Melodic Contours of Music in Nautanki

Music in Nautanki resembles other South Asian theatrical music in general ways, it also possesses a distinctive blueprint: a configuration in sound that immediately labels this genre Nautanki, even when compared to neighbouring theatres such as Haryanvi Sang or Rajasthani Khyal. This blueprint is the music used for the ten-line stanza known as dohd-chaubola-daur, the basic building block of Nautanki composition. It is significant that this identifying unit issues from the narrative level of the text, not the lyric.

Nautanki performance freely borrows lyric genres from various sources and incorporates them according to current fashion and the taste of the actors and audience. In older texts we find Hindi folk songs and semi-classical genres such as Dadra, Savan and Mana as well as the Urdu Shayeri, Ghazal, Qawali and so forth. Nowadays film tunes of Bollywood versions of the above genres tend to predominate. Popular songs are not exclusive to Nautanki; they turn up in many performance contexts classified as "folk." Film-based musical quotations may lend a performance verve and status, but they do not distinguish Nautanki as the old meters Doha and Chaubola do.

In any case, nineteenth-century Sangit texts reveal that the doha-chaubola alone dominates Swang composition from about 1850 to 1890. Beginning in the 1890s the six lines of doha-chaubola commonly add on an asymmetrical quatrain called Daur to form a ten-line unit; in the Hathras texts this becomes the standard. Doha, chaubola and daur are scanned according to rules of Hindi prosody, by which every syllable bears either a short weight or measure, indicated by the symbols. The long weight counts as two measures, twice the short weight. Each line contains a fixed number of measures (Matras) that vary in their arrangements of short and long but have specific patterns at line ends.

Nautanki, a shorter stanza useful for dialogue, known as bahr-e-tavti, was introduced around 1910. This meter is based on Urdu prosody rather than Hindi, indicating the mixed linguistic heritage of this region and the presence of both Hindi and Urdu prototypes in the oral stratum