Abstract
Sir William Jones’s “On the Musical Modes of the Hindus” resounds with the excitement of discovering a “pure and original musick […] not an imitation of nature but the voice of nature herself.” Blending Cicero’s thoughts upon harmony and the soul and the synaesthetic musical and poetic traditions of the Vedic goddess Sarasvatī, he explores the effects of harmonious sounds upon the human body, “the noblest and sweetest of musical instruments, endued with a natural disposition to resonance and sympathy.” The sympathetic relation between musician and instrument is mirrored in the relation between the music and the “sonorous body” of both performer and listener. This chapter attempts to investigate some of the ways in which Jones’s self resonates in reflexive affective experiences, including his profound commitments to political harmony and reconciliation, the poetry of politics, and the politics of poetry.
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Notes
- 1.
“Harmonious Jones! who in his splendid strains / Sings Camdeo’s sports, on Agra’s flowery plains: / In Hindu fictions while we fondly trace / Love and the Muses, deck’d with Attick grace” (Courtenay 1786, p. 23). Major John Cartwright described his friend as “God-like Jones, whom Johnson esteemed ‘the most enlightened of the sons of men’” (Cartwright 1807, p. 564).
- 2.
Rockingham had written to Edmund Burke on 14 February 1771: “I fear indeed the future struggles of the people in defence of their Constitutional Rights will grow weaker and weaker. It is much too probable that the power and influence of the Crown will increase rapidly.”
- 3.
A regicidal version was sung at a joint meeting of the SCI and the London Corresponding Society on 2 May 1794 (see Barrell 2000, p. 214). Wordsworth’s own translation of the “Harmodiou melos” was published in the Morning Post of 13 February 1798 over the signature “Publicola.”
- 4.
For a detailed consideration of the evangelical Shore as an Orientalist, see Franklin (2016).
- 5.
In the opinion of the Supreme Court pandit, Govardhana Kaula, of the very many commentaries on the Hindu scriptures “that of VASISHTHA seems to be reputed the most excellent” (Jones 1807, vol. 4, p. 106).
- 6.
The talented sculptor, Thomas Banks (1735–1805), produced the mould and painted plaster cast of ‘The Hindu Deity Camadeva with his mistress’, on a crocodile’, c.1794, see: Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, http://collections.soane.org/object-a12. Banks also executed some superb chimneypieces and friezes portraying Hindu subjects for Warren Hastings’s Daylesford House; see Annals of Thomas Banks, ed. C. F. Bell (Cambridge: CUP, 1938), pp. 88–90.
- 7.
On this aspect, see also Elizabeth Bruce Elton Smith’s philistinic rhetorical question: “How could Sir W. Jones, having the gift of his two ears withal, permit himself to compose an elaborate essay on the music of the Hindoos?” (Smith 1832, p. 144). See also Bennett Zon, ‘From “acute and plausible” to “curiously misinterpreted”: Sir William Jones’s “On the Musical Modes of the Hindu” (1792) and its reception in later musical treatises’, in Romantic Representations of British India, ed. Michael J. Franklin (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 197–219.
- 8.
Friedrich Hugo von Dalberg translated Jones’s essay on Indian music as Über die Musik der Indien in 1802, the same year in which he translated Jones’s translation of Gītagovinda, and presented a copy to Haydn.
- 9.
Cf. the last lines of Milton’s “At a Solemn Music”: “O may we soon again renew that Song, / And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere long / To His celestial consort us unite, / To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light!”
- 10.
Jones continues to imagine a harmonizing and cultural synthesizing Ost-Westliche scheme of his own: “A noble work might be composed by any musician and scholar, who enjoyed leisure and disregarded expense, if he would exhibit a perfect system of Indian musick from Sanscrit authorities, with the old melodies of SÓMA, applied to the songs of JAYADÉVA, embellished with descriptions of all the modes accurately translated, and with Mr. Hay’s Rágamálà delineated and engraved by the scholars of CIPRIANI and BARTOLOZZI” (Jones 1792, p. 74).
- 11.
See National Library of Wales, MS Ormathwaite, FE 5/1 Memoir of Margaret Walsh [née Fowke].
- 12.
See British Library, APAC, Fowke MS Eur E5, 65; Jones to Margaret Fowke, Maldah, 17 January 1785. For a consideration of two translations of Kṛṣṇa-bhakti songs in Jones’s hand located among the Hastings papers (BL, Add. MSS. 29,235, ff. 48–49) which appear to be two of the three he sent to Margaret, see Franklin (2011, pp. 32–33).
- 13.
Cf. “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” Genesis, 1:2.
- 14.
Jerome McGann asserted this sentence “might be used as an epigraph for a collection of romantic writing. It defines […] salient features of many different romantic styles,” placing “Hymn to Náráyena” as the opening poem in his The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (McGann 1993, p. xxii).
- 15.
Compare the many versions of the legend on the performance of this rāga by the brilliant Vaishnava (devotee of Viṣṇu) musician Mian Tansen (c. 1500–1586), who could make oil lamps light up. When Tansen was commanded by the emperor Akbar at whose syncretic court he was one of the “nine jewels,” the singer was obliged to obey. As all the lamps flared up and flames began to lick at his robes, he asked his daughter Saraswati to sing the monsoon rāga Megh Malhar which created an extinguishing cloudburst. For a less incendiary illustration to Dipaka Raga, see the rāgamālā painting in opaque watercolour on paper, which portrays a prince with a lighted candle in his turban, listening to a female musician, while a female attendant fans him, Deccan, ca. 1690, Victoria and Albert Museum, IS.10–1952.
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Franklin, M.J. (2019). “Endued with a Natural Disposition to Resonance and Sympathy”: “Harmonious” Jones’s Intimate Reading and Cultural Translation of India. In: Gallien, C., Niayesh, L. (eds) Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England. New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22925-2_4
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