Meccan messages, Indic idioms

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Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge

Three women stand next to the musicians, dressed in peach- and crimson-coloured robes. A fourth kneels to play the ektar, a one-stringed lute. A young boy sits to the left of the lute player and taps his tambourine to the music.

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A Mehfil of Indo-Islamic Music with Dr Ankur Barua & students from the Faculty of Divinity

During the dark age of lockdown, Dr Ankur Barua started re-teaching himself, by listening to YouTube videos, some devotional songs from the liminal locations of South Asia. In these songs, which he first learnt in his early childhood, Hindu theological language is symbolically re-envisioned by Indo-Muslim poets through their Quranic prisms.

In this mehfil, he will sing five songs – in Assamese, Bengali, and Hindi – to illuminate a theo-sonic spectrum of Indo-Islamic music. Two of them embody Hindu vocabularies in a directly visible way; one is a hymn of praise to the Prophet Muhammad; one is an Indo-Persian Sufi adoration of the beloved; and one is a declaration of the unbound spirit that sleeps in the human heart.

Each song will be followed by a reflection offered by a student at the Faculty of Divinity. 

Anyone who can play the violin or a percussion instrument, such as the tabla, is invited to accompany the singing.  

 

Feature image: Detail from Musical gathering, opaque watercolour from Ottoman-era Turkey. From the Aga Khan Museum's collections. Used under Creative Commons license for non-commercial use. (CC BY NC 2.5.)