The Islamic Period influence on South-Asian-Indian music genres and aesthetics
The Islamic Period influence on South-Asian-Indian music genres, aesthetics and Theoretical developments
The Muslim conquest of India can be said to have started in the 12th century, although Sindh (now in Pakistan) had already been conquered by the Arabs in the 8th century. Muslim writers such as al-Jāḥiẓ and al-Masʿūdī had commented favorably on Indian music as early as the 9th and 10th centuries, and Muslims in India seem to have been very attracted to it.
At the beginning of the 14th century, the great poet Amīr Khosrow, who was considered extremely competent in both Persian and Indian music, wrote that Indian music was superior to the music of any other country. It is further stated that after the Muslim conquest of the Deccan under Malik Kāfūr (c. 1310), large numbers of Hindu musicians were enlisted with the royal armies and settled in the north. Although orthodox Islam considered music illegal, acceptance of Sufi doctrines, in which music was an accepted means of realizing God, allowed Muslim rulers and nobles to extend their patronage to the art. Music flourished on a grand scale in the courts of the Mughal Emperors Akbar, Jahāngīr and Shah Jahān. In addition to Indian musicians, musicians from Persia, Afghanistan and Kashmir were also employed by these rulers; Nonetheless, it seems that Indian music was the most favored. Famous Indian musicians like Svami Haridas and Tansen are legendary artists and innovators of this time. Following the example of Amīr Khosrow, Muslim musicians took an active interest in performing Indian music and expanded the repertoire by inventing new ragas, talas and forms of music, as well as new instruments.
Muslim patronage of music has been largely effective in northern India and has had a profound influence on North Indian music. Perhaps the main result of this influence was to emphasize the meaning of the words of the songs, which were mainly based on Hindu devotional themes. Furthermore, the songs had generally been composed in Sanskrit, a language that was no longer a medium of communication except among scholars and priests. Sanskrit songs were gradually replaced by compositions in the various dialects of Hindi, Braj Bhasha, Bhojpuri and Dakhani, as well as Urdu and Persian. Nevertheless, the linguistic and thematic communication problems were not easy to reconcile.
However, it was around this time that a new approach to religion was sweeping through India. This emphasized devotion (bhakti) as the primary means of attaining union with God, bypassing the traditional Hindu beliefs of the soul's transmigration from body to body in the lengthy process of purification before it could attain deity. The Islamic Sufi movement was based on a similar approach to the Bhakti movement and also won many converts in India. One manifestation of these devotional cults was the growth of a new form of mystical devotional poetry composed by wandering beggars who had dedicated their lives to the realization of God. Many of these beggars were sanctified and are referred to as poet or singer saints because their poems were all set to music. A number of devotional sects emerged across the country—some Muslim, some Hindu, and others that brought together elements of both. These sects emphasized the individual's personal relationship with God. In her poetry, human love for God was often portrayed as a woman's love for a man, and particularly as the milkmaid Radha's love for Krishna, a popular incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. Around the royal courts there was a less idealistic interpretation of the word 'love', and much of the poetry and miniature painting of the time depicts the states of experience of the lover and the beloved.
This attitude is also reflected in the music literature of the time. From the beginning it was described that both jatis and ragas evoke certain feelings (rasa) in their connection with dramatic performances and are suitable for the accompaniment of certain dramatic events. It was this connotative rather than the technical aspect that took precedence during this period. The most popular method of classification was ragas (male) and their wives, called raginis, expanded to include putras, their sons, and bharyas, the sons' wives. The ragas were personified and associated with specific scenes, some drawn from Hindu mythology, while others depicted aspects of the relationship between two lovers. The culmination of this personification is in the Ragamala paintings, usually a series of 36, depicting the ragas and raginis in their emotional settings.