Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India

Abstract

AcknowledgementsThis 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 KBSLondon and Cambridge, July 2015 Note on TransliterationA 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. V, Ū (O only if specified as majhul) ‫ﻩ‬ H ‫ﯼ‬ Y, Ī (E only if specified as majhul)short vowels: a, i, u Note on Dating SystemsThis 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, d...