scholarly journals Dreams, songs and letters: Sectarian networks and musical archives in eighteenth-century North India

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-604
Author(s):  
Richard David Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
North India ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Musical Accompaniment

Early modern poets conventionally began their compositions by praising and invoking the blessings of their higher authorities, be they their gods, gurus or courtly patrons. In the eighteenth century, North Indian society was particularly unstable, and the relationships between these different power brokers proved volatile. This article considers how intellectuals attached to religious households navigated the challenges of the period, particularly invading armies, religious reforms and forced migration. I examine the works of Vrindavandas (c. 1700–87), a Brajbhasha poet and lay devotee of the Radhavallabh Sampraday, and provide contextualised readings of two of his poems, concerned with recent history and the contemporary political climate. Vrindavandas was not a scribe or chronicler in a conventional sense; however, closer examination of his works reveals the porous boundaries between scribes-cum-recorders and other kinds of intellectuals. Here, I consider how Vrindavandas’ literary activity included copying archival sources, recording recent history, documenting dreams and emotions, and folding different senses of temporality into a single work. This article asks how far his poetic works gesture to a distinctively eighteenth-century mode of literary expression and reflexivity, and how performing these poetic archives through reading, singing, and musical accompaniment provided the sect with tools to navigate a turbulent political landscape.

Warriors and the State in Early Modern India

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Richards
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
North India ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Grand Nombre ◽  
Nous Permet ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Military Contractors ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractThis essay argues for reconsideration and greater scholarly attention to the insights of Prof. Dirk Kolff as expressed in his 1989 book, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy and in later writings. Kolff described a fluid, pervasive military labor market in late Mughal and early colonial North India that made vast numbers of armed, largely peasant soldiers available to military contractors, rulers, and rebels alike. His formulation permits us to see that armed Indian peasants in this period had considerable agency and independence within a society that was riven with con flict. Such a reconsideration underscores the magnitude of the changes wrought in Indian society by violent British conquest, pacification and disarmament in rural society — especially after the failed 1857 revolt. L'article plaide pour une reconsidération et une réévaluation des idées du professeur Dirk Kolff, telles qu'elles sont présentées dans son ouvrage paru en 1989, Naukar, Rajput et Sepoy, et dans ses publications ultérieures. Kolff décrit un marché du travail militaire flexible et omniprésent en Inde Mogole et en Inde Septentrionale au début de l'ère coloniale, et qui a rendu disponible aux courtiers militaires, aux dirigeants et aux rebelles un grand nombre de soldats d'origine paysanne. Son exposé nous permet de voir comment, pendant cette période, les paysans indiens armés avaient une importance et une indépendance considérables dans une société fendue par les con flits armés. Une telle reconsidération souligne l'importance des changements dans la société indienne, déclenchés par la soumission violente, la paci fication et le désarmement par les Anglais — surtout après l'échec de la révolte de 1857.

Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Northern India ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Literary Histories

Early modern India—a period extending from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century—saw dramatic cultural, religious, and political changes as it went from Sultanate, to Mughal, to early colonial rule. Witness to the rise of multiple literary and devotional traditions, this period was characterized by pulsating political energy and cultural vibrancy. Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India brings together recent scholarship on the languages, literatures, and religious traditions of northern India to highlight the importance of reconstructing multilingual literary histories. Focusing on the rise of vernacular languages, the volume underscores the manifold connections across regions, languages, communities, and traditions to reveal the diversity of literary and religious practices in this multilingual world. Analysing the emergence and development of literary cultures of north India, Text and Tradition also highlights processes of exchange and influence across these cultures. Spanning across various disciplines, the chapters here shed new light upon not only existing literary and religious traditions, but also those that may have disappeared but which should not be forgotten.

Controversies Surrounding the Reception of Valī “Dakhanī” (1665?–1707?) in Early Tażkirahs of Urdu Poets

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
PURNIMA DHAVAN ◽  
HEIDI PAUWELS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
North India ◽  
Inflected Form ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Modern Form ◽  
Historical Origins

Early Urdu poetry, at the time called Reḳhtah, forms a remarkable example of the circulation of ideas in early modern India. Scholars trace its modern form to the reception in early eighteenth-century Delhi of a Southern literary idiom, usually called Dakhanī that is itself the result of repeated waves of migration from North India to the Deccan. While the historical origins of Urdu occupy an arena of lively scholarly debate, its later historical and literary importance is quite clear. By the start of the nineteenth century a highly literary and Persian-inflected form of Urdu would swiftly replace Persian in elite circles. Thus we have a historically significant moment at which the confluence of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan created a new cosmopolitan vernacular, however this process remains understudied.

scholarly journals Enslaved in Dzungaria: what an eighteenth-century crocheting instructor can teach us about overland globalisation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Lisa Hellman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Economic Integration ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Border Trade ◽  
History Of ◽  
Circulation Of Knowledge

Abstract This global microhistorical analysis of the Swede Brigitta Scherzenfeldt’s capture in Russia and her subsequent enslavement in the Dzungar khanate stresses actors and regions needed to nuance the history of globalisation. The early globalisation process is commonly exemplified with maritime contacts, involving free and often male West European actors. In contrast, this study combines multilingual source material to trace and discuss economic integration, cross-border trade, forced migration, the circulation of knowledge, literary depictions, and diplomatic contacts in the Central Asian borderlands between China and Russia. In the process, I clarify the importance of female, coerced actors, and overland connections between non-European empires for the history of early modern globalisation.

Free Trade before Liberalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Tazzara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Free Trade Zone ◽  
Central Mediterranean ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Institutional Variation ◽  
Intellectual Legacy

Chapter 8 situates Livorno amidst a larger picture of competition in the central Mediterranean. It analyzes the spread of free ports by considering the two axes along which Italian ports liberalized during the early modern period: hospitality toward merchants and openness toward goods. Despite much institutional variation, a maritime free trade zone was in existence by the mid-eighteenth century. The intellectual legacy of free ports such as Livorno was nonetheless ambivalent. Though some Enlightenment thinkers used free ports to formulate general theories of free trade, others believed they promoted the subjection of state policy to foreign merchants.

Baroque Opera

2018 ◽  
pp. 369-385
Author(s):  
Downing A. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Social World ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Nested Structures ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Baroque Opera

The fundamental assumption of commentators from the early modern period is that tasteful music functions simultaneously to express sentiment and to move listener-spectators. The three core elements of the baroque operatic spectacle—poetry, music, and dance—are defined by their ability to express and convey passion. Commentators point to the particular ability of musical language—and its combination with poetry and movement—to represent that which is out of reach of spoken language, or below the threshold of linguistic representation. Although both dramma per musica and the tragédie en musique arose and were fundamentally grounded in monarchical cultural worlds, both also endured successfully as public art forms. Aesthetically, baroque opera exhibits and revels in nested structures, manifested in plays within plays and in references that place the operatic moment within a social world outside the opera. Opera left this aesthetic behind as it moved into the second half of the eighteenth century, influenced by the views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the works of Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck among others.

scholarly journals Cervantes, the Journey, and What it Tells Us About Becoming a Writer

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 391-394
Author(s):  
Lania Knight
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Confirmation Bias ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Fiction Writers

Abstract The article traces the notion of empathy in fiction writing and how Cervantes’s treatment of characters in Don Quixote initiated a tradition which is ongoing in literature even today. The path of the writer is examined as a means for understanding how a writer must develop empathy for others, beginning with quotes from writers Helene Cixous and Henry James. Next, within the current political context of global upheaval and shift following on from the election of Donald Trump as president of the U.S.A. as well as the vote for Brexit in the U.K., the article argues for the relevance of Cervantes’s novel, not as a dated work of fiction, but as a text relevant both in form and in content for the modern political climate. Finally, the connection is made between fiction writers’ ability to feel empathy for others and create characters which readers will feel empathy for. The article follows on to proclaim the revolutionary and timely role of the fiction writer to help save us from ourselves in a tumultuous political landscape made unpredictable by social media-generated confirmation bias and insularity.

Literary Conduits for ‘Consent’

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pankaj Kumar Jha
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
North India ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The North ◽  
Literary Cultures

The making of the imperial subjects is as much a matter of historical process as the emergence of the empire. In the case of the Mughal state, this process started much before its actual establishment in the sixteenth century. The fifteenth century in North India was a period of unusual cultural ferment. The emergence of the Mughal imperial formation in the next century was intimately related to the fast congealing tendency of the north Indian society towards greater disciplining of itself. This tendency is evident in the multilingual literary cultures and diverse knowledge formations of the long fifteenth century.

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