1,720,974 research outputs found
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/
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
The courtesan tale:Female musicians and dancers in Mughal historical chronicles
No full textThere are many problems in trying to construct a history of female musicians and dancers in Mughal North India. Such women appear frequently in Mughal writings and apparently played an important role in elite society; there is clearly much we can learn from such sources about gender and class in the empire generally, as well as female performers more specifically. However, what evidence we have is written from the perspective of their male patrons and cast according to long-standing rhetorical and cultural conventions concerning the fateful roles of music and love in historical events. In this article I examine how Mughal historical chronicles transform named female performers into stereotyped agents of the downfall of noblemen. Using the stories of several historical courtesans, I demonstrate how stock topoi of desire, enslavement, longing, rebellion, danger, fate and above all musical and erotic power, were used to shape all stories of courtesans into tragic cautionary tales. I aim to show that the ‘fictive’ elements of Mughal courtesan tales furthermore reveal important cultural truths about the role and meanings of music in Mughal male society
Liminality and the Social Location of Musicians:Introduction
No full textLiminality seems to have become something of a buzzword. Typing ‘liminal OR liminality’ into Google™ produces one and a quarter million hits. That this should be so is not altogether surprising, for the liminal state has much in common with the postmodern age, as scholars as diverse as Homi Bhabha and Sharon Zukin have argued: the blurring and crossing of thresholds and boundaries; the breakdown of historically fixed categories; the exposure of ambiguities; the fluidity and hybridity of identities; play and absurdity; and uncertainty. Indeed, Bhabha has gone so far as to suggest that liminality is the hallmark of postmodernity, that the postmodern age is itself liminal, existing between a dead modernity and a future not yet known
Chief musicians to the Mughal emperors:The Delhi kalawant biraderi, 17th to 19th centuries
Full text linkThis article traces the genealogy of the chief Hindustani musicians to the Mughal emperors from Akbar (r.1556-1605) down to Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837-58), for the first time from contemporaneous written sources. It includes a great deal of information about the written sources available for Hindustani music history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The original paper was published in a very limited print-only run in India. I have therefore uploaded a substantially revised version here for "open peer review"
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