SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, Indian scholars embedded elements of European science in new works on the nature of sound and music. Exploring a range of genres and languages, this chapter examines moments of enquiry into the physics and experience of sound, and considers points of continuity, transition, and departures in new directions. Far from a single arena of global debate, nineteenth-century books, manuscripts, and newspapers in Indian languages indicate an enormous diversity of ideas, arguments, and sonic practices, many of which intersected with ideas from Europe, but selectively and often unexpectedly. This chapter also examines sonic practices relating to medicine, healing, and divination, and interrogates how French history and British philosophy became entangled with Hindustani music and tantric hymnology. I argue these entanglements gestured to an epistemological jugalbandī—borrowing a term in Hindustani music for a creative dialogue—that is, a contrapuntal, selective, and adaptive conversation between knowledge systems.