Open access for this publication was provided by the following grant: FP7 Ideas: European Research Council - 263643

Abstract

"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."

1 online resource (xix, 543 pages)

Annotation

Includes bibliographical references and index

Part 1. Between texts and practices. The example in Dadupanthi Homiletics / Monika Horstmann -- Making it vernacular in Agra: the practice of translation by seventeenth-century Jains / John E. Cort -- World enough and time : religious strategy and historical imagination in an Indian Sufi tale / Muzaffar Alam -- Hearing Mo'jizat in South Asian Shi'ism / Amy Bard -- Part 2. Books and performances, books for performance. Note to self : What Marathi Kirtankars' notebooks suggest about literacy, performance, and the travelling performer in pre-colonial Maharashtra / Christian Lee Novetzke -- A handbook for storytellers : the Ṭirāz al-akhbār and the Qissa genre / Pasha M. Khan -- Did Surdas perform the Bhāgavata Purāṇa? / John Stratton Hawley -- Text, orality, and performance in Newar devotional music / Richard Widdess --Part 3. Written clues about performed texts. Listening for the context : tuning in to the reception of Riti poetry / Allison Busch -- Reading the acts and lives of performers in Mughal Persian texts / Sunil Sharma -- Persian poets on the streets : the lore of Indo-Persian poetic circles in late Mughal India / Stefano Pellò -- Texts and tellings : kathas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries / Francesca Orsini -- A curious king, a psychic leper, and the workings of karma : Bajid's entertaining narratives / Imre Bangha -- Part 4. Musical knowledge and aesthetics. Raga in the early sixteenth century / Allyn Miner -- Learning to taste the emotions : the Mughal Rasika / Katherine Butler Schofield -- Patterns of composition in the seventeenth-century Bengali literature of Arakan / Thibaut d'Hubert -- The musical lives of texts : rhythms and communal relationships among the Nizamis and some of their neighbours in south and west Asia / Richard K. Wolf

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