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Did Aurangzeb Ban Music? Questions for the Historiography of his Reign

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2006

KATHERINE BUTLER BROWN
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University

Extract

Bury [music] so deep under the earth that no sound or echo of it may rise again.

- Attributed to Aurangzeb

There is no safer way to blacken a person's reputation in the estimate of following generations than to attribute a wanton holocaust of wasted beauty to him.

- Antonia Fraser on Oliver Cromwell

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was generously funded by a Postgraduate Award from the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). I am particularly grateful to Richard Widdess, Avril Powell, Jonathan Katz, and Gage Averill for their penetrating comments on this work at an earlier stage of its gestation; see Brown, “Hindustani music in the time of Aurangzeb” (2003), pp. 81–117.