Book contents
- Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
- Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Boxes
- Examples
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Additional material
- Ruling Dynasties*
- Genealogies of Principal Musicians and Music Treatises
- Additional material
- 1 Chasing Eurydice
- 2 The Mughal Orpheus: Remembering Khushhal Khan Gunasamudra in Eighteenth-Century Delhi
- 3 The Rivals: Anjha Baras, Adarang and the Scattering of Shahjahanabad
- 4 The Courtesan and the Memsahib: Khanum Jan and Sophia Plowden at the Court of Lucknow
- 5 Eclipsed by the Moon: Mahlaqa Bai and Khushhal Khan Anup in Nizami Hyderabad
- 6 Faithful to the Salt: Mayalee Dancing Girl versus the East India Company in Rajasthan
- 7 Keeper of the Flame: Miyan Himmat Khan and the Last of the Mughal Emperors
- 8 Orphans of the Uprising: Late Mughal Echoes and 1857
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Tazkira: List of Names
- Index
7 - Keeper of the Flame: Miyan Himmat Khan and the Last of the Mughal Emperors
Ethnography and New Music Treatises
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2023
- Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
- Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Boxes
- Examples
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Additional material
- Ruling Dynasties*
- Genealogies of Principal Musicians and Music Treatises
- Additional material
- 1 Chasing Eurydice
- 2 The Mughal Orpheus: Remembering Khushhal Khan Gunasamudra in Eighteenth-Century Delhi
- 3 The Rivals: Anjha Baras, Adarang and the Scattering of Shahjahanabad
- 4 The Courtesan and the Memsahib: Khanum Jan and Sophia Plowden at the Court of Lucknow
- 5 Eclipsed by the Moon: Mahlaqa Bai and Khushhal Khan Anup in Nizami Hyderabad
- 6 Faithful to the Salt: Mayalee Dancing Girl versus the East India Company in Rajasthan
- 7 Keeper of the Flame: Miyan Himmat Khan and the Last of the Mughal Emperors
- 8 Orphans of the Uprising: Late Mughal Echoes and 1857
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Tazkira: List of Names
- Index
Summary
James Skinner’s 1825 Tashrīh al-Aqwām includes a real-life portrait of the chief hereditary bīn-player to the last Mughal emperors, Miyan Himmat Khan. But the painting was simultaneously intended as an ethnographic archetype. A man of mixed race, Skinner wrote in Persian and drew on multiple precolonial traditions of describing ethnographic “types”. But Skinner’s entry is radically irreconcilable with Himmat Khan’s own biography and intellectual output: a revolutionary co-written music treatise, the Asl al-Usūl. To unravel this baffling discrepancy, I read ethnographic paintings and writings in Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and English against a new wave of Persian music treatises c. 1780−1850. These reveal an incipient Indian modernity in the most authoritative centres of Hindustani music production running alongside colonial knowledge projects.
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- Music and Musicians in Late Mughal IndiaHistories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858, pp. 180 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023