ABSTRACT

Music’s ability to stimulate the emotions has long been fundamental to the aesthetics and reception of India’s elite rāga-based traditions. These emotions are generally studied aesthetically through the lens of ‘rasa’: the Sanskrit theory that proposes the musician’s role is to stimulate one of nine distilled emotional essences (rasas) that is ‘tasted’ by the audience. But here I ask the inverse question: what emotions arose when historical listeners were threatened with the loss of that crucial source of emotional stimulus; and how were those negative emotions expressed through historical texts? In this paper, I consider the Hayy al-Arwāh, a music treatise and tazkira (biographical collection) written by an ex-Mughal official from Delhi living in exile in Patna c. 1785–88, Miyan Zia-ud-din ‘Zia’. Zia-ud-din’s work reveals much about the emotions felt by musicians and music lovers affected by the violent political upheaval centred on late Mughal Delhi c1740–80 – but not in obvious ways. For such an emotional subject, his writing is curiously dispassionate. Nevertheless, I argue that his writing was impelled by one very powerful emotion in particular: anxiety. In order to approach the question I examine some alternative ways we might get at the emotional resonances of texts like the Hayy al-Arwāh: through genre, in this case the tazkira; the etic observations of modern neuroscience; and a turn outwards to writings of more emotionally loquacious contemporaries, here the Urdu poet Mir Taqi ‘Mir’. I argue it is precisely Zia-ud-din’s detatched attention to detail, as he traced hundreds of lost and scattered musicians and listeners, that reveals the emotional driving force behind the writing of the Hayy al-Arwāh to be a deep and abiding anxiety engendered by the very real existential threat of war and exile to the music of late Mughal Delhi. In writing the Hayy al-Arwāh, Zia-ud-din acted as witness and record keeper for his community to insure against the potential loss of the music of his beloved homeland. At the same time, the work of gathering and reporting information acted to alleviate his anxiety over the threatened disappearance of what was to him a most important source of personal solace.

摘要

长期以来，音乐激发情感的能力一直是印度精英拉格传统的美学和接受度的基础。这些情绪通常通过“ rasa ”的镜头进行美学研究：提出音乐家角色的梵文理论是刺激观众“品尝”的九种提炼的情感本质（rasa s）之一。但在这里我要问相反的问题：当历史听众因失去重要的情感刺激源而受到威胁时，他们会产生什么样的情感？那些负面情绪又是如何通过历史文本来表达的？在这篇论文中，我考虑了Hayy al-Arwāh，一部音乐论文和tazkira（传记集）由德里的一位前莫卧儿官员撰写，流亡在巴特那 c。1785–88 年，Miyan Zia-ud-din 'Zia'。Zia-ud-din 的作品揭示了音乐家和音乐爱好者受到以莫卧儿德里晚期 1740-80 年为中心的暴力政治动荡影响的情绪——但不是以明显的方式。对于这样一个情绪化的主题，他的作品出奇地冷静。尽管如此，我认为他的写作是由一种非常强烈的情绪所推动的：焦虑。为了解决这个问题，我研究了一些替代方法，我们可能会获得像Hayy al-Arwāh这样的文本的情感共鸣：通过体裁，在这种情况下是tazkira; 现代神经科学的 etic 观察；以及转向更情绪化的同时代人的作品，这里是乌尔都语诗人 Mir Taqi 'Mir'。我认为正是 Zia-ud-din 对细节的过分关注，因为他追踪了数百名迷失和分散的音乐家和听众，揭示了Hayy al-Arwāh写作背后的情感驱动力是一种深刻而持久的焦虑战争和流放对已故莫卧儿德里音乐的非常真实的生存威胁。在撰写Hayy al-Arwāh, Zia-ud-din 为他的社区担任见证人和记录保管员，以确保他心爱的祖国的音乐不会丢失。与此同时，收集和报告信息的工作减轻了他对自己最重要的个人安慰来源即将消失的担忧。