A Unique XVIIth Century Source on the History of Central Asian-Indian Musical Connections (Zamzame-ye Vahdat by Nā'inī)

This article is a brief introduction to a remarkable but little-known treatise on music in the Persian language, Zamzame-ye Vahdat (Hummings of Unity), which is one of the earliest sources that have shed some light on the deep cultural interactions between India and the lands of Central Asia in the #eld of music. The author of this treatise, Bāqiyā Nā'inī, is not very well-known to historians of music, despite his pioneering efforts to make a comparative study of Indian and Central Asian music. In this paper, the musicologist Alexander Djumaev not only provides some biographical details about Nā'inī, but also ably summarizes his unique overview of the similarities between the melodic structures of Indian and Central Asian music.