‘To make a homeland in the heart’: Iranian listeners of Indian music in Mughal South Asia

Abstract

This paper asks what discussions of Indian music by Iranian émigré poets can tell us about how ‘inaudible’ music was experienced in 17^th century South Asia. Building on recent scholarship on music as a site of translation and interpretation, it explores how the ephemeral experience of listening was translated into the medium of Persian poetry and ornate prose. Mughal-period treatises and poetry on music often reference the blending of Persianate and Indic idioms to create something new, but as South Asian musicologists have observed, they often leave us with little information about what such innovations sounded like. However, texts about music do often refer to the emotional effects listening to rāgas and lyrics in Hindawi generated in listeners, which could include spiritual ecstacy; the ease of the experience of exile (ghurbat); or a specific aesthetic pleasure generated by strangeness. To approach how Persian authors described the experience of listening, I will focus on the autobiographical writings of a peripheral Mughal poet, Tughra Mashhadi (d. 1667). Drawing on Sufi poetic models such as Jalal al-Din Rumi, Tughra thematized music as transcendental and all-pervading. At the same time, he drew the celestial music of the spheres into a specific place and time, emphasizing the experience of listening as embodied and personal, and weaving the affective power of the music of India into his life-narrative. For Tughra and other émigré writers, music did not simply flatten cultural difference. Rather, they viewed unfamiliarity itself as giving rise to the specific pleasures of Indian music, and its potent effects on the heart, mind, and body.