Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Hindi Poetry in a Musical Genre
Indian classical music has long been fascinating to Western audiences, most prominently since the Beatles' sessions with Ravi Shankar in the 1960s. Du Perron examines Thumi Lyrics, a major genre of Hindustani music, from a primarily linguistic perspective.
Health and Population in South Asia
This text focuses on the population history of Asia over 25 centuries. Chapters focus on the interaction between demography, climate, health, medicine and culture. There is also a compact survey of the evolution of environmental hygiene in India through the 20th Century.
Rāgs Around the Clock
Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vibrant compendium for the discovery and study of North Indian classical music. The theory and practice of rāg are explored through two interlinked resources: a handbook of essays and analyses offering technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives; and two online albums – Rāg samay cakra and Twilight Rāgs from North India – featuring khayāl singer Vijay Rajput and accompanists. Extracts from the albums are also embedded into the text to enhance learning and understanding. Each rāg is accompanied by a description of its chief characteristics and technical features, a notation of the song (bandiś) on which the performance is based, an...
Boats in a Storm
For more than century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period, Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants contin...
Indian Classical Music and the Gramophone, 1900–1930
In 1902 The Gramophone Company in London sent out recording experts on "expeditions" across the world to record voices from different cultures and backgrounds. All over India, it was women who embraced the challenge of overcoming numerous social taboos and aesthetic handicaps that came along with this nascent technology. Women who took the plunge and recorded largely belonged to the courtesan community, called tawaifs and devadasis, in North and South India, respectively. Recording brought with it great fame, brand recognition, freedom from exploitative patrons, and monetary benefits to the women singers. They were to become pioneers of the music industry in the Indian sub-continent. However...
The Rise of the Ottoman Empire
Paul Wittek’s The Rise of the Ottoman Empire was first published by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1938 and has been out of print for more than a quarter of a century. The present reissue of the text also brings together translations of some of his other studies on Ottoman history; eight closely interconnected writings on the period from the founding of the state to the Fall of Constantinople and the reign of Mehmed II. Most of these pieces reproduces the texts of lectures or conference papers delivered by Wittek between 1936 and 1938 when he was teaching at Université Libré in Brussels, Belgium. The books or journals in which they were originally published are for the most part inaccessib...
The Voice of the Indian Mona Lisa
The 'Indian Mona Lisa' is an eighteenth-century portrait of the goddess Radha from the Kishangarh school of Rajput Painting. It was purportedly modelled after a young enslaved woman and court-performer, Banī-ṭhanī, who became a concubine of the patron of the painting, crown-prince Savant Singh. Tracing her career, Heidi Pauwels recovers her role as a composer of devotional songs in multiple registers of Classical Hindi and shows how she was a conduit for trend-setting styles from Delhi, including the new vogue of Urdu. Through a combination of literary, historical, and art-historical analysis, she brings to life the vibrant cultural production center of Kishangarh in the eighteenth century by reconstructing how Banī-ṭhanī came to be acclaimed as the devotional poetess Rasikbihārī and as 'India's Mona Lisa'. This major new study conveys important new insights in the history of Hindi literature and devotion, the family, palace women and the social mobility of the enslaved.
Bandish as Text
This book provides a socio-cultural analysis of khayal bandishes composed by Ne’mat Khan ‘Sadarang’ and Feroze Khan ‘Adarang’. It argues that deciphering khayal bandishes as cultural symbols provides an understanding of the constitution of medieval Indian society and shows how society gets represented via such symbols. The author examines the cultural forces that nurtured the context of compositions by Sadarang and Adarang. She touches upon the cultural exchanges between Hindu and Muslim communities through scholarly and philosophical discourses to create a rationale for khayal as a syncretic form of art. A unique contribution to the study of Indian culture and music, the book will be an indispensable resource for students, teachers, and researcher scholars of South Asian studies, Hindustani music, cultural studies, history, and medieval Indian society.
Śambūka and the Rāmāyaṇa Tradition
According to Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa (early centuries CE), Śambūka was practicing severe acts of austerity to enter heaven. In engaging in these acts as a Śūdra, Śambūka was in violation of class- and caste-based societal norms prescribed exclusively by the ruling and religious elite. Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa epic, is dispatched to kill Śambūka, whose transgression is said to be the cause of a young Brahmin’s death. The gods rejoice upon the Śūdra’s death and restore the life of the Brahmin. Subsequent Rāmāyaṇa poets almost instantly recognized this incident as a blemish on Rāma’s character and they began problematizing this earliest version of the...
Dhrupad: Tradition and Performance in Indian Music
Dhrupad is believed to be the oldest style of classical vocal music performed today in North India. This detailed study of the genre considers the relationship between the oral tradition, its transmission from generation to generation, and its re-creation in performance. There is an overview of the historical development of the dhrupad tradition and its performance style from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and of the musical lineages that carried it forward into the twentieth century, followed by analyses of performance techniques, processes and styles. The authors examine the relationship between the structures provided by tradition and their realization by the performer to throw light on the nature of tradition and creativity in Indian music; and the book ends with an account of the ‘revival’ movement of the late twentieth century that re-established the genre in new contexts. Augmented with an analytical transcription of a complete dhrupad performance, this is the first book-length study of an Indian vocal genre to be co-authored by an Indian practitioner and a Western musicologist.
