Songs of the Divine: Music, Poetry and Spirituality

What do music and poetry have to do with the divine?

How have different cultures and religions used the arts to explore spirituality?

How did the great Persian and Indian poets and musicians formulate their practice?

How have music and poetry been used to subvert and reinforce systems of control and oppression?

Do we briefly reach the divine when we listen to the right music?

Join us on July 8th at MULTI STORY to discuss this all :)

Dr William Rees Hofmann is a Research Associate in the South Asian Studies Unit at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. His research explores the connected textual and musical traditions of Nizārī Ismā‘īlī, Sufi, and Bhakti devotion in early modern Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Deccan, as well as histories of musical knowledge in South Asia and larger histories of emotion and the senses. William is also a multi-instrumentalist and composer specialising in both the Indian Sarod and the Afghan Rubab, and is the director of Ensemble Ḳhusrawi, an Indo-Persian musical ensemble.

Dr Ankur Barua is Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. His fields of research are Vedantic theology, philosophical anthropology, and religious interactions in South Asia. He integrates into his pedagogic styles devotional music from Bollywood, Rabindranath Tagore, Nazrul Islam, and the Bauls.

Tagore's Salon is a London-based literary event series platforming translated and underrepresented writing and cultural output.