Singing in tune with God: Bengali vaiṣṇava musical scholarship in the eighteenth century

ABSTRACT Over the seventeenth century, scholars working for courtly patrons extensively produced new treatises on the theory and practice of music in Sanskrit, Persian, and vernacular languages. This arena of musicology grew through to the eighteenth century, when Bengali vaiṣṇava poets and lyricists began curating extensive song anthologies and expounding the aesthetic considerations derived from canonical works on poetics and the performing arts. This article explores the scholarly connections between non-sectarian, courtly intellectual arenas and vaiṣṇava religious communities by examining the musical works of Narahari Cakravarti (c.1698–1760), who lived in Vrindavan in the first half of the eighteenth century. His Sanskrit and Bengali works gesture to the transregional circulation of conversations and texts about musical aesthetics between northern and eastern India, and how intellectuals accommodated contemporary scholastic developments and trends in musical performance in their theology and religious practices.

Music history; sacred music; eighteenth century; religious history; Bengali literature In most histories of South Asian music, Bengali vais _ n _ ava performance culture is usually considered separately from north Indian art music, and seen instead as a regional, devotional tradition. This reflects a larger debate over the relationship between what, in today's world, is considered 'sacred' and 'secular' (including 'art' and 'courtly') music: these categories are modern formations and can prove unproductive when applied too rigidly, especially in the absence of nuanced histories of how musical forms and practices have evolved over time. Generally speaking, musical exchanges are mediated and rarely straightforward: even when one form -like dhrupad -can be performed both as a religious or a courtly (darbārī) genre, it acquires different functions and musical features depending on whether it is performed in a temple or a concert stage. 1 Over time, repertoires of lyrics and compositions have moved between spaces, taken up by communities of performers working between temples, courts, and modern platforms of classical music. 2 However, even when musicians share a broader technical vocabulary and aesthetic based on rāga, their music can take divergent forms. 3 In this vein, in his pathbreaking history of Bengali kīrtana, Hitesranjan Sanyal argued that while vais _ n _ ava singing had a historical basis in dhrupad, it has never seamlessly connected to the forms and aesthetics of art music. 4 In the early modern period, the boundary between religious music and those forms that were later considered 'classical' was often porous: musicians and scholars of music developed repertoires, systems of aesthetics, and performance practices that resonated in both temple and courtly settings. 5 These spaces were drawn into close proximity: when vais _ n _ ava deities and their priestly custodians became associated with specific rulers, sacred and royal ritual practices could converge. 6 How did this juxtaposing of rulers and deities -and the artists who performed for them -influence and encourage exchanges of ideas and practices? The landscape of early-modern north India was populated by intellectuals and service providers on the move, travelling between patrons and clients and cultivating transregional exchanges. 7 Men of letters based in northern and eastern India were connected both by the Mughal imperial infrastructure and by a network of vais _ n _ ava institutions, especially the temples and their courtly sponsors affiliated with the Gaud _ īyas. 8 Pilgrimage circuits connected Braj (Mathura and Vrindavan), Bengal (including Nadia and Bishnupur), and Odisha (particularly Puri). These religious centres were also important forums for musical scholarship and taste: devotees would experience a range of religious soundscapes as they travelled between them, and pilgrims who practiced music could acquire training from specialists in cities such as Banaras and Delhi before returning home. 9 In this article, I examine the works of one vais _ n _ ava intellectual, Narahari Cakravarti (c.1698Cakravarti (c. -1760, as a window onto circuits of musical conversations to consider the kinds of transregional conversations that unfolded between courtly musicologists and singing theologians. Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, north Indian scholars from a range of different social backgrounds engaged with musical literature and aesthetics in new ways. These authors invested themselves in theoretical and literary materials prepared by scholars of musicology, that is saṅgīta śāstra (Sanskrit) or 'ilm-i-mūsīqī (Persian). 10 Music treatises had been steadily produced in Sanskrit for centuries, but the 1600s saw the proliferation of new works in Mughal and Rajput courts, especially in classical Hindi (Brajbhasha) and Persian. These studies considered the canonical (śāstriya) theory and practice of music, but were greatly varied in outlook: some were reiterations of archaic ideas about music that would have had little relevance to contemporary performance practices, while others posed fresh interventions, as scholars grappled with the mysteries of sound's influence on the self. Most musicologists were attached to aristocratic patrons. In particular, Shah Jahan (r.1628-1658) stimulated musical research, commissioning a team to prepare a curated anthology of dhrupad lyrics attributed to Nayak Bakhshu of Gwalior, the Sahasras. 11 This work testifies to the monumental prestige given to the dhrupad genre, which had acquired pre-eminence in the late sixteenth century both in the Mughal court (having superseded the Tomar court of Gwalior and appropriated its reputation as a centre of musical refinement and patronage) and, simultaneously, as a devotional song genre amongst the vais _ n _ ava communities of Braj, especially in the hands of Swami Haridasa (d. c.1575Haridasa (d. c. -1607. 12 Several scholars working in Brajbhasha prepared new studies and translations of Sanskrit music treatises which circulated between Mughal and Rajput intellectual circles through to the end of the eighteenth century. 13 Writings in Persian also proliferated from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, especially under the reign of Aurangzeb 'Alamgir (r.1658-1707). 14 Despite their different priorities, in general, these treatise materials were prepared for aristocratic circles of listeners, who aspired to the status of connoisseur (rasika), grounded in elite modes of informed listening, courtly sensibility, and the poetic ideal of an aesthetically saturated experience. 15 In eastern India, rasikas had been closely engaging with music theory before these Mughal developments. As Thibaut d'Hubert has recently argued, 'saṅgīta more than any other śāstric discipline made possible the emergence of elaborate forms of vernacular connoisseurship in regional courts.' 16 Vernacular connoisseurship was cultivated under the Sultanates across a multilingual textual community that spread between Mithila, Nepal, Bengal, Assam, Odisha, and Arakan. This community was highly intertextual, inspired by literary traditions in multiple languages, and critically engaged with the performing arts. D'Hubert underlines the particular influence of one music treatise, Subhankara's Sanskrit Saṅgītadāmodara (fifteenth-sixteenth century): principles from this treatise infiltrated the imaginaries of vernacular lyrical poetry, and influenced a wide range of texts -including commentaries and translations of the Gītagovindademonstrating how Subhankara's approach to music informed how intellectuals read, performed, and listened to lyrical and religious literature. Scholarship aside, under the Mughals, professional musicians travelled between northern India and Bengal, cultivating the transregional circulation of musical genres, ideas, and performance practices. Court musicians were sent to Bengal on imperial missions, sometimes to recruit performing artists from regional kingdoms and bring them back to the Mughal court, while others found patronage with local rulers (including Bishnupur and Murshidabad) and remained in Bengal. 17 By the eighteenth century, Bengali intellectuals found different applications for musicological knowledge to suit the demands of their different milieus, engaging questions about sound or performance techniques in treatises, song collections, edifying literature, and rāgamālā poetry. 18 From the late sixteenth century, Bengali vais _ n _ ava communities also began to critically engage with śāstriya musicology in innovative ways: devotees were responding to larger conversations about the principles of art music and finding ways to embed them in religious practices. Narahari Cakravarti offers especially rich insights into these exchanges between musicology and theology. Writing under the pen-name (bhan _ itā) Ghanaśyāma, his most famous works are hagiographical accounts of the sect, including the Śrīnivāsa-caritra, and Bhaktiratnākara. 19 In these works, he looked back to earlier musical developments in his community, while as a songwriter and musicologist in his own right, he developed his own position on the role of music and sound within a Gaud _ īya worldview. Narahari was part of a Bengali community that had settled in Vrindavan (according to one tradition, he was responsible for the kitchens of Radha Govindji temple, where he was known as 'Rasuā Narahari'). 20 It is believed that Narahari studied music in Delhi, Mathura, and Vrindavan from both Hindu gurus and Muslim ustāds, which perhaps informed his refined dhrupad-prabandha-gāna compositions and his systematic account of music theory. As I will demonstrate, from his home in northern India he closely engaged with vais _ n _ ava musical intellectuals based in eastern India, in ways that his contemporaries working in courts did not. His work therefore gestures to how vais _ n _ ava intellectuals both engaged with the mainstream (i.e. non-sectarian) science of music in northern India and also extended their networks to eastern India in order to accommodate music within their model of a sacred universe.

Before Narahari: kīrtana at Kheturi
The hagiographies of the Gaud _ īya sampradāya are replete with accounts of powerful musical experiences, with devotees bursting into song and breaking into dance. From the outset, Chaitanya (1486-1533) himself had foregrounded the value of communal singing by developing new styles of kīrtana groups: both the 'simple, unconventional and non-ritualistic' nāmasam _ kīrtana, and the practice of performing while processing through the streets, nagarakīrtana. 21 Even if the early devotees were not technically trained in music, certain core principles had to be taken seriously, such as the appropriate times of day for certain rāgas, in order to align musical performances with the correct daily rituals of temple worship. 22 However, in sectarian histories, it was the conference at Kheturi (perhaps between 1576-1582) that would be remembered as the watershed moment for the evolution of Bengali kīrtana. 23 It was there that Narottama Dasa (d.1611?) laid out a model for a musically-advanced form of worship, the gar Narottama Dasa had lived in Vrindavan between c.1556-1570, where he was exposed to northern styles of art music and, it is believed, had personally studied with Swami Haridasa. 24 He was then sent east as part of a mission to Bengal: between 1566 and the early 1570s (perhaps), Jiva Goswami sent three disciples -Shrinivasa Archarya, Narottama Dasa, and Syamananda Pala -to spread the Vrindavan Goswamis' theology to the eastern disciples of Chaitanya. 25 Assembling the leaders of different sectarian factions at Kheturi, Narottama debuted a new style of kīrtana, alongside several musically accomplished companions: Devidasa and Vallabhadasa (on drums, mardal and khol), Gaurangadasa (on cymbals, kartāl) and Gokuladasa (vocals). 26 Sanyal has argued that Narottama's contribution was combining musical poetry (kabyasaṅgīta) and local musical tastes (lokasaṅgīta) with rāga-based art music, in particular, bringing it line with recent developments that had happened in the central Mughal territories (including Braj), especially regarding dhrupad. 27 However, much of this analysis is based on Narahari Cakravarti's own account of the music at Kheturi in the Bhaktiratnākara and the Narottama-vilāsa, written some 150 years later. Certainly, Narahari brought a śāstriya flavour to his discussion, invoking an abundance of musical terms, at times in the precise sequence one might expect to find them in a musicological treatise (ālāpa, rāga, rāgin _ ī, śruti, svara, grāma, mūrchana, tāla), yet also colouring them with bhakti overtones: sound is steeped in love (premamaýa śabda), and the sam _ kīrtana is performed in the sweet style of excited passion (saṁkīrttana ābeśe ki madhura bhaṅgimā). 28 In particular, Narahari credited Narottama's ensemble with introducing anibaddha music and ālāpacārī. In śāstriya terms, music could be conceived of either as nibaddha, 'constrained' by elements like meaningful text and tāla, or anibaddha, 'unconstrained' and open to expansion and exploration through ālāpa, the elaboration of the tones, moods, and inherent forms of a rāga. In Narahari's account, Gokuladasa performed anibaddha, before Narottama began singing a lyric, i.e. the nibaddha portion. Unconstrained music is often considered more abstract and deeper than singing lyrical poetry: the music exists unimpeded by any other consideration, music in its own terms. Sanyal suggests that Narottama's introduction of anibaddha technique resonated with the uccāṅga (exalted) art music of courts, rather than the emotional or functional music of worship. The nibaddha, lyrical portions of Narottama's repertoire also gestured to art music, specifically padagāna (lyrical song), associated with salon music (bait _ hakī). Lyricists associated with the eastern arena of music appreciation, including Vidyapati and Chandidas, were arranged together to relate the episodic līlās of Krishna (kr _ s _ n _ alīlā gāna), the basis of līlā-kīrtana. 29 Although these poets had been sung by vais _ n _ avas before, Sanyal argues that it was only now that they were encouraged to consider musical conventions (niýam) and refined performance practices in their execution.
While the hagiographies present Narottama as bringing a classicizing impulse to vais _ n _ ava music, we need to be a little cautious. Firstly, as Sanyal reminds us, bringing in musical elements associated with dhrupad culture did not turn kīrtana into a new form of art music. For one thing, kīrtana artists favoured standing while they sang and played (āsar) rather than sitting (bait _ hakī), which necessarily informed the techniques and overall aesthetic of the music. The energy of a dynamic kīrtana group lent itself to emotional and emotive performance, which is not always desirable or prioritized in art music. The instrumentation was also quite different, since the khol, kartāl, jhaṅjh, khamak, and khaṅjarī are not associated with court music styles. A second issue is one of chronology: Narahari was not at Kheturi, and it is difficult to distinguish his own contributions in framing the refined musicality of the vais _ n _ avas from Narottama's original enterprise. Kīrtana had been evolving over the intervening period: Narottama's new style, gar _ ān _ ahāt _ i, was gradually simplified and new styles emerged, especially the manoharśāhī, ren 30 There is a possibility, then, that some features Narahari described may have emerged after Narottama's own time. In the meantime, vais _ n _ ava musical literature had been proliferating, especially the lyrical poetry anthology (padāvali). Discussions about devotional song intersected with themes in art music, including technical discussions surrounding the affective basis of aesthetic experience (rasa). 31 Members of the Gaud _ īya literati had already included sections on music and sound in several Sanskrit literary works, including Kavikarnapura's Ānanda-vr It is worth remembering that the Gaud _ īya intellectual fascination with classical (i.e. śāstriya) aesthetics and music was distinctive, compared to other bhakti communities with musical religious practices. Although other sects developed song anthologies and musical aesthetics of their own, the Gaud _ īyas were perhaps unusual in their committed engagement with the non-sectarian arena of musicological thought. As Anand Venkatkrishnan reminds us, despite the associations of bhakti with musical worship, Brahmin engagement with music and sonic practices was not uncontroversial in the early modern period. At the end of the sixteenth century, the propriety of Brahmins singing, and the value of nāma-sam _ kīrtana were hotly debated by Sanskrit intellectuals in Banaras. 35 The Gaud _ īya theological commitment to the efficacy of sung worship distanced intellectuals like Narahari Cakravarti from these debates and encouraged close engagements with saṅgīta śāstra.
Over several studies, he developed three underlying principles: that God is fundamentally musical; that if the devotee understands how music works, they will be better equipped to approach God; and that studying music can be understood as a process of reworking the body and the self and fashioning a ladder to a higher metaphysical plane. Examining how Narahari curated his sources to develop these positions sheds light on how religious communities could integrate a nonsectarian, transregional library of musical ideas into their theology and practices.

God as musical experience
Narahari's celebrated hagiographies appealed to his readers and listeners' auditory imaginations: these texts discuss the lives of the saints and provide glimpses into the divine world through evocative poems and songs. To experience God was to experience the eternal play (līlā) of bliss: that is, the passionate bliss of Radha and Krishna as they delight in each other's love, and revel with their handmaids, the sakhīs. From his extensive descriptions of the divine plane, it is apparent that Narahari understood theophany as a sonic experience. For example, in the Bhaktiratnākara (5:3330-6), Narahari describes how Krishna performs in the round rāsa dance 36 : The crown jewel of aesthetes, the dusky king, is dancing How many desires in that sweet dance, sings the poet.
Narahari illuminated his accounts of the divine realm with songs, which could then be performed by devotees in the mortal realm, yoking the two realities together through sound 37 : The lyric concludes with niramañchana, the ceremonial waving of lights before a deity, so it is possible that this song was prescribed for niramañchana portion of the rites of the temple. Sung in rāga Kedar, these verses create a musical tie between human time -as portioned and arranged by ritual -and the timelessness of the līlā.
The song meditates on the sensual body of God: singing the verse allows for repetitions and selected emphasis on particular phrases, allowing 'burgeoning bends' or 'jasmine-white' to resonate more evocatively. The sensuality of Krishna is refined and nuanced by appealing to specific musical concepts: his expertise in tāla, and the different flourishes of his hand gestures, abhinaya. Most dramatically, the song deploys parmelu dance bols to reproduce an echo of Krishna's dancing feet: parmelu syllables combine different sound effects, especially those that imitate nature, such as thunder (dhilaṅga) and birds (kuku). Some of these bols are still used in kathak repertoire, with some adjustments: i.e. jhijhi kit _ a rather than dhidhi kat _ a for the sound of ankle-bells. 38 These songs gesture to the importance of performance and music in allowing the devotees to literally manifest the divine realm through their voices and dancing, pulsating bodies.

Understanding music to understand the divine
Given that the divine realm is eternally caught up in a musical moment, it made sense to Narahari to learn about music and dance in order to better engage with God. Within the fifth chapter of the Bhaktiratnākara, Narahari elaborated a substantial section on music (1490 ślokas, vv.2347-3837), 39 where he followed the conventions and topics of canonical musicology, saṅgīta śāstra. Aside from this treatise section, Narahari also composed the Sanskrit Rāgaratnākara (Ocean of Rāga), which he framed as a practical and theoretical guide for singers; 40 a song anthology, Gītacandodaya (Moonrise of Music) in Sanskrit and Bengali, that contains a substantial treatment of rhythm (covering 101 tālas 41 ); and a compendium of musicological treatises, the Saṅgītasārasaṅgraha (Compilation on the Essence of Music). 42 Throughout these works, Narahari claimed to be educating singers within the sampradāya community, by distilling useful music theory and embedding it in a vais _ n _ ava frame of reference. For example, the Rāgaratnākara begins with a specifically vais _ n _ ava explanation of the origins of musical sound (16,000 rāgas arising from Krishna's playing the flute, and the gopīs' singing), and then situated śāstriya theory within that cosmology (36 of these rāgas are known in the human sphere), before expanding on the relevant technical terms (śruti, grāma, mūrcchanā etc.) by appealing to multiple authoritative music treatises (e.g. Saṅgītadarpana of Damodara, Saṅgītaratnamālā of Mammata, Saṅgītakaumudī and so on).
His research enabled Narahari to develop a musical commentary on the divine reality. For example, he considered which specific instruments are being played in the divine realm 43 : The instruments in this set gesture to Narahari's learned eye for detail: they are not all that common, especially the different varieties of vīn _ ā. However, he had prepared his readers by providing discussions from selected music treatises: for vīn _ ās, he quoted directly from Subhankara's Saṅgītadāmodara. 45 It seems that Narahari had read about the full extent of instruments and concepts in the music treatises and assumed that they must all be resounding in the divine realm.
Narahari created a musical commentary on the sports of the divine couple: he collated citations from authoritative Sanskrit treatises 46 to write a comprehensive, detailed guide to the musical dimension of the gods' līlā, analysing in turn the fundamentals of song, instrumentation, and dance (gīta-vādya-nr _ tyatray). 47 He began with the tradition of Brahma's composing a fifth Veda of musical knowledge, and progressed through a discussion of mārga and deśī (canonical and regional varieties), nāda (absolute sound) and all the successive standard categories of musical theory (vv.2501ff.), citing multiple authorities on any given point. 48 While Narahari was comprehensive in his survey of musical theory, he also judged that not all aspects were equally significant. For example, although he listed the conventional flaws of a deficient singer (dos _ a, vv.3091ff.), he also explained that since the singers of the divine realm were flawless he was only including these conventional defects for the sake of completeness. In other instances, Narahari suggested that even the vast purview of musicology could not comprehend the music of that realm: 49 ahe śrīnivāsa! paks There is no telling the variety of their song-sequences: Their tranquility, colour and excellence -the treatises do not help! A consistent theme in Narahari's musicology was the contrast between the perfect music of the higher realm and the confused proliferation of attempts to comprehend it in treatises. Although he was extensive in his research, he pointed out the limits of his enquiries: there were simply too many perfectly-executed rāgas and tālas in the rāsaman _ d _ al (the divine circle-dance), he argued, for humans to comprehend. (Indeed, according to Narahari, even Sarasvati cannot ford the ocean of notes. 50 ) He represented this diversity spreading across territories and regions, intimating that in practice there were significant local variations, as on the question of appropriate timings for different rāgas. 51 This may suggest he was conscious of the inadequacies of theoretical musicology, and how living practices could diverge fundamentally in reality. The treatises were not always helpful in their sense of abundance: in the Bhaktiratnākara he cited the Saṅgītadāmodara to say that there were 5033 possible tālas (v.2653), while in his own study of rhythm in the Gītachandrodaya he (only!) considered 101. 52 He also stipulated the inadequacy of too rigid a taxonomy: 'One sees [tāla] in some of these places, such as in Damodara and so on. But an alternative (vikalpa) is found that differs from the multitude of systems (mata) of the Sages.' 53 Yet by engaging in musical study, the devotee could acquire a cultivated disposition towards, first, sung worship and, then, the higher reality of the divine couple.
Narahari reflected on the intellectual ambitions of his project and the character of musicological literature. He presented his own contributions as a comprehensive survey of a differentiated field, as in the Gītacandrodaya 54 : The language in one country is beautiful in that country He who composes poetry (kāvya) in that language is the poet-god! These meditations on language might be read playfully: the poet-god of one region could be totally unknown in another. Narahari seemed to place Sanskrit and vernacular literature on an even footing -different views exist in śāstra, whatever the language -and acknowledged all their deficiencies as evidence of the ineffable quality of the object of study. While he cited works in their original Sanskrit, often his most interesting insights and enlightening commentaries are in Bengali. That said, in another of his musicological works, the Saṅgītasārasaṅgraha, his approach was more conservative. Here he compiled quotations from authoritative Sanskrit works into a new compendium of musical scholarship, over five chapters, 56 and underlined the purity and propriety of Sanskrit as opposed to regional or Prakrit languages (deśi-bhās _ ā, apabhraṁs _ a-bhās _ ā). 57

Musical soteriology
What was the value of musicology for Narahari? His extensive studies had a practical application both in terms of performance and religious practice (sādhana): salvation through song. The rituals and daily routines of temple life are very much present in these works. Visvanath's song anthology was structured as a liturgical text, providing lyrics for the ritual calendar. Narahari noted that the devotees were often perplexed (byākula) by the ins-and-outs of music yet had to be attentive (sābadhāna) to engage with music correctly. Narahari felt it incumbent upon himself to clarify any misunderstandings in musical practice, and to enrich the devotees' comprehension of the divine couple's dance. After all, music was itself an expression of divinity 58 : One only knows it as it is revealed through the charming rāsa dance: as Krishnacandra discloses a śruti, and as Radha reveals it, incredible! Again, this verse indicates the dual argument inherent in Narahari's musicology: devotees required musical knowledge to appreciate Krishna, but musical knowledge itself sprung from Krishna and the rāsa. This rhetoric elevated the significance of non-sectarian musicology, while simultaneously claiming it as part of the vais _ n _ ava universe. His textbook-style approach to musical training also gestures to contemporary developments in kīrtana -especially, perhaps, the manoharśāhī style -which evolved in conversation with courtly genres. 59 In the earlier history of the sect -by the time of Shrinivasa and Narottama -nāmasam _ kīrtana had become established among aristocratic circles of devotees and was accompanied by formalized instrumentation and dance. 60 Narahari wrote partly to propagate a sophisticated and informed approach to music, to enrich the performance practices of the sampradāya.
Engaging with musicological theory would culturally elevate the devotional genres, but also enable the full potential of the music, heightening the effects of participation in performance. The desired effect of accomplished performance was to transform the devotees and draw them into the divine music of the rāsaman _ d _ ala. Music provided a ladder between worlds. Just as Tony Stewart has argued that expositions on the man _ d _ alī drew the human and divine spheres into convergence, 61 in the same way, Narahari's musical commentaries plotted the music of Krishna's world over the immediate experience of participation in kīrtana, by underlining the building-blocks of sound that were basic to both.
How was a devotee supposed to ascend this musical ladder between worlds? Barbara Holdrege has examined the metaphysics underpinning Gaud _ īya theology and has drawn particular focus to 'the human body as a site of central significance.' 62 Devotional practices are geared towards the reinterpretation of the body: realizing oneself not as an individual jīva, but as a separated-part (bibhinnām _ śa) of the absolute divine body (vigraha). 63 This separation is illusory, and pins the devotee to a border (tat _ asthā) between the material and the transcendent. The Gaud _ īyas established a practice (sādhana) of fashioning an authentic, devotional body, through external techniques of purification and transformation (vaidhī-bhakti) and internal techniques of cultivating a perfected and eternal form (rāgānugā-bhakti). In the Bhaktirasāmr _ tasindhu, Rupa underlined the vital importance of hearing (śravan _ a), singing kīrtana, and meditating on the divine play (krīd _ ādhyāna) to accomplishing this sādhana. I suggest Narahari's musical ladder was designed to propel devotees over the border between this world of illusion and matter and the authentic world of music and bliss. In the context of modern nāma-kīrtana, Sukanya Sarbadhikary has described the 'smearing of boundaries of the voice and skin of oneself from others, felt through the body-ear, an indomitable ego-effaced community spirit,' 64 which dissolves the distinctions of an embodied and located self. The physicality of līlā-kīrtana singing reorients the body and displaces the performer, projecting them into a virtual Vrindavan. 65 Sarbadhikary interprets this response to music as 'sensory excesses' that are affective, biologically-grounded effects, which are reinforced by a cultural appreciation and the theorization of kīrtana as achieving a sacred ideal. 66 Narahari's musicology can be read as a historic part of that theorization, designed to train devotees to refashion their bodies and to reorient themselves between worlds through musical practices.

Narahari's place in musicology
Significantly, the texts that Narahari deemed authoritative were not all long-established works of śāstra. In the Saṅgītasārasaṅgraha, his selections range from the classical Nāt _ yaśāstra (early centuries CE) to the seventeenth-century Saṅgītapārijāta of Ahobala. The inclusion of recent works indicates how Narahari was not merely reiterating antique theory, but engaging with current developments in the field: the Saṅgītapārijāta, for instance, was a widely copied text and had already been translated into Persian by 1666 (Mirza Raushan 'Zamir''s Tarjuma-i Kitāb-i Pārījātak). Narahari's reading list is therefore quite typical of other northern musicologists in this period, except for his engagement with recent works from eastern India, especially Odisha. These include the Gītaprakāśa of Krishnadasa Badajana Mahapatra; the Saṅgītasāra of Harinarayana; the Saṅgītanārāyan _ a of Purusottama Misra; the Saṅgītakaumudī of Sanasena; and the Saṅgītamuktāvali by Haricandana of Kanika. 67 These texts were not widely discussed in northern India or Mughal circles of musicologists, and their inclusion in Narahari's studies gestures to a vais _ n _ ava sector of the field, connecting scholars based in Vrindavan to court pandits in Odisha. How connected were the northern and eastern arenas of musical scholarship? On the one hand, there were concrete connections between these zones in the early modern period. Krishnadasa Badajana Mahapatra, author of one of the older texts, the Gītaprakāśa, had himself relocated to the Mughal centre, when he was absorbed into Akbar's court following the treaty with Gajapati Mukunda Deva in 1565. 68 On the other, each arena followed its own distinctive trends: scholars in the east were heavily influenced by the Saṅgītadāmodara, but apparently missed the northern and western fascination with the Saṅgītadarpan _ a. 69 Even the Bengali vais _ n _ avas were not always singing from the same hymn sheet: Radhamohana Thakura did not include Visvanatha Cakravarti in his song anthology, suggesting that although they were peers with shared musical interests, the geographical distances between them limited their exposure to each other's work. 70 Narahari overcame this distance when he connected with musical texts with a distinctively vais _ n _ ava flavour that had been cultivated in Odisha in the seventeenth century. In the 1640s, Rasikananda (c.1590-1652), the disciple of Syamananda Pala, had been proselytizing amongst the rulers of Odisha. He had court musicians (Syamadasa and Mohana from Hijli) and scholars of music in his retinue, and in his hagiography, the Rasikamaṅgala, we are told he routinely travelled with a collection of books on music, and converted Gajapati Narasimha by playing the six iconic rāgas on his flute. 71 Narasimha had then initiated a series of religious reforms, erected his palace to the south of the Jagannatha temple in Puri, and installed new ritual codes that cemented the links between the royal court and the temple. 72 This may have encouraged further exchanges between courtly and ritual aesthetics, including in music practice. Following Narasimha's death in 1647, one court intellectual, Purusottama Misra, left Puri and relocated to Paralakhemundi, a southern feudatory kingdom in Ganjam district, where he wrote the Saṅgītanārāyan _ a for Sarvajña Jagannatha Narayanadeva (r.1648-1664). 73 This work followed the nibandha principle of anthologizing earlier thinkers along with new observations and insights, and constituted a useful reference guide to music theory. 74 Like Narahari, Purusottama Misra also located the genesis of sound in Krishna's play with the gopīs. 75 This vais _ n _ ava frame of reference resonated with Narahari, and may account for his engaging with this work when other, non-sectarian intellectuals did not. 76 Beyond Narahari, it is difficult to gauge the Saṅgītanārāyan _ a's influence. The text circulated in multiple scripts (Oriya, Bengali, and Devanagari) and entered libraries in Odisha, Bengal, and onwards to Banaras, where copies were made and taken further afield to Jammu and Kathmandu. 77 William Jones found a copy in Banaras and drew on it extensively in his seminal essay on Indian music of 1784: he noted that it was widely available, but not so popular with Indian scholars, who indeed preferred the older Saṅgītadāmodara. 78 While the work was perhaps well read as a useful digest, the only significant Indian writers to use it for their own work were Narahari and another scholar from Odisha, Haricandana of Kanika (who was also included in Narahari's study). 79 In summary, based in Vrindavan, Narahari was evidently part of a conversation about musicology that was proliferating in northern India, and was reading the same materials available to court intellectuals there. However, his work was different for three reasons: he was still writing in Sanskrit when, by the eighteenth century, most northern musicologists preferred either Persian or Brajbhasha; he was engaging with works from Odisha, some of which were read in Banaras and beyond, but ultimately were part of an eastern arena that did not impact larger conversations in the north; and because he was explicitly embedding his knowledge of music into a theology and religious practice.

Conclusions
Given the importance and popularity of Narahari's hagiographies in Gaud _ īya history, the limited influence of his extensive musicological scholarship is perhaps surprising. Later Bengali scholars did not cite him. Radhamohan Sen Das, author of the first Bengali printed book on music theory, the Saṅgītataraṅga (Wave of Music, 1818), almost implied that he was the first to present saṅgīta śāstra in the Bengali language: he invoked a more 'mainstream' list of courtly music treatises in Sanskrit, Persian, and classical Hindi, but did not mention Narahari. 80 Later nineteenth-century scholars did not discuss his contributions either: the extremely well-read Sanskritist Sourindro Mohan Tagore (1840Tagore ( -1914, who foregrounded the musical heritage of Bengal in his own writings, named some of the treatises from Odisha, but not Narahari. 81 Likewise, Narahari did not feature in Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande's (1860Bhatkhande's ( -1936 survey of Hindu scholars of music, nor in comprehensive studies of early-modern vais _ n _ ava musicology. 82 Indeed, it appears that he was largely forgotten by music scholars until 1956, when Swami Prajnanananda published Narahari's Saṅgītasarasaṅgraha. 83 The neglect of Narahari's work reflects aspects of the modern reception history of Indian musicology. Narahari worked between the intellectual domains of music and bhakti literature, but these fields were otherwise quite separate: the authors of saṅgīta śāstra texts read and cited one another, but they did not view Narahari as one of their own. While Gaud _ īya intellectuals working on rasa and Sanskrit poetics have been brought into larger conversations about aestheticsespecially Rupa and Jiva Goswami -the same cannot be said for music. Swami Haridasa is often included in music histories, primarily because of the tradition that he taught Tansen, which secured him a key role. However, Narahari's works were less compelling beyond his vais _ n _ ava readership: he chose to write in Sanskrit when other northern musicologists did not, and in the nineteenth century, when there was a neo-traditional revival of Sanskrit scholarship among intellectuals like S.M. Tagore, Narahari may have been seen as too late or derivative to deserve attention. Following Swami Prajnanananda's contribution, Emmie te Nijenhuis was one of the first Anglophone scholars to position Narahari in a larger conversation about musicology; she thought he was simultaneously modern (she was under the impression that he was early nineteenth-century) and 'old-fashioned' in his treatment of music theory. In his defence, she suggested that he wrote 'in order to stimulate the interest in the traditional theory of Indian music, just as he tried to revive the older type of classical music among the vais _ n _ ava musicians in Bengal . . . However, compilations like this work have no more than a relative value, i.e. for philological studies and the restauration of the older Sanskrit texts on Indian music.' 84 Five years later, Bipin Singh published a larger set of Narahari's musicological works, which would shed new light on his broader and more innovative treatment of saṅgīta śāstra. 85 Within Gaud _ īya communitites, how influential were Narahari's studies on actual musical practice? Although reconstructing performance practices and historicizing their evolution is challenging (and often impossible), Ramakanta Chakrabarty has suggested that Narahari's efforts with classical tāla were not adopted by the Bengali vais _ n _ avas. Instead, his project might have had a greater impact on kīrtana outside temples, including aristocratic bait _ hakī kīrtana, that is, on regional art music rather than religious performance culture. 86 Likewise, in Sanyal's history of kīrtana, Narahari is a scholar and chronicler rather than a pioneer of new practices. While most studies of kīrtana focus on developments in eastern India, it is possible that Narahari had more profound influence on Bengali vais _ n _ ava music in the north, since his own community was based in Vrindavan. As Selina Thielemann notes, there are more local musical forms specific to Braj that are separate from the tradition of kīrtana in Bengal, including samāj gāyan (congregational singing). Today, Bengali vais _ n _ avas perform this differently from their neighbours: for example, rāga structures are closer to their classical namesakes, compared to the Radhavallabhis or Nimbarkis, and their melody types have been less modernized than in Haridasi practice. 87 This attention to classical conventions may indeed be a legacy of Narahari's lessons on śāstriya music.
In terms of early-modern intellectual culture, Narahari's works indicates how religious communities could engage with larger, non-sectarian conversations about specialist disciplines like music. Just as Narottoma Dasa was inspired by the contemporary growth of dhrupad and related art music forms and found innovative ways to integrate them with kīrtana, Narahari appears to have been responding to the transregional proliferation of new treatises on music theory. Like the court intellectuals around him, he read widely and gave his own assessments and curatorial judgements on the spread of topics in musicology. However, as we have seen, his vais _ n _ ava stance distanced him from other musicologists in northern India, due to his writing in Sanskrit, his unusual engagement with scholars based in Odisha, and -most crucially -his emphasis on the sacred dimensions of music, stemming from the higher forms in the divine rāsaman _ d _ ala. He not only integrated śāstriya understandings of ālāpa and rāga into religious music, but also installed the entire discipline of musical thought into a theological framework.