Hindustani Traces in Malay Ghazal: ‘A song, So Old and Yet Still Famous’, by Chinthaka Prageeth Meddegoda and Gisa Jähnichen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".