The session will address the agentive role of music, chanting, and song in religious practice in contemporary South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. We will give special attention to the ways that musical performance in South Asian religious contexts functions to actively create, shape, or enhance participants’ experiences and perceptions. We consider how both the production and consumption of music and song in religious performative contexts help help produce various kinds of human responses, including not just religious responses, but also political, social, or ethical types of responses. Collectively, we explore song, music, chanting, and text in four different South Asian religious environments.
The Tamil yogin Sri Sabhapati Swami (ca. 1828–1936) is known for his elaborate visual depictions of the Royal Yoga for Śiva, but lesser known is the attention paid to musical poetry and sound within his publications, which span Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, and English language worlds. In addition to lyrical songs and poetic compositions, Sabhapati also included instructions on the aural recitation of musical notes and mantric seed-syllables (bījamantra), framing them as fragmented powers of the syllable Om. He was probably the first modern yogin to develop a practice of silent chanting linked to the purification of the five elemental principles (tattvas), cakras, and lotuses. This paper analyzes how singing and aurality played an integral part of Sabhapati’s yogic literature as well as at a contemporary temple devoted to him, with special focus on how it was designed to enhance meditative practice as well as benefit audiences of devotees.
This paper explores the world of religious songs called ginans. Ginans, from the Sanskrit jnana ("gnosis”), are devotional poems and hymns attributed to Ismaili pīrs, or Muslim saints. The performance of these songs is of special importance to the Satpanth Ismailis of South Asia, a religious community that evolved in the Indian subcontinent since the twelfth century. In exploring the Satpanth Ismaili ginan tradition, this paper asks several larger questions: can a tradition of hymns fashion a religious community? Is there enough perceived sacred power in ginans to move listeners to reorient their religious or emotional attachments from their existing religious identity to another? This paper is going to suggest that ginans have played a foundational role, by virtue of their combined musical and poetic impact, in reshaping the perception of listeners, in this case, “Hindus,” and making them receptive to the authority of Ismaili Pirs and Shia Ismaili Imams.
The Gujarati poet Nishkulanand Swami composed lyric texts within a bhakti (devotional) community as it re-established itself in western India under the leadership of Swaminarayan (1781-1830). These texts have been sung in private practices and public spaces throughout the community’s growth locally and internationally. In recent decades, live and video productions have rendered them into melodic sequences interspersed with expositions, contemplative practices, or images of gods and gurus. I argue that these musical productions perform a vital religious role by facilitating embodied meaning-making experiences of the texts, creating meanings that, although based on texts, refer to religious desires, persons, and events external to the texts. Preliminary ethnography suggests that for many, the texts become meaningful only through their musical renderings. Using the lens of metonymic shifts, I illustrate the process by which individuals come to engage Nishkulanand's writing through extralinguistic elements: music and their visceral reactions to the musical productions.
This paper explores the music and movements of the performers during the Uthra Śīvēli festival at the Śrī Vallabha Temple located in central Kerala. This festival is celebrated by Hindu devotees across caste and geographical boundaries in the region. The festival procession of deities inside and outside the temple is accompanied by music, which directs the procession's progression, including the dance performance in which processing devotees participate. In addition, temple priests personify various deities to make them accessible to the devotees. This paper examines the role of music in producing and facilitating the religious experience of ritual performers and devotees observing the ritual. I argue that music functions as a ritual agent in this context; it plays an active role in producing, in the context of this festival rite, “ritualized” bodies (Bell 1992) and the experience of “sacredness” (Jacobsen 2008).
| Tracy Pintchman | tpintch@luc.edu | View |