Abstract
From theoretical treatises to songbooks, literature relating to Hindustani music proliferated in nineteenth-century Bengal. With few exceptions, these innovative Bengali works have received scant attention in studies of colonial-era music, which have focused instead on Anglophone scholarship. Bringing a wider range of vernacular texts into the analysis nuances the landscape of intellectual production, and indicates that nationalist or reformist interests pertained to but one public arena, jostling against several others. This article examines treatises dealing with the theory and history of Hindustani music, demonstrating the journey of Bengali musicology from Persian antecedents to its own system. The field of print production is then diversified further through an analysis of song collections, a major genre that disrupts any notion of a uniform sphere of transmission, reading, and listening. Rather than thinking of nineteenth-century music purely in terms of the colonial relationship, this article foregrounds a wider set of competing cultural and aesthetic considerations.
Highlights
Introduction inBandyopadhyay, G| tasutrasara.Madhabcandra Datta Caudhuri, Sa_ng| ta nanda Lahar| (Calcutta, 1848), p. ii.The editor’s introduction expresses his excitement in his new enterprise both through familiar literary tropes (‘the thrilled peacock of the mind’, citta s¤ikh| sukh| ) and his elaborate phrasing of the emotional-cum-technological process (‘braved myself at once to dispatch it to the printing press’, mudra jantralay¤e presana karane sahasa sahas| hailam).This combination of the traditional and modern through the editorial venture and market dissemination of the printed book characterizes the work as a whole in its treatment of religious literature
Bringing a wider range of texts into the analysis indicates that interests in nationalism, the ‘colonial encounter’, reformism, and ‘Hindu Music’9 pertained to but one public arena, jostling against several others
Due to the cultural legacy of the Mughal Empire, the association of this authority with Muslim musicians from upper India (i.e. Hindustan, Awadh, and Delhi) was not displaced. This complicated the epistemological transition of music under British rule: while Bengalis asserted their intellectual authority in a colonial space, their ongoing relationships with Hindustani culture, musical professionals, and Mughal texts suggest that they found ways to accommodate an appreciation for pre-colonial and nonBengali culture in their modern and increasingly provincialized identity
Summary
Bengali printing presses based in Calcutta and beyond churned out new works on music in vast numbers. Prior to the nineteenth century, music in Bengal was a limb of a larger body, whose core was incontrovertibly in the Mughal heartlands of upper India To change their cultural standing, Bengalis required a new set of tools (including a corpus of technical writings in their own language) and a recognized position of authority. Due to the cultural legacy of the Mughal Empire, the association of this authority with Muslim musicians from upper India (i.e. Hindustan, Awadh, and Delhi) was not displaced This complicated the epistemological transition of music under British rule: while Bengalis asserted their intellectual authority in a colonial space, their ongoing relationships with Hindustani culture, musical professionals, and Mughal texts suggest that they found ways to accommodate an appreciation for pre-colonial and nonBengali culture in their modern and increasingly provincialized identity. The emphasis in previous scholarship on these points of ‘public’ engagement has presented only one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.
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