152 research outputs found
Persian Poets on the Streets: The Lore of Indo-Persian Poetic Circles in Late Mughal India
Full text linkA good deal of the work on literature in the North Indian vernaculars over the last decades has been, perhaps out of necessity, somewhat narrowly philological. This volume, however, marks a new stage of collective development in the field. Any scholar interested in current directions in South Asian humanities should find the papers exciting. Tellings and Texts, however, is much more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, it is hard to express how well put-together this volume is. Much too often edited books even on a fairly well-defined topic consist of separate chapters that appear mostly independent of one another, with section divisions that seem somewhat forced and not particularly coherent. This volume, by contrast, really does read as a well-executed whole, with the papers referencing one another generously and a progression from one nicely conceived section to the next.
— Daniel Gold, Professor of South-Asian Religions, Cornell University
Examining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Textsbrings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some of the best scholars in the field cover a wide range of literary genres and social and cultural contexts across the region.
The texts and practices are contextualized in relation to the broader social and political background in which they emerged, showing how religious affiliations, caste dynamics and political concerns played a role in shaping social identities as well as aesthetic sensibilities. By doing so this book sheds light into theoretical issues of more general significance, such as textual versus oral norms; the features of oral performance and improvisation; the role of the text in performance; the aesthetics and social dimension of performance; the significance of space in performance history and important considerations on repertoires of story-telling. The book also contains links to audio files of some of the works discussed in the text.
Tellings and Texts is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian culture and, more generally, in the theory and practice of oral literature, performance and story-telling.
King’s College London has generously contributed towards the publication of this volume
Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean: Final Summary Report
No full textKatherine Butler Schofield. 2016. "Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean: Final Summary Report." European Research Council. Project ID 263643; Principal Investigator Katherine Butler Schofield. .
The main finding of our project was that "precolonial knowledge systems did not consecutively give way to transitional, then colonial knowledge systems. Instead, reformism was but one strand among many thriving lineages of knowledge that competed for precedence in dynamic musical economies during the colonial era. These streams were facilitated or altered in their course by colonial presence and action, but the vast majority were not beholden to colonial epistemologies. In seeking to account for these economies while never losing sight of the coercive colonial context that shaped them, we have developed the concept of “paracolonial” knowledge systems (after Stephanie Newell), denoting lineages of knowledge that continued, developed, and were born and died alongside and beyond the colonial. The paracolonial enables us to account for the many otherwise unaccountable regional musical practices and knowledges that coexisted, waxed, and waned in differing relations to European power and culture during the years conventionally marked off as the “colonial period”. It also makes sense of the persistence of older forms and ideas long after independence in India and the Malay world." (Katherine Butler Schofield, 2016
The SHAMSA database 1.0 – Sources for the History and Analysis of Music/Dance in South Asia, c. 1700–1900. (Version 1.0)
No full textThe SHAMSA bibliographical database and digital collection has been developed as part of the European Research Council project Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean (MUSTECIO, Grant no. 263643, PI Katherine Butler Schofield, 2011–2015/16). The attached xlsx document, licensed as a CC-BY-NC resource, provides the bibliographical metadata of Version 1.0 of the database. It describes well over 300 major written sources c. 1700-1900 for the history and analysis of North Indian music and dance in Mughal and British-colonial South Asia. About one third – well over 100 – of these sources are also currently held in digital copies in the Department of Music at King’s College London. The SHAMSA digital collection already constitutes the largest single repository of major primary sources on Indian music and dance in the world, and is planned to be a major ongoing resource for future researchers on Indian music and cultural history
Delight, devotion, and the music of the monsoon at the court of Emperor Shah Alam II
No full textWhat 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.<br/
Speculative Literature in Modern Society: Octavia Butler and the Tragedy of the Commons
Full text linkWhat leads to peaceful prosperity and what leads to destructive collapse in any society? While it may seem daunting or overwhelming to dissect the success or collapse of a multi-faceted society, there are lenses and tools through which we are able to do so, such as political theory and speculative dystopian fiction. By using lenses to analyze the society in which we live, we are able to recognize the seeds of both prosperity and destruction in our society that may otherwise be overlooked or ignored. The speculative dystopian fiction of Octavia Butler may be considered as building upon the political theory of the tragedy of the commons. Butler provides her American audience an analysis of the root causes of this tragedy, as well as some possible preventative measures or solutions. We are able to read her novel, The Parable of the Sower, as a warning against ignoring current trends in our society which could lead to our tragedy of the commons. Octavia Butler was an American author of speculative dystopian fiction, and was the first science fiction novelist to be awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 1955. She was born in California on June 22, 1947 and died in Washington on January 24, 2006. Butler was well-known for critiquing social hierarchies and inequalities as well as for exploring what forms healthy, sustainable communities. Her first novel in her Parable Series, The Parable of the Sower, introduces Butler’s reader to a broken community in a divided society after an environmental apocalypse. Through her protagonist, Lauren Olamina, Butler shows her reader the flaws and failures in society that lead to the community’s collapse as well as how a community can be rebuilt
The SHAMSA database 1.0 – Sources for the History and Analysis of Music/Dance in South Asia, c. 1700–1900.
No full text<p>The SHAMSA* bibliographical database and digital collection has been developed as part of the European Research Council project Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean (MUSTECIO, Grant no. 263643, PI Katherine Butler Schofield, 2011–2015/16). The attached xlsx document, licensed as a CC-BY-NC resource, provides the bibliographical metadata of Version 1.0 of the database. It describes well over 300 major written sources c. 1700-1900 for the history and analysis of North Indian (Hindustani) music and dance in Mughal and British-colonial South Asia. About one third – well over 100 – of these sources are also currently held in digital copies in the Department of Music at King’s College London. The SHAMSA digital collection already constitutes the largest single repository of primary written sources on Indian music and dance in the world, and is planned to be a major ongoing resource for future researchers on Indian music, dance, and cultural history.</p>
<p>The sources of SHAMSA 1.0 were located and consulted Jan 2011– Dec 2015 by members of the Awadh Case Study of the ERC Musical Transitions project, including James Kippen, David Lunn, Allyn Miner, Katherine Butler Schofield, Margaret E Walker, and Richard David Williams. The initial collection has clearly defined limits: it 1) focusses on the Gangetic plains region between Delhi, Lucknow, and Calcutta; 2) during the timeframe c. 1700-1900 i.e. explicitly before the era of recorded sound (but with some key 17C and 20C outliers, and some materials from e.g. Hyderabad, Kashmir). 3) The linguistic focus of the collection is on works largely in Persian, Brajbhasha/Hindavi, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, but with some works in Sanskrit, English, and other Northern Indian vernacular languages. Sources include music and dance treatises, biographical works (tazkiras), song collections, ethnographic works, department archives, encyclopedias, cosmographies, theatre scripts, moral and ethical tracts, histories, and a tiny handful of the large number of extant ragamala painting sets (for a comprehensive treatment of ragamala sets see e.g. Ebeling 1973 and the <a href="http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM08400.html">Ebeling digital image collection</a> at Cornell).</p>
<p>It is critically important to note that this is by no means a complete collection of everything written on music and dance in Northern India in the period of transition from the Mughal to the British empires. We have been completely overwhelmed by the volume and richness of the materials we have uncovered for the history of music and dance before the period of recorded sound. This bibilography should be considered a mere starting point; we are already aware of a large number of sources, especially visual, that we have not yet included. Version 1.0 consists only of (largely) textual sources that at least one of the team members personally consulted 2011–15, and considered to include substantial and noteworthy musical and/or dance-related contents (very occasionally key sources are also included that we know about, but have been unable to locate yet despite our best efforts.)</p>
<p>We know that there are many more written and visual sources for North Indian forms of music and dance beyond the geographical, temporal, and/or linguistic scope of the current version of this database – for example for Panjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, etc. – but even considering our core region and timeframe we keep uncovering more sources all the time, and aim to update the open access versions of the database periodically. We would be delighted to hear from anyone who has information about sources that are not yet in our database that we might be able to consult and include, or about any verifiable errors in the metadata that need correcting.</p>
<p>Well over one third of the works in the bibliographical file are already available to consult as digital copies in situ at King’s College London. The copyright statuses of these copies are exceedingly complex; but we aim to make as many of these available via Creative Commons licenses as and when we gain approval from the holders of the original documents to do so. Please do <a href="https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/music/people/acad/butlerschofield/index.aspx">get in touch</a> with Dr Katherine Schofield at King’s College London if you wish to consult the digital copies in the SHAMSA collection, or if you have suggestions of works whose metadata should be included in the bibliographical list. (Version 1.0 was completed 1 Jan 2016, and checked/exported 2 Oct 2018.)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>*Deriving from the Persian word "shams", meaning "sun", a shamsa is both a ray of solar light often indicating the bestowal of special knowledge or enlightenment, and the technical term for an illuminated orb-like frontispiece in Islamicate manuscripts that often encloses the patron's name, titles, and/or portrait — see for example the beautiful shamsa for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan that adorns the SHAMSA Community page (Metropolitan Museum of Art). In later lithographed works on music in Urdu, the title of the manuscript would often be enclosed in a shamsa. But the name SHAMSA also pays homage to the first Persian treatise on North Indian music written by an imperial hereditary musician, the Shams al-Aswat by Ras Baras Khan (1698), in which he named shams as the presiding star of the musical note Ma, the fourth scale degree (MUSTECIO 0131/British Library, I O Islamic 1746, f. 19r).</p>Katherine Butler Schofield's 2018 British Academy Fellowship "Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India, 1748–1858" builds substantially on the SHAMSA database and digital collection, and aims to bring many of its treasures to public attention, particularly those housed in the British Library's Asian and African Studies collection
Tellings and Texts
No full textExamining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Texts brings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some of the best scholars in the field cover a wide range of literary genres and social and cultural contexts across the region. By doing so this book sheds light into theoretical issues of more general significance, such as textual versus oral norms; the features of oral performance and improvisation; the role of the text in performance; the aesthetics and social dimension of performance; the significance of space in performance history and important considerations on repertoires of music, literature and dramatization. Tellings and Texts is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian culture and, more generally, in the theory and practice of oral literature, performance and storytelling
Songs of the Sufi:The Untold Story of Classical Qawwali
No full textIn an unbroken chain spanning over 800 years, a form of music has inspired, entranced & enlightened people. Songs of the Sufi takes viewers on a musical and artistic journey that catalogues traditional “Qawwali”, the mystical music tradition of the Indian Subcontinent associated with 13th-century Sufi seminaries, which is enjoyed globally today.The story is told from the lens of two families—A Qawwali lover who grew up with Qawwali around him, his mother a Sufi disciple who reminisces about her listening experiences as a teenager in India; and Qawwali singers who have been paying homage to this genre for 25 generations. Live performances of various Qawwalis, the use of secret syllables and odes written in the 13th century blend with modern Qawwalis to create a meditative visual and listening experience. Dr. Katherine Schofield, a renowned musicologist shares her scholarly insights. The film explores the history, culture, etiquette, and the universal message of love that Qawwali embodies
- …
