CHAPTER 1

Colonial Concentration: Attention in Bengali Music Scholarship in 1885

Richard David Williams

What constituted “attention” in musical contexts in northern India at the end of the nineteenth century? In the context of British colonialism, how far were ideas about attention impacted by Western concepts and evolving conversations in Europe about concentration, focus, and distraction? As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, ideas around attention and distraction evolved over the long nineteenth century in conversation with new social contexts for music making, new theories of auditory perception and cognition, burgeoning discourses around psychology and the work of the mind, and the commodification of attention. However, although recent scholarship has nuanced our sense of these developments in Euro-American historical contexts, it remains unclear how far concepts like “attention” were significant to actors invested in music in other parts of the world, and whether ideas and practices cultivated in the West became global in their own time.

Clearly, these are large questions that resist easy answers. In South Asian history more broadly, there is an ongoing debate about colonial knowledge production in the nineteenth century: Were contemporary concepts and categories (from religions to the caste system) the imports and products of colonialism, or were they adaptations of earlier, precolonial ideas that had transitioned in response to colonial forms of knowledge and global conversations?1 Colonialism took different forms in different regions, intellectual disciplines, and arenas of debate, and the responses of Indian intellectuals could vary enormously: Some continued to work within the frameworks provided by older, precolonial systems, while others renounced them as antiquated and adopted new approaches from Europe.

This essay concentrates on musical scholarship written in Bengali, focusing on one individual—Krishnadhan Bandyopadhyay (1846–1904)—who was part of an extremely dynamic and varied music scene in colonial Calcutta.2 Bandyopadhyay, I suggest, was atypical in the way he thought about musical attention and in the extent of his subscription to ideas found in European studies. Nonetheless, his research sheds light on how Indian music scholars accessed information learned from English-language sources, selectively co-opted certain ideas, and brought them into conversation with materials in Sanskrit and Bengali. His work further indicates how intellectuals creatively negotiated multiple epistemologies of music and drew on European concerns with the nature of listening and attention to frame their own manifestos for the future of the practice and appreciation of music in South Asia. While not entirely in tune with debates and conversations in Europe, these manifestos drew upon a shared, circulating conceptual vocabulary for thinking about musical experience. At the same time, when this vocabulary was presented in Bengali, the local, vernacular terms of debate were themselves products of a longer colonial engagement between European and South Asian languages and knowledge systems. To make sense of this engagement, I begin by introducing the terms that eighteenth-century music scholars writing in Bengali used when they considered how the listening subject attends to music. I then turn to the broader conceptual vocabulary for attention and concentration available in colonial north India and explore the connected history of European and Indian litterateurs. I follow these terms through to Bandyopadhyay’s work in the late nineteenth century and consider the place of attention in his vision for the future of Indian music.

Attending to Sound Through Visualization

Although Krishnadhan Bandyopadhyay was an idiosyncratic thinker, his work emerged out of a longer history of South Asian scholarship on art music. His generation of scholars prepared innovative studies on music, written in Bengali, which proliferated from the late 1860s onward.3 Bengali intellectuals had been engaging with the study of music long before this, but the activity of the mid-nineteenth century represented a new development, reflecting larger changes in the language and medium of scholarship.4 In the early modern period, South Asian musicology5 had largely been carried out in Sanskrit (saṅgīta-śāstra) and Persian (‘ilm-i-mūsīqī), though vernacular scholarship gradually took over from Sanskrit, especially in the eighteenth century.6 A number of intellectuals from eastern India, operating out of aristocratic courts and religious institutions, developed poetic treatises on music theory in Bengali. These works followed the older models set by Sanskrit literature but were also informed by more recent trends in vernacular scholarship, especially the focus on the visualization (dhyāna) of modal entities, the rāgas.7 Sanskrit music scholars had explained that a rāga could be understood in terms of its musical structure, its affective connotations, and through iconography, which could be illustrated through a painted image or a poem. The word dhyāna refers in particular to a practice of concentrated meditation, in which the practitioner assembles an image or icon in their mind in order to focus and integrate the object of concentration into their own internal environment.8 Early examples of dhyāna visualization-concentration for rāgas certainly suggest an affinity with ritual meditation on deities.9 Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chapters on dhyāna in music treatises moved into new directions, especially in vernacular languages such as Classical Hindi (Brajbhasha), in which the poets brought music theory into dialogue with “mannerist” (rīti) courtly poetry, which provided a nuanced vocabulary for discussing emotion, sensation, and pleasure through literary archetypes.10 According to this aesthetic system, to attend to music was to construct and contemplate its imagined body: a woman waiting for her lover, a sage chanting by his shrine.11

To give one example, in 1717, Phajil Nasir Muhammad composed a Rāganāmā (“Book of Rāga”) for Wahid Muhammad Caudhuri, the landlord of Sultanpur (Chittagong). The work opens with praise poems (hāmd and nā’t) to Allah and the Prophet, then eulogizes the patron and his kingdom. Phajil Nasir contextualized and localized his work to the particular space of the Sultanpur court, describing how his lord had requested him to make Sanskrit musical lore (primarily drawn from the Saṅgītadāmodara, fifteenth to mid-sixteenth century) available to readers in Bengali.12 Following the standard convention of the genre, the visualizations of the rāgas were arranged in a series, that is, selected and strung together to make up a “garland” (mālā). For his rāga-mālā series, Phajil Nazir cited a description in Sanskrit, then expounded upon it in Bengali in two ways: in a paýār couplet, and then in tripadī triplets, as with the rāga called Mālava:13

deha-kānti śukla barṇa

sucāru kuṇḍala karṇa

mahāmatta mati atiśaý

pariýā bicitra mālā

prabeśanta gīti śālā

pradoṣa samaýa suniścaý

uttama basana pari

maneta kautuka kari

priýā padmamukha cumbe ghana

nṛtyagīta mana sukhī

saṅhati saroja mukhī

saba nārī madanamohana

preme magna haiýā cita

gāhasta susvara gīta

priýā saba dekhiýā susāja

daśa daṇḍa dibā ādi

rātri daśa daṇḍābadhi

gāha-e mālaba rāga-rāja

His radiant body, white in color,

charming earrings in his ears,

his thoughts excited in excess.

Wearing a colorful garland,

entering the music hall,

resolute at evening time,

Wearing the finest clothes,

feeling playful in his heart,

deep in a kiss with his lotus-faced love,

Delighted by music and dance,

alongside her lily face,

enchanting to all women.

His mind becomes steeped in love,

they sing a melodious song,

his beloved is finely adorned all over.

From the first daṇḍa of the day

to the tenth daṇḍa of night

Mālava, the king of rāga, sings.14

Following a poetic approach to musical scholarship, the gendered archetypes of the rāga series are brimming with emotions, immersed in love, spectacle, and the pleasures of music and dance. At least some of these descriptions were designed to be performed as songs—certain verses are marked as a refrain (“dhru.” short for dhrubā)—which indicates how the rāga series could be brought to life, enacting a mental vision of musical pleasure through the interplay of sound and verbal, evocative imagery.

However, by the nineteenth century, courtly musicologists of this kind were largely forgotten. They were surpassed instead by a new class of gentlemen (bhadralok) scholars in Calcutta, the new colonial metropolis, who only selectively affiliated themselves with the older generations of intellectuals. This selectivity had lasting implications for the future of musical thought, as subsequent generations of Bengali writers located themselves between the precolonial musical conversations that interested them and colonial forms of knowledge production and dissemination. As I have argued elsewhere, a turning point was the 1818 publication of the Saṅgītataraṅga (“Wave of Music”), the first printed Bengali book on music theory, which was a digest of older ideas in Persian and Sanskrit.15 Associated with the academy at Fort William, the book’s author partially addressed a non-Indian readership and availed himself of the new possibilities posed by print technology. This book became an influential reference work for later generations of scholars, especially in the wake of a colonial language policy in 1837 whereby Persian ceased to carry official functions: Increasingly less familiar with the language, Bengali scholars also became increasingly disengaged from the vast corpus of Persian musicological thought—and by extension, the work of Muslim intellectuals—drawing what they needed from the Bengali summary and then reorienting themselves toward novel approaches and questions.

These breaks with convention led to a new landscape of musical publishing and the proliferation of several different types of music book: songbooks (often with introductions to the fundamentals of music); instrumental manuals; treatises on the history and theory of music; and antiquarian studies and editions of Sanskrit texts. While my focus here is on Bengali, we should remember that these works were part of a larger, multilingual conversation about the state and future of music studies in India, and that certain authors were directly influenced by concurrent trends in other languages, such as Hindi, Marathi, and Urdu.

This new generation of authors was interested both in the practice of music and in writing useful books, reflecting a larger sea change in access to musical training, which distanced their outlook from the likes of Phajil Nasir in the eighteenth century and called for a different kind of musical study. Nasir’s royal patron was expected to appreciate musical aesthetics but uninterested in singing or performing himself: After all, music making was the work of professional, hereditary musicians, who were service providers to their patrons. However, in early nineteenth-century Calcutta, men from the elite classes were beginning to sing and play and to develop reputations as celebrated musicians and composers themselves.16 By the 1860s, this had become increasingly typical, and collectives formed to appreciate, study, and perform music together. Of these, the Bengal Music School, established in 1871 by S. M. Tagore (1840–1914) and Kshetramohan Goswami (1813–1893), and another society, the Bhavanipur Saṅgīt Sammilanī, were especially influential. Writers in these circles engaged with developments in European scholarship to varying degrees; for example, there were debates over whether notation (including staff notation) was appropriate for Indian music, or how far the harmonium should be integrated into art music.17 Certain authors, including S. M. Tagore and his colleague, Nabinchandra Datta, explicitly discussed ideas they found in European works on music in parallel to developing a neo-traditionalist approach to Indian music, one that framed innovative ideas as ancient and Sanskritic, often skipping backward in time over their immediate predecessors.18

One striking trend in this this period is the lack of interest in rāga visualization: While rāga-mālā had been a chief concern in writings on music in the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth it was increasingly framed as a curiosity or a form of poetry, but not as a significant theme for musicology. Thus, S. M. Tagore incorporated rāga visualizations in one work dedicated to the Prince of Wales (1877) and called them “meditations,” but framed them as a decorative curiosity rather than as an essential way of concentrating on music: “To impart picturesqueness to the treatise, as well as to clothe it with orientalism, he has also given their emblematic representations.”19 I suggest the old form of musical concentration epitomized in dhyāna was no longer fit for purpose: Musical authors were no longer patron-listeners but performer-scholars, and they required a new vocabulary and technique for attending to music. While experiments with notation—both European and Indian—was a partial solution, some scholars also sought a new language for concentration and attention.

Defining “Attention” in Colonial India

Any attempt to find the equivalent of the word “attention” in multilingual north India indicates the variety of concepts and intellectual histories relating to consciousness that were already on the table before colonial interventions. In addition to the aforementioned notion of dhyāna, we can consider the Urdu word tawajjǒh (توجه), which has the sense of turning to face something or someone. In particular, the word was theorized in Sufi practices as the disciple offering his countenance to the face of the master and holding his image in his mind at all times, shutting out worldly distractions and absorbing the master’s image to perceive the beauty of Allah therein.20 The same sense occurs in other terms, such as to twist or turn (multafit ملتفت) to something to regard it attentively.21

Bengal was one of the first regions to be systematically and deeply colonized by the British, and Bengali intellectuals are renowned for their creative responses to the transformative influx of ideas from Europe. This influx can be traced in terms of a conceptual history of attention. In the earliest European vocabulary of the Bengali language, Fr. Manoel da Assumpçam’s Vocabulario em Idioma Bengalla e Portuguez (1743), “Attençaõ” is listed as “Monsuba” (i.e., mansubā, a “fixed plan; contrivance; pretext”)22 and “Achenotá v. chit” (ācenatā bā cit),23 where cit refers to the mind (“I think” is cit kari).24 These were, perhaps, not the most obvious choices, and later authors developed their own set of equivalences. For example, in 1849, one Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyay had translated The Improvement of the Mind (1741) by Isaac Watts into Bengali as part of his Encyclopedia Bengalensis translation project. His abridged version of this exhortation to study culminated in the chapter “Of fixing the attention,” or “manaḥsthir karibār biṣaý” (literally, “the subject of making the mind still”). Bandyopadhyay elaborated a range of synonyms for Watts’s terms: manaḥsthir (mind-stilling) for “a steady fixation of thought”; manaḥsaṅyogitā (mind-joining) for “attention”; and parīkṣā (examination) for “inspection.”25

While my focus here is on Bengal, the situation in Calcutta can be seen as part of a larger set of developments in response to European influence. From the eighteenth century, conversations in Europe around auditory attention and distraction were informed by emergent trends in literature, medicine, theology, economics, and technology.26 Some of these trends, including the nineteenth-century fascination with mesmerism, circulated in colonial India where they were selectively integrated with earlier, indigenous systems. For example, Muhammad Taqi Sayyid’s study of mesmerism in Urdu, Tāsir al-anẕār (“The Impression of the Gaze,” 1877) was marketed as a compendium of specifically European talismanic devices (ṯilism-i-farang) yet embedded these Western ideas in a larger discussion involving Islamic medicine (al-Ṯibb).27 In Hindi, Baldev Prasad Misra’s Mṛtak-milap: yā Pretnagar. Spirit Land (“Meeting the Dead: or Ghost City. Spirit Land,” 1897) examined how European spiritualism (both directly transliterated and translated as spiricuyālizam and pret-tattva) and mesmerism (mesmerizam) departed from Indian theories, including yoga, sorcery (ojhā bidyā), and tantra. The introduction to mesmerism defines a fit and able mind:

Only those who conduct themselves well, those with the faculty of an intense remembrance and belief in God, endowed with a sharp consciousness (tej buddhi), a powerful brain (sabal mastiṣk), courage and forbearance and character, compassion, feeling, steadfastness and self-control can study this art (bidyā).28

This book outlined different techniques of mediumship and seances, preserving key phrases and terms in the original English. While the specific terms in this passage were hardly new to Hindi intellectuals, here they were deployed in new and self-consciously Occidentalist directions.

Krishnadhan Bandyopadhyay’s Manifesto for Attentive Listening

Against this larger context, similar engagements and appropriations of European ideas can be seen emerging in Bengali musical scholarship. Krishnadhan Bandyopadhyay was one of the most original Bengali musicologists of the nineteenth century. Yet, as Sagnik Atarthi reminds us, his influence was curtailed because of his limited personal resources, especially compared to some of his peers and rivals in Calcutta’s musical forums, who were able to set up their own schools and cultivate larger followings.29

Krishnadhan had a varied training: a Western-style education at Hindu College, an early career in Calcutta’s musical theater scene as an actor-singer, followed by a period spent studying sitar in Gwalior with a hereditary professional master (ustād), Ahmed Khan. A voracious reader and prolific scholar, Bandyopadhyay wrote a Bengali history of China in 1866, but also devoted himself to preparing new resources for music students. Over the 1860s–1870s, he published several music books about Indian art music presented with staff notation. Despite the criticism of scholars like S. M. Tagore who were busy promoting their own, “national” systems of inscription, Bandyopadhyay was a vocal champion of Western notation.30 He also deployed concepts and arguments derived from his research on European music to make new inroads into the theory and practice of Indian music. This approach was spelled out in his Saṅgīt Śikṣā (“Music Instruction,” 1868). This Comprehensive Self-Instructor for the Setar, Esraj, Violin, Flute, and Harmonium; and also for Singing was highly pragmatic in its arrangement of lessons and compositions: Bandyopadhyay retained the conventional vocabulary for Indian music (using terms in Hindustani, Sanskrit, and Bengali), but also provided a glossary of his neologisms that were entirely new to Indian musical discourse, including “Chromatic” (acalasvārik), “Minor” (gauṇa), “Enharmonic” (mādhurācalik), and “Acoustics” (śabdabijñān).31

Seventeen years later, Bandyopadhyay published his magnum opus, the Gītasūtrasār (“Quintessence of Music,” 1885–1886). Here he abandoned the long-established Indian conventions for discussing sound and music and started from a new set of first principles, opening his book with Darwinian evolution, the biological development of the throat and voice, and the prehistoric role of sound in social communication.32

The Gītasūtrasār can be read as a manifesto: Bandyopadhyay exhorted his readers to pay music what he considered an appropriate level of attention. He attempted to provide a new model for musical scholarship and critical engagement with sound, since he thought the prevailing mode of discussing music in Indian languages was inadequate. He believed this deficiency was ingrained in the work of both ancient and contemporary musicologists, the performance practices of living musicians, and in popular listening habits:

Many people have the impression that music which induces drowsiness in its listeners is, to their minds, the best; this is a terrible mistake. Listening to monotonous music lacking variety will bring on sleepiness. Listening to music that does something new and novel each and every moment, with tāns [fast phrases], and revelations of new and novel affects (nūtun nūtun raser abirbhāb haý), even sleepy and spiritless individuals are stirred up and come alive. Listening to the tambura or sitar for five or seven minutes, many people, especially children, fall asleep: this has been observed frequently. The reason is monotonous sound. . . .

. . . The primary purpose of musical study should not just be to achieve the satisfaction of listeners. What should be done in music is whatever achieves mental satisfaction (mānasik sukh). Changes in mental mood (cittabikār), the elevation of the mind’s passions (maner ābeg), and the captivation of the listener (śrotāke mugdha karā-i) is the finest work of music. While it is a challenging enterprise to give an account of how mental moods change and so on by means of arranging musical notes, this indeed is the legitimate work of music. Owing to the miserable state of our national (jātīýa) preferences and tastes, as with everything, [music] is not looking well.33

How far was Bandyopadhyay’s dim view of Indian musical scholarship a product of Orientalist criticism? His model for critical engagement was certainly shaped by European studies of European music (below): while he had also read English studies of Indian music (e.g., William Jones and Augustus Willard), which informed his accounts of musical forms and their histories, he was less interested in these Orientalist works about India and more indebted to books and articles on vocal production, music education, and the scientific basis of sound. Bandyopadhyay was less concerned with musicology’s pasts than its present and possible futures. While his Bengali contemporaries typically focused on the decline of music (especially in the hands of Muslim musicians) and focused their energies on ancient (and therefore purer and more authentic) Sanskrit music treatises, Bandyopadhyay regarded change as inevitable and considered the ancient authorities redundant for modern times. Since music—like everything else, he argued—had evolved over the centuries, it was futile to try to compare the music of his day to the music described in older texts.34 Indeed, he explicitly called his former colleague Kshetramohan Goswami’s attempt to devise modern practices based on ancient theories illogical.35

Although Bandyopadhyay engaged extensively with centuries-old music treatises, he read these Sanskrit works as historical texts rather than as tools for understanding the music of his day. He contrasted his own worldview and epistemology, which was proudly shaped by modern theories like evolution, to the antique modes of attending to and studying music: “All those treatise writers were poets; to them the entire subject of music was included within the poetic imagination.”36 To highlight the point, he turned to the Saṅgīta-dāmodara, a Sanskrit treatise from the fifteenth–sixteenth century, a once highly influential source for music scholars in eastern India:

It is said in the Saṅgīta-dāmodara that when the air in the navel is hiccupped, and that within the throat and head is struck, a particular sound is produced, and since it is possessed of both fragrance (gandhayukta) and purity its name is gāndhār. If a certain note is pleasing it is very fragrant; some notes have a light fragrance, others have none; in our time, people do not have the faculty to make sense of this. That real [or material, bāstabik] notes should have fragrances is an impossible business . . . we are only introduced to this kind of marvelous imagination; but not to anything real.37

Dismissing earlier modes of canonical writings on music (saṅgīta śāstra) as poetry rather than musicology proper resonated with other critics of the late nineteenth century, including Bharatendu Harischandra (1850–1885), who made similar pronouncements in Hindi and argued against “blind tradition.”38 However, in Bengali circles the dominant trend involved reclaiming musical information from ancient texts and allocating a place for it in modern practice, something that Bandyopadhyay explicitly berated. Bandyopadhyay criticized his contemporaries, especially S. M. Tagore and Kshetramohan Goswami, for pursuing this line of inquiry and also critiqued earlier seminal works on music theory, such as the aforementioned Saṅgītataraṅga (1818), which was too conventional and uncritical for his liking.

Moreover, this particular example testifies to a friction between modes of musical perception: dissecting the experience of sound through a poetic palette—in this case, fragrance—was part of a larger epistemology of musical pleasure, and attentive multimodality, cultivated by early modern intellectuals. Bandyopadhyay urges his readers to reject this mode of experience in favor of what he called the “real” (āsal) and the “material” (bāstabik).

How did Bandyopadhyay account for the neglect of “real” music? He traced the problem back to the culture of musical professionals, which had permeated society at large and impacted the attention of individual listeners. In line with many other Hindu musicologists of his time, he dismissed hereditary Muslim masters (ustāds) as illiterate and suggested that because they were not erudite scholars they did not give their consideration (anudhāban) to the internal, affective dimensions of sound:

Rāgas and rāginīs, whether certain rhythms (tāla) and tempos (laýa) are “impure” or not—since ustāds are only concentrating (manoyogī hauýāte) on this subject, the inner meaning of Hindustani music has disappeared.39

On a first reading, this claim sounds very familiar: Many writers in this period were actively accusing Muslims of being the inept custodians of musical culture.40 Certainly, the myth of the “illiterate ustād” has been debunked in recent scholarship, including studies by Katherine Schofield and Max Katz on musicians who wrote music treatises in Persian and Urdu over the Mughal and colonial periods.41 However, it is true that in Bandyopadhyay’s own time, ustāds primarily contributed to the arena of Bengali music book production as consultants rather than authors.42 Given that he also criticized the intellectual projects of elite Hindu writers, such as S. M. Tagore, Bandyopadhyay’s scathing judgments evidently crossed communal boundaries. Like Orientalist writers, he characterized Muslim rulers by their love of pleasure (bilās priýatā), but rather than developing this into the increasingly standard colonial account of degeneracy and decadence, he merely commented that they especially enjoyed music that cultivated the aesthetic of grief (śok).43 Likewise, while other authors were hesitant to discuss certain genres like ṭhumrī without denouncing the immorality of courtesans and their Muslim accompanists, Bandyopadhyay had nothing but praise for ṭhumrī and its performers.44 Given that Bandyopadhyay himself had chosen to study sitar with an ustād, Ahmed Khan, I suggest that his criticism was less concerned with denouncing Muslim involvement in the arts and more about his personal frustrations with the current terms of debate in musical scholarship. In particular, he was annoyed that musicians persisted in traditional frameworks for conceptualizing and composing musical sound:

While superstition (kusaṅskār) and conservatism (goṅrāmī) are the king of the gods when it comes to progress in any given subject, in music it is even more so. Resistant to progress, adhering to superstition, the creativity of accomplished people in composing new sounds can never come into bloom.45

The possibilities of art music, he argued, had been narrowly defined and curtailed by a lack of forward-thinking vision.

Inspiration from Europe

Despondent about the state of musical creativity in India, Bandyopadhyay looked for inspiration elsewhere, especially from Europe. In doing so, he aligned himself with other Bengali intellectuals who were inspired by European precedents.46 Bandyopadhyay articulates his own Occidentalism most dramatically when he describes his ideal musical genius, a poet of sound (svar-kabi), and disparagingly claims that even Tansen, the most celebrated court musician in the history of Hindustani music, would not qualify, since he did not pioneer composition beyond the hegemony of canonical rāga-based music.47 While he does not name anyone instead, he offers a model for an artist explicitly based on European concepts:

The fine English author Carlyle, said of the famous German poet and philosopher Goethe that: “He sees through every pore.” Accordingly, the one I call the truly best singer should not only see but also feel in his every pore. At present, is there not a singer of this kind in our country?48

Bandyopadhyay here appears quintessentially cosmopolitan, invoking Thomas Carlyle’s characterization of Goethe to formulate his aspiration for Indian music. At the same time, the global flow of ideas here was less than straightforward. It was not Thomas Carlyle who said this (in the English original: “for he seems to see out of every pore of his skin”), but rather Ralph Waldo Emerson: The two writers had been juxtaposed in a piece by Richard Holt Hutton, who quoted Emerson in order to demonstrate how “Carlyle worships Goethe blindly, but Emerson discerns the very core of the poet.”49 Hutton’s own phrasing was a little confusing, and the Welsh singer and scientist Margaret Watts Hughes (1842–1907) misattributed the quotation as coming from Carlyle when she included it in her article, “A Glimpse into the Art of Singing,” published in 1875. There we also find her commenting on the essential requirements of a good singer:

Carlyle, in speaking of the great philosopher Goethe, says: “He sees through every pore of his skin.” We can say of the truly great vocal artist, that he not only sees, but also feels, through every pore of his skin.50

Bandyopadhyay closely translated her phrasing into Bengali and then redirected it toward his larger argument about the poverty of music education in India. Indeed, Bandyopadhyay clearly used her article extensively, as many of her insights—including birdsong, pronunciation, and the techniques associated with her vocal teacher, Manuel Garcia—are closely followed, though not directly credited, in the the Gītasūtrasār.

Another significant source for Bandyopadhyay was John Curwen’s Singing for Schools and Congregations: A Grammar of Vocal Music (1843). Bandyopadhyay seems to have relied on the third edition (1852), as he duplicated Curwen’s table of “The Alphabet of Music,” which prioritizes the “mental effects” of the seven notes.51 This table (Figure 1.1) strongly appealed to Bandyopadhyay’s fascination with the emotional architecture of music and his desire to scientifically deduce, dissect, and document the properties of sound and their relationship to the mind of the listener. He does not credit Curwen directly with this scheme but includes him in a footnote alongside several other “celebrated European musicologists”: M. Jeu de Berneval, Dr. [John Wall] Callcott (author of the Grammar of Music), and Dr. R. J. Bryce, all of whom he probably read about in Curwen. These naming practices are intended to make Bandyopadhyay appear extremely well read and intimately engaged in conversations happening in Europe, as well as to highlight the variety of Western thinkers he admired and emulated, compared to the Indian musicologists he criticized and condemned.

While he followed the formula and related most of the mental effects directly, there are some differences in the properties of each note too: Doh, “The Strong or Firm note” becomes Sā, “The Firm or Restful note” (acal bā biśrāmdāýak sur); likewise, Te, “The Sensitive or Piercing note” becomes Ni, “The Piercing or Revealing note” (tīkṣṇ bā pradarśak sur), and so on.

The affective properties of the scale were a long-established topic in canonical Indian musicology: Notes were said to have emerged from the sounds of specific wildlife and had emotional connotations, but perhaps Bandyopadhyay saw this as another expression of a poetic imagination and archaic orthodoxy. Instead, he preferred to think in terms of biology and psychology: Humans associated tones and notes with emotional states that were interpreted through the work of the mind. He invokes classical rasa theory (which examines how affect is generated in an aesthetic experience) but only superficially.52 Instead, he emphasizes how emotional journeys are generated by the arrangement of the notes and their distinctive mental effects, which can then be mixed and contrasted like colors:53

Now it will be demonstrated by what means various kinds of affect are introduced through meaningless, inexpressible notes. It is the relationship of the mind (maner sambandha-i) to the series of tones within the tones of the scale that is its root. If that relationship is not there, it is not possible for changes in mental mood and so on (cittabikārādi) to manifest.54

He then explains this further by discussing specific melodic phrases or sequences, the interplay of expectation and excitement between notes, and how this might be explored in composition. This is emblematic of his larger endeavor to dissect, document, and demonstrate the inner workings of sound, while appealing to a physical universe of biological responses and resonating matter.

Conclusions

Bandyopadhyay saw the theoretical underpinnings of the emotional perception of music as fundamental: He maintained that because ustāds had neglected the art of singing pursuant to affective experience (rasānusāre gān gāoýā),55 they were also careless with their pronunciation of lyrics and articulation of musical structures and were undermining their audiences’ engagement with musical meaning.

This emphasis on the mental stimulation of the listener, the emotional journey of the mind, and what Bandyopadhyay saw as the neglect in concentration and attention by lazy musicians and their sleepy audiences gestures to a larger divergence from older modes of understanding aesthetic emotion. As we have seen, before the nineteenth century, the key concept in musical reception theory was dhyāna, the remembrance or visualization of a musical entity. This visualization was tied to a specific iconography (as in rāga-mālā) and was interpreted through the vocabulary provided by classical rasa theory. This theory had originally been devised to dissect the emotions of a scene in a drama. In this system, the mind did not have a monopoly over emotions, and affective meaning was distributed across several components: the larger categorical emotions (sthāyi-bhāva) of the characters, their auxiliary feelings (vyābhicāri-bhāva), their embodied responses (anubhāva), and the stimulants provided by their surroundings (uddīpana-vibhāva).56 Emotional states (bhāva) were cultivated across these components and played out at the level of the body. Bandyopadhyay regarded this system as inadequate and the idea of specific iconographies as limiting, archaic, and superstitious. In his system, rasa was an affect or emotional mood stimulated in the mind by configurations of notes, rather than an aesthetic substance that could only be understood through Sanskrit taxonomies of stimulants and responses. In other words, musical meaning was now a property of the mind.

While other Bengali scholars were critical of their peers and were actively pursuing new ways to talk about music, Bandyopadhyay was unusual in the ferocity of his critique and the radicalism of his reimagining of Indian musicology. A social and intellectual outlier, his ideas did not have a dramatic impact on discourses in Calcutta and beyond: Indeed, arguably his entire generation was overshadowed by the giants of the early twentieth century, especially Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860–1936), and later forums for discussion, especially the All India Music Conferences.57 While the dhyāna system in rāga-mālā never had a revival,58 other aspects of classical aesthetics, especially rasa, continue to provide a vocabulary for contemplating music and articulating musical experience—though this too has been deeply critiqued, including by the philosopher Daya Krishna, who called rasa “The Bane of Indian Aesthetics” and stressed that music required a less logocentric discourse, that is, one that was not adapted from literary theory.59

Bandyopadhyay certainly would have agreed, and over a hundred years earlier had written his music treatise as a manifesto for an evolution in musical discourse: He had argued that Indian musicians and scholars had neglected the work of the mind, that they were imprecise and blindly following tradition rather than engaging with modern, scientific paradigms. He was unabashedly in favor of adopting European ideas and practices, and he clearly saw himself as part of a global musical intelligentsia, yet also firmly at odds with his immediate neighbors in India. However, as Sagnik Atarthi and Charles Capwell have pointed out, while Bandyopadhyay had allies in Bengal, he ultimately struggled to compete with rival—and more influential—thinkers like S. M. Tagore and his followers.60 Indeed, Bandyopadhyay’s manifesto largely fell on deaf ears, as his demand for a modern, Occidental attentiveness in music ultimately did not gain significant traction, which itself raises yet further questions about how far concentration was colonized.

If we consider the larger picture and longer history behind Bandyopadhyay’s work, three colonial-era developments emerge as especially influential. First, the imposition of British society’s value system instigated a reckoning over the social nature of musical listening, one that foregrounded the idea of music as leisure and entertainment rather than an ethical, social, and political practice, as had been previously theorized through the codes of the Mughal salon assemblage (meḥfil).61 As the conceptualization of what music was evolved, a space for amateur musicians from the patron classes grew: Musical practice was no longer imagined as the exclusive property of hereditary artists cum service providers. The language of articulating these conceptual and social changes was also evolving, with the political decline of Persian, the disenchantment with courtly forms of the vernaculars, and a steady preference for prosaic, accessible, and pragmatic forms of Bengali, Hindi, and so on. Taken together, these three developments—in society, in the performers, and in the language—cultivated a demand for new scholarly resources and literary tools for amateur musicians who wanted a systematic, theoretically informed approach to musical sound that was aligned with the Western understanding of music, one that was independent of the oral systems of hereditary masters and presented in a modern and critical vernacular register. From the perspective of attention, older modes of entrained listening and contemplation, from dhyāna visualization to rasa theory, were questioned if not judged as wholly redundant. Instead, from the 1860s in particular, notation, analytical writing, and studies that prioritized the specifics of musical form over poetic aesthetics and embodied modes of focus became increasingly desirable.

At the same time, the case study of Bandyopadhyay’s work indicates how these factors did not result in a total sea change in musical attention in colonial India. Transformations in musical research certainly raised new questions and possibilities (often learned from European models), but these were not resolved with a standard, shared model of how to attend to music. There was a disconnect between these impressive tomes and lived listening practices, which often continued to uphold the aesthetic values of earlier times.62 Western ideas were invoked by some thinkers, but again, when we look at Bandyopadhyay’s actual sources, these were circulating in a piecemeal, fragmented manner. These ideas did not always find an eager audience either: Against the background of a nascent Indian nationalism and the related trend of Sanskritic neo-traditionalism in musical scholarship, appealing to European ideals did not become a standard practice, and the intrusion of Western musical concepts continued to be debated. Nonetheless, even if Bandyopadhyay’s manifesto for critical attention did not transform the entire landscape of Indian art music, his work is a testament to how the field of musical scholarship had been substantially transformed, as the conventions and conceptual vocabularies for musical experience had been blown wide open and could now encompass new possibilities, propelled by expanding, modern, and colonial vocabularies for attention and concentration.

Notes

1. 1.  Key reference points in this debate include Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002); C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
2. 2.  Richard David Williams, The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2023).
3. 3.  Richard David Williams, “Music, Lyrics, and the Bengali Book: Hindustani Musicology in Calcutta, 1818–1905,” Music and Letters 97, no. 3 (2016): 465–495.
4. 4.  For the significant developments in Bengali literary culture in this period, see Sudiptu Kaviraj, “The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 503–566.
5. 5.  While Anglophone scholarship conventionally employs “musicology” as a translation of the nineteenth-century concept Musikwissenschaft, in this article the term refers to the systematic and canonical epistemology of music that developed in the South Asian context.
6. 6.  Emmie te Nijenhuis and Françoise “Nalini” Delvoye, “Sanskrit and Indo-Persian Literature on Music,” in Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries, ed. Joep Bor, Françoise “Nalini” Delvoye, Jane Harvey, and Emmie te Nijenhuis (New Delhi: Manohar, 2010), 35–64; Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, Music Systems in India: A Comparative Study of Some of the Leading Music Systems of the 15th, 16th, 17th & 18th Centuries (Delhi: S. Lal, 1984); Katherine Butler Schofield, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
7. 7.  Ahmad Sharif, Madhyayuger Rāg-Tālnāmā (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1967); Richard David Williams “Singing in Tune with God: Bengali Vaiṣṇava Musical Scholarship in the Eighteenth Century,” South Asian History and Culture 13, no. 2 (2022): 180–196.
8. 8.  Jinah Kim, Garland of Visions: Color, Tantra, and a Material History of Indian Painting (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021); Richard David Williams, “Playing the Spinal Chord: Tantric Musicology and Bengali Songs in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Hindu Studies 12 (2019): 319–338.
9. 9.  Sudhākalaśa, Saṅgītopaniṣatsāroddhāraḥ: A Fourteenth-Century Text on Music from Western India, trans. Allyn Miner (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Motilal Banarsidass, 1998).
10. 10.  Richard David Williams, “Reflecting in the Vernacular: Translation and Transmission in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century North India,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 39, no. 1 (2019): 96–110.
11. 11.  This term also resonated with a body of theory developed by Hindi-speaking religious communities, who outlined the weakness of the embodied mind, which is assaulted and misled by the senses into thinking that the world of perception is real. These communities stressed that authentic listening and attending to the words of the guru offered a way out of this metaphysical trap. See Monika Horstmann and Dalpat Singh Rajpurohit, In the Shrine of the Heart: Sants of Rajasthan from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2023).
12. 12.  Thibaut d’Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 287; Emmie te Nijenhuis, “The Sanskrit ‘Dhyānas’ of Johnson Album 35 and the Rāga Descriptions of Subhaṅkara’s ‘Saṃgītadāmodara,’” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1 (1971): 52–58.
13. 13.  Sharif, Madhyayuger, 49–50.
14. 14.  A daṇḍa is a unit of time, approximately 24 minutes.
15. 15.  Williams, “Music, Lyrics,” 468–470.
16. 16.  Williams, Scattered Court, 156–91; Justin Scarimbolo, “Brahmans Beyond Nationalism, Muslims Beyond Dominance: A Hidden History of North Indian Classical Music’s Hinduization” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014).
17. 17.  Charles Capwell, “Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta as a Component in the History of a Secondary Urban Center,” Asian Music 18, no. 1 (1986): 139–163.
18. 18.  John Napier, “The Svarmaṇḍal and Its ‘Ancestors’: From Organological to Aesthetic Continuity,” The Galpin Society Journal 58 (2005): 124–131, 225.
19. 19.  Sourindro Mohan Tagore, Six Principal Rágas, with a Brief View of Hindu Music (Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press, 1877), i.
20. 20.  Gerhard Böwering, “ENSĀN-E KĀMEL,” Encyclopædia Iranica, Vol. VIII, Fasc. 5 (1998), 457–461.
21. 21.  Indeed, this resonates with the origins of the English word “attention,” in the Latin attendere, “to stretch to.”
22. 22.  Manuel da Assumpção, Manoel da Assumpçam‘s Bengali Grammar. Facsimile Reprint of the Original Portuguese, with Bengali Translation and Selections from his Bengali-Portuguese Vocabulary, trans. Suniti Kumar Chatterji and Priyaranjan Sen (Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1931), 88. English definitions from Sukumar Sen, An Etymological Dictionary of Bengali, c. 1000–1800 A.D., Vol. II (1971): 737.
23. 23.  Assumpção, Manoel, 42
24. 24.  Other relevant Bengali terms include: ābagāha- (to plunge into, to pay attention); gaur (consideration, from Arabic ghaur, with sense of lowering into something, to go deep); cita kari (paying attention). Sen, Etymological, Vol. I: 48, 243, 277.
25. 25.  Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyay, Bidyākalpadruma: Arthāt Bibidha Bidyā Biṣaýak Racnā. Cittotkarṣa Bidhān (Calcutta: R. C. Lepage and Co. and P. S. D’Rozario and Co., 1849), 139.
26. 26.  Francesca Brittan and Carmel Raz, eds., “Colloquy: Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 2 (2019): 541–580.
27. 27.  Muhammad Taqi Sayyid, Tāsir al-anẕār (Kanpur: Naval Kishor, 1877).
28. 28.  Baldev Prasad Misra, Mṛtak-milap: yā Pretnagar. Spirit Land. (Lucknow: Jain Press, 1897), 192.
29. 29.  Sagnik Atarthi, “Whither Musicology? Amateur Musicologists and Music Writing in Bengal,” Ethnomusicology Forum 26, no. 2 (2017): 247–268.
30. 30.  Atarthi, Whither; Charles Capwell, “Marginality and Musicology in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta: The Case of Sourindro Mohun Tagore,” in Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, ed. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 228–243.
31. 31.  Krishnadhan Bandyopadhyay, Saṅgīt Śikṣā (Calcutta: P. C. Doss, Day and Co., 1868).
32. 32.  Richard David Williams, “Epistemological Jugalbandī: Sound, Science, and the Supernatural in Colonial North India,” in The Acoustics of Empire: Sound, Power, and Media in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Peter McMurray and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 134–155.
33. 33.  Krishnadhan Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra (Koch Bihar: Rajakiya Press, 1885), 97–98.
34. 34.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 105.
35. 35.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 107.
36. 36.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 109.
37. 37.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 109.
38. 38.  Essay first published in Hindi in 1875. See Bharatendu Harischandra and Kesarinarayan Shukla (eds.), Bhāratendu ke Nibandha (Varanasi: Nandakisora, 1967), 211–220.
39. 39.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 97.
40. 40.  Lakshmi Subramanian, “The Master, Muse and the Nation: The New Cultural Project and the Reification of Colonial Modernity in India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (2000): 1–32.
41. 41.  Schofield, Music; Max Katz, Lineage of Loss: Counternarratives of North Indian Music (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017).
42. 42.  An exception to the rule is Asadullah “Kaukab” Khan’s (ca. 1850–1919) introduction to music in Bengali, formatted as a question and answer session with one Bengali disciple. See A. K. Kaukab, Saṅgīt Paricaý (Calcutta: P. C. Mookerjee, 1915).
43. 43.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 99. On the rhetoric of decadence in this period, see Williams, Scattered Court, 64–95.
44. 44.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 86–87. On the evolving discourse around this genre, see Lalita du Perron, Hindi Poetry in a Musical Genre: Ṭhumrī Lyrics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).
45. 45.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 101.
46. 46.  In particular, Bandyopadhyay was influenced by the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873), most famous for his epic poem, The Slaying of Meghnad (Meghnādbadh Kābya, 1861), an adaptation of the Rāmayaṇa modeled on Paradise Lost. The two had first crossed paths in 1859 when Bandyopadhyay had acted in one of Dutt’s plays, and Bandyopadhyay had dedicated his music self-instructor, the Saṅgīt Sikṣā, to Dutt nine years later. See Atarthi, “Whither,” 256.
47. 47.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 101.
48. 48.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 104.
49. 49.  Richard Holt Hutton, “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” The Spectator, May 6, 1882, 590–591. Reproduced in Richard Holt Hutton, Criticism on Contemporary Thought and Thinkers, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), 49.
50. 50.  Margaret Watts Hughes, “A Glimpse into the Art of Singing,” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 13, no. 75 (1883): 862–871, here 868.
51. 51.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 94; John Curwen, Singing for Schools and Congregations: A Grammar of Vocal Music (London: T. Ward and Co., 1852), i.
52. 52.  On rasa theory, see Sheldon Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
53. 53.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 95–96.
54. 54.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 93–94.
55. 55.  Bandyopadhyay, Gītasūtrasāra, 103.
56. 56.  Pollock, Rasa.
57. 57.  Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008).
58. 58.  Aspects of the rāga-mālā have certainly continued in popular discourse among musicians and audiences. See Laura Leante, “The Lotus and the King: Imagery, Gesture and Meaning in a Hindustani Rāg,” Ethnomusicology Forum 18, no. 2 (2009): 185–206.
59. 59.  Daya Krishna, “Rasa—the Bane of Indian Aesthetics,” The Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 21, no. 3 (2004): 119–135.
60. 60.  Atarthi, “Whither”; Capwell, “Marginality.”
61. 61.  Katherine Butler Brown, “If Music Be the Food of Love: Masculinity and Eroticism in the Mughal Mehfil,” in Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, ed. Francesca Orsini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61–83.
62. 62.  Williams, Scattered Court.