Local soundscapes as canonised knowledge: Music, place and circulation in Kṣemakarṇa’s Rāgamālā (1570)

A seminar on how local–encompassing place, people and performance–was ‘audibilized’, inviting us to rethink the intersection of music, politics, and society in the early modern period of Kṣemakarṇa’s Rāgamālā (1570)

Kṣemakarṇa’s Rāgamālā (Garland of Melodies; c.1570) was composed for King Jāṭava, the ruler of the Gond kingdom of Deogarh (in present-day central India). The Rāgamālā is most well-known as the textual source for a genre of miniature paintings on music, also known as rāgamālā, produced at the eighteenth-century Pahari courts located in the foothills of the Himalayas. This paper, however, is interested in a curious set of eleven verses within Kṣemakarṇa’s text that make onomatopoeic comparisons between each rāga (musical mode) and a ‘sound’ or ‘voice’ drawn from the physical world. 

Thus, rāga Sāgara sounds like the churning of sour milk, rāga Mālava like the grinding of grains or rāga Śankara like the laundering of clothes. How might we read Kṣemakarṇa’s rather rustic or bucolic phrases in light of a courtly audience where the swish of the cāmara (horsetail fan), the clash of swords, or the beating of numerous drums might have been more commonplace? Setting aside the cosmopolitan social world of musicological writing, this paper is interested in how the local–encompassing place, people and performance–was ‘audibilized’, inviting us to rethink the intersection of music, politics, and society in the early modern period.

About the speaker

Ayesha Sheth is a historian of early modern South Asia, specialising in courtly culture and polity formation with a particular focus on music, literature, and comparative knowledge traditions in South Asia and the broader Persianate cosmopolis. She received her PhD from the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Her research interests span performance studies, early modern literatures, indigenous histories, and mercantile histories of South Asia. She is currently developing two research projects: one on the Gond kingdoms of central India and the other on the role of Jain mercantile networks in early modern literary and cultural circulation.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons (Bhairavi Ragini)