreciative listener (bhābukgaṇ). Over the nineteenth century, a new class of bhadralok music enthusiasts invested themselves in the theory and practice of music, resulting in the proliferation of books in Bengali on musicology (Williams 2016). These authors re-worked the older discipline of music theory and aesthetics (often termed saṅgīta-śāstra or 'ilm-imūsīqī) that had been cultivated by early-modern intellectuals working in Sanskrit, Persian and vernacular languages (Rowell 1992;Te Nijenhuis 1977;Te Nijenhuis and Delvoye 2010;Bhatkhande 1984).…”

“…These collections provided a significant resource for worship and the practice of sacred music. As songbooks, they might also be read as one facet of an explosion in Bengali musical publishing, that escalated over the second half of the nineteenth century (Williams 2016). This article considers these two dimensions of the song collection-as a śākta tool of worship and as an exercise in musical editorial-and examines how Bengali songbooks drew connections between the discipline of music theory and the bodily techniques of tantric Śāktism.…”

Salacious Songs: Khemṭā Dance and Participatory Printed Media in Nineteenth-Century North India

“…From the 1840s onwards, songbooks were an especially popular product of the North Indian book industry (Orsini, 2009: 81-105;Williams, 2016).1 From cheap chapbooks to multi-volume tomes, collections of lyrics covered a range of tastes and genres, appealing to very different social settings and performance practices. This essay considers the worlds of music-making invoked by these books through a case study of khemṭā.…”