Bunche Hall 10383 & online
ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
In 1913, a Maldivian Islamic scholar named Maulavi Huiy Ali Didi (1874–1932) drew upon structures in Arabic verse to introduce a new genre of Dhivehi-language poetry called lhen. In his first composition, Ali Didi organized the verses in couplets, and he imbued each line with the rhythmic pattern of long and short syllables found in the rajaz meter of Arabic poetry. Ali Didi’s poetic innovation, however, can be understood as part of a longer Maldivian tradition—nine letters of the Dhivehi script Thaana, in which Ali Didi wrote, were created out of Arabic numerals by an unknown Maldivian scholar in the 1500s or 1600s. In this presentation, I explore the Arabicate world of the Maldives through the lens of the inventions of Thaana and Ali Didi’s poetic genre. Thaana and lhen can be described as “Arabicate” because they are examples of a script and literary form that developed through contact with Arabic.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Garrett Field is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology/Musicology in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and School of Music at Ohio University. He is the author of
Modernizing Composition: Sinhala Song, Poetry, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka (University of California Press, 2017). Field has published research articles in
Ethnomusicology Translations,
Modern Asian Studies,
Anthropological Linguistics,
Analytical Approaches to World Music,
The Journal of Asian Studies, and
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. His scholarship investigates Dhivehi-language song, poetry, and fiction of the Maldives; Sinhala-language song and poetry of Sri Lanka, and improvisation in South Indian classical music.
WEBINAR CODE WILL BE PROVIDED UPON REGISTRATION
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Direct accommodation requests to mohammadi@ucla.edu.
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Download file: Field-0m-lur.pdf
Sponsor(s): Center for India and South Asia, Anthropology