Histories Of The Ephemeral Katherine Schofield

The illustrated version of this podcast may be found here: https://youtu.be/GelmvIU9xfs

Victoria's Sonic Empire: Musical Curios between London and India in the Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum

A brief history of the Indian musical instruments that were sent for display in colonial-era world exhibitions and museums outside India during the reign of Queen Victoria.

Recording of Sitar-been https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAJ3lXw6rdw

V&A Images to accompany the podcast http://collections.vam.ac.uk :
IS.83-1989 Woman playing vina; Jaipur, 1890.
IS.176-1949 Rag Megh Malhar; Deccan, mid 18C.
07365:3/(IS) A vina-player; Benares, c.1860.
IS.182-1882 Taus
IS.47-2002 Bin-sitar or Sitar-been

Written and performed by Katherine Butler Schofield and recorded under a CC–BY–NC–SA license

The images that accompany this podcast may be found here: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2018/03/canonical-hindustani-music-treatises-of-aurangzeb-alamgirs-reign.html .

What was the connection between the power of Indian music and the Mughal emperor’s sovereign power? And why is there a picture of Orpheus above the Mughal throne in Delhi?

Perhaps the most famous anecdote of the reign of emperor Aurangzeb (r.1658–1707) concerns his “burial of music”, a parodic funeral procession put on by devastated court musicians in protest at the Emperor having banned music in 1668. In legend, the leader of this procession was Khushhal Khan “Gunasamudra” (fl. 1630s–70s), one of the most feted court musicians of his time. Great-grand-son of the most famous Mughal musician of them all, Tansen, and chief musician to the emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1627–58), he was written about extensively in his lifetime as a virtuoso singer of exceptional merit and serious character.

Yet this was not how he was memorialised a hundred years later in 1753, when nobleman Inayat Khan “Rasikh” put the legends of the great Mughal musicians of the past into a biographical collection for the first time. Rather, Khushhal was remembered as the protagonist in a shocking scandal that supernaturally sealed Shah Jahan’s fate:— to be overthrown by his son Aurangzeb in the Mughal War of Succession, 1657–8. In this podcast I retell this story from Khushhal Khan’s life from the vantage point of the 1750s looking back over the canonical Mughal writings on music of Shah Jahan’s and Aurangzeb’s reigns. And I reveal what all this tells us about the power and importance of music at the Mughal court, before everything began to unravel.

1. Panipat, 1753 – 0:00
2. The War of Succession, 1657-8 – 7:20
3. Khushhal Khan’s Story – 12:30
4. The Powers of Music – 26:02
5. Panipat, 1753 – 35:34

This podcast is part of the project Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India, sponsored by the British Academy in association with the British Library; additional research was funded by the European Research Council.

The Orpheus of Delhi was written by me, Katherine Butler Schofield (King's College London), and is based on my original research. It was produced by Chris Elcombe http://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-elcombe-523a60116/ and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC–BY-NC–ND)license.

The recordings of Rag Bilaskhani Todi — the main form of Rag Todi in the time of Khushhal Khan, and legendarily created by his grandfather Bilas Khan — are courtesy of:

Rakae Jamil on surbahar: https://soundcloud.com/sanjannagar/surbahar-rakae-edited . By permission.

M V N Murthy on veena, Veena-Murthy-19-4-2011 recorded by xserra. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY 4.0: https://freesound.org/people/xserra/sounds/125655/

Pamulka Karunanayake on esraj:
https://soundcloud.com/pamalka-karunanayake/raga-bilaskhani-todi-madhya-laya . By permission.

Lothar Berger, Soumyojit Das & Sourendro Mullick, “Nachtgesang/Bilaskhani Todi”: https://soundcloud.com/lothar-berger-music/nachtgesang-bilaskhani-todi . By permission.

Professor Ritwik Sanyal, dhrupad composition by Bilas Khan himself, recorded in Benares by Hans Wettstein in 1995: https://youtu.be/5l9hxmD5ul8 . By permission.

With thanks to: the British Academy, the European Research Council, the British Library, Yale University Art Gallery, Ebba Koch, William Dalrymple and Bruce Wannell. For more episodes and information email katherine.schofield@kcl.ac.uk.

The images that accompany this podcast may be found here: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2019/03/musicians-and-dancers-in-the-india-office-records.html

In 1818, the East India Company signed a treaty with the autonomous Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, offering British political and military protection in exchange for heavy cash tribute. By the early 1830s, these states were swimming in debt and increasingly resisting the Company's influence. So in 1835 the Company took direct control over the revenue of the salt lake at Sambhar, still one of India’s largest sources of that most precious of commodities, salt. Sambhar Lake was returned to Jaipur's and Jodhpur’s control in 1842 when, having been brought to the brink of ruin by the Company’s protection racket, their arrears were written off by the Government in Calcutta. Short-lived and little-studied, the Sambhar Lake affair left behind a set of financial accounts in the East India Company records that are alive with details of musicians and dancers, the cycle of Sambhar's festival year, and the economics of such cultural production.

One musician in particular stands forth from Jaipur's accounts as exceptional, Mayalee “dancing girl”. As well as being paid a monthly cash stipend, she received 25 maunds of salt annually, and was clearly one of Sambhar’s chief courtesans. Little exculpatory notes in the margins of successive Company accounts reveal that Mayalee successfully resisted the Company’s attempt to force her to give up her salt stipend in exchange for cash. Was she merely protecting a nice little sideline selling salt? Or did the more lofty ideal of “faithfulness to the salt” (namak-halali) underpin her resistance? In this podcast I consider why Indian musicians and especially courtesans appear at all in the official records of the East India Company, and what this tells us about relations between the British colonial state and the Indian peoples whose worlds it was increasingly encroaching upon during the 1830s and 40s.

This podcast is part of the project Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India, sponsored by the British Academy in association with the British Library; additional research was funded by the European Research Council.

Mayalee Dancing Girl vs the East india Company was written by me, Katherine Butler Schofield (King's College London), and is based on my original research. It was produced by Chris Elcombe. Additional voices were Michael Bywater, Chris Elcombe, and Kanav Gupta. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC–BY-NC–ND) license.

The recording of Rag Jaunpuri by Jaipur gharana doyenne Kesarbai Kerkar is courtesy of the Archive of Indian Music and Vikram Sampath. https://soundcloud.com/archive-of-indian-music/kesarbai-kerkar

The sarangi recording of Rag Bhairavi is by Nicolas Magriel and reproduced with thanks.

Information on the Jaipur gunijan-khana is taken from the work of Joan Erdman, and material on Amber/Jaipur’s political life from the work of Giles Tillotson and Monika Horstmann.

With thanks to: the British Academy, the British Library, the National Archives of India, the European Research Council, Norbert Peabody, Paul Schofield, and Mrinalini Venkateswaran.

Flute and Drum, Rishikesh by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0

Prayer Temple Jaipur by Xserra CC BY 4.0

20160922_summers.end.marshes by dobroide CC BY 4.0

Waves on the Lake by Vlatko Blazek CC BY 4.0

Kirtana_in_Hindi by psubhashish CC BY 4.0

Water Music From the Handel Show by The United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps Public Domain Mark 1.0 Licence

Ganga Aarti Ceremony V, Haridwar by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0

Shiva Worship Ceremony, Varanasi by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0

A Man Approaches with Bowed Sitar, Rishikesh by Samuel Corwin CC BY 4.0

Track 1 by Deep Singh and Ikhlaq Hussain Khan
Originally broadcast live on Rob Weisberg's show, Transpacific Sound Paradise on WF

The images that accompany this podcast may be found here: http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2018/06/sophia-plowden-khanum-jan-and-hindustani-airs.html

Khanum Jan was a celebrity courtesan in the cantonment of Kanpur and the court of Asafuddaula of Lucknow in 1780s North India. Famed then for her virtuosic singing, dancing, and speaking eyes, Khanum became famous again in the twentieth century because of her close musical interactions with a remarkable Englishwoman, Sophia Plowden. Through Plowden’s papers and extraordinary collection of Khanum’s repertoire, it is possible to reconstruct songs from the Lucknow court as they may have been performed 200 years ago, in both Indian and European versions. In this podcast, Katherine Butler Schofield tells the story of these two women, and harpsichordist Jane Chapman joins her to perform some of Khanum’s “Hindustani Airs”. The intertwined stories of Khanum and Sophia show that using Indian sources of the time to read between the lines of European papers and collections gives us a much richer view of this sadly short-lived moment of intercultural accord in late Mughal India.

This podcast is part of the project Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India, sponsored by the British Academy in association with the British Library; additional research was funded by the European Research Council.

The Courtesan and the Memsahib was written and performed by me, Katherine Butler Schofield (King's College London), based on my original research, with harpsichordist Jane Chapman http://www.janechapman.com. It was produced by Chris Elcombe. Additional voices were Georgie Pope, Kanav Gupta, Priyanka Basu, and Michael Bywater. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC–BY-NC–ND) license.

Recordings of vocalists Kesarbai Kerkar and Gangubai Hangal, and sarangi player Hamid Hussain, are courtesy of the Archive of Indian Music and Vikram Sampath: http://archiveofindianmusic.org/artists/bai-kesarbai-kerkar/ ; http://archiveofindianmusic.org/artists/bai-gangubai-hangal/ ; http://archiveofindianmusic.org/artists/hamid-hussain-a-i-r/ .

Selections from Jane Chapman’s studio recording "The Oriental Miscellany: Airs of Hindustan—William Bird" are found on Signum Classics: I. Ghat; II. Rekhtah: Sakia! Fusul beharust; III. Tuppah: Kia kam keea dil ne? By permission.

Image of Khanum Jan illustrating the podcast: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Colonel_Antoine-Louis_Henri_Polier_watching_a_nautch_at_Faizabad.jpg

Santoor and Tabla at Assi Ghat, Varanasi by Samuel Corwin. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY 4.0

Track 1 by Deep Singh and Ikhlaq Hussain Khan. Originally broadcast live on Rob Weisberg's show, Transpacific Sound Paradise on WFMU. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share-alike 3.0 Licence

With thanks to: the British Academy, the British Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the European Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, Edinburgh University Library, the Norfolk Records Office, Yousuf Mahmoud, James Kippen, Margaret Walker, Allyn Miner, Richard David Williams, David Lunn, Ursula Sims-Williams, Nick Cook, and Katie de La Matter. For more episodes and information email katherine.schofield@kcl.ac.uk.