Output details

Dāphā: sacred singing in a South Asian city

The output articulates a complex thesis that combines musicological, ethnographic, historical and linguistic analysis to interpret the meanings of music in context. The first in-depth study of dāphā in any language, the work is almost entirely dependent on primary sources. These are difficult of access, because they are (a) human subjects and their unwritten knowledge and performances, operating in a little-documented vernacular, and only in Nepal; (b) song-text manuscripts, written in multiple languages, posing many problems of textual restoration and translation; (c) archival manuscripts in archaic languages and scripts. Extensive materials were collected over a period of 9 years.