The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas

Alter, Joseph S.; Lutgendorf, Philip

doi:10.2307/3317112

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Therefore, while studies of South Asian religious literature that use songs as primary sources abound, these works rarely, if ever, address the practitioners' understandings of what songs are made of and used for. 13 Texts have been privileged as markers of canonicity in the study of religiosity in South Asia (Coburn 1984;Lutgendorf 1991). These religious texts, rather than silent and static, are often performed as "audible texts" arousing "acoustic piety" (Wilke and Moebus 2011, 12).…”

Section: Songs As Method Body As Research Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sonic matters: Singing as method and the epistemology of singing across Bengali esoteric lineages

Lorea

2022

American Anthropologist

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Songs are knowledge" (g āne jñ ān) is a recurrent saying among Bauls, Fakirs, Sahajiyas, and other Bengali esoteric and heterodox communities. The sonic dimension of songs is related to cosmogonic vibration, seed, food, and feminine bodily fluids. Singing, requiring breath control and concentration, is associated with yoga. How is the performance of songs simultaneously an embodied way of knowing and an act of indigenous scholarship? Can the epistemology of singing coexist with hegemonic sensory epistemologies in a postcolonial South Asia? This article draws upon a ten-year ethnographic engagement with Bengali-speaking gurus and performers to discuss how singing provides a transformative and anthropopoietic knowledge, rooted in bodily experience and exchanged among performers-listeners to build togetherness in ways that subvert dominant ideologies of relatedness. This article also adopts Bengali understandings of ensounded knowledge to question the ocularcentric and scriptist epistemologies that underlie modern academia. Taking songs seriously as ways of knowing in their own right, I suggest singing as method and using the feelingful body as a research tool, not only for an ethnography that reflects the sensory epistemology of the communities I work with but also as a promising way to decolonize anthropology's epistemic ethnocentrism.

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Section: Songs As Method Body As Research Toolmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Texts have been privileged as markers of canonicity in the study of religiosity in South Asia (Coburn 1984; Lutgendorf 1991). These religious texts, rather than silent and static, are often performed as “audible texts” arousing “acoustic piety” (Wilke and Moebus 2011, 12).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sonic matters: Singing as method and the epistemology of singing across Bengali esoteric lineages

Lorea

2022

American Anthropologist

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“…Interestingly, Gold chose to translate the arthav rather than the sung text as more representative of Madhu's artful performance. 7 Lutgendorf (1991), p. 118, quoting Mānas 1.30b, and p. 115. Tulsidas seems to occasionally throw in obscure verses, brief allusions, and references to religiophilosophical doctrines that cry out to be explained and developed; for examples of "mysterious verses" and the ways in which katha expounders explain them, see importance of the enigmatic form in Hindavi sufi kathas: "Sufi romances are composed enigmatically because of a fundamental problem or enigma with which the spiritual users had to grapple".…”

Section: Francesca Orsinimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…18 For a brilliant analysis of Surdas's use of this device in his song-poems and the effect it has on listeners, see K. Bryant, Poems to the Child-God: Structures and Strategies in the Poetry of Sūrdās (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), and Hawley in this volume. That the ability to refer to or to link a verse, a name or a situation to other characters and stories is still highly valued in oral exposition is supported by evidence inLutgendorf (1991) andGold (1992).…”

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6. A Handbook for Storytellers: The Ṭirāz al-akhbār and the Qissa Genre

Khan¹

2015

Tellings and Texts

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This volume brings together the papers presented at the third and final conference of the AHRC-funded project "North Indian Literary Culture and History from a Multilingual Perspective: 1450-1650", which Francesca ran at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) between 2006-2009 and in which Katherine was intimately involved from start to finish. The conference was initially entitled "Tellings, Not Texts", but over the course of the three days it became clear that texts were very much involved in many of the performance forms and traditions we were discussing, hence the change of title. (The first conference volume, After Timur Left, came out in 2014 from Oxford University Press, New Delhi, co-edited by Francesca and Samira Sheikh.) We would first of all like to thank the AHRC for its generous support. The conference, which took place on 8-10 June 2009, benefited from a British Academy conference support grant, for which we are also grateful, as we are to the European Research Council which supported Katherine's contributions in the latter stages. We would like here to heartily thank all the contributors for their patience and good humour as we asked for more and more changes. We thank Alessandra Tosi for her enthusiasm and welcome, and Dr David Lunn for careful copy-editing. Our dear friend Aditya Behl helped plan the conference and was supposed to come, but was in the end too ill to travel. He died, tragically young, two months later. We would like to dedicate the volume to him, for he remains in our thoughts and in our love. FO and KBS London and Cambridge, July 2015This volume necessarily makes reference to four discrete calendrical systems.Where otherwise unmarked, we use the Common/Christian Era (Anno Domini), denoted "CE". The Islamic calendar (denoted "AH": Anno Hegirae, or Hijri year), commenced in the year 622 CE. A lunar calendar, it does not correspond directly to the Gregorian Calendar, and the year 2015 CE is 1436-37 AH. The Vikram Samvat calendar, denoted "VS", is between 56-57 years ahead of the Common Era, thus 2015 CE covers 2071-72 VS. Finally, the Banggabda or Bengali Calendar, denoted "BA", is between 593-94 years behind the Common Era, thus 2015 CE is 1421-22 BA. Both VS and BA are solar calendars, but do not begin in January, so there is no precise overlap with CE. List of Illustrations5.1 (L) Jnaneshwari Stamp, issued in 1990 to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the composition of the Jñāneśvarī; (R) "Saint Dnyaneshwar" stamp, issued in 1997 in memory of Jnaneswhar/ Jnandev. Public Domain. 5.2 Namdev Performing a Kirtan, folio from a nineteenth-century publication of Mahipati's eighteenth-century biography [1890]. Public Domain. 5.3 Four typical badas or "notebooks" in the collection of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Author's photograph, CC BY. 5.4 Transcript of a kirtan from a Marathi bada, c. eighteenth century.

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The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas

Cited by 2 publications

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Sonic matters: Singing as method and the epistemology of singing across Bengali esoteric lineages

Sonic matters: Singing as method and the epistemology of singing across Bengali esoteric lineages

6. A Handbook for Storytellers: The Ṭirāz al-akhbār and the Qissa Genre

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