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1 results

  • 4 - The Courtesan and the Memsahib: Khanum Jan and Sophia Plowden at the Court of Lucknow

  • Katherine Butler Schofield, King's College London
  • Book:
    Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
    Published online:
    09 November 2023
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023, pp 79-116

  • Summary

    Khanum Jan was a celebrity courtesan at the court of Lucknow in the 1780s. She became famous again in twentieth-century musicology because of her musical interactions with an Englishwoman, Sophia Plowden. Plowden’s involvement in the “Hindustani Airs” episode has been told before from the European side. In this chapter, I focus instead on Plowden’s collection of song lyrics in Persian and Indian languages, alongside writings by Indian musicians and patrons about their views of Europeans and their music. Reading Indian-language sources and European papers and notations together make it possible to get much closer to how songs from the Lucknow court may have sounded in the 1780s. But it also gives us a much richer understanding of Lucknow courtesan culture between late Mughal and early colonial patronage.