The Lyric in Lanka: Alternative Histories of Music through the Hugh Nevill Collection

Peterson, Tom

Abstract

In 1897, a British civil servant named Hugh Nevill (1847–97) left colonial Ceylon with a vast collection of local manuscripts. This collection is now held by the British Library in London and is the largest archive of Sri Lankan manuscripts outside of Sri Lanka. Many of Nevill’s manuscripts contain lyrics, but the collection has not yet been studied as a colonial musical archive. This thesis explores Nevill’s musical holdings and his appreciation for lyrics, resulting in alternative histories of music in Ceylon and colonial listening practices.
First, the thesis complicates a well-known colonial discourse that reads Sinhala music as deficient and subordinate to European music. This discourse dominated nineteenth-century literature on Sinhala music, provoked a political musical identity crisis in the mid-twentieth century, and became entrenched in the Sinhala public consciousness. Elsewhere in nineteenth-century Ceylon, Nevill and others were gathering songs as sources of sociohistorical evidence. Lyrics formed an important part of Nevill’s scholarly work and, after years of collecting and studying them, he also developed an aesthetic appreciation for them. Building on the archives and scholarship of Nevill and his peers, I incorporate Sri Lanka’s long and diverse histories of song into a postcolonial global music history that decentres European epistemologies, sketching out new readings that disrupt the historic subordination of Sinhala music.
Second and consequently, the thesis nuances Jonathan Sterne’s model of the ‘audiovisual litany’, which observes an ocularcentric bias in Christian sensorial ontologies that interpret the ocular as objective and scientific and the aural as subjective and emotional. This model is considered fundamental to European-colonial readings of music, but the scholarly utility of song shared among Nevill and his peers reveals an alternative colonial context that prioritised local uses of music over the litany, challenging general assumptions about colonial listening practices and epistemologies.
Drawing on the above, the thesis shows how examining a single colonial music collection can complicate understandings of global music history, reevaluate colonial interactions with non-European practices and knowledge systems, and show how something considered regional and local like debates about Sinhala musicality can have a global intellectual hinterland behind it.

Citation

Peterson, T. The Lyric in Lanka: Alternative Histories of Music through the Hugh Nevill Collection. (Thesis). SOAS University of London

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: May 19, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: May 19, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.25501/SOAS.00463462
• Additional Information: 277 pages
• Award Date: Jan 1, 2025