Hindi Poetry in a Musical Genre: Thumri Lyrics (review)

The classical music traditions of India, as we know them today, are the result of a process of selection from and redefinition of a variety of musical traditions from the subcontinent, often practiced by and identified with different communities. Prior to the 20th century, much musical tradition and knowledge was located in communities of hereditary women artists—the tawaifs [courtesans] associated with the courts of Lucknow and other North Indian courts, or the devadasis, associated with Hindu temples in South India. Despite the rather different milieus they occupied, tawaifs and devadasis had in common the fact that they were highly educated musicians and dancers who did not marry, but had relationships with men who acted as their patrons.

As is now well-known, the lives these women lived came under attack in the late 19th century, under pressure from social reform movements that identified them as "prostitutes" and promoted a morality based on the ideal of the respectable "family" woman. Elite nationalism, meanwhile, encouraged the revival and purification of music and dance by such respectable women in the early 20th century. Those musical genres that had been associated with male musicians, such as dhrupad and khyal in North India, have become the main repertoire of what is now called Hindustani classical music, while genres associated more strongly with courtesan culture—ghazals and thumri—occupy the lesser status of the "semi-classical."

Both ghazal and thumri concern the topic of romantic love and the longing that accompanies separation from one's beloved. While ghazal is in Urdu and is written from a male perspective, thumri, in Hindi, is written from a female perspective, although thumris have been mostly composed by men and are also sung by men. Unlike the unambiguously "classical" genres in which words are considered less important than "the music itself," ghazal and thumri both require a knowledge of the meaning and sensitivity to the poetic structure of the composition to be sung effectively. As Lalita du Perron points out in this informative book, ghazal and thumri have had different trajectories in the 20th century: "Whereas ghazal could distance itself from the courtesan tradition by virtue of its male perspective and its independent role as poetry outside of a musical context, thumri had 'performance' as well as 'femaleness' woven into its basic structure, and could not escape the stigma that came to be attached to women performers" (27).

Du Perron's book focuses on the lyrics of thumri, in an attempt to redress the neglect of the poetic aspects of these compositions. A large part of the book consists of what she calls the "main corpus" of thumri compositions—a group of 138 texts and their variants that she has collected from various performances and anthologies. For each text, the original Hindi, a transliteration, and translation are given, in addition to notes on the translation and identification of the recording in which it can be heard performed. The translations of these thumri texts, as well as the chapters that focus on their poetic devices and tropes and the construction of the female voice in them, are the main contribution of the book and should be of interest to scholars of Indian classical music and Indian literary history generally. Although the book claims to focus on the literary analysis of thumri texts apart from performance, du Perron, a student of the renowned vocalist Girija Devi, has extensive knowledge of the musical and performance context of thumri, and she does include an analysis of the way in which the poetic aspects of thumri are enhanced by musical performance, especially repetition, emphasis, and variation of particular words and phrases. The recordings to which du Perron refers are carefully identified, but it is unfortunate that at least a few recordings, which she analyzes in detail, could not be included with the book.

Interspersed with these parts of the book that take a...