Tellings and texts

ion, were considered exemplary in their capacity to concentrate and refract the many facets of the nine rasas and thereby to provoke the connoisseurs’ tasting. In the figure of the rasika, Indic aesthetic theory thus emphasises “the role of the perceiving subject” and privileges “experience and affect”. Artists and their works thereby succeed or fail not on their own terms, but “by [their] ability to evoke aesthetic response in the listener”.11 Critical to the Mughals’ extensively attested capacity to appreciate Indic forms of poetry and music was the fact that Persianate aesthetic theory also shared this emphasis on the audience. In particular, the Islamicate discourse on sama‘ or “audition”, the devotional use of music and poetry by sufi initiates from which much Persianate music aesthetics derive, focuses so heavily on the knowledgeability and emotional and spiritual preparedness of the audience, that comments on music itself or on musicians may be sidelined.12 The theory of the rasas, and of how vernacular poetry and song lyrics brought them into being, was certainly known at the Mughal court by the late sixteenth century. Particularly important were the versified catalogues in Sanskrit and Brajbhasha called nayika-bheda, which categorised different kinds of heroines (nayika) and heroes (nayak) using traditional metaphors, and which constituted the lyrical repertory of much courtly song and poetry. Such lyrics were not merely to be read straightforwardly; rather, they exemplified the rasas, and the purpose of nayika-bheda textbooks was to make “the path of rasa [...] understood by everybody”.13 Important Mughal patrons not only knew and commissioned nayika-bhedas in Indic languages, but they translated them into Persian, incorporated Persian-language nayikabhedas into treatises on Indian arts, and even used them to guide their own writing of vernacular poetry. Three canonical writers on music— Abu’l Fazl (1551-1602), Mirza Khan (fl.1675), and Saif Khan Faqirullah 11 Martin Clayton, ‘Introduction: Towards a Theory of Musical Meaning (in India and Elsewhere)’, Ethnomusicology Forum 17.2 (2001), 13. 12 Qazi Hasan, Mift̄ḥ al-sarūd [mistransliterated Miṣb̄ḥ al-sorūr], Asiatic Society of Bengal, MS 1629, ff. 2a-4a; also Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 34-46. For extensive discussion of sufi appropriation of rasa theory in the domain of literature, see Aditya Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379-1545 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012b), especially pp. 59-108, 286-384. 13 Sundar, Sundarśṅḡr, cited in Busch (2010), 287. More widely on Mughal-era nayikabheda and rasa theory, see ibid., 281-7. Learning to Taste the Emotions 411 (d.1684)—incorporated Persian-language nayika-bhedas into their works.14 And a great Mughal office-holder like Abdurrahim Khan-i Khanan “Rahim” (1556-1626) was able to compose a set of nayika-bheda verses in Brajbhasha sufficiently accomplished to be praised by his contemporary critics.15 He at least must have qualified as a rasika in the literary sense. It is particularly important to note that in this poetic tradition, one rasa above all others was celebrated and explored: shringara rasa, the erotic sentiment, known as the king of rasas. Written from the feminine perspective of the nayika, Brajbhasha poetry characteristically explores the travails of a heroine waiting for the return of an absent, neglectful, or teasing beloved; this can also be read ambiguously as referring to a human or a divine beloved.16 The Indic tradition therefore had significant affinities with the Persian poetry central to Mughal cultural traditions. This likewise took as its principal theme ‘ishq, or love, and firaq, longing for the absent beloved, and could similarly be read in either a courtly or devotional manner. In sufi readings of such poetry, the soul—the interlocutor—was frequently construed as feminine,17 even though the interlocutor of Persian poetry is usually construed as masculine. The peculiar affection of Indian sufis for the female voice of Indian vernacular poetry and song lyrics, particularly in the guise of the virahini seeking reunion with her male beloved, is well known.18 Through 14 Abu’l Fazl “‘Allami”, Ā’īn-i Akbarī, trans. by H. Blochmann and Col. H.S. Jarrett (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal and Baptist Mission Press, 1873-1907; reprint 2008), Vol. 3, pp. 239-44; Mirza Khan ibn Fakhruddin Muhammad, Tuḥfat al-Hind, ed. by N.H. Ansari (Tehran: Bunyad-i Farhang-i Iran, 1968), Vol. 1, pp. 297-321; Saif Khan “Faqirullah”, Tarjuma-i-M̄nakutūhala & Ris̄la-i-R̄g Darpan, ed. and trans. by Shahab Sarmadee (New Delhi: IGNCA and Motilal Banarsidass, 1996), pp. 132-49. 15 Busch (2010), 282-84. A matter for further contemplation concerns Persian translations of Sanskrit and Brajbhasha nayika-bheda and ragamala verses (dhyanas), whose subject matter and evocative purpose are related. While both Brajbhasha and Sanskrit versions explicitly seek through poetical means to evoke the rasa associated with nayika or raga iconography, there is no attempt to do this in Persian translations of the same material. Rather, the latter tend not merely to be in prose, but in prosaic prose, almost as if they are simply guides to the original materials. 16 It is worth noting that in the Tuḥfat al-Hind, Mirza Khan inserted his nayika-bheda section into the chapter on shringara rasa; Khan (1968), pp. 297-31. 17 On the nafs or “lower” soul as woman in Persian sufi poetry, particularly that of Jalaluddin Rumi, see Annemarie Schimmel, My Soul is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam (New York: Continuum, 2003 [1997]), pp. 69-80. 18 Ibid., esp. 118-38; see also e.g. Shantanu Phukan, ‘‘Through Throats Where Many Rivers Meet’: The Ecology of Hindi in the World of Persian’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 38.1 (2001), 33-58; Katherine Butler Brown [Schofield], ‘The Origins and Early Development of Khayal’, in Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, ed. by Joep Bor et al. (New Delhi: Manohar, 2010), pp. 159-94; Francesca Orsini, 412 Tellings and Texts nayika-bheda descriptions of different kinds of romantic heroines in verse and song, a vast proliferation of emotions and scenarios, all of them revealing different aspects of shringara rasa, were made available to the Mughal connoisseur for exploration in the person of the Indian nayika. Shantanu Phukan makes clear that in seventeenth-century Mughal readings of vernacular poetry, shringara rasa as enacted through the romances of heroes and heroines resonated profoundly with ‘ishq.19 Mughal aficionados of songs may therefore have seized on the nayika, the principal embodiment of shringara rasa, as a means to enhance and enlarge the emotional experiences of their own exploration of ‘ishq through the shared Indic and Persianate metaphor of the lover yearning for the beloved.20 It is the affinity between shringara rasa and ‘ishq that most obviously connects the Mughal connoisseur of music to the Indic rasika. This affinity goes back at least to the pre-Mughal sufi romances, magical narratives in which sufi vernacular authors used poetical imagery from the Indic tradition as complex allegories, and which when revisited by Mughal noblemen became a renewed source of pleasure and moral and spiritual instruction.21 Aditya Behl pointed out that the principal object of the hero’s quest in the sufi romance, which is a metaphor for the journey of the human soul towards the Divine, is shringara rasa. However, along the way, all nine of the rasas are explored, savoured, tasted, and transformed for the purposes of teaching the sufi how to control and sublimate his baser emotions22—a notion that has clear links with Islamicate understandings of cultivating the emotions through ‘“Krishna is the Truth of Man”: Mir ‘Abdul Wahid Bilgrami’s Haq̄’iq-i Hindī (Indian Truths) and the Circulation of Dhrupad and Bishnupad’, in Culture and Circulation, ed. by Allison Busch and Thomas de Bruijn (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 222-46. 19 Phukan (2001), 34-36. Phukan’s article, with its reflections on the confluence of the “varying emotional resonance[s]” of Hindi and Persian in Mughal literature, has many things to say to my work in this chapter. 20 See e.g. the lyrics of the dhrupad and other song compositions in the Sahasras compiled for Shah Jahan, and Khushhal Khan’s R̄g-r̄ginī roz o shab, compiled for Nizam Asaf Jah III of Hyderabad; Sahasras: N̄yak Bakhśū ke dhrupadoṃ k̄ sañgrah, ed. by Premlata Sharma (New Delhi: Sangit Natak Academy, 1972); Khushhal Khan “Anup”, R̄gr̄ginī-yi roz o shab, Salar Jung Museum Library, MS Urdu Mus 2. 21 Ibid., 36; Phukan, ‘”None Mad as a Hindu Woman”: Contesting Communal Readings of Padmavat’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 16.1 (1996), 41-54. 22 Aditya Behl, ‘Presence and Absence in Bhakti: An Afterword’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 11.3 (2007), 321-2; Behl (2009), 73-76. Learning to Taste the Emotions 413 artistic means in order to balance mental and physical health.23 There thus appears to be a long tradition within Indian sufism of the sufi as true rasika, an idea that is at least obliquely manifested in the treatises on music written at the seventeenth-century Mughal court. Several Mughal holders of high office and patrons of music were undoubtedly rasikas, going by the depth of their musical writings. The most interesting was Mirza Raushan Zamir (d.1669).24 The author of the 1666 Tarjuma-yi P̄rij̄tak,25 a Persian commentary on Ahobala’s contemporary Sanskrit music treatise, the Saṅgītap̄rij̄ta, he was by far the most sophisticated and knowledgable scholar of Hindustani music and Sanskrit music theory of the Indo-Persian corpus. He is better known to Indian literary history, however, as the Brajbhasha poet “Nehi”, and Allison Busch argues that his poems, including seve