Indian and Persian Prosody and Recitation (with CD)

Contents: Part One : Early Indo-Iranian Metres: 1. Ancient Iranian Poetic Metres/Hassan Rezai Baghbidi. Classical Persian Metre: 2. Basic Principles Of Persian Prosody/Ayano Sasaki. 3. Meter In Classical Persian Narrative Poetry/Zahra Taheri. 4. Verbal Rhythm And Musical Rhythm: A Case Study Of Iranian Traditional Music/Masato Tani. New Indo-Aryan Metres Urdu: 5. A Note On The Hindi Metre In Urdu Poetry/Takamitsu Matsumura. 6. Dual Trends Of Urdu And Punjabi Prosody/So Yamane. Hindi: 7. Hindi Metre: Origins And Development/Hiroko Nagasaki. 8. The Prosody Of Kesav Das/Yoshifumi Mizuno. 9. Marriage Ceremony Scenes And Metrical Forms In The 16th Century Hindi Narratives Padmavat And Ramcaritmanas/Teiji Sakata. 10. Kabir\'s Doha: Its History And Concepts/Taigen Hashimoto. 11. Metre And Rhythm In Hindu Devotional Songs: A Musicological Analysis Of Kabir’s Bhajan/Takako Tanaka. Bengali: 12. Caca Songs: The Oral Tradition In Kathmandu/Makoto Kitada. 13. The Development Of Metre In Modern Bengali Poetry/Kyoko Niwa. Part Two : 1. Selection Of Classical Persian Poetry Metres/Ayano Sasaki. 2. Samples Of Urdu Metre/Suhail Abbas Khan. 3. Selected Metres Of Urdu Prosody: From Its Beginning To The Twentieth Century/Suhail Abbas Khan. 4. Samples Of Hindi Metre/Hiroko Nagasaki. 5. Middle Bengali Metres/Makoto Kitada. 6. Samples Of Bengali Metre/Kyoko Niwa.

Indian and Persian Prosody and Recitation is a comparative study of Indo-Aryan and Persian metrical systems and their musical performances, with text and audio samples.
The essays in Part I of this volume survey Persian, Urdu, Hindi and Bengali metres and compare their rhythmic patterns. In addition to offering comparative surveys on Indo-Aryan and Persian metres and their musical and recitational performances, the essays attempt to identify the legacy of traditional Sanskrit-Prakrit-Apabhramsa metre as well as the influence of Perso-Arabic metre in Hindi-Urdu poetry. The papers on Bengali prosody look into its unique path of development between the medieval and modern periods. The musicological papers on Indian and Persian recitation of poetry address the relationship between the linguistic and musical rhythms.

Part II of this book contains actual sample poems using the metres under study, along with prosodic analysis. A CD-ROM of corresponding recordings recited by native speakers comes with the volume.

This book is a product of the three-year international joint research project titled "Rhythmic construction of Hindi and Urdu metre and its origin in Persian prosody" conducted at Osaka University. It is a contribution both to prosody and Indo-Persian poetry.