INTRODUCTION

This book is about the lyrics of a vocal genre in the North Indian (Hindustani) art music tradition. There are three major vocal genres in this tradition: dhrupad, relatively ancient and austere, and in its present context primarily a ‘connoisseur’s genre’; khyāl, which was originally (in the eighteenth century1) intended to offset some of the sobriety of dhrupad, but which is now the main vocal form of North Indian art music;

and often termed ‘semi-classical’ music because it is lighter and more accessible than dhrupad and khyāl and adheres less strictly to the rules of rāg. All three genres have been the subject of major studies. Dhrupad has been the focus of a musicological work by Indurama Srivastava (1980), which only briefly discusses the texts of the genre. Dhrupad texts have been the subject of linguistic analyses, most notably by Françoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye (1987) and Lucy Rosenstein (1997). Both authors are primarily concerned with the poetical (i.e. non-musical) aspect of dhrupad texts, and concentrate their analyses on poetry that is not necessarily part of the contemporary singing tradition. The dynamic relationship between performance and text has not been discussed in these studies. Two musicological studies in English have focused in depth on khyāl: Wim van der Meer (1980) and Bonnie Wade (1984). Both authors discuss the thematic components of khyāl texts in some detail, but linguistic analysis falls outside the

scope of their work. has also been the subject of two major studies: Shatrughna Shukla (1983) and Peter Manuel (1989). These works are, again, primarily

musicological, although they include chapters on the linguistic aspect of compositions. lyrics deserve to be the focus of a dedicated language-based study. Although the present work contextualises the lyrics in their performance setting, it is primarily a textual analysis in which musical observations are based on existing studies, augmented by my own experiences as a student of Hindustani vocal music.