The Scattering of Shahjahanabad: The Lives of Musicians in a Time of Crisis, 1739–1788 (Hartley Residency with Katherine Butler Schofield, Day Two) Seminar

Right at the centre of this vibrant milieu was the emperor’s singing teacher and master of the imperial atelier, Anjha Baras Khan. But posterity has forgotten him—it is his rivals Ni‘mat Khan “Sadarang” and Firoz Khan “Adarang” whom we remember as the greatest musicians of the eighteenth century. Why?

This musical rivalry played out against the geopolitical backdrop of a much more tumultuous drama: what music theorist Zia-ud-din called the “scattering of Shahjahanabad”. Delhi was repeatedly invaded, sacked, and occupied 1739–61, and Mughal court musicians fled to the four corners of India, where they had to seek new strategies to survive.

What happened to Delhi’s musicians throughout the period c. 1739–1788, and the music they carried with them, is copiously documented in a genre new to writing on music at this time: the biographical compendium or tazkira.

In this lecture, I will be looking at musicians’ biographies and genealogies as both a product of upheaval, dispersal, diversification, innovation, and considerable anxiety over the threat to Hindustani music; and as a record of these things. Both views give us unusual access to the history of elite artisans on the move in late Mughal and early colonial India.

The event will condlude with a roundtable staring at 16.00, and concluding at 17.30. Its topic will be “Saving Afghanistan’s Musicians.” with Dr Schofield in conversation with Southampton colleagues on her work with Afghan Refugee Musicians. (link: https://www.icfam.info/ )

SPEAKER:

Katherine Butler Schofield is Senior Lecturer in South Asian Music and History at Kings College London. She is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean. She trained as a viola player before embarking on her PhD at SOAS, University of London. She came to KCL after a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds.

Working largely with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, Katherine’s general research interests lie in South Asian music; the history of Mughal India (1526–1858); Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural.

Through stories about ill-fated courtesans, legendary musicians, and captivated patrons she writes on sovereignty and selfhood, affection and desire, sympathy and loss, and power, worldly and strange.