Orality Conference
In the context of a research project on literary culture in north India in the 15th to 17th centuries from a multilingual perspective, it was clear from the beginning that music, songs, story-telling and performance traditions would be crucial to the picture we would try to piece together, for a number of reasons. Music and singing were cultivated intensively at several princely courts, at the homes of noblemen and merchants, at some Sufi khanqahs and formed an essential part of Bhakti practice as well as of entertainment at fairs, festivals and other celebrations, with varying degree of access. Musical knowledge and expertise, both in form of treatises, song collections and embodied in performers, connoisseurs and patrons circulated between (and connected) these different spaces and different languages. The work of F. Nalini Delvoye has done much to uncover the textual and musical landscape of this period, and can be usefully taken as a guide to explore other oral and performative aspects of literary culture
This focus on orality and performance allows us:
- to explore literary culture beyond the court;
- to understand the links between forms and performers outside and within the courts, and dynamics of classicisation and popularisation;
- to attend to the oral-performative aspect of poetic culture and repartee/wit, so obviously valued as a cultural asset;
- to consider the relationship between religious message and entertainment, and generic similarities between religious and non-religious stories and wit;
- to consider the dynamics between oral exposition and written recording (e.g. of malfuzat or sermons).
By considering singing, story-telling and performance (including religious discourse) in a variety of languages and traditions, we hope to capture the layered and inter-connected nature of literary culture in north India in these centuries, and some of the processes of cultural transmission and diffusion.
Proposed themes:
- Singers, singing and songs: networks, diffusion, tastes. Can we map the connection between singing for temples and for bhaktas and singing for other patrons?
- Story-telling: what do we know about professional story-tellers (dastan-go and katha-vachak) in this period? What were their repertoires? Which stories were particularly popular, and what oral and performative aspects can we identify in their written versions?
- Poetic performances: bait-bazi, mahfils. What textual evidence do we have for poetic performances inside, and especially outside, the court in this period? Is there any relation between the performative code of the evolving
- Braj Bhasha riti poetic culture and Persian codes?
- Religious sermons, stories and malfuzat: what themes/topics and performative strategies can we see through the written records? And what do we know about audiences and context of performance? Can we seen shared “floating anecdotes” or rhetorical strategies?
- Response: how can read traces in the texts (given that contextual evidence is so scant and patchy) in order to identify their intended audiences? Do the texts themselves theorise response? Does a comparative approach to the arts (art, music, poetry, etc.) help in this enterprise?
Participants:
Singers, singing and performance:
Allyn Miner (UPenn)
F. ‘Nalini’ Delvoye (EPHE, Paris)
Richard Widdess (SOAS)
Richard Wolf (Harvard)
Jack Hawley (Barnard College)
Story-telling:
Pasha Mohammad Khan (Columbia)
Francesca Orsini (SOAS)
Amy Bard (Harvard)
Mahfil and sabha:
Thibaut d’Hubert (Paris)
Stefano Pello’ (Venice)
Allison Busch (Columbia)
Sermons and discourses:
Monika Boehm-Tettelbach (Heidelberg)
Imre Bangha (Oxford)
Muzaffar Alam (Chicago)
John Cort (Denison)
Response/reception:
Aditya Behl (UPenn)
Sunil Sharma (Boston)
Patrons, clients and networks:
Katherine Brown (King’s)
Polly O’Hanlon (Oxford)
Christian Novetzke (Washington)
