Copyright
Francesca Orsini; Katherine Butler Schofield; Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chaptersâ authors.Published On
2015-10-05ISBN
Language
- English
Print Length
566 pages (xx + 546)Dimensions
Weight
Media
Funding
OCLC Number
993949330LCCN
2019467888BIC
- DS
- HBTB
- 1FM
BISAC
- LIT008020
- PER019000
- SOC002010
LCC
- GR72.3
Keywords
- North India
- Pakistan
- storytelling
- oral performances
- texts
- improvisation
- social identity
Tellings and Texts
Music, Literature and Performance in North India
Examining 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.
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.
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.
Endorsements
A 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
Contents
1. The Example in Dadupanthi Homiletics
(pp. 31â60)- Monika Horstmann
2. Making it Vernacular in Agra: The Practice of Translation by Seventeenth-Century Jains
(pp. 61â106)- John E. Cort
3. World Enough and Time: Religious Strategy and Historical Imagination in an Indian Sufi Tale
(pp. 107â136)- Muzaffar Alam
4. Hearing Moâjizat in South Asian Shiâism
(pp. 137â166)- Amy Bard
- Christian Lee Novetzke
- Pasha M. Khan
7. Did Surdas Perform the BhÄgavata-purÄáša?
(pp. 209â230)- John Stratton Hawley
8. Text, Orality, and Performance in Newar Devotional Music1
(pp. 231â246)- Richard Widdess
- Allison Busch
- Sunil Sharma
11. Persian Poets on the Streets: The Lore of Indo-Persian Poetic Circles in Late Mughal India
(pp. 303â326)- Stefano Pellò
- Francesca Orsini
13. A Curious King, a Psychic Leper, and the Workings of Karma: Bajidâs Entertaining Narratives
(pp. 359â382)- Imre Bangha
14. Raga in the Early Sixteenth Century
(pp. 385â406)- Allyn Miner
15. Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika
(pp. 407â422)- Katherine Butler Schofield
- Thibaut dâHubert
17. The Musical Lives of Texts: Rhythms and Communal Relationships among the Nizamis and Some of Their Neighbours in South and West Asia
(pp. 445â484)- Richard K. Wolf
Introduction
(pp. 1â28)- Francesca Orsini
- Katherine Butler Schofield
Contributors
Francesca Orsini
(editor)Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research spans modern and contemporary Hindi literature (The Hindi Public Sphere: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, 2002), cultural history (she edited Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, 2006), popular literature and the history of the book (Print and Pleasure: The Genres of Commercial Publishing in Nineteenth-century North India, 2009), and multilingual literary history (Hindi and Urdu Before the Divide, 2010; After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-century North India, co-edited with S. Sheikh, 2014).
Katherine Butler Schofield
(editor)Katherine Butler Schofield (nĂŠe Brown) is a historian of music in Mughal India and the colonial Indian Ocean. Working largely with Persian sources for Hindustani music c.1570-1860, she has established music as central to Mughal technologies of sovereignty and selfhood, identified classicisation processes at work in early modern Indian arts, examined the role of connoisseurship in nourishing male friendships, told tales about ill-fated courtesans and overweening ustads, and traced the lineage of the chief musicians to the Mughal emperors from Akbar to Bahadur Shah Zafar. Her current European Research Council project, "Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean" (2011-2015), investigates the ways in which the musical field was transformed in India and the Malay world c.1750-1900 as pre-colonial polities gave way to colonial regimes. As part of this project she is co-writing a book, Hindustani Music Between Empires: Alternative Histories.