The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan c5.25

c5.25

“I have been assured by a credible eye-witness,” says Sir William Jones, “that two wild antelopes used often to come to the woods to the place where a mere savage beast, Siraj ud Doulah, entertained himself with concerts, and that they listened to the strain with an appearance of pleasure till the monster, in whose soul there was no music, shot one of them to display his archery; secondly, a learned native of this country told me that he had frequently seen the most venomous and indignant snakes leave their holes upon hearing tunes on a flute, which he supposed gave them peculiar delight; and thirdly, an intelligent Persian, who repeated his story again and again and permitted me to write it down from his lips, told me that he had more than once been present when a celebrated lutenist, Mirza Mahomed, surnamed Bulbul, was playing to a large company in a grove near Shiraz, that he distinctly saw the nightingales trying to vie with the musician—sometimes warbling on the trees, sometimes fluttering from branch to branch, as if they wished to approach the instrument whence the melody proceeded, and at length dropping on the ground in a kind of timid ecstasy, from which they were soon raised, he assured me, by a change of the mode.”⁷