TELLINGS AND TEXTS Tellings and Texts Music, Literature and Performance in North India Edited by Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield http://www.openbookpublishers.com © Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Orsini, Francesca and Butler Schofield, Katherine (eds.), Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0062 Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783741021#copyright All external links were active on 22/09/2015 and archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/web/ Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at http:// www.openbookpublishers.com/isbn/9781783741021#resources ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-102-1 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-103-8 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-104-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-105-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9978-1-78374-106-9 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0062 King’s College London has generously contributed to the publication of this volume. Cover image: Late eighteenth-century miniature by Mir Kalan Khan (Awadh, c.1775). Photo by Pernille Klemp. © The David Collection, Copenhagen. Inventory no. 50/1981. All rights reserved. Cover design by Heidi Coburn. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers To Aditya’s memory, once again Contents Acknowledgements ix Note on Transliteration xi Note on Dating Systems xii List of Illustrations xiii Notes on Contributors xv Introduction 1 Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield I. Between Texts and Practices 1. The Example in Dadupanthi Homiletics 31 Monika Horstmann 2. Making it Vernacular in Agra: The Practice of Translation 61 by Seventeenth-Century Jains John E. Cort 3. World Enough and Time: Religious Strategy and 107 Historical Imagination in an Indian Sufi Tale Muzaffar Alam 4. Hearing Mo‘jizat in South Asian Shi‘ism 137 Amy Bard II. Books and Performances, Books for Performance 5. Note to Self: What Marathi Kirtankars’ Notebooks Suggest 169 about Literacy, Performance, and the Travelling Performer in Pre-Colonial Maharashtra Christian Lee Novetzke 6. A Handbook for Storytellers: The Ṭirāz al-akhbār and the 185 Qissa Genre Pasha M. Khan 7. Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa? 209 John Stratton Hawley 8. Text, Orality, and Performance in Newar Devotional Music 231 Richard Widdess III. Written Clues about Performed Texts 9. Listening for the Context: Tuning in to the Reception of 249 Riti Poetry Allison Busch 10. Reading the Acts and Lives of Performers in Mughal 283 Persian Texts Sunil Sharma 11. Persian Poets on the Streets: The Lore of Indo-Persian 303 Poetic Circles in Late Mughal India Stefano Pellò 12. Texts and Tellings: Kathas in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth 327 Centuries Francesca Orsini 13. A Curious King, a Psychic Leper, and the Workings of 359 Karma: Bajid’s Entertaining Narratives Imre Bangha IV. Musical Knowledge and Aesthetics 14. Raga in the Early Sixteenth Century 385 Allyn Miner 15. Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika 407 Katherine Butler Schofield 16. Patterns of Composition in the Seventeenth-Century 423 Bengali Literature of Arakan Thibaut d’Hubert 17. The Musical Lives of Texts: Rhythms and Communal 445 Relationships among the Nizamis and Some of Their Neighbours in South and West Asia Richard K. Wolf Glossary 485 Bibliography 493 Index 535 Acknowledgements This volume brings together the papers presented at the third and final conference of the AHRC-funded project “North Indian Literary Culture and History from a Multilingual Perspective: 1450-1650”, which Francesca ran at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) between 2006-2009 and in which Katherine was intimately involved from start to finish. The conference was initially entitled “Tellings, Not Texts”, but over the course of the three days it became clear that texts were very much involved in many of the performance forms and traditions we were discussing, hence the change of title. (The first conference volume, After Timur Left, came out in 2014 from Oxford University Press, New Delhi, co-edited by Francesca and Samira Sheikh.) We would first of all like to thank the AHRC for its generous support. The conference, which took place on 8-10 June 2009, benefited from a British Academy conference support grant, for which we are also grateful, as we are to the European Research Council which supported Katherine’s contributions in the latter stages. We would like here to heartily thank all the contributors for their patience and good humour as we asked for more and more changes. We thank Alessandra Tosi for her enthusiasm and welcome, and Dr David Lunn for careful copy-editing. Our dear friend Aditya Behl helped plan the conference and was supposed to come, but was in the end too ill to travel. He died, tragically young, two months later. We would like to dedicate the volume to him, for he remains in our thoughts and in our love. FO and KBS London and Cambridge, July 2015 Note on Transliteration A volume of this kind inevitably has a large number of transliterated words in several languages. To make the text readable without sacrificing its scholarly appeal, we have chosen to use diacritical marks for book titles and direct quotations, and to keep them to a minimum elsewhere; in some instances, notably where metrical considerations are important, they are used more extensively. For Devanagari, the transliteration used follows R.S. McGregor, The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), with the exception that nasalised vowels are transliterated with a ṃ instead of ṁ. For Persian words, we have slightly adapted existing systems as below. In spite of our efforts, we have not achieved complete consistency. S̱ ﺙ T ﺕ P ﭖ B ﺏ A ا KH ﺥ Ḥ ﺡ CH ﭺ J ﺝ ZH ﮊ Z ﺯ R ﺭ Ẕ ﺫ D ﺩ Ż ﺽ Ṣ ﺹ SH ﺵ S ﺱ Q ﻕ F ﻑ GH ﻍ ‘ ﻉ Ẓ ﻅ Ṭ ﻁ N ﻥ M ﻡ L ﻝ G ﮒ K ﮎ H ﻩ (W,V, Ū (O only if specified as majhul و (Y, Ī (E only if specified as majhul ﯼ short vowels: a, i, u Note on Dating Systems This volume necessarily makes reference to four discrete calendrical systems. Where otherwise unmarked, we use the Common/Christian Era (Anno Domini), denoted “CE”. The Islamic calendar (denoted “AH”: Anno Hegirae, or Hijri year), commenced in the year 622 CE. A lunar calendar, it does not correspond directly to the Gregorian Calendar, and the year 2015 CE is 1436-37 AH. The Vikram Samvat calendar, denoted “VS”, is between 56-57 years ahead of the Common Era, thus 2015 CE covers 2071-72 VS. Finally, the Banggabda or Bengali Calendar, denoted “BA”, is between 593-94 years behind the Common Era, thus 2015 CE is 1421-22 BA. Both VS and BA are solar calendars, but do not begin in January, so there is no precise overlap with CE. List of Illustrations 5.1 (L) Jnaneshwari Stamp, issued in 1990 to commemorate the 171 700th anniversary of the composition of the Jñāneśvarī; (R) “Saint Dnyaneshwar” stamp, issued in 1997 in memory of Jnaneswhar/ Jnandev. Public Domain. 5.2 Namdev Performing a Kirtan, folio from a nineteenth-century 173 publication of Mahipati’s eighteenth-century biography [1890]. Public Domain. 5.3 Four typical badas or “notebooks” in the collection of the Bhandarkar 175 Oriental Research Institute. Author’s photograph, CC BY. 5.4 Transcript of a kirtan from a Marathi bada, c. eighteenth century. 178 Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Author’s photograph, CC BY. 5.5 A representative page from Lohiya, K. 1997. Kirtan mārga darśikā 179 (Pune: Sharada Sahitya), pp. 194-95. All rights reserved. 5.6 (L) section is taken from the Śrī Nāmdev gāthā (1970), p. 343; (R) 181 is taken from the Bhaktavijay 1996 [1762], pp. 164-65. Image by the author, CC BY. 8.1 Dapha group performing in Suryamarhi Square, Bhaktapur. 233 September 2007. Author’s photograph, CC BY. 8.2 Raga Lalit. Bhaktapur, early seventeenth century. Photograph by 235 Gert-Matthias Wegner, CC BY. 8.3 Dapha group performing at the Taleju temple, Kathmandu, in 1664. 237 Detail of a painting now in the Collège de France, Paris. Author’s sketch, CC BY. 8.4 Ganamani. Dattatreya Navadapha songbook, song no. 63 (fol. 239 20r-20v). Public Domain. 8.5 One side of the Bhairav Navadapha group performing on the first 244 day of Biskah, Tahmarhi Square, Bhaktapur. The chariot of Bhairav is visible behind the singers. April 2003. Author’s photograph, CC BY. Notes on Contributors Muzaffar Alam is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of, among others, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India (1986) and The Languages of Political Islam in India: c.1200-1800 (2004); and, with Sanjay Subrahmanyam, of Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (2011).