Bhairava Rāgamāla. Chunar, 1591. Victoria and Albert Museum, I.S. 40-1981.
Session 13: Sensory cross-over
Can you hear colors? Can you see tastes? At this point in the course we have seen multiple cases in which one sense is intimately linked to another, in which one sense is understood in terms of another, or in which one sense ‘stands in for’ another. In this session we will explore how artists, musicians, and thinkers have deliberately explored these ‘sensory cross-overs’ in the context of the rāgamālā tradition in South Asia.
Jackie Menzies’s “Ragamala: a Garland of Musical Modes” in Dancing to the Flute introduces the concept and object of the rāgamālā (garland of musical modes). As we saw earlier in the course, the rāgamālā is a tradition of producing paintings and poetry that ‘manifest’ the mood, affect, or emotional essence of a given rāga (and are therefore connected to the concept of aesthetic rasa). As you read through this excerpt from Dancing to the Flute, pay attention to the translated poems (noted in the margins of the text) that correspond to each painting of a rāga. Note the use of colors, romantic or literary situations and tropes, and deities in regard to the various rāgas.
Katherine Butler Schofield’s article, “Music Art and Power in ‘Adil Shahi Bijapur, c. 1570-1630, delves deeper into one tradition of rāgamālā painting in order to identify the underlying logic or concepts that join the visual, textual, and auditory content (or referents) of rāgamālās, concluding that just because the particular notions of ‘power’ that undergirded such systems are opaque to us does not mean that they did not exist.
Readings:
- Masselos, Jim, Jackie Menzies, Pratapaditya Pal, and Flora Reis Wenger. Dancing to the Flute: Music and Dance in Indian Art. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997. pp 280-303.
- Schofield, Katherine Butler. “Music, Art and Power in ‘Adil Shahi Bijapur, c. 1570-1630.” In Singh, Kavita (ed). Scent upon a Southern Breeze: The Synaesthetic Arts of the Deccan. Mumbai: Marg, 2018. 68-87.
Session 14: Engineering a synaesthetic experience
In this session we explore how different peoples in South Asia have attempted to facilitate or ‘bring on’ syntaesthetic experiences through different bodily, sensory, performative, literary, and artistic techniques.
In Eyad Abuali’s essay, “Words Clothed in Light,” we will see how one tradition of Muslim practitioners in South and Central Asia, the Kubrawi Sufi order, attempted to occasion synaesthetic experiences of the divine through dhikr, the practice of ‘remembering’ God through auditory, visual, and bodily stimulation.
In Dipti Khera’s chapter, “Worlds of Pleasure and Politics of Connoisseurship” from The Place of Many Moods, we will see how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political elites in northern India fashioned themselves as ideal rulers through the cultivation of finely-tuned multi-sensory experiences.
Readings:
- Abuali, Eyad. “Words Clothed in Light: Dhikr (Recollection), Colour and Synaesthesia in Early Kubrawi Sufism.” Iran (2019): 1-14.
- Khera, Dipti. The Place of Many Moods. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Chapter Three: Worlds of Pleasure and Politics of Connoisseurship. pp 89-115.