Sangitanarayana (2 Vols.): (A Seventeenth centuary text on music and dance from Orissa)

Sangitanarayana is a Sanskrit text on music and dance written in the 17th century by purusottama Misra, a minister at the court of Kind Gajapati Narayanadeva of Parlakimidi in Orissa and his instructor in musicology, with the assistance of the kind. While the precise date of the Sangitanarayana is not known, its relationship to Purusottama Misra and Gajapati Narayanadeva prompts us to place it in the first half of the 17th century.

One of the most valuable and extensive texts on music and dance from eastern Indian, Sangitanarayana consists of four chapters, the first on vocal music ( gitaniranya), the second on instrumental music (vadyanirnaya), and a fourth chapter that provides examples of musical compositions (suddhaprabandhodharana).

Altogether 15 mss., of the text are known to exist. Some full and some fragmentary. An edition of the text comprising all the four chapters was published first by Orissa Sangeet Natak Akademi in 1966 under the joint editorship of Pandit vanambaracarya, Kavichandra Kalicharan Patnaik and Shri Kdearnath Mahapatra. A more recent edition of the three musicological chapters was accomplished in 1987 by Janothan Katz of Oxford but remains yet unpublished. Present edition is the first critical edition, which also provides an English translation of the text.

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About the Author(s)

Mandakranta Bose is Professor Emerita at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She is also Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and the Royal Society of Canada. Dr. Bose is a Sanskritist with active research interests in the classical performing arts and religions of India, the Ramayana, and gender studies.

Her publications include a critical edition of Nartananirnaya, a 16th century musicological text (Calcutta, 1991), Movement and Mimesis (Dortdrecht, 1991), Faces of the Feminine in Classical, Medieval and Modern India (New York, 2000), Speaking of Dance: The Indian Critique (Delhi, 2003), and The Ramayana Revisited (New York, 2004). Her forthcoming book, Rules, Roles and Exceptions: Women in the Hindu Tradition, is scheduled for published by Routledge UK in 2009.