In this chapter I look not so much at the song texts contained within these manuscripts, but at the different logics behind the making of such collections c.1780-1830. While many such collections were produced for Muslim elite patrons in courts such as Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, a significant number were written for or purchased by European collectors resident in these locations, including women. What has not so far been considered is the musicological and social significance of a significant corpus of collections of lighter courtly songs, predominantly khayal, tappa, ghazal and tarana, that emerged in unprecedented number in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and circulated right across and beyond North India from Bharuch to Calcutta and from Kathmandu to Hyderabad. To a more limited extent, written collections of the prestigious courtly genre dhrupad have been mined for their literary implications, and more recently new social history has been drawn out of the contents of printed miscellanies of Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali songs from the nineteenth century. In South Asian studies, the song collection as a literary genre has received considerable attention in certain areas of scholarship, most notably in religious studies where collections of sung poetry form the major corpus for the study of bhakti and Sikh traditions. in various Indian languages in Sanskrit, Samskrutam, Hindia, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Bengali, Oriya, English scripts with pdf. Reasons for neglect would not be hard to seek: the güfte mecmuası belongs functionally to the realm of music, but the early examples, for which there is little or no access to the accompanying melodies, could now be thought of as primarily literary in relevance as well as content, while for the musicologist the crucial absence of any notation has presumably meant that they have generally been deemed insufficiently informative to warrant detailed investigation.” This could equally be said to be true of research on pre-colonial song collections in North India. In his important book on Ottoman song collections, Words without songs, Owen Wright noted that “it is fair to say that such works have failed to receive the attention which the evident popularity of the genre would seem to justify.
Citation: Schofield, Katherine Butler, "'Words without songs': the social history of Hindustani song collections in India's Muslim courts, c.1770–1830," in Rachel Harris and Martin Stokes, eds., Theory and Practice in the Music of the Islamic World (Routledge, 2018).
0 kommentar(er)
