Séminaire Littératures d’Asie du Sud
Richard David Williams (SOAS) : Archaic Listening: Empiricising the Senses in Colonial India
Vendredi 13 décembre – 10h-12h – EHESS Condorcet – Salle 327
In 1875, the celebrated litterateur Bharatendu Hariscandra (1850-1885) bemoaned what he saw as the dearth of good musical scholarship in Hindi. He explained how there was a wealth of unexplored theory in north Indian art music, and pointed to his neighbours in Calcutta, who were writing cutting-edge studies in Bengali, as a good model to follow for future musicologists. He acknowledged that there were some works in Hindi, but stressed their inadequacies: there were, he argued, two ways to write about music—the “unempirical” (adṛṣṭvād) and the “empirical” (dṛṣṭvād)—and it was high time for Hindi scholars to finally adopt empiricism as their approach. Read against the longer history of musical scholarship in north India, Hariscandra’s views can be nuanced and challenged, but they also shed light on a specific moment in the social and intellectual history of music. Musical scholarship had proliferated across multiple languages over the early-modern period and into the nineteenth century. In Hindi, poet-intellectuals operating out of aristocratic courts had developed sophisticated genres of musical scholarship, composing in a classical form of the language, Brajbhasha. Hariscandra’s lack of engagement with this literature gestures to three larger transitions over the colonial period: changes in language policy and vernacular intellectual expression; the social ascent of new kinds of musicologists; and a shift in what these scholars understood as the rationale of musicology. This essay explores these three transitions to reconstruct the context of Hariscandra’s call for a new, empirical musicology, and argues that they culminated in a turn away from a beauty-oriented style of music appreciation in favour of a more applied and analytical approach. Significantly, these shifts shed light on the subtle implications of colonialism on the experience and study of music.