1: “The Orpheus of Delhi: The Maestro Khushhal Khan and the Mughal War of Succession, 1657–8.”

2: “Miyan Himmat Khan and the Last Mughal Emperors.”

3: “A Bloody Difficult Woman: Mayalee Dancing Girl vs. the East India Company.”

4: “Eclipsed by the Moon: Mahlaqa Bai and Her Teacher ‘The Incomparable’ in Nizami Hyderabad.”

5: “The Rivals: Anjha Baras Khan, Adarang, and What Happened to Muhammad Shah’s Court.”

6: “The Courtesan and the Memsahib: Khanum Jan Meets Sophia Plowden at the 18C Court of Lucknow.”Footnote ¹

URL: https://soundcloud.com/user-513302522.

In this set of six podcasts, Katherine Schofield explores the musical history of northern India in the late Mughal empire, from the reign of Mohammad Shah (1719–1748) to the Uprising of 1856–1857. This was a turbulent period, in which the gradual weakening and eventual collapse of Delhi as the imperial centre allowed it to be eclipsed by satellite cultural centres, and by the rising British power; and yet, despite cataclysmic disruptions of the political order, cultivation of the exquisite in music and allied arts such as dance, poetry and painting, proliferated and flourished. Our sketchy knowledge of this musical history was previously based on a tiny number of Persian- and English-language sources of disparate age, provenance, and reliability, and on orally-transmitted genealogies and anecdotes of the ancestors of today’s great artists; one could have been forgiven for thinking that performance was too ephemeral to appear significantly in the historical record. But building on her earlier studies of music at the Mughal court in the seventeenth century, Schofield has unearthed, in archives in India, Europe and North America, an unsuspected wealth of sources that, in various ways and languages, capture and illuminate that ephemerality.

What are these sources? The most informative are the tazkīras—literary records of contemporary leading artistic figures, combining genealogy, biography, and anecdotes, often reflecting first-hand knowledge. Then there are the treatises on music, mainly in Persian, in which accumulated theory from the age-old Sanskritic tradition is gradually discarded in favour of new approaches, foreshadowing the musical system we know today. Alongside these indigenous genres are sources reflecting or resulting from the rise of colonialism, including “ethnographic” records of performing communities, paintings of performers, patrons, instruments, and soirées, administrative records, and personal letters. And there are song collections, mostly comprising sung poetry, but also including European arrangements of the music. Schofield’s painstaking detective-work evokes stunningly vivid encounters with performers whose exceptional skills placed them at the intersection of subaltern and elite classes; they include ustāds and courtesans, singers of dhrupad, khayāl, and Persian or Urdu poetry, players of the ancient bīn and newly-invented sitār, hereditary maestros and “gentlemen amateurs,” successful and less successful seekers of fame and fortune; a few of these performers are still celebrated, but the majority have been forgotten until now. We also meet, however fleetingly, emperors, princes, nobles, and invaders; Indian and European literati and connoisseurs; colonialist administrators and soldiers and, importantly, their wives.

Each podcast is an elaborate vignette focusing on an individual or small group of players in the cultural and cross-cultural encounters of the period: singers at the court of Shahjahan as remembered a century later; the last emperor’s bīn player; an unknown dancer who took on the East India Company in defence of her traditional rights—and won; a pious courtesan and her distinguished music teacher at the Nizam of Hyderabad’s court; rival singers at the court of Mohammad Shah Rangīle; and the Englishwoman Sophia Plowden’s musical encounter with courtesans in eighteenth-century Lucknow. The last subject has been written about before (notably by Ian Woodfield, Gerry Farrell, and Nicholas Cook), but Schofield’s re-reading of Plowden’s song collection, in consultation with Indian vocalists, leads to delightful performances by herself and harpsichordist Jane Chapman, which perhaps for the first time evoke distant echoes, through the mists of European representation and mis-representation, of Khanam’s captivating ghazals.

For the historian of Indian music, listening to the podcasts is like entering a landscape previously only glimpsed from afar. Fascinating revelations and insights come thick and fast round every corner. The landscape is populated by real individuals who briefly share their experiences with us. Rather than a chronological grand narrative, Schofield gives us a bricolage of encounters, through which different themes emerge at different times. One of these is the symbolic importance of music for concepts of empire, state, religion, power, auspiciousness, and prosperity, founded on beliefs about the esoteric and affective power of sound, embodied in rāgas—beliefs that were inherited from earlier Mughal, Hindu, and Greek sources, and which enabled music to underpin “the whole structure of empire and proper governance.” More broadly, Schofield’s claim that these sources illuminate “sovereignty and selfhood, friendship and desire, sympathy and loss, and power…as the Mughal empire gave way to British rule” (podcast 1) is well founded.

Appropriately, perhaps, there is a degree of ephemerality in the podcast format. This is clearly a work in progress, and one looks forward to the print version with its apparatus of footnotes and references. Meanwhile, however, the genre lends itself to storytelling, which Schofield does engagingly; it is not so well suited to dense historical data—a plethora of personal names and source titles can be hard to hold in the memory. But several of the talks incorporate extracts from recorded music, which, although they cannot be strictly of the period, are highly evocative of the musical effects and experiences referred to in the sources. There are also pictures: clicking on the title of each track in SoundCloud takes one to a web page with further details, whence there are often further links to pictures and documents mentioned in the podcast, and in one case (podcast 4) to a YouTube video combining the lecture with stunning pages of calligraphy and painting. All of this creates a vivid sense of immersion in the past that may be more difficult to evoke in print.

The myriad individuals who shaped and were shaped by history are too easily forgotten, and encountered again only with difficulty. As Schofield says of her subjects, “We have remembered them.” Their stories can now become a part of musical history.