89

Katherine Butler Brown

Evidence of Indo-Persian Musical Synthesis? The tanbur and rudra vina in seventeenth-century Indo-Persian treatises It has long been accepted wisdom that North Indian classical music as we know it today developed as a synthesis of Indian and Persian influences, largely under Mughal patronage between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries1. Whether celebrated as a brilliant symbol of North Indias tolerant composite culture (Ratanjankar in Bhatkhande 1990 [1930]: iii), or criticised for its impurities in comparison with its supposedly undiluted Southern counterpart (Tagore 1990 [1896]: 67), the hybrid nature of Hindustani music is usually taken for granted. There can be no doubt that the Mughal emperors (1526-1858) as well as their rivals, contemporaries and earlier Indo-Muslim rulers were thoroughly ecumenical in their patronage of music, employing performers of Hindustani, Karnatic, Persian, Central Asian, Ottoman, and even European music at their courts. Evidence for this eclecticity is found in a wide range of sources, from Persian historical chronicles to miniature paintings to European travel accounts2. Musicians and theorists too, from both sides of the Indian/Persianate divide, demonstrated an interest in each others music. The Sanskrit theorist Pundarika Vitthala for instance noted the names of the Persian maqams in his sixteenth-century treatise Ragamanjari (Sarmadee 1996: xxv), but by far the greater interest came from the Indo-Persian theorists, who created an enormous corpus of musicological texts in Persian exploring both Sanskrit theory and contemporary Hindustani musical practice3. The obvious descent of such quintessential modern Hindustani instruments as the sitar and sarod from West and Central Asian forebears is further living testament to the meeting of diverse musical cultures facilitated by Mughal rule in North India4. 1 This research was generously funded by a Postgraduate Award from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and a Small Research Grant from the British Academy. 2 For the Mughal court see Brown 2003: 35-42 and Brown 2000; see also Faqirullah 1996: 95; Wright 1996a: 457; Wright 1996b: 680; Ahmad 1975: 101; Kamilkhani f. 135; Wade 1998: pl. 7; Mir 1999: 46,72; Sarmadee 1996: xxxv, lii; Lahawri 1867-8: vol ii 5-7; Woodfield 1990: 52; Das 1959: 211. 3 See Delvoye 1994 and Brown 2003: 27-81 for details. 4 See Miner 1993 for details.

90 However, the idea that this eclecticity of patronage translated into a synthesis of local and foreign musical systems or styles is very difficult to demonstrate. The concept of synthesis as applied to North Indian classical music is deeply problematic. It is very hard to pin down exactly what is meant by this term in Indian musicological discourse. There seems to be an unexamined and unstated assumption that the term synthesis describes a historically verifiable process whereby two separate musical styles, Indian and Persian, were combined together to produce a new, intermediate musical style called Hindustani music. However, the term synthesis is customarily used in a very vague manner, without ever defining precisely what that synthesis entailed on a music-technical level, or how this confluence differed from simple appropriation. The evidence often presented for synthesis5 may in fact demonstrate only the most superficial levels of cross-cultural encounter. Paintings, for example, of Indian and West or Central Asian instruments being played side by side may simply be testament to the very eclecticity of patronage already noted, or at best suggest that instruments were borrowed from one system into another. It is simply not possible to make any conclusive statement about a merging of styles on the basis of such visual evidence because it is not possible to tell just by looking at a picture - or even at an instrument itself - what the music played on it sounded like, or indeed whether that music was Indian, Persian, something in between, or something entirely different. Similarly, a few hints of foreign melodic graftings into the Hindustani modal system seem to be betrayed by the names of a number of Hindustani ragas (such as Rags Kafi and Hijaj), and mixed ragas that have supposedly been created from maqams (e.g. Faqirullah 1996: 59-63). But in the general absence of musical examples in the treatises to confirm tangible melodic relationships leaving aside the possibility that these relationships might in any case be coincidental these names and associations remain merely suggestive. This leads us to the question of what was identifiably and specifically Persian about the non-Indian musical elements of this supposed Indo-Persian synthesis. Except when the source leaves no room for doubt, our modern choice of Persian to signify any and every foreign grafting into Hindustani music seems to have been made on the somewhat random basis that the Mughal treatises are written in Persian and Mughal courtly culture often identified itself with Persian norms (Richards 1993: 61; OHanlon 1999: 55, 84). But the ethnicity of a musical style is certainly not 5 For example in Wade 1998: 27-32, 136-159; cf. 161, Brown 2001: 168 and Brown 2003: 40-45.

91 synonymous with the language in which its musicological treatises were written, or even the language of its song texts. The Mughals may have used Persian for official purposes and deferred to Persian cultural etiquette, but they were not Persians; they came from Central Asia, drew their pride and claims of sovereign legitimacy from their Turkic and Mongol ancestry (Alam and Subrahmanyam 1998: 17), and spoke a variant of Turkish, and later Urdu, as their mother tongue. The foreign musical influences on Hindustani music could just as often and as easily have been Central Asian as Persian. We frequently cannot tell from the available evidence, and I would suggest that Indo-Persian as a descriptive term for whatever style resulted from the musical encounter between India and its neighbours may be as much of a misnomer as synthesis. More persuasive suggestions of foreign graftings however - and specifically Persian and Arabic influences in this case - have been made with respect to scale types and instrumental tuning systems. This is important, because if any stylistic synthesis occurred in the interaction between Indian and other musical cultures, solid evidence for it must be found in the material building blocks of the music itself - the notes of the scale and the patterns they formed in raga and maqam, and the rhythmic patterns of tala and usul. It has been noted for example that ragas with augmented seconds only began to appear in North India after the Muslim conquests in the late 12th century. Te Nijenhuis has also noted the widespread popularity of Arabic treatises on music in medieval North India, arguing that the scale temperaments used by the Sanskrit theorists Pundarika Vitthala, Somanatha, and possibly Ramamatya, were influenced by Pythagorean systems for fretting stringed instruments in Arabic and Persian musical traditions (1976: 4, 7). However, these well-educated guesses still do not provide evidence that Persian styles were mixed with Indian ones to create a new hybrid musical system. At most they demonstrate the propensity of Hindustani musicians to borrow novel melodic material, temperaments and methods of tuning from Persian theory, perhaps opening up the possibility of playing maqams on the rudra vina and ragas on the tanbur. Surely a true synthesis should be more than just appropriation? One would never claim that Puccinis opera Madame Butterfly is a synthesis of Western and Japanese music just because he borrowed a few Japanese folk tunes to add an authentic flavour to his score. It is too early to present a coherent and fully elaborated theory on this, but I am beginning to think that synthesis is neither an accurate nor a helpful concept to use when analysing the interaction of Indian and West and Central Asian musics in the development of Hindustani music if only because such a radical mingling

92 cannot be proven on the available evidence. Nor do I think influence is a particularly useful concept to invoke, because it suggests a lack of agency on the part of the influenced - the music makers, both individual and collective. To be influenced even smacks of a lack of choice in the matter, a forcible yet strangely agent-less imposition of Persian styles on passive musicians helpless to do anything about it. Instead, I want to discuss these interactions in terms of appropriation, a deliberate borrowing of interesting concepts, techniques and methods from another musical system to enhance ones own craft and tradition. I am therefore going to sidestep the issue of synthesis altogether, and consider some concrete ways in which both ideational and music-technical concepts taken originally from Persian music theory and instrumental practice were applied by Mughal theorists and musicians to the Hindustani musical system in the mid to late seventeenth century. By sidestepping I mean that I am not going to make any claims that the Hindustani style underwent any radical movements in the direction of a so-called Persian style as a result of these appropriations. However, I am going to demonstrate that certain discrete aspects of the Hindustani system did change as a result of active decisions made by individual musicians and theorists in the encounter between Indian and other cultures, and Persian musical culture in particular. Talking about specific appropriations from Persian tradition, rather than a vaguely generalised synthesis, makes it possible to avoid fruitless and unanswerable questions about style, while at the same time making it possible to talk in concrete terms about verifiable historical interactions between two musical systems. The area I wish to consider here is the convergence in mid seventeenth-century Hindustani performance practice of fretting systems and scale temperaments on the Indian rudra vina and West Asian tanbur. In fact, I am going to argue that this was not so much a convergence as a deliberate transferral of tanbur techniques and methods onto the rudra vina for pragmatic and ideational reasons. This convergence is revealed in a remarkable series of musical treatises, primarily in Persian but also confirmed in Sanskrit texts, and embraced by both theorists and some of the foremost performing musicians of the Mughal era. By the end of the seventeenth century, not only were the bin and tanbur fretted the same way using the same scale temperament and the same series of fretting patterns called thaths, but this was done according to a technical and ideational

93 system of Perso-Arabic origin6. This convergence made it possible for Hindustani ragas and Persian maqams to be played on both the bin and the tanbur - often by the same musicians - and for experiments in combining the two instrumental techniques to be undertaken. The thath systems and scale temperament set in place by the late seventeenth century seem to have lasted until at least the nineteenth century, and are still partly recognisable in V N Bhatkhandes more theoretical elaboration of the system. More interestingly, however, the appropriation of this Persianate system for setting up the frets had a significant cultural impact on the way in which Hindustani performers thought about the extra-musical properties of the ragas. Contrary to conventional music historiography, thath systems using their original definition - that is to say, discrete series of fretting patterns for stringed instruments into which the majority of ragas can be fitted (Gangoly 1935: 3; Widdess 1995: 31) - have a surprising longevity and continuity in the Indo-Persian and later Urdu theoretical traditions. The key texts in this tradition, written over nearly three hundred years, are a series of practical manuals, or smaller sections of more general texts, on instrumental construction and playing technique. The earliest known text to describe the thaths, the Chishtiyya-i Bihishtiyya (f. 261a), was written in 1655 by Alauddin Barnawi, the son of the earliest known composer of khayal, Shaikh Bahauddin Barnawi. (It is worth noting in passing that this text contains four khayal bandishes, which to my knowledge are the oldest khayal texts so far discovered7.) They extend via Mirza Raushan Zamirs 1666 translation of Ahobalas famous Sangita Parijata (e.g. f.49b), and Kamilkhanis two seminal 1668 treatises on thath systems, to two early eighteenth-century musical treatises (the anonymous Risala dar Rag (f.144b) and Risala-i Musiqi (f.23b)), late eighteenth and early nineteenth century works on tanbur technique (e.g. Risala dar navakhtan-i rag dar tanbur (f. 3a) and Risala-i Musiqi-i Ghulam Muhammad (n.f.)), Captain Willards 1834 Treatise on the music of Hindoostan (1882: 64)), and several sitar handbooks of the late nineteenth century (see Miner 1993: 45). These texts nature as practical and not theoretical manuals is important to note, because it indicates that before Bhatkhande, thath systems were not conceived as a new way of classifying the ragas designed to replace the all important aesthetic raga classificatory system, the raga-ragini system. Instead, thaths coexisted with and were subsidiary to the raga-ragini system, acting simply as a practical shorthand

6 For details of the thath system in use at the seventeenth-century Mughal court as a practical shorthand for use in performance practice, see Brown 2003/4. 7 For details see Brown forthcoming a.

94 indicating to instrumentalists how to set up their frets for particular ragas (Brown 2003/4: 8). Figure 1. Comparison of Ahobalas and Kamilkhanis scales by string fractions

The first scale in both cases constitutes Ahobalas and Kamilkhanis suddha scale; Kamilkhanis suddha scale, being produced on a moveable-fret vina, consists of all swaras in their lowest fret positions. There is no fret position for komal Dha in Kamilkhanis thath system; for an explanation of this conundrum see Brown 2003: 217-24 and 2003/4: 9. There are two principal areas in which tanbur techniques and methods seem to have been deployed by Hindustani musicians and theorists in the seventeenth century. The first is scale temperament. Three treatises, Ahobalas Sangita Parijata and Kamilkhanis treatises, give us the precise locations of the 12 notes of the Hindustani scale along a single string of the rudra vina worked out lengthwise according to Pythagorean calculations (see Figure 1). Both treatises were clearly written independently of each other, but the closeness of their final calculations and the correspondence of several of their scales or thaths testifies strongly to the basis of their tuning systems in contemporary performance practice (see Figure 2).

95 Figure 2. Comparison of kamilkhanis seventeen- thath system with thath-s extrapolated from Ahobala/Mirza Rausham Zamir Corresponding that-s are highlighted in bold.

The reason for the transferral of tanbur fretting systems and temperaments onto the rudra vina seems to lie in a so far unexplained change in the tuning of the rudra vina from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century, from Ramamatyas vina tuned mandra Sa, mandra Pa, madhya Sa, madhya Ma, to Ahobala and Kamilkhanis vinas tuned mandra Pa, madhya Sa, madhya Pa, tar Sa.

96 Because of the tuning system he used, Ramamatya was able to establish his frets very easily and swiftly using Pythagorean relationships across the strings of the vina (see Figure 3).

It appears from Mirza Raushan Zamirs translation of Ahobala that a crosswise method of fretting the new vina had also been used originally (see Figure 4)8. However, because of the new tuning, it was considerably more laborious and unsystematic than Ramamatyas method. By the time Ahobala was writing, however, a much simpler lengthwise method for fretting instruments by Pythagorean ratios had been in existence in North India for some time: the Persian system used to fret the tanbur. This system is described, for example, in a Persian treatise widely available in sixteenth-century India, the Kashf al-Autar by Qasim bin Dost Ali Bukhari 9. The notes of the lower tetrachord of its basic scale are fixed at identical ratios to Ahobalas (Qasim f. 244a; cf. Mirza Raushan Zamir f. 43b-4a). Furthermore, as Ahobalas description of the tanbur shows, the tanbur was extensively used in the performance of Indian music at this time, employing identical fretting patterns thaths in Mirza Raushan Zamirs translation as Indian instruments (f. 93a). Mirza Raushan Zamir states explicitly in his commentary on Ahobalas string ratios that the bin and tanbur were fretted using the same method as does Alauddin Barnawi (f. 261a) and that both were instruments of equal prestige played by the kalawants (Mirza Raushan Zamir f. 49b). In his tazkira of musicians Faqirullah described at least one kalawant, Tarachand, who specialised in tanbur and whose late ustad Shauqi

8 For details, see Brown 2003: 204-12. 9 In her study of Somanathas Ragavibodha, te Nijenhuis also notes the popularity in India of Safiuddins thirteenth-century Arab treatise, the Kitab al-Adwar, and its possible influence on Indian methods of fretting (1976: 4, 7). Two copies of this treatise in Persian (both Shahjahanabad 1664) and one in Arabic (Shahjahanabad 1663) are in the important connoisseur Diyanat Khans collection in the British Library.

97 had been equally an expert in Indian and Persian music (1996: 209). It therefore seems probable that Ahobala appropriated the lengthwise Persian system of establishing the frets from the tanbur for use on the rudra vina, for the entirely practical reason that it simplified the fretting of an instrument tuned Pa-Sa-Pa-Sa. Kamilkhanis string ratio system is if anything more clearly derived from tanbur techniques. This further extension of Persianate fretting systems onto the rudra vina was made possible by the one significant difference between Kamilkhanis and Ahobalas instruments: Kamilkhanis vina used moveable frets, covering two octaves of a single string tuned to Sa, exactly like the tanbur (Kamilkhani f.125a-7a)10. Because the frets were positioned only in relationship with Sa, they were liberated from the need to be in samvadi relationship with swaras in crosswise alignment with them, making it possible for Kamilkhani to use the harmonic proportions in tempering his scale11. The use of moveable frets also required Kamilkhani to lay out a table of fretting patterns to explain where to move the frets in order to play different ragas. Kamilkhanis table is the first known Hindustani thath system, comprising first seventeen, then eight different scales. The more radical nature of Kamilkhanis system begs the question as to whether or not Kamilkhani was describing a traditional rudra vina. The inclusion in his first thath system of a scale clearly borrowed from Persian music with a three-quarter-tone Re called ghazal thath is suggestive. Indeed, the way he establishes his frets is strikingly similar to the two later treatises on the fretting of the tanbur12. It is possible that Kamilkhanis moveable frets, harmonic proportions, and thath system represent a more radical transferral of tanbur techniques onto the rudra vina, which may not have any lasting impact on the fixed-fret rudra vina, but which may have influenced subsequent developments on tanbur and ultimately sitar. At any rate, this full convergence of rudra vina and tanbur construction must have facilitated 10 For details see Brown 2003/4 and Brown 2003: 198-201, 212-6. 11 All the fractions Kamilkhani uses to temper his scale correspond almost exactly to the Pythagorean harmonic proportions, except that because he uses geomancy divination from the geometric configuration of 16 dots to establish his frets, all his denominators are required to divide into the number 96, a multiple of 16 (f. 126a). Hence the strange fraction, 19/48, for Kamilkhanis Dha fret, which is as close as he can get to 2/5, the harmonic major 6th, under the geomantic circumstances. Note also that his smallest interval is set at 1/16, and his extended thath system in fact has 16, not 17, thaths. 12 For comparison see Risala dar navakhtan-i rag dar tanbur, f. 1b-8b, and Risala-i Musiqi-i Ghulam Muhammad, section three.

98 considerable possibilities of movement between different styles and musical systems. It is quite clear from all the treatises that once the frets had been established, on the bin or on the tanbur, either instrument could be used to play Persian or Hindustani music. Indeed, Alauddin Barnawi states that when the thath was set up, any style of music could be played in it Persian, Hindustani, Afghani, Kashmiri, and startlingly even European (firangi) music (f.261b). And in theory he was quite right; the European system still used Pythagorean tunings in the seventeenth century. It is with respect to the moveable frets used in the thath system that several treatises reveal the second area in which tanbur terminology became indispensable to rudra vina performance practice: in explaining how and why the frets were moved. The moveable thath system is described in exactly the same way by Alauddin Barnawi, Kamilkhani, and the treatises on tanbur, as well as in an important 1698 treatise, the Shams al Aswat, by Ras Baras Khan Kalawant, a direct descendant of Tansen, the chief musician of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb13, and the greatest performing musician of his generation14. Each of the seven swaras on the rudra vina was allocated to one of the seven celestial bodies. Because Sa and Pa are fixed swaras, they were allocated to the two celestial bodies with fixed orbits, the moon and the sun respectively, whereas the swaras that move were allocated to the five planets with vacillating orbits visible to the naked eye (Kamilkhani f. 126a-b). The fact that both Alauddin Barnawi (f. 261a) and Ras Baras Khan (f. 16b-7a) endorse this terminology strongly indicates that it had entered the ideational repertoire of practicing musicians at the highest levels. More importantly though, it is Ras Baras Khan who lets us in on the secret of its cultural meaning, a meaning that is reiterated by Kamilkhani. It was the celestial bodies that determined the times and seasons at which the ragas should be sung. Each celestial body is dominated by one of the four elements earth, air, fire and water which according to the Indo-Islamic psycho-physiological theories of Unani medicine act directly upon the four humours that animate the functions of the human body (Ullmann 1978: 56-8).

13 Contrary to popular belief, Aurangzeb did not ban music. Although he renounced it privately for personal religious reasons, he knowingly acquiesced in its continuing patronage under his sons and noblemen throughout his reign. See Brown forthcoming b for a refutation of this myth. 14 Ras Baras Khan was certainly still under the emperors patronage in 1698 (f. 11a-12a); his father, Khushhal Khan, had been Aurangzebs chief musician before him. Khushhal Khan was the son of Lal Khan, Shah Jahans chief musician, the son-in-law and chief disciple of the great Bilas Khan, Jahangirs chief musician, son of Tansen (for details see Brown 2003: 75-6; 108-9).

99

The celestial bodies determine the elemental character of their associated swara. Because the maintenance of humoral equilibrium is of paramount importance in maintaining health in Unani physiology, ragas that included fiery swaras should thus be sung in the cool of the morning or the evening to balance out the cold with heat, and similarly ragas with watery swaras

100 should be sung in the heat of the day (Ras Baras Khan f. 16b-7a). Ras Baras Khan is therefore arguing that the time at which each raga should be performed was determined in the Mughal period by each swaras effect on the bodily humours15. It is clear from Ras Baras Khans writings, which are based on his own hereditary performance practices and oral theories, that he had no idea where Indian knowledge ended and Persian knowledge began; it was all one to him16. But by wholly embracing these Persianate concepts derived from tanbur technique, and applying them to his understanding of Hindustani raga aesthetics, Ras Baras Khan has supplied us with a cogent physiological reason fully in accordance with his own hybrid worldview why conformity to the time theory of ragas was so necessary in Mughal musical culture. It is in the person of Ras Baras Khan that we perhaps get closest to a true sense of what Indo-Persian musical synthesis might have meant.

Bibliography Primary Sources Ahmad, Aziz, trans. (1975) The British Museum Mirzanama and the seventeenth-century mirza in India, Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies 8: 99-110. Ahobala Pandit (1971) Sangita Parijata. Hathras, U P: Sangit Karyalaya. Allaudin Barnawi (1655) Chishtiyya-i Bihishtiyya. Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata, Curzon Collection no. 78. Anonymous (1719-48) Risala dar Rag. Raza Library, Rampur, no. 1252, f.140-50. Anonymous (early 18C) Risala-i Musiqi. National Library, Kolkata, MS no. 236, ff. 17b-40a. Anonymous (late 18C) Risala dar navakhtan-i rag dar tanbur. (Risala-i ilm-i musiqi, chapter 4) National Library, Kolkata, no. 237. Faqirullah, Saif Khan (1996/1666) Tarjuma-i-Manakutuhala & Risala-i-Rag Darpan. Shahab Sarmadee, ed. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Performing Arts and Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

15 For details of the extensive connections Mughal theorists and musicians drew between the ragas and swaras and Unani medical theories and therapies, see Brown 2003: 188-201, 222-4. 16 For more information on Ras Baras Khans treatise the Shams al-Aswat, and its unique contribution to Indo-Persian musicology, see Brown 2003: 56-61, 76-8.

101 Ghulam Muhammad (early 19C) Risala-i Musiqi-i Ghulam Muhammad. Raza Library, Rampur, no. 1262. Kamilkhani, Iwaz Muhammad (1668) Risala-i Ivaz Muhammad Kamilkhani dar amal-i bin va thatha-i ragha-i Hindi (c.1668). Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ouseley 158, f.123a-132b. _____ Risala-i Kamil Khan dar bayan-i thata yani navakhtan-i sazha. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ousely 158, f.133b-136a. Lahawri, Abdul Hamid (1867-8) Padishahnama. Kabir al din Ahmad and Abd al Rahim, eds. Bibliotheca Indica. Calcutta: College Press. Mir. Muhammad Taqi (1999) Zikr-i Mir: the autobiography of the eighteenth century Mughal poet Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir. C M Naim, ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mirza Raushan Zamir (1666) Tarjoma-i Parijatak. British Library, London, India Office no. 808. Qasim bin Dost Ali Bukhari (16C) Kashf al-Autar. British Library, London, Or. 2361. Ras Baras Khan Kalawant (1698) Shams al-Aswat. Salar Jung Museum Library, Hyderabad, Mus.9. Willard, N. Augustus (1882) [1834] A Treatise on the music of Hindoostan. In Sourindro Mohun Tagore, ed. Hindu music from various authors, 2nd ed. Calcutta: I C Bose. Secondary Sources Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, eds. (1998) The Mughal state, 1526-1750. Oxford in India Readings: Themes in Indian History. Oxford University Press. Bhatkhande, V N (1990) [1930] A comparative study of some of the leading music systems of the 15th, 16th, 17th & 18th centuries. Delhi: Low Price. Brown, Katherine Butler (2000) Reading Indian music: the interpretation of seventeenth-century European travel writing in the (re)construction of Indian music history, British Journal of Ethnomusicology 9.2: 1-34. _____ (2001) Bonnie C Wade Imaging Sound, review in Yearbook for Traditional Music 33:167-8. _____ (2003) Hindustani music in the time of Aurangzeb. Unpublished PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. _____ (2003/4) The that system of seventeenth-century North Indian ragas: a preliminary report on the treatises of Kamilkhani, Asian Music 35/1:1-13. _____ (forthcoming a) The origins and early development of khayal. In J Bor, F Delvoye and E te Nijenhuis, eds. The history of North Indian music. _____ (forthcoming b) Did Aurangzeb ban music? Questions for the historiography of his reign, Modern Asian Studies.

102 Das, Harihara (1959) The Norris Embassy to Aurangzeb. Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay. Delvoye, Franoise Nalini (1994) Indo-Persian literature on art-music: some historical and technical aspects. In Franoise Delvoye, ed. Confluence of cultures. New Delhi: Manohar. Gangoly, O C (1989) [1935] Ragas and raginis: a pictorial and iconographic study of Indian musical modes based on original sources. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal. Miner, Allyn (1993) Sitar and sarod in the 18th and 19th centuries. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. O'Hanlon, Rosalind (1999) Manliness and imperial service in Mughal North India, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 42.1: 47-94. Powers, Harold S and Widdess, Richard (2001) India III: Theory and practice of classical music. In Stanley Sadie, ed. The new Grove dictionary of music and musicians, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Richartds, John F (1993) The Mughal empire. The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge University Press. Sarmadee, Shahab (1996). Introduction to Tarjuma-i-Manakutuhala & Risala-i-Rag Darpan, by Saif Khan Faqirullah. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Performing Arts and Motilal Banarsidass. Tagore, Sourindro Mohun (1990) [1896] Universal history of music compiled from divers sources together with various original notes on Hindu music. Delhi: Low Price. te Nijenhuis, Emmie (1976) The ragas of Somanatha, vol.i. Leiden: E J Brill. Ullmann, Manfred (1978) Islamic medicine. Islamic Surveys. Edinburgh University Press. Wade, Bonnie C (1998) Imaging sound: an ethnomusicological study of music, art and culture in Mughal India. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology. Chicago University Press. Widdess, Richard (1995) The ragas of early Indian music: modes, melodies, and musical notations from the Gupta period to c.1250. Oxford Monographs on Music. Oxford: Clarendon. Wright, Owen (1996a) Middle Eastern song-text collections, Early Music August: 455-69. _____ (1996b) On the concept of a Timurid music, Oriente Moderno 76.2: 665-81.

Discussion JB - I would like to come to one of the statements made in this paper questioning the credibility of the visual aspect. I think it can become an

103 extremely important source of evidence if used along with relevant texts. This paper also raises a question whether there is any visual source suggesting co-existence of bin and tambur. If theoretically they were so close, were they close in practice as well? How much of the theoretical system of tuning and fretting was reflected in the practice? I havent come across any visual evidence pointing to the co-existence of these instruments. There is a dramatic shift between the instruments from the time of Akbar to Shahjahan. We see Iranian instruments like ghichak, tambur, duff and nai in the Moghul painitings, primarily up to the time of Akbar. Even in the descriptions of thirty-six musicians of this period, there isnt much about the practitioners of these Iranian instruments. However, all this changed at the time of Shahjahan. Therefore, I think that visual evidence combined with the literary evidence is extremely useful. NJ - There is always a problem with measurements on string, because it needs to be pressed down on the fret, and as we go near the nut, on either side, the pressure changes in proportion. As a result, it is not possible to obtain Pythagorean or any other scale for that matter, from such measurements. There would be deviations. Therefore, the whole idea seems like a theoretic rationalization of the performance practice.

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