Hindustani Traces in Malay Ghazal: ‘A song, So Old and Yet Still Famous’, by Chinthaka Prageeth Meddegoda and Gisa Jähnichen

This co-written volume aims to study very specific elements of one discrete musical tradition-elements within the Malay ghazal tradition of sung poetry that are directly related to the tradition as practiced in the Hindustani musical world.To address this seemingly modest subject, the book covers an extremely broad range of historical and musicological topics, moving from Persia through various parts of India to the broader Malay world (including Singapore, Sumatra, and the Riau islands); it discusses the histories of the diverse Indian communities in colonial Malaya, and the popularization of ghazal in Lucknow and Johor; and describes the origins of both the Parsi theatre and local Sumatran genre of gamat (the latter genre previously unknown to this reader, a scholar of Sumatran music).To illustrate the challenges and promise of coming to terms with the Malay ghazal, consider that the ghazal seems to have arrived the Malay world at least four different ways: through precolonial Islamic literary circles, the stage productions of the Parsi theatre, the recordings of early Bollywood, and the lived musical experiences of Indians brought to Southeast Asia by the British colonial state (and those who listened to and with them).Consider as well that the ghazal Johor features one musical instrument that comes from the Middle East and uses Arabic musical modes (the gambus), one musical instrument that was brought by Europeans but has been adapted as a substitute for a Hindustani instrument that uses Indian musical modes (the biola, filling in for the sarangi), and one instrument of relatively recent creation that is associated with colonial, Malay, and Indian musical traditions (the harmonium).And we have not even begun to talk about the sung poetry, or its singers and listeners.The book draws widely on a variety of sources, moving between a Malaysian MA thesis or newspaper article, and older and recent scholarship from South and Southeast Asia, by Malay, Indian, and Western scholars.The authors suggest that the ghazal tradition has not produced a great range of scholarship, requiring resourcefulness in finding relevant literature.This rings true considering that only recently have ethnomusicologists of Southeast Asia begun to recognize the importance of Islamic musical traditions, and begun to employ the historical methodologies often necessary to understand them.This is perhaps more true of Indonesianists than scholars of Malaysian music, but in any case, the disparity between the plentiful studies of Indonesian music, and

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