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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

Katherine Butler Schofield
Affiliation:
King's College London
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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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858
, pp. 180 - 218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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