The study of South Asian music falls under the purview of ethnomusicology, whereas that of South Asian literature falls under South Asian studies. As a consequence of this academic separation, scholars rarely take notice of connections between South Asian song and poetry. Modernizing Composition overcomes this disciplinary fragmentation by examining the history of Sinhala-language song and poetry in twentieth-century Sri Lanka. Garrett Field describes how songwriters and poets modernized song and poetry in response to colonial and postcolonial formations. The story of this modernization is significant in that it shifts focus from India's relationship to the West to little-studied connections between Sri Lanka and North India.
AbstractIn 1890, the Maldivian judge and poet Sheikh Muhammad Jamaluddin connected poetry with linguistic description in two ways. First, when he described features of the Dhivehi language with the aid of Arabic linguistic theory, he used Dhivehi poetry as linguistic evidence for correct usage. Second, he authored Dhivehi-language poetry about Arabic linguistic theory. Cosmopolis scholarship relates a narrative of how the wide circulation of Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian fostered a vast network of writers who authored texts in major vernacular languages like Bengali, Burmese, Javanese, Kannada, Khmer, Malay, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, and Urdu. This scholarship suggests that authors living within a particular cosmopolis wrote in divergent vernacular languages yet were, in some sense, connected because they translated and responded creatively to the same widely circulated source texts written in Sanskrit, Arabic, and/or Persian. Yet in cosmopolis scholarship's effort to reveal understudied connections, various degrees of disconnection among writers of vernacular languages within a cosmopolis tend to be missed. One problem of overlooking disconnection among writers of vernacular languages is that readers could mistakenly conflate superculture-subculture interaction with intercultural interaction. In this article, I argue that Dhivehi-language poetry and linguistic description was inside the Arabic cosmopolis but simultaneously outside, because in circa 1890 non-Maldivians in the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia could not even read the Thaana script of the Dhivehi language.
The study of South Asian music falls under the purview of ethnomusicology, whereas that of South Asian literature falls under South Asian studies. As a consequence of this academic separation, scholars rarely take notice of connections between South Asian song and poetry. Modernizing Composition overcomes this disciplinary fragmentation by examining the history of Sinhala-language song and poetry in twentieth-century Sri Lanka. Garrett Field describes how songwriters and poets modernized song and poetry in response to colonial and postcolonial formations. The story of this modernization is significant in that it shifts focus from India's relationship to the West to little-studied connections between Sri Lanka and North India. "Takes an innovative approach toward studying modern Sinhala songs as literary works in their own right. Garrett Field's delightful translations and insightful analysis serve to make these little-studied works into a fascinating lens for viewing significant political and cultural changes in modern South Asia." STEPHEN C. BERKWITZ, author of Buddhist Poetry and Colonialism: Alagiyavanna and the Portuguese in Sri Lanka "Garrett Field's attention to poetics makes this book critical for understanding the larger literary culture of the region. His account of Sri Lankan modern song composers operating in relation to the dominant forces of Indian classical and film musics makes it a must-read for ethnomusicologists." -RICHARD K. WOLF, author of The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia "Masterfully demonstrates how the intertwined histories of Sinhala musical and poetic efforts developed in relation to the political dynamics of Sri Lanka in the early and mid-twentieth century." -AMANDA WEIDMAN, author of Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India GARRETT FIELD is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and the School of Music at Ohio University.
