Songs of Love and Loss: Early Vernacular Sufi Musicking and the Development of an Indo-Persian Music

Presenter:

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Abstract

The historical narrative concerning the development of Indian classical music is largely based on uncritical readings of 17th and 18th century texts produced in Mughal courts, which focus on the role played by Sufis and courtiers of the Delhi Sultanates centuries earlier. Approaching this narrative from a standpoint of translation, this paper will look at the performance of vernacular song forms within the space of the Sufi khanqāh, or hospice. Tracing the introduction of vernacular poetry and song as found in Persian-language religious texts, I investigate early song-text collections to examine what they tell us about the performance practices of Sufis, and their role in the development of Hindustani classical music. Within the recorded discourses of 15th – 16th century Chishti (and Chishti-adjacent) Sufi Shaikhs, we find some of the earliest examples of Sufi song-texts in Hindi, complete with rāga prescriptions. As the ‘translation’ of Sufi ideology, these vernacular songs occupied an important position within the repertoire of qawwāls, being performed alongside Arabic and Persian song-genres, and written down within didactic texts recording the assemblies of Sufi Shaikhs. I will particularly focus on the jikrī song genre, as it seems to have occupied a place of significance among Sufi qawwāls performing between Delhi, Jaunpur, Gujarat, and the Deccan. By examining the contexts of Sufi performance practices within contemporary 14th and 15th century texts, I hope to unpack the ways in which Sufis used vernacular music and poetry as a central component of spiritual practice, and what it meant for the development of Hindustani music.