Sangitanarayana: A Seventeenth Century Text on Music and Dance from Orissa (In 2 Volumes)

Sangitanarayana is a Sanskrit text on music and dance written in the 17th century by Purusottama Misra, a minister at the court of the King Gajapati Narayanadeva of Parlakimidi in Orissa and his instructor in musicology, with the assistance of the king. 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 India, Sangitanarayana consists of four chapters, the first on vocal music (gitanirnaya), the second on instrumental music (vadyanirnaya), the third on dance and dramatic art (natyanirnaya), and the fourth chapter 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 first published by Orissa Sangeet Natak Akadmi in 1966 under the joint editorship of Pandit Vanambaracarya, Kavichandra Kalicharan Patnaik and Shri Kedarnath Mahapatra. A more recent edition of the three musicological chapters was accomplished in 1987 by Jonathan Katz at Oxford but remains yet unpublished. This is the first critical edition, which also provides an English translation of the text.