THUMRI: A STUDY OF TRACES THE HISTORY OF HINDUSTANI MUSIC

Abstract [English]

Thumri, a genre of Indian classical music, occupies a unique space in the country’s rich musical heritage. Known for its emotive expressions, lyrical beauty, and intricate improvisations, Thumri is often described as the “song of the heart”. It stands out as one of the most popular forms of vocal music today and is almost invariably a concluding item of a classical performance. Thumri, which is an improvised vocal form of the semi-classical genre, is a short amatory text with devotional overtones, and until recently, typically performed by courtesans as accompaniment to interpretive kathak dance through spectacular action, rhythmic movements, and gestures. If historians of Indian classical music have been obliged to rely primarily upon a finite and often enigmatic set of treatises and iconographic sources, historical studies of semi-classical genres like thumri confront even more formidable challenges. Such styles and their predecessors were largely ignored by Sanskrit theoreticians, who tended to be more interested in hoary modal and metrical systems than in contemporary vernacular or regional-language genres sung by courtesans. It is thus inevitable attempts to reconstruct the development of such genres involve considerable amounts of conjecture, and in some senses raise more questions than they answer. Nevertheless, thumri, and earlier counterparts, which we may retrospectively call “light-classical”, have played too important a role in South Asian music to be ignored by historians. In this article, I tried to explore this apparent contradiction, and further suggest how the divergent trajectories of thumri in the later twentieth century illustrate the distinctive form that modernity has assumed in Indian music culture. The findings of the study will help to understand what we can practice to ensure the sustainability of the thumri genre of Indian music and History.