Acknowledgements

ix

Note on Transliteration

xi

Note on Dating Systems

xii

List of Illustrations

xiii

Notes on Contributors

xv

Introduction

1

Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield

I. Between Texts and Practices

1.

The Example in Dadupanthi Homiletics

31

Monika Horstmann

2.

Making it Vernacular in Agra: The Practice of Translation by Seventeenth-Century Jains

61

John E. Cort

3.

World Enough and Time: Religious Strategy and Historical Imagination in an Indian Sufi Tale

107

Muzaffar Alam

4.

Hearing Mo‘jizat in South Asian Shi‘ism

137

Amy Bard

II. Books and Performances, Books for Performance

5.

Note to Self: What Marathi Kirtankars’ Notebooks Suggest about Literacy, Performance, and the Travelling Performer in Pre-Colonial Maharashtra

169

Christian Lee Novetzke

6.

A Handbook for Storytellers: The Ṭirāz al-akhbār and the Qissa Genre

185

Pasha M. Khan

7.

Did Surdas Perform the Bhāgavata-purāṇa?

209

John Stratton Hawley

8.

Text, Orality, and Performance in Newar Devotional Music

231

Richard Widdess

III. Written Clues about Performed Texts

9.

Listening for the Context: Tuning in to the Reception of Riti Poetry

249

Allison Busch

10.

Reading the Acts and Lives of Performers in Mughal Persian Texts

283

Sunil Sharma

11.

Persian Poets on the Streets: The Lore of Indo-Persian Poetic Circles in Late Mughal India

303

Stefano Pellò

12.

Texts and Tellings: Kathas in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

327

Francesca Orsini

13.

A Curious King, a Psychic Leper, and the Workings of Karma: Bajid’s Entertaining Narratives

359

Imre Bangha

IV. Musical Knowledge and Aesthetics

14.

Raga in the Early Sixteenth Century

385

Allyn Miner

15.

Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika

407

Katherine Butler Schofield

16.

Patterns of Composition in the Seventeenth-Century Bengali Literature of Arakan

423

Thibaut d’Hubert

17.

The Musical Lives of Texts: Rhythms and Communal Relationships among the Nizamis and Some of Their Neighbours in South and West Asia

445

Richard K. Wolf

Glossary

485

Bibliography

493

Index

535