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2 results

  • 8 - Orphans of the Uprising: Late Mughal Echoes and 1857

  • 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 219-247

  • Summary

    The summative discussion opens with the dethronement of major music impresario and last King of Lucknow, Wajid ‘Ali Shah, and the canonical treatises his chief rabab player Basit Khan took with him into exile in 1856. I then synthesise the findings of the previous chapters to explore the reasons why both colonial and Indian/mixed-race figures wrote about music during this transitional period. For the coloniser, I argue, the reasons were a hunger to collect the auditory picturesque and, later, to control musical communities. Mughal writers, in contrast, were grappling with significant change as well as trying to mitigate the loss those changes threatened to their beloved musical culture. I conclude with the aftermath of the devastating 1857 Uprising as the reason we have forgotten these musicians and their writings, and point to the lingering echoes of the late Mughal in the classical music of today.

Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
  • Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858
  • Katherine Butler Schofield
  • Published online:
    09 November 2023
    Print publication:
    23 November 2023
  • Based on a vast, virtually unstudied archive of Indian writings alongside visual sources, this book presents the first history of music and musicians in late Mughal India c.1748–1858 and takes the lives of nine musicians as entry points into six prominent types of writing on music in Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu and English, moving from Delhi to Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur and among the British. It shows how a key Mughal cultural field responded to the political, economic and social upheaval of the transition to British rule, while addressing a central philosophical question: can we ever recapture the ephemeral experience of music once the performance is over? These rich, diverse sources shine new light on the wider historical processes of this pivotal transitional period, and provide a new history of music, musicians and their audiences during the precise period in which North Indian classical music coalesced in its modern form.