Arabic Echoes and Persian Refrains: Devotional Poetry and Intersonicality in Eighteenth- And Nineteenth-Century North India

Abstract

Arabic has been deeply embedded in South Asian religious and cultural life for well over a thousand years, but when spoken, recited, sung, and heard by Muslim communities across the region, it has almost always been accompanied by the sounds of other languages. Reconstructing this multilingual sound world of devotional texts in the past is undoubtedly difficult, but archives of devotional manuscripts and printed books from South Asia are anything but silent. This paper explores devotional poems and prayers that were popular in North India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centurieswith a particular focus on munājāt:intimate words of supplication addressed to God, the Prophet, or revered Sufi Shaykhs such as ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī. Although, at first glance, these appear to be Arabic poems, manuscripts and printed books containing them feature a wealth of interlinear glosses, versified translations, and bilingual poetic expansions in Persian, Urdu, and other languages. This points to a shared sound world where devotional poetics were inherently multilingual and where Arabic devotional texts were not just understood in terms of their semantic meaning nor passively experienced through the spiritual benefits they offered as recited sound. Instead, I argue that their meanings rested on what I call intersonic knowledge: a shared ability to recognise rhymes and refrains that echoed across Arabic and other languages, and even produce sonic resonances between them