Introduction

Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield

Khwāndan: To read, to recite [...] to sing.1

What would an auditory history of South Asia sound like? As we walk

down a city street or a neighbourhood lane in contemporary India,
loudspeakers hanging from electricity poles spread the tune of a choral
bhajan or amateur singing at a ritual wake, while few neighbourhoods are
out of aural reach of an azan, the call to prayer. Public spaces are routinely
occupied by religious processions with drums, marriage processions
with band baja, or political demonstrations with loud slogans and public
speeches. Every town has public spaces—a maidan, lila ground, karbala,
or park—where religious performances and “programmes”, fairs
(melas), and political rallies regularly attract visitors and broadcast their
activities through their lively noises. Amidst the cacophony of traffic
sounds—extra-loud car horns, shrill cycle-rickshaw bells, the deeper
grumble of buses and trucks—people’s mobile ringtones advertise their
musical taste: Punjabi beats, melodious ghazals, or the latest Bombay
dance number. Several times a day, when your own mobile rings and
you pick up, a jingle or a verse addresses you for no apparent reason.
This soundscape is not static and unchanging. On the Delhi metro, the
bilingual warnings “metro paridhan ko ganda karna ek dandaniy apradh hai”

1 Francis Joseph Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1892), p. 481. In Indo-Persian literature, khwānanda was the
most commonly used word for a professional singer. Whether a khwānanda was a
singer, a reader, or a reciter can only be understood from context.

© F. Orsini and K. Butler Schofield, CC BY http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0062.18

2 Tellings and Texts

and “mind the gap” have replaced the scratchy audio cassettes on buses
as accompaniments on one’s daily journey through the city, while fewer
autorickshaws seem to ride with their radio on full-blast.
South Asia’s visual culture has been the object of much study in
recent years, from calendar art to photography, from truck art to political
statuary. Yet it would be hard to deny that making sound and hearing
or listening to music, songs, speeches, sermons, and stories have been
equally constitutive of South Asian social and cultural history until the
present day.2 But how has the mosaic of sounds, voices, and tellings
changed over time? More fundamentally, how can we even write the
history of sound at all, given that its nature is ephemeral: over in a
moment, gone forever, and never fully captured in words on a page?
This volume explores the interconnected histories of singing,
storytelling, and oral performance in early modern and contemporary
North India (and Pakistan), in an attempt to restore the auditory
realm to the literary and cultural history of South Asia. It does not
aim at comprehensive coverage—there is no essay that deals with the
rich performance traditions of Punjab, for example3—but presents
strategically identified case studies that show different uses of texts in
performance, give an idea of the wide range of performance practices,
and highlight the significant circulation of aesthetic concepts and ideas
about the beneficial effects of music, singing, and storytelling.
In the past two decades, an interest in what has been labelled
acoustic or auditory history—the history not just of “music” but of
historical soundworlds in their broadest possible sense—has begun
to emerge in the study of Western music. This new move has received
considerable stimulus from parallel work in ethnomusicology on
contemporary soundscapes,4 research that has been foundational in the

2 The list of studies of contemporary South Asian soundworlds—musical, literary, and

ritual performances—would in itself take hours to recite. As Stuart Blackburn and
Joyce Burkhalter Flueckinger noted of Oral Epics in India, “[w]hen Milman Parry went
to the Balkans in search of oral epics in the 1930s, he had problems locating singers;
for researchers in South Asia today, the problem is not where to find oral epics, but
which ones to study”; ‘Introduction’, Oral Epics in India (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989), p. 1.
3 These have been abundantly studied, from Richard C. Temple’s classic Legends of the
Panjâb (1884) to Michael Nijhawan’s recent study of dhadhi singers in Dhadi Darbar:
Religion, Violence, and the Performance of Sikh History (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2006).
4 The “soundscape” concept ultimately derives from Canadian composer R. Murray
Schafer’s 1977 monograph The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the
 Introduction 3

new interdiscipline of sound studies or “acoustemology”, which takes

in fields as diverse as geography, anthropology, environmental science,
and music.5
While most scholarship on acoustic history and auditory cultures
has been restricted to the period of recorded sound (the late nineteenth
through the twenty-first centuries), Emma Dillon’s magisterial 2012
monograph The Sense of Sound definitively turns musicology’s attention
to the European medieval past and to the difficult task of disinterring
auditory history, and the history of music as it was sounded and
embodied, from its textual traces.6 Although such a task is made easier
by the existence of detailed musical notation for European music that
allows some sense of sounded reality to echo in the present, Dillon’s
methodology offers much of relevance to our quest to understand the
acoustic and somatic lives of North Indian texts. Historians, too, have
recently turned to the auditory, with Mark Smith’s pioneering volume
Hearing History opening our ears to the sounds of early modern Europe
and America.7 Typically, though, the pre-twentieth-century acoustic
histories of other literate cultures so far remain largely untold. The recent
works of Gary Tomlinson and Barbara Andaya, on the soundscapes of
the pre-colonial Aztec and Malay worlds respectively, thus provide
stimulating foils for us, with their insistence that sound was heard and
understood differently in earlier cultural contexts and that sonic power
and song were of vital significance and signification to Southeast Asian
and American polities.8

World (New York: Knopf), but was then more famously taken up by Arjun Appadurai
in his 1990 article ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Public
Culture 2.2 (1990), 1-24.
5 For an excellent review of these influential developments in ethnomusicology
and sound studies, see David W. Samuels et al., ‘Soundscapes: Towards a
Sounded Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010), 329-45. The term
“acoustemology” is a coinage of ethnomusicologist Steven Feld; e.g. ‘Waterfalls of
Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea’, in
Senses of Place, ed. by Steven Feld and Keith Basso (Santa Fe: School of American
Research Press, 1996), pp. 91-135.
6 Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
7 Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens, GA: University of Georgia
Press, 2004).
8 Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European
Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Barbara Watson Andaya,
‘Distant Drums and Thunderous Cannon: Authority in Traditional Malay Society’,
International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 7.2 (2011), 19-35.
4 Tellings and Texts

In this volume, therefore, we undertake a task that has not, to our

knowledge, been attempted before for the literary cultures of North
India.9 We seek to theorise the deep interdependencies of written text,
sound, performer, audience, and meaning that the case studies in this
volume make audible, in a situation where in most cases we no longer
possess nor can ever recover the soundedness of the texts with which we
work (see Schofield in this volume). By and large, texts that were once
recited, sung, danced, and enacted have been territory ceded to scholars
of literature and religion, who have generally acknowledged their aural
and performative dimensions but gone little further.10 The aural domain,
in turn, has been relegated to ethnomusicologists studying the highly
exclusive soundworld of North Indian art music.11 And the very few
ethnomusicologists who have brought tools of sonic analysis to bear on
the textual archive have restricted their studies to instrumental genres
and raga examples, whose mnemonic notation systems have been easier
to translate, if only partially, into sound.12 Perhaps concerned that their
literary understanding might be found wanting, or perhaps because
of the sheer inaudibility of most historical texts, music historians have
steered clear of explaining how poems subtitled with raga and tala names
might have sounded, or what other sonic hints might tell us about the
lives of North Indian texts as they circulated as sounded and embodied
entities in a resonant world.
In any case, the overwhelming majority of ethnomusicologists study
the present, not the past: music, singing, and storytelling in North India
have primarily been the domain of anthropologists of music and scholars
of orality, who rarely view the living traditions they study as part of a
cultural and literary field that can be mapped historically. This is the
connection that this book aims to make: the contemporary ethnographies

9 Though the last chapter, ‘Hierarchies of Response’, of Aditya Behl’s posthumously

published monograph is typically prescient; Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic
Literary Tradition, 1379-1545 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012b).
10 An exception is Christian Novetzke’s Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of
Saint Namdev in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
11 Most recently, see the important collection of essays Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to
Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Joep Bor, Françoise “Nalini” Delvoye, Emmie te Nijenhuis,
and Jane Harvey (New Delhi: Manohar, 2010).
12 See e.g. Allyn Miner, Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries (New Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1997); and D. Richard Widdess, The Ragas of Early Indian Music: Modes,
Melodies and Musical Notations from the Gupta Period to c.1250 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1995).
 Introduction 5

by Amy Bard, Christian Novetzke, Richard Widdess, and Richard Wolf

show what uses—sometimes startling and counter-intuitive ones—
words, texts, and books are put to in contemporary formal and informal
performance practices, and the subtle nuances of tone, emphasis, and
effect that each performance brings. They show the textual scholars
what they are missing and suggest exciting possibilities. Conversely, the
essays by textual scholars and music historians reveal that even texts,
when examined in this light, turn out to provide a surprising amount of
clues about what Stefano Pellò calls the pre-textual and con-textual life
of poetry, sermons, and stories: the anecdotes, gossip, and discussions
that accompanied and explained how certain texts came into being
(Cort, Pellò, Sharma); the correct knowledge that was required in order
to understand and appreciate sophisticated oral performances (Hawley,
Khan, d’Hubert); the performance needed to bring the texts we have to
life (Horstmann, Novetzke, Busch, Bangha, Orsini). Through a number
of recurring key words like raga (musical mode), rasa (juice, sentiment),
rasika (connoisseur), and bhava (emotion), these essays also show how
aesthetic and/or spiritual cultivation and understanding were crucial to
the listening of music and tales in the early modern period. Such words
were part of a code that straddled the multilingual poetic, musical, and
visual arts—though declined with subtle differences in the courtly, sufi,
and bhakti (devotion) contexts where songs and tales circulated (see
particularly Miner, d’Hubert, Schofield, and Busch).13

Oral-literate, Multilingual, and Intermedial

General accounts of orality in South Asia typically begin with the oral-
mnemonic tradition of Vedic and post-Vedic knowledge (the Upanishads,
Panini’s grammar, etc.). But as Sheldon Pollock has pointed out, this
much touted orality, while undoubtedly and bedazzingly true, has too
often been taken as emblematic of a general Indian “indifference” to
writing. The cultural premium on memorised knowledge (kanthastha
or “held in the throat”, as Pollock reminds us) “left indelible traces in
secular written culture”. And “from the moment writing was invented

13 Persian and Persianate intellectuals, the essays by Schofield and d’Hubert show us,
consciously translated Indic aesthetic terminology and set up equivalences with
Perso-Arabic terms, like vacana with sukhan (as “speech”), or rasa with zauq and lazzat
(as “taste” or “pleasure”).
6 Tellings and Texts

literary culture, the culture of kavya, became indissolubly connected to

writing, so much so that the history of the one becomes unintelligible
without taking into account the history of the other”.14 Similarly,
Richard Widdess has noted that although there has been perhaps an
even stronger emphasis placed on the superiority of oral-aural modes
of transmission in Indian musical discourse, “many systems of ‘oral
notation’ exist, and have existed since ancient times. These systems
use solmization or other mnemonic syllables, and are primarily recited
or sung, although they can also be written down”—and have been
used to notate musical examples in written treatises since the Gupta
period.15 Like Pollock, Stuart Blackburn notes of South India that even
the early Sangam corpus of Tamil poetry (third century CE, but edited
and anthologised only in the eighth) valorises both orality and writing:
“Many of the poems are presented as if spoken or sung by bards, while,
on the other hand, many give prominence to the role of the poet-scholar
(pulavar)”.16 Both Blackburn and Pollock note the endurance of practices
of orality in South Asia “as both fact and ideal” well into the modern
period, and their persistence into the present day is particularly obvious
in their continuing predominance in music pedagogy.17 Christian
Novetzke notes that pre-modern sants and performers in Maharashtra
lived in a milieu where literacy was a fairly ordinary and widespread
skill. Yet the public culture of bhakti and the logic of performance meant
that, though literate, kirtankars would still privilege orality. In fact, as he
puts it, the kirtankar “might be considered an intermediary between text
and orality” (p. 180).
Velcheru Narayana Rao coined the very useful term “oral-literate”
to describe pandits, poets, and storytellers who operate within a culture
that is both orally transmitted and literate at the same time—and this
is a term that applies in different ways to almost all the people, cases,

14 Sheldon Pollock, ‘Literary Culture and Manuscript Culture in Precolonial India’, in

Literary Cultures and the Material Book, ed. by Simon Eliot, Andrew Nash, and Ian
Willison (London: British Library, 2007), pp. 79, 80.
15 Widdess (1995), p. 87. Solmization is a system of attributing a distinct syllable to each
note in a musical scale; key examples include European sol-fa (do re mi fa so la ti) and
Indian sargam (sa re ga ma pa dha ni).
16 S. Blackburn, Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India (New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2006), ‘Introduction’, p. 20.
17 Pollock (2007), p. 78; Huib Schippers, ‘The Guru Recontextualized? Perspectives on
Learning North Indian Classical Music in Shifting Contexts for Professional Training’,
Asian Music 38.1 (2007), 123-38.
 Introduction 7

and genres presented in this volume: from preachers to kirtankars, from

poets to musicians, from musical treatises to song-poems, from poetry
manuals to tazkiras that record the gossip around poets, from early
modern tales to the contemporary niyaz kahani pamphlets of Amy Bard’s
essay. Perhaps the most surprising group that qualify as oral-literate
are musicians; the consensus modern view that Hindustani ustads were
illiterate is belied by a series of treatises and song collections written by
hereditary musicians and their disciples from Mughal times down to the
present day, demonstrating literacy in Sanskrit, Persian, Brajbhasha, and
Urdu.18 Indeed most of the essays prefer to use the term performative
rather than oral, in order to stress that sight, gesture, and sound were all
involved.19 About qissa storytelling, for example, Pasha M. Khan notes
that the seventeenth-century manual

Ṭirāz al-akhbār makes it clear to us that the term “qissa-khwan” does not
convey the full range and force of the storyteller’s activities. Impressive
as it seems that storytellers like Fakhr al-Zamani recited and improvised
the interminable Dāstān-i Amīr Ḥamza from memory, they did not simply
read them, but performed them. In his description of the presentation of
the qissa, Fakhr al-Zamani prescribes not only modulations of the voice,
but gestures and postures for the storyteller. (Khan, p. 198)

The same is true of many of the performance practices covered in

this book: singing, poetic recitation, and storytelling. Conversely, the
mere physical presence of a book during a performance—even if it is
not consulted—may work symbolically as an authorising gesture, as
Widdess shows in his essay.
Methodologically, however, although scholars of literature and
religion concerned with the past are aware of the all-important oral
dimension of performance, and ethnomusicologists and scholars of
orality recognise that the living traditions they study are part of cultural
and literary fields that have much longer histories, by and large it is

18 See, for example, Ras Baras Khan’s 1698 treatise, the Shams al-aṣvāt, trans. by Mehrdad
Fallahzadeh (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2012); Khushhal Khan “Anup”’s
Braj and Persian Rāg darshan (Brajbhasha (1800): University of Pennsylvania Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Lawrence J Schoenberg Collection, LJS 63; Persian (1808):
Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, University of Madras, D1024 P Ms); and
Karamatullah Khan’s Isrār-e karāmat (Allahabad: Janaki Press, 1908).
19 In other words, we are using the terms performative and performativity not in the
sense bequeathed to us by J.L. Austin via Judith Butler, but rather following their
more general usage in ethnomusicology and performance studies.
8 Tellings and Texts

difficult for one person to have the technical training to do both. The
documents we have from the past—written texts, manuscripts, visual
images, and written descriptions—often bear only scant traces of
their oral-performative contexts, or else describe them in terms that
are minimal or opaque, as in the musical notation of ragas or attempts
to describe aesthetic experience. Conversely, current performance
traditions that have been orally transmitted, especially the further we
move from institutional centres, often bear only oblique traces of their
history.20 We will come back to the relationship between texts/books
and orality below.
Trying to reconstruct the oral-performative history of early modern
North India, as this book tries to do, presents additional challenges.
While certain aspects have been well studied—bhakti sayings, songs,
and performances; the circulation of songs and singers in devotional
circles and across North Indian courts (especially the Mughal imperial
court); sufi romances in Hindavi21—others remain unclear. Texts of the
time often contain lively religious discussions, goshtis, and repartees,
but what relationship do those iconic representations bear to real events
and/or practices? Numerous musical treatises contain notated raga
examples, but what do these actually tell us about how the ragas sounded
in performance? Many texts that suggest concurrent oral-performative
practices such as Puranas or sufi malfuzat, or that were explicitly offered
to patrons, were written or copied in the high languages of Persian
and Sanskrit—does this mean they reflect speech practices, or rather
protocols of writing? Much path-breaking work is currently being done
on Sanskrit-Persian interactions in the Mughal period,22 and questions
like “did the Mughals (or sufis) really know Sanskrit?”, or “did they
really speak in Persian?”, regularly arise. While the answers necessarily

20 See e.g. James Caron, ‘Reading the Power of Printed Orality in Afghanistan: Popular
Pashto Literature as Historical Evidence and Public Intervention’, Journal of Social
History 45.1 (2011), 172.
21 On bhakti, see e.g. Rupert Snell, The Eighty-four Hymns of Hita Harivaṃśa: an Edition of
the Caurāsī Pada (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991). On songs and singers, see Françoise
“Nalini” Delvoye, ‘Collections of Lyrics in Hindustani Music: The Case of Dhrupad’
and the bibliography she gives, in Bor et al. (2010), pp. 141-58, and more generally part
I of that volume, ‘The Formative Period’, pp. 35-194. On Hindavi sufi romances, see
the work of Aditya Behl, and especially Love’s Subtle Magic.
22 See Audrey Truschke, ‘Cosmopolitan Encounters: Sanskrit and Persian at the Mughal
Court’ (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2012), http://hdl.handle.net/10022/
AC:P:12951; see also Busch and Schofield in this volume.
 Introduction 9

vary according to the educational capital and background of patrons

and audiences, we must recognise that the multiple diglossia of the time
means that texts written in the high languages existed in an oral context
that was vernacular and multilingual.
To state it more clearly, we begin from the premise that the linguistic
economy of North India can be described as one of “multiple diglossias”,23
with several high languages—Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit—and a general
spoken vernacular (what we call here Hindavi) that was variously
written in the Persian, Kaithi, or Devanagari scripts. We intentionally
use the term Hindavi, which was the term (together with Hindi and
Hindui) employed for North Indian vernaculars in Persian sources, in
order to avoid the split history of Hindi and Urdu that has dominated
modern scholarship and language consciousness.24 A concurrent premise
is that language and script were a function of written transmission and
the competence of patrons and copyists: script was not intrinsic to a
language, and the script and language of writing did not necessarily
reproduce the language of oral performance or exchange. The protocols
of high language meant that discussions in Hindavi between a sufi pir
and his disciples would be written down in Persian, or that the Hindavi
song-poems composed by Persian literati were referred to but not
included in Persian-language histories and anthologies.25
Once we are aware of these premises, we begin to see that texts that
appear to exist in separate domains sealed by boundaries of script and
literacy could and did circulate thanks to oral transmission, translation,
exposition, and memorisation. We also see that at times the texts are

23 See María Angeles Gallego, ‘The Languages of Medieval Iberia and their Religious
Dimension’, Medieval Encounters 9.1 (2003): 107-39.
24 We consider Hindavi here as synonymous with bhakha. Though modern scholarship
distinguishes between Western and Eastern Hindi, and between Avadhi, Brajbhasha,
Khari Boli (Hindi and Urdu), etc., it is our contention—supported by the wide
circulation of texts like the “Avadhi” Candāyan in Delhi and of Kabir’s poems or
Gwaliyari dhrupad all over North India—that vernacular (or bhakha, “language”,
as vernacular sources call it) literary forms travelled easily and widely at this time
within a unified language domain. True, terms like “eastern” (purbi) and “of Gwalior”
(gwaliyari) were also sometimes used in this period, but it was only at the end of
sixteenth century that Brajbhasha emerged as a separate, specific (partly) codified
literary vernacular; see Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of
Mughal India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
25 For Hindavi and the written protocols of Persian, see Francesca Orsini, ‘Traces of
a Multilingual World: Hindavi in Persian Texts’, in After Timur Left: Culture and
Circulation in Fifteenth-century North India, ed. by F. Orsini and S. Sheikh (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 403-36.
10 Tellings and Texts

themselves translations of oral vernacular tellings/performances.

Thus Jack Hawley’s essay on Surdas’s reworking of a passage from the
Sanskrit Bhāgavata-purāṇa shows us that the Brajbhasha poet-singer
Surdas, traditionally memorialised as being blind, knew the Sanskrit
canonical text well enough to riff on it and could expect his audience
to understand his game.26 His quasi-contemporary, the poet Alam,
declared that “since few listen to this tale in Sanskrit, I have bound [this
tale] together in chaupais in bhakha”.27 Does he mean that he knew the
Sanskrit versions of the tale? The case of ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti’s Mir’āt
al-makhlūqāt, analysed in Muzaffar Alam’s essay, is even more intriguing:
the Persian text purports to be a translation of a Sanskrit Purana and its
author declares and cites evidence of his knowledge of Sanskrit and of
the text. The aim is to render public something that the keepers of the
original text—the Brahmins—have tried to keep secret, i.e. that Shiva
himself predicted the advent of Adam and the Prophet Muhammad and
the takeover of India by their descendants, who intermarried with the
local population. The text faithfully reproduces in Persian the generic
conventions of the Purana—the chain of narrators, the explanation of
past and future events, etc.—but what is the relationship of this text to
orality? Were ‘Abd al-Rahman or his readers familiar with the Sanskrit
text and/or oral expositions of the Bhaviṣya-purāṇa; did he sermonise on
it; and if so in which language?
Several essays in this volume seek to tease out the oral-performative
dimension of written texts and genres, particularly those in the high
languages or whose accessibility is uncertain. Taken together, the
contributions of Busch, Schofield, Sharma, and Khan show that texts that
have come down to us as part of separate and sophisticated traditions—
Brajbhasha riti poetry, Hindustani music theory and song lyrics, and
Persian poetry and storytelling—were all consumed by the same people
at the Mughal court. Thus, while seeking to understand the logic internal
to the formation and transmission of each archive (courtly and madrasa
Persian, Jain, courtly bhakha, bhakti, sufi), it has been crucial for us to also
question their limits and exclusions, and to place them within the larger

26 Already in his 1984 book Sūrdas: Poet, Singer, Saint (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, and Delhi: Oxford University Press), Hawley argued that Surdas’s blindness
should be taken metaphorically, and expressed doubts about his illiteracy, too.
27 Alam, Ālamkt Mādhavānal Kāmakandalā, ed. by Rajkumari Misra (Allahabad:
Ratnakumari Svadhyay Sansthan, 1982), 6.5, p. 5, see Orsini in this volume.
 Introduction 11

framework of orature and oral transmission.28 An approach sensitive

to oral circulation and performance highlights the dynamics through
which these connections took place. The result is a map of a richer and
more densely interconnected cultural and social world.
Of course there is a way in which music in particular has long been
viewed as constitutive of premodern India’s “composite culture”, the
aesthetic glue that held the otherwise fractious/centripetal polity
together. While parallel religious nationalisms have positioned Hindu
(and Jain) and Muslim communities as inevitably hostile and barely
reconciled, the discourse of “composite culture” has upheld music and
painting as evidence that Hindus and Muslims had been friends and
had cultivated similar tastes.29 In this discourse, music or bhakti and
sufi religions are held up selectively as special cases of “synthesis”,
representing a “bridge” that connected what are still perceived as
separate communities, each with their own traditions. In the process,
music, bhakti, and sufism get extracted from their social histories and
charged with a mysterious agent-less intentionality that obscures the
messy and much larger-scale social processes of conscious mixing
and intentional borrowing by thoughtful and knowledgeable men and
women that historically must have occurred to produce any kind of
“composite”.30 In contradistinction, while our evidence shows much
circulation and translation of music and song genres, singers and
performers, stories, and even aesthetic categories, we see these as normal
products of a culturally diverse and multilingual polity—a regular
multilingualism—with multilayered, distinct, yet interlocking contexts:
courtly, urban, ritual/devotional, rural. The evidence also leads us away

28 The term “orature” was coined by the Ugandan linguist Pio Zirimu but has been
given broader scope by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, e.g. in his ‘Notes towards a Performance
Theory of Orature’, Performance Research 12.3 (2007), 4-7.
29 On the genealogy of the concept of “composite culture” to refer to Hindu-Muslim
interactions over the longue durée, see Kathryn Hansen, ‘Who Wants to be a
Cosmopolitan? Readings from the Composite Culture’, Indian Economic and Social
History Review 47.3 (2010), 291-308.
30 On the inadequacy of the terms “synthesis”, “influence”, and “composite” to describe
the processes of appropriation between Indian and West Asian musicians that forged
Hindustani music, see Katherine Butler Brown [Schofield], ‘Evidence of Indo-Persian
Musical Synthesis? The Tanbur and Rudra Vina in Seventeenth-century Indo-Persian
Treatises’, Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 36-7 (2006), 89-103. On the need to
consider traditional culture-producers’ intelligence and intent in creating art works,
see Molly Emma Aitken’s ground-breaking monograph on Rajput court painters, The
Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale, 2010).
12 Tellings and Texts

from the idea of the “composite” to thinking in terms of individuals

actively appropriating across cultural and linguistic thresholds and
between media (from poetry to musical sound to painting, etc.) to
produce a widely shared early modern aesthetic of borrowing and
reuse that revelled in virtuosity, brilliance, and multilayered depth and
richness.31

Spaces of Performance and Performers

A major advantage of a multilingual and intermedial approach to
orality and performance traditions is that it allows us to explore literary
culture beyond the court, to understand the links between forms and
performers outside and within the court, and to examine the dynamics of
classicisation and popularisation. It also allows us to attend to the oral-
performative aspects of poetic culture and wit, so obviously valued as
cultural assets (see Pellò in this volume), and to consider the performers
who enacted/produced these verbal forms, their social position, their
self-presentation, and their own mobility.
Ever since Françoise “Nalini” Delvoye’s pioneering studies of
dhrupad texts in Persian sources, of the circulation of songs and of
song-poets (vaggeyakar) from the court of Gwalior to that of the Sultan
of Gujarat and thence to Akbar’s court and sub-imperial centres, and
of the relationships between Tansen, Swami Haridas in Vrindaban,
and Muhammad Ghaus Gwaliori, we have been alerted to the intense
circulation of songs, musicians, and musical knowledge between courtly
and devotional/ritual domains.32 The striking flexibility in song themes
and “retooling” of song texts as well as poems, so that a ruler’s name
could be substituted by another, or by the name of Krishna, were a direct
consequence of this circulation, as Busch reminds us in her essay.
The essays in this volume cover a wide range of performance spaces
and domains. Sharma, Busch, Khan, and Schofield explore the culture
of poetic, musical, and storytelling performances at the Mughal court

31 For a fine example of this aesthetic in action, see Aitken’s chapter on Rajput paintings
of Layla and Majnun; (2010), pp. 155-209.
32 See e.g. Françoise “Nalini” Delvoye, ‘Indo-Persian Accounts on Music Patronage in
the Sultanate of Gujarat’, in The Making of Indo-Persian Culture, ed. by Muzaffar Alam,
Françoise “Nalini” Delvoye, and Marc Gaborieau (Delhi: Manohar and Centre de
Sciences Humaines, 2000), pp. 253-80.
 Introduction 13

from Akbar’s reign to Muhammad Shah’s. Sharma’s essay, for instance,

details the kinds of Persian poetic and prose texts that were recited and
discussed at the Mughal court, and notes that “in the Mughal context
storytelling, poetic recitation, and discussion also functioned as a form
of re-enacting and validating the canon in the face of new literary
developments and challenges, especially when it came to poetry” (p.
288). He notes that Emperor Akbar preferred literary gatherings that
involved storytelling to poetry recitations (musha‘iras), whereas his son
and successor Jahangir was fond of listening to and discussing Persian
poetry, particularly the ghazal, during long night gatherings. He also
observes that Emperor Shah Jahan was particularly interested in literary
works concerned with contemporary history, while Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir
was especially fond of Jalaluddin Rumi’s Mas̱navī. Sharma points out
that during Shah Jahan’s period (r.1628-1656), many Persian poets at
court wrote short topical poems in masnavi form to be recited at court,
suggesting that “these poems gradually replaced the ceremonial qasida
as the traditional poetic form to mark formal occasions” (p. 292). As far
as the performance of the ghazal is concerned, anecdotes show a certain
overlap between courtly and sufi practices by the sixteenth century, and
khayal, now known only as a genre of classical music, enjoyed a dual
existence in both the dargah and the darbar from its sixteenth-century
appearance until at least the time of Muhammad Shah (r.1719-1748).33
Allyn Miner’s essay shows how much of that musical knowledge
was already cultivated at pre-Mughal courts such as the Sharqi court
in Jaunpur, and how the musical knowledge codified there and in
other apparently peripheral locations such as Rewa34 circulated among
three different kinds of constituencies: one made of connoisseurs and
music specialists who wanted to learn the specific qualities of each raga;
another constituted by those who only wanted the basic vocabulary
and took pleasure in the imaginative aspects of raga visualisation; and a
third one made of practitioners and religious devotees who employed a
more restricted range of ragas for ritual singing.

33 Katherine Butler Brown [Schofield], ‘The Origins and Early Development of Khayal’,
in Bor et al. (2010), pp. 159-96.
34 Apparently being the operative word here; it is worth noting that Tansen was
employed at Rewa immediately before his services were requisitioned by Akbar, so
the Raja was clearly a patron of considerable discrimination.
14 Tellings and Texts

Several essays tackle performance texts and traditions at regional

courts (Miner, Busch, d’Hubert, Orsini). Orsini’s traces the emergence
of kathas or tales for local courts such as the Baghela of “Amarpur” in
the wake of epic and Puranic retellings. Allison Busch’s pathbreaking
work has shown how riti poets like Keshavdas, working in the small
court in Orchha, created a new literary culture in the early sixteenth
century by carefully studying Sanskrit models and reproducing them
in the vernacular.35 She has also shown how, in the wake of political
alliances between local rulers like the Bundelas of Orchha and Mughal
princes, this literary culture spread into the heart of the Mughal imperial
court and found ready patronage not only in the imperial entourage, but
also among its ministers (like Todar Mal, whom Alam also mentioned
in admiring terms in his 1582 Mādhavānal Kāmakandalā) and Rajput
mansabdars, and who in their home territories developed their own
sub-imperial courtly cultures and employed their own array of poets,
genealogists, and storytellers.36 In her essay for this volume Busch
focuses on the oral and performative dimensions of this literary culture
in the form of memorising verses and rules as a necessary preparation
for extempore poetic performances, of the retooling of verses by itinerant
poets for successive patrons, and on the functions of poetry at these
courts, including the performance of martial poetry on the battlefield
itself, with the expressed aim of enthusing the warriors. Nor should
we forget that these local rulers were also major patrons of ritual and
devotional performances and sponsored a whole range of temples,
monasteries (maths), and festivals.37 A particularly interesting case is
that of the sophisticated seventeenth-century poet Alaol, the subject
of Thibaut d’Hubert’s contribution, whose Bengali narrative poems/
romances were informed by Persian, Sanskrit, and Hindavi poetics and
literary models. The case of Alaol points to a kind of cosmopolitanism
that was directly produced by the confluence of multilingual literary
traditions, translated into the local literary language for a small but
heterogeneous court in Arakan (now Myanmar). Widdess’s essay also
touches on the circulation of North Indian musical and literary culture

35 Busch (2011).
36 Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India Before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006); Aitken (2010).
37 See Monika Thiel-Horstmann, In Favour of Govinddevjī: Historical Documents Relating
to a Deity of Vrindaban and Eastern Rajasthan (Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for
the Arts in association with Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1999).
 Introduction 15

at the Malla court in Nepal. Not only did sangitashastra texts circulate
there, but it is also here that some of the earliest manuscripts are to be
found. He further notes that some of the Malla kings’ dapha compositions
are present in contemporary dapha songbooks—a tantalising “tenuous
textual continuity can thus be demonstrated between the early
seventeenth-century palace context and twenty-first-century farmers’
music” (p. 234)—while the wonderful detail in his Figure 8.3 shows how
non-courtly genres and performers were visualised in a hierarchical
spatial fashion.
Several other essays focus on urban spaces and activities among a range
of merchant, service, professional, and artisanal groups. Stefano Pellò
shows how tazkiras of poets written in Persian from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries focus on the activities and the professionalisation
of contemporary poets and their disciples outside the court, in the urban
spaces of Delhi and Lucknow, and in doing so eulogise and canonise
them. But these texts also display keen interest in humbler and more
marginal figures in the urban landscape such as madmen, opium-
addicts, jesters, and street performers. John Cort’s essay focuses on the
parallel world of Jain laymen in Mughal Agra, who met regularly in
a temple courtyard and constituted themselves into debating circles
that produced newly-authoritative doctrinal and liturgical texts and
virtually emptied the figure of the bhattarak of authority.38 This was a
process of vernacularisation of knowledge that happened independently
of royal initiatives or patronage, the fruits of which are still part of Jain
ritual practices today. Novetzke’s essay on kirtan performances and
Widdess’s on dapha both straddle premodern texts and contemporary
performances and include urban ritual performances among artisanal/
subaltern groups, while Richard Wolf’s takes us to the diasporic urban
streets of Karachi for rhythmically sophisticated perfomances of Nizami
drumming.
With the essays by Horstmann, Novetzke, Hawley, Bangha, and Alam we
are taken to spaces that range from small-town (qasba) sufi establishments
and villages, maths, and festivals (mahotsav) where Dadupanthi acharyas
would deliver their sermons.39 The great circulation of Surdas’s songs

38 The term bhattarak (bhaṭṭaraka) indicates the head of Digambara Jain institutions,
responsible for managing endowments, running the institutions, and training scholars,
as well as for maintaining libraries and presiding over installation ceremonies; see
Cort in this volume.
39 As Novetzke puts it: “for the professional performer appearances at the Pune darbar
16 Tellings and Texts

and Bajid’s arilla verses, and of manuscripts with Bajid’s short, humorous
tales, points to a popular realm of religious, entertaining, and instructive
performance that would definitely include Novetzke’s kirtans, which
nowadays usually comprise “a story from the life of a sant that goes along
with the song, and usually other songs or texts are brought in that can
range from Sanskritic philosophy to sufi mysticism to the wisdom of
political leaders and popular adages and sayings of unknown provenance
in any language, including English” (p. 171). That Bajid’s manuscripts are
also held in royal libraries like the Pothikhana in Jaipur alerts us to the fact
that, just as there is a sophisticated oral knowledge that does not depend
on literacy (Hawley, Wolf), so elite tastes could and did include popular
genres. Conversely, the career of the early-seventeenth-century Iranian
émigré storyteller Fakhr al-Zamani shows the remarkable mobility from
urban to courtly spaces of both performer and genre. “If Fakhr al-Zamani’s
progress is any indication, qissas that began at the ‘popular’ level could,
given a chance and perhaps with some stylistic alterations, eventually be
performed in the courts of nobles and preserved as manuscripts in their
libraries”, notes Khan (p. 192). And while his gestural style of storytelling
recalls the figure of the naqqal, a professional actor who conveyed “a
story with words and actions, attempting to embody the narrative and
its characters”, Khan reminds us that naqqals were lower on the scale of
professions than qissa-khwan,40 and Fakhr al-Zamani never used the word
naqqali for what he did (Khan, p. 198).

Contemporary Ethnography and History

Because of the challenges outlined above, we considered it to be vital to
bring ethnomusicologists and scholars of contemporary performance
practices into conversation with the more historically-oriented among
us. We do not wish to suggest naively that contemporary performances

were few. The regular terrain of the kirtankar consisted of the many village centres,
pilgrimage networks, and holy sites that dotted the Deccan” (p. 176).
40 Naqqals in both Dargah Quli Khan’s Muraqqa‘-i Dehlī (c.1740) and Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s
Bānī (1877) were street performers of equivalent status to (and in personnel possibly
substantially overlapping with) bhands and bhagats; Ibbetson thought naqqal and bhand
were synonymous. Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa‘-e Dehli, trans. by Chander Shekhar
and Shama Mitra Chenoy (Delhi: Deputy, 1989), p. 99; Wajid ‘Ali Shah, Bānī (Lucknow:
Sangit Natak Akademi, 1987), pp. 115-16; and Denzil Ibbetson and Edward Maclagan,
A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province (Lahore:
Superintendent, Govt. Printing, 1911), pp. 156-57.
 Introduction 17

reflect past practices. But what their study reveals holds great imaginative
power for historical work. For example, contemporary ethnographies
show us a consistent combination of recitation of oral/written text with
extempore exposition (arthav or, in raga performance, vistar) right across
the genres and contexts we are looking at.41 For the earliest tales, the text
is indeed all we have; but were any of these tales—particularly those rich
in ritual, technical, or esoteric meanings—accompanied by exposition? It
seems likely, particularly in cases where the length of the stanzas and
the narrative “density” in extant copies vary.42 There are, for instance,
obvious markers of ritual beginning in most of our texts—but how much
richer is Philip Lutgendorf’s description of kathavachaks (called Vyasas in
this instance) taking their seat after worshipping the seat and garlanding
the book, etc., in katha performances of the Rāmcaritmānas!43 Christian
Novetzke makes the useful distinction between “didactic kirtan” (which
includes a wide range of modes, as we shall see) and “ecstatic kirtan” on
the basis of the protocols of sitting and standing. In the ecstatic “Varkari
kirtan” everyone stands and dances, whereas in the other forms of kirtan
only the performer (kirtankar) stands while the audience sits, though
the audience still participates in many ways, “singing along with the
songs, finishing well known verses along with the kirtankar, sometimes
interacting with the kirtankar, and so on” (p. 172).
In many cases, all we have for past musical performances are musical
treatises or manuscripts with song texts. Mukund Lath and Winand
Callewaert have argued that the form in which the song-texts are collected
and ordered in a manuscript can tell us whether it was a singer’s own
workmanlike collection or a systematisation, e.g. for ritual purposes, though
Miner in this volume suggests that the very presence of a raga in bhakti
texts indicates, at the very least, “that the original compiler or composers
moved in or were connected with court or temple circles” (p. 399). Christian
Novetzke has made a crucial distinction between formal pothis and informal
badas (more on which below). In the case of the book used in dapha

41 Of the specialists who still recite narrative texts (panchalis) in Bengal, d’Hubert notes
that the names they are called by—kathak, pathak, or gayen—each stress one aspect of
their style of recitation: “the two first terms refer to a musically tuned reading cum
commentary, and the second more specifically to singing” (pp. 427-28).
42 For interpolations that appear to be the result of storytellers’ intervention, see Orsini
in this volume.
43 Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991), pp. 182-85.
18 Tellings and Texts

performances, we could muse over the meaning and interpretation of the

song texts, were Richard Widdess not to tell us that in dapha performance
sound and key words and effort are much more important than the text.
We can imagine Bajid’s short and entertaining tales retold in intimate
familial contexts, and similar qissas were printed in chapbook forms
not dissimilar from the niyaz kahanis that Amy Bard writes about. But
while Bajid’s mock subversion of the moral ending puzzles us, Bard
gives us a rich account of the various ways in which tellers and listeners
interpret the kahanis and relate them to their own life experiences. Both
Bajid’s irreverent stories and Amy Bard’s contemporary formal and
informal miracle tales show an informal relationship between written
texts and orality. One intriguing notion she puts forward concerns the
different quality of listening in formal and informal niyaz kahanis—
reading them is perceived as hardly efficacious. Although both types
of mo‘jizat emphasise listening, formal kahanis efface narrators, are
less “personal“, less interactive, and more listening-oriented. In casual
mo‘jizat, which speak to local, familial needs with clear geographical
anchoring, listeners are likely to “talk back“. (Though why Osho was so
keen on Bajid and what use he made of his verses and tales remains an
intriguing question!)

Books and Performance

The conference from which this volume draws was originally entitled
“Tellings, Not Texts”, but one participant pointed out that “Tellings and
Texts” was a more appropriate title, since texts—in their material form
as books—were often present in the performances we talked about.
What roles do texts play in performance, we asked, and what is the
relationship between them? Which way does the directionality go—
from text to performance or from performance/oral exposition to text?
Here, too, early modern North India shows a great range of possibilities
and choices.
At one end of the spectrum, we see a great deal of interest in books
as material objects. Already at North Indian Sultanate courts illustrated
manuscripts (and illuminated Qur’ans) were valued and copied in
Persianate and Indic styles and provide a tantalising glimpse of the
circulation of shared tastes among elites that impacted, for example,
 Introduction 19

upon Jain book-copying and book-dedicating practices.44 It is surely

not by chance that the earliest illustrated manuscripts of the Sanskrit
Bhāgavata-purāṇa also appeared in this period. The dazzling and profuse
production of the imperial Mughal workshop (karkhana) has tended to
absorb most scholarly attention, and we still await a comprehensive
picture of illustrated book production in this period that devotes
parallel and equal consideration to non-imperial manuscripts and book
circulation.
Among the religious groups of the period, too, we find a striking
investment in books. The most obvious example is that of the pothis
(compilations) of the early Sikh gurus. Guru Nanak himself, who
“believed that he had been assigned by God the vocation of singing his
praises […] and that his hymns were the result of direct communication
from God”, nonetheless urged writing God’s name as a devotional act.
This has been taken as an implicit hint towards the fact that already in
his lifetime disciples wrote down his hymns in a pothi.45 As G.S. Mann
points out, Guru Nanak referred explicitly to the role of the Qur’an in
Muslim devotional life and must have been familiar with the practice
common in sufi khanqahs of placing the Qur’an in the open to allow for
full access.46 Having a pothi became crucial to the authority claims of his
descendants and disciples at their various seats (gaddis). Textual history
shows that the early pothis were subsequently added to, though much
emphasis has traditionally been placed within the Sikh tradition on the
singularity and unbroken continuity of the Guru Granth—whose status
is very much that of a sacred text, to be read, recited, and sung to raga
but also worshipped in private and public rituals.
The Sikhs were not the only sant group who invested in writing,
compiling, and copying books. Dadu Dayal’s disciples also compiled
his utterances (vani) together with those of other sants (panch-vani),
as well as enormous and literally comprehensive compilations (lit.
sarvangi). They also wrote the first biographies/hagiographies (parchais

44 See Éloïse Brac de la Perrière, L’art du livre dans l’Inde des sultanats (Paris: Presses
de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008), and Preeti Khosla’s PhD dissertation on ‘The
Visual Languages of the North Indian Styles of Book Paintings during the Sultanate
Period (1411-1525)’ (School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2014).
45 Gurinder Singh Mann, The Making of Sikh Scriptures (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2001), p. 10. Jack Hawley also reminds us of Guru Nanak’s dislike for the
proliferation of mercenary and beggarly performers (p. 211).
46 Mann (2001), p. 12.
20 Tellings and Texts

and bhaktamals) in the vernacular in North India, and the manuals

for sermons that Monika Horstmann writes about.47 She notes that,
especially from the eighteenth century, “the wealth of manuscripts
often of great length and calligraphic quality indicate that the patrons
of these were men—and occasionally women—of considerable means”
(p. 45). These developments form a striking parallel to the already
existing but growing production in sufi circles of compilations of
sayings (malfuzat) and biographical dictionaries (tazkiras) devoted to
one’s master—a sure way of placing him on the map. Another related
phenomenon concerns the considerable growth in the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries of writing about and by elite lineages of
musicians, especially kalawants and those with lineal connections to
Delhi. Far from confirming the “illiterate ustad” stereotype we have
inherited from nationalist musicologists,48 the later Mughal period saw
major professional musicians and socially prominent amateurs writing
their own names into history in the form of two kinds of books: tazkiras
and song collections49 in Persian and Hindavi.50 This oral-literate field of
musical knowledge transmission probably developed in part as a way of
ensuring the longevity of lineages and the preservation of lineal musical
property threatened in the eighteenth century by increased economic
migration away from traditional centres of familial oral transmission.
The evidence of lineages of hereditary performers who, alongside

47 For Dadu-panthi biographies, see e.g. Jangopal, The Hindī Biography of Dādū Dayāl,
ed. and trans. by Winand M. Callewaert (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988); for Dadu-
panthi compendia, see Winand M. Callewaert, The Sarvāṅgī of Gopāldās: A 17th Century
Anthology of Bhakti Literature (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1993), and W.M.
Callewaert and Bart Op de Beeck, Nirguṇa Bhakti Sāgara = Devotional Hindī Literature: A
Critical Edition of the Pañc-Vāṇī or Five Works of Dādū, Kābir, Nāmdev, Raidās, Hardās with
the Hindī Songs of Gorakhnāth and Sundardās, 2 vols (New Delhi: Manohar Publications,
1991).
48 See e.g. Janaki Bakhle on V.N. Bhatkhande’s condemnation of Muslim ustads as
ignorant and illiterate, in Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian
Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 109-13, 120-23.
49 The history of song collections in South Asia is patently much older and more
extensive (see Busch and Bangha in this volume); but before this eighteenth-century
flurry of activity, collections of the courtly repertoire that forms the basis of what is
now called Hindustani music (dhrupad, khayal, tappa, etc.) are significantly rarer than,
say, bhakti collections.
50 For bibliographical details of many of these texts, see the database SHAMSA: Sources
for the History and Analysis of Music/Dance in South Asia, held at King’s College
London. At the time of writing it holds information on all known major writings (300+
sources) on North Indian music c.1700-1900 written in Persian, Hindavi, English, and
modern Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali.
 Introduction 21

oral transmission, simultaneously contributed to the written lineage

of Indo-Persianate musical knowledge furthermore underlines the
central importance of community and silsila, or what Indrani Chatterjee
calls “monastic governmentality”, in sustaining written as well as oral
knowledge systems in early modern India.51
In this period we thus see a marked expansion of textuality—not
just in Persian and Sanskrit, but also in the vernaculars—to new groups
and new genres, often as the writing down of oral genres, if not whole
performances. As Bangha points out, until the sixteenth century only

Puranic, epic and historical narratives and Sufi romances—composed

normally in the doha-chaupai metre, conveying important religious or
political messages, and usually of a performative nature—[…] had been
deemed worthy of being committed to writing in the vernacular. Towards
the end of the sixteeenth century, instead, books began to appear in
Brajbhasha that were composed in order to be read and studied and not
primarily to be performed (see Busch in this volume). This is also the
time when we can spot the beginning of an ever-increasing activity to
commit to writing Hindi songs that have so far been transmitted in oral
performance. (p. 359)

About Bengali mangalkabyas, d’Hubert notes that the poet is typically

represented but as the conduit of the Goddess’s wish to tell the story.
The ritual act by which he grabs a flywhisk marks not only the beginning
of the performance but also the moment in which he remembers the
text: “in terms of representation of the literary activity, it is not only that
performance is the main way to share the content of a written text; rather
it means that no text is ever able to come to existence without a setting
of ritual performance” (p. 428).
Courtly literary culture, Busch reminds us, was very much a written
literary culture—she quotes a description of the court of Bir Singh
Deo Bundela by Keshavdas in which “there sat countless writers
writing, hundreds, and thousands of them” (p. 254). While her essay
painstakingly teases out the performative elements and qualities of the
poetic, historical, martial texts, and manuals written by Brajbhasha riti
poets, she is also keen to stress that this “riti corpus was underwritten
first and foremost by a textual engagement with the Sanskrit past”. Sunil
Sharma points out that while history records that Akbar had Persian

51 On the centrality of lineage to political formation and knowledge production in South
Asia, see Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Monastic Governmentality, Colonial Misogyny, and
Postcolonial Amnesia in South Asia’, History of the Present 3.1 (2013), 57-98.
22 Tellings and Texts

classics like the Shāhnāma and the Gulistān read out in court and these
works were meant to be read aloud in sections, “their orality was
accompanied by an equal value placed on these works as books, and it
was usually through the copying and use of manuscripts of these texts
that they were transmitted with the seals of the members of the royal
family and nobility” (p. 288).
Inside and outside the court, the Puranas (which both Muzaffar Alam
and Jack Hawley touch upon) present a tantalising case. While Puranas
remained written in Sanskrit in North India and the Bhāgavata-purāṇa
attracted important Sanskrit commentaries by the main Vaishnava
acharyas, Hawley reminds us that the Bhāgavata-purāṇa was performed
in a number of ways both in Sanskrit and in the vernacular: through
recitation; reading and exposition involving sermons and songs; or
in rituals (yajnas). Indeed, the Bhāgavata māhātmya manuscripts that
began to appear at the turn of the eighteenth century expressed the
need to regulate these performances. In their different ways, both ‘Abd
al-Rahman Chishti’s Persian Purana and Surdas’s “song commentary”
are evidence of this culture of Puranas circulating between writing and
performance.52
By comparison, John Cort’s essay explores the process by which Jain
hymns in Sanskrit (stotras) were skilfully translated by Banarsidas and
his circle in Agra in the early seventeenth century. (As he points out,
they chose to translate not Jain scriptures, but ritual texts.) The written
translation was itself the result of oral debates, and in turn it became
the subject of further debates. Yet “no one wanted to read a kirtan or
an abhang, after all—they wanted to see it, hear it, and experience it
displayed before them”, as Novetzke forcefully argues. Perhaps the most
unexpected arguments about the directionality between performance
and text and the role of texts in performance come from his essay and
Widdess’s. By contrasting the bada (notebook) of kirtan performers—
“loosely organised and often hastily constructed with lots of margin
corrections, lines crossed out, and other emendations”—with the orderly
pothi (book) of theologians and institutional figures, Novetzke argues
that badas represent the logic of kirtan performance. His argument is
worth quoting in full:

52 Vernacular translations of the Bhāgavata-purāṇa, particularly of books X and XI, also

proliferated from the sixteenth century onwards; see R.S. McGregor, Hindi Literature
from its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), pp.
96-97.
 Introduction 23

[The bada] is a format that privileges performance. Text here is submitted

to the demands of performance. The text is a tool, a means and not an
end. Furthermore, its role is not preservation—it may function as an
archive, but its composition is not intended to ossify a text and convey
it into the future as a fixed form. Instead, the text is dynamic, meant to
trigger and prompt a performance, existing as a kind of outline of a kirtan,
but containing no narrative, typological, or historical logic independent
of performance. In other words, it cannot stand alone, as can a pothi or a
fixed, complete composition. (p. 179)53

As the archetypal kirtankar, Namdev expresses suspicion of books and

scriptures and expresses a theory of practice in which devotion “is on
display, through the body and voice, and never on paper”. “Despite the
rather impressive rate of literacy among the Marathi sants”, Novetzke
argues, “the logic of practice of Varkari religious expression has been
oral, or rather performative, and not written”. Kirtan is the performance
of devotion and is central to bhakti practice because it is public and open
to all.
Monika Horstmann likewise makes the case that the thematic and
musical arrangement of sant vanis, and the fact that all these texts are
used as manuals by preachers, means that “there can be no doubt that
the Dādūvāṇī originated from the redaction of sayings by, or used by,
Dadu in live homiletic contexts” (p. 59). During Dadupanthi festive
occasions today, preachers do not consult a prepared script but “may
hold the open sacred scripture in front of them”, though their sermons
will draw upon material taken from a range of books. And if they are
preaching about a verse in the scriptures they might read the verses out.
“The live performance of a sermon is therefore oral in its fullest sense”,
she notes, “although it draws on memorised or printed material and
perhaps on notes the preacher has taken while preparing for the task”
(p. 36). The manuals that she and Khan write about can be viewed in
a similar light—not as free-standing texts but as aids to performance.
Indeed, she points out that notwithstanding the respect accorded to

53 
He also points out the implications for collecting, archiving, preservation, and
research: “Major archival institutions—such as university libraries, research centres,
and other institutes—amid their many collections of pothis do not generally collect
badas. Even the concern with which these notebooks are preserved today differs from
the careful attention given to manuscripts—badas are alien to the teak-wood glass
case, rarely have an index or catalogue citations, and generally rest in haphazard
stacks or even piles in the closets of institutions and private collectors” (p. 175).
24 Tellings and Texts

Mahant Pokhardas’s spiritual stature, his sermons were acknowledged

to be hard to enjoy since he read out the manual!
While Fakhr al-Zamani’s seventeenth-century Persian manual on
storytelling, the Ṭirāz al-akhbār, resembles the Dadupanthi sermon
manuals in containing useful lists of terms, lexical aids, assorted
sayings, and nutshell versions of longer stories, it seems closer to the
ritigranth manuals (Busch) in operating as a proof, almost a certificate,
of its author’s own skills as a storyteller, and in elevating storytelling
to an art that requires a manual. Khan notes that the text not only tells
us much about the process of qissa performance but also shows us “one
manner in which the qissa was defined or ‘encoded’” (Khan, p. 186). In
the case of the qissa, the manual’s approach to genre as an assemblage of
elements (Khan uses the term bayaz or scrapbook) that could and should
be combined and recombined in new and attractive ways “undermines
the very idea of monolithic genres”, because if we look at the range
of intertextual and extra-literary material that each qissa-khwan was
supposed to have “in his throat”, the range is stupendous and in fact
crosses the line between mimetic and veracious genres that Fakhr
al-Zamani otherwise subscribed to (p. 186). Each qissa performance
was therefore something of an “intertextual tapestry” that “can only be
comprehended as a complex of multi-generic intertexts that fall under
the order of the master genre code of the qissa” (p. 205).
By contrast, in the Newar devotional singing (dapha) studied by
Richard Widdess, the book containing the song-texts is important—
but only as a ritual object. It is never consulted, and the boys who are
taught the songs from it are not taught to read them. For singers and
audience the texts only provide clues to meaning: “a word, name or
phrase evokes a network of meanings and associations, which may in
turn determine when and where the song is sung”. What is important,
he notes, is the performance, “which has its own meanings and values
independently of the text: as religious exertion, as an expression of
social identity, and as a component in urban ritual” (Widdess, p. 244).
When he asked one group why they go to the trouble of singing the
entire Sanskrit poem Gītagovinda in one all-night performance when
they do not understand the words, “they explained that the objective is
to sing all night. Therefore they choose to sing the Gītagovinda, because
it takes that length of time” (p. 240).
 Introduction 25

Beyond Text:
Musical Sound and the Inexpressible
This, finally, leads us to the question of the limits of the verbal—what does
music, what do singing or vocally heightened forms of recitation, add or
do to a text that supersedes what a text can do alone? In considering this
issue in particular, the insights of our contemporary ethnographic case
studies have proven especially helpful.
Rhythmic patterns are sometimes inserted verbally in performance
scenes within tales or poems (Orsini, Busch), and the notated non-
lexical syllables of courtly taranas that were vocalised and embodied
by drummers and dancers in performance are interlaced with Persian
couplets in eighteenth-century song collections.54 But in Richard Wolf’s
essay, drum syllables become a code unto themselves, speaking of the
performers’ mastery and enjoyment of skills recognised by each other
and by those few in the audience—like Madhavanal with Kamakandala
(Orsini)—who can understand their abstract relationships with verbal
texts. And as Widdess concludes, cases like dapha, khayal, or the marai
kirtan in Bengal suggest that “some South Asian musical forms escape
such conventional categories as orality and text, but are better understood
as performance: a process in which text may be present, in written and/
or oral form, but is subsumed by musical elaboration and the enactment
of religious and social meanings” (p. 245). The presence of cosmic
sound within the body is key for bhakti poets like Kabir, and for their
contemporary performers like Prahlad Singh Tipania, who evoke the
continuous inner sound, the subtle voice (nada, jhini avaz).55
For the period before recorded sound, the question of what music does
that goes beyond text is more difficult to answer because we no longer
have access to the object under discussion. Since Plato,56 music in many
cultures, past and present, has been used to deal with excess; to go beyond
words, to express the inexpressible; to soothe, magnify, and charm the

54 See e.g. Sophia Plowden’s song collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, MS 380.
55 For a sensitive and embodied discussion, see Linda Hess’s forthcoming book, Bodies
of Song: Kabir Oral Traditions and Performative Worlds in North India (New York: Oxford
University Press), ch. 1.
56 Plato’s theory of the “music of the spheres”, which built upon Pythagoras, was a clear
influence on Indo-Persian treatises on Hindustani music; see especially Shaikh ‘Abdul
Karim bin Shaikh Farid Ansari al-Qadiri, Javāhir al-mūsīqāt-i Muḥammadī (British
Library, MS Or. 12,857).
26 Tellings and Texts

emotions through the senses rather than the intellect. Because music’s
mode of communication is abstract, music’s semantic and affective
associations are more ambiguous than language, capable of expressing a
greater depth and number of nuances, often simultaneously.57 This is not
to say that music’s significations are endless: music always exists within
a culturally specific net of meaning that determines its limits. What it
does mean is that the very choice to recite or to sing, and in many of
our cases the choice of raga in which to set a text, can both enrich and
multiply the possible meanings of text—or conversely render a lyric less
ambiguous by intimating one meaning among many.
What is more, the raga itself exists both as a specifically musical
formula (a set of notes that need to be sung in particular orders and
ways), nadamaya, and as an icon, devatamaya, that conveys a distinct mood
and set of associations accompanied by specific instructions as to the
correct time or season to stimulate those associations.58 In the Mughal
court, a clear “scientific” correlation was drawn between each of the
seven notes of the Hindustani scale, the seven celestial bodies, and the
four elements presiding over each, embedding raga firmly in the fields of
Islamicate cosmology and Unani medicine.59 But this was in large part an
attempt to interpret in new terms why the Indic system associated each
raga with particular iconographies, deities and nayak-nayikas, timings,
and rasa. At the heart of both knowledge systems was an attempt to
account for each raga’s effect on the listener, its ta‘sir. This effect was
not merely subjective, it was specific; and it was not merely affective,
able to transport listeners into a state of meditation or restlessness or
tearfulness, it was supernatural—it rearranged the natural world,
whether that be a heart sickened by melancholy or a gathering rain cloud
refusing to burst. Although the rational, “scientific” underpinnings of
the explanation of ta‘sir had attenuated by the nineteenth century, the

57 Dillon (2012), pp. 6-7, 16-43, especially on Augustine pp. 36-42; see also Laudan
Nooshin, ‘Prelude: Power and the Play of Music’, in Music and the Play of Power in
the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, ed. by L. Nooshin (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2009), pp. 1-32, especially 1-4 and 9-17; and Victor Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable,
trans. by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
58 Discussion of Somanatha’s Rāgavibodha (1609) in Harold Powers, ‘Illustrated
Inventories of Indian Rāgamāla Painting’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 100.4
(1980), 473-93, especially pp. 473-75.
59 Katherine Butler Brown [Schofield], ‘Rāga Systems in Performance’, in ‘Hindustani
Music in the Time of Aurangzeb’ (PhD dissertation, School of Oriental and African
Studies, London, 2003), pp. 177-225.
 Introduction 27

Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī (1869) nonetheless describes in magical terms how the

singer’s command over ta’sir should work. The singer was in effect a
necromancer (an ‘amil), and the melodic form of the raga was a magical
formula (‘amal; du‘a ba tarkib) that, when voiced at the right cosmological
time, would conjure up a spirit (a muwakkal) that would do his bidding.
That spirit was the ta‘sir of the raga.60
In other words, sound in and of itself was powerful—effective and
affecting—and the silencing of this dimension to the texts with which we
work is definitively a loss. We are not ‘amils, and cannot conjure up the
inexpressible experience of sounds that have long passed into silence.
But all our work in this volume is underpinned by the conviction that
we must be constantly mindful of the fact that texts in North India were
(and are) frequently experienced as live auditory entities with a fuller
range of experiential possibilities than may be apparent on the surface
of the page.

60 Munshi Muhammad Karam Imam Khan, Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī (Lucknow: Hindustani

Press, 1925), pp. 111-16.