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In India, where oral traditions predate hand scripted manuscripts or printed compilations, poets with vastly varied literary impulses have written poems prescribing musical rendering in specific raags, taals and genres. There also exists a flourishing tradition of musicians and composers selectively extracting a few lines from a larger existing poem or narrative verse for use in forms that demand relatively less wordiness. Briefly then, there is ample evidence to prove that the giving, sharing, borrowing and lending between literature and music is in itself an established tradition in India where the vaggeyakar or song composer is often both poet and music composer. In the contemporary context, where music is as much ‘seen’ as heard, the study and analysis of the song-text in India as evinced in this volume must be an interdisciplinary and collaborative activity between musicians, composers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists and scholars and students of music, literature, linguistics, cultural studies, history, sociology, psychology, media, theatre, film and phonology. This book therefore brings on board new ways of thinking and responding to the song-text in India.

Contents: Foreword. Understanding Shabd aur Sangeet/Javed Akhtar. Introduction/Shubha Mudgal, Aneesh Pradhan and Kunal Ray. 1. Seeing the Singer: Early Portraits of Surdas from Udaipur/Jack Hawley. 2. Travels of Song-Texts: Hindi Film Songs in ‘Translation’/Chandrani Chatterjee and Vikki Gayakavad. 3. Song as Subversion and Individualism Encountering Poetry as Performance in Bhardwaj’s ‘Haider’/Asijit Dutta. 4. Songs as History: The Lamkang Naga Experience/Shelmi Sankhil. 5. The Song of Rural Life: Barahmasa in G. F. Riaz’s Poetry/Rohit Sharma. 6. Towards a New Shabd aur Sangeet: A study on the Politics of Vernacularizing the Liturgical Music of the Syrian Christians of Malabar/George Pioustin. 7. Dasya Bhava and Vatsalya Bhava in the Bhakti of Borgeet: A Vaishnavite Music Form of Assam/Dipanjali Deka. 8. The Idea of Erotic in the female tradition of Bangla Viraha genre/Bashabi Barua. 9. Poetics and Politics of Spirituality in Akka’s Vachanas/Nishtha Saxena. 10. Finding Shakti through Bhakti Andal--the Empowered One/Chitra Sreedharan. 11. Song-Text and the Protest Song: Understanding the Musical Tradition of the IPTA/Sumangala Damodaran. 12. Contemporary Dalit Identity in Marathi Bhim Geet/Tushar Meshram. 13. Phenomenology of A Radical Aesthetics: Embodied Memories and Enmeshed ‘Shabd-O-Sangeet’ in Kobi-gaan from the Matua/Namasudra Performance Repertoire/Benil Biswas. 14. Pichakaaree: Songs of Protest and Celebration in an Indo-Caribbean Community/Sharda Patasar.