4 Social concerns became embedded in even the most obscure and technical aspects of cultural knowledge, and the core function of musicological texts-as intellectual history-could vary dramatically. Reading the musicological texts together demonstrates how late Mughal 3 texts were taken in very new directions by Bengali musicologists over a relatively short period of time. Some eighty new works on Hindustani 1 art music were published in Bengali between 18 alone, 2 a figure that excludes the unwieldy numbers of printed song collections from the theatre, street, and courtesanвЂ™s salon, or contemporary publications on music in Sanskrit and English. Some of these books contained popular song texts based on the repertories of theatres or religious communities, while others were technical compendia drawing on ancient history or modern acoustic theory. Over the nineteenth century, Bengali printing presses based in Calcutta and beyond churned out new works on music in vast numbers.

Rather than thinking of nineteenth-century music purely in terms of the colonial relationship, this article foregrounds a wider set of competing cultural and aesthetic considerations. The field of print production is then diversified further through an analysis of song collections, a major genre that disrupts any notion of a uniform sphere of transmission, reading, and listening. This article examines treatises dealing with the theory and history of Hindustani music, demonstrating the journey of Bengali musicology from Persian antecedents to its own system. Bringing a wider range of vernacular texts into the analysis nuances the landscape of intellectual production, and indicates that nationalist or reformist interests pertained to but one public arena, jostling against several others. With few exceptions, these innovative Bengali works have received scant attention in studies of colonial-era music, which have focused instead on Anglophone scholarship. From theoretical treatises to songbooks, literature relating to Hindustani music proliferated in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Old bengali books