Khushhal Khan ‘Gunasamudra’ was the most feted court singer of the mid-seventeenth century. Great-grandson of the most famous Mughal musician of all time, Tansen, and chief musician to the emperors Shah Jahan (r.1627−1658) and Aurangzeb (r.1658−1707), he was written about extensively in his lifetime as a virtuoso of exceptional merit. Yet this was not how he was memorialised in the 1750s, when legends of the great Mughal musicians of past and present were first compiled into biographical collections. Rather, he was remembered as the instigator of a shocking political scandal that supernaturally sealed Shah Jahan’s downfall. In this chapter I retell Khushhal’s story from the vantage point of the 1750s, in the light of the canonical Mughal music treatises of Shah Jahan’s and Aurangzeb’s reigns. I consider what they together tell us about the role and power of music in the Mughal empire, just before everything began to unravel.

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.

I introduce the geographical and chronological frames of the book in terms of the current historiography of the transition from Mughal to British rule and of music history. I lay out the book’s conceptual framework: 1) the use of musicians’ stories to illuminate the changes wrought in the transition; 2) the examination of several types of Indian and European writing on music prominent at this time, most of which have been overlooked, that reveal these changes; and 3) my deeper interest in why writers tried to capture music in words when they knew it was impossible. I contextualise the sources on which my history is based within a consideration of the concept of paracolonial knowledge systems and social networks. And I introduce my overarching philosophical question: whether it is ever possible for Orpheus (writing on music) to bring Eurydice (music and its experience) back from the dead.

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.

This chapter provides an overview of the shahr āshob genre and analyses one collection of 1857 poems: The Lament for Delhi (Fuġhān-e Dehlī, 1863). Reassessing this body of texts through an analysis of its emotional language, it highlights its originality from previous Urdu shahr āshobs. The resort to elegiac literary devices and the association with the secular elegy (marṡiyah) paved the way for a particular expression of collective grief (ġham), in which it was associated with physical suffering and trauma. The contrast between pre-1857 paradise and post-1857 doomsday materialised in the image of the garden, which was deployed to describe the city as symbol of an ideal vision of Mughal political order.

India is a land of enormous diversity. Cross-cultural influences are everywhere in evidence, in the food people eat, the clothes they wear, and in the places they worship. This was ever the case, and at no time more so than in the India that existed from 1200 to 1750, before the European intervention. In this absorbing and richly illustrated second edition, the authors take the reader on a journey across the political, economic, religious, and cultural landscapes of India from the Ghurid conquests and the Delhi Sultanate, through the rise and fall of the southern kingdom of Vijayanagara and their successors, to the peripheries of empire, and finally, to the great court of the Mughals. This was a time of conquest and consolidation, when Muslims and Hindus came together to create a literary, material, and visual culture which was uniquely their own and which still resonates in today’s India.

In the late 1620s, Prince Khurram was serving his punishment posting as governor of Deccan, while his sons were held hostage at the imperial court by his own father, Emperor Jahangir. Prince Khurram, who would eventually assume the imperial Mughal throne as Shah Jahan in 1628, was being punished for armed rebellion, which had also seen him attempting to build a military and political base in the sūba (province) of Malwa, until he was chased across the country by the imperial army and eventually defeated. While embroiled in imperial high politics, Prince Khurram found the time to issue a nishān (a princely order) confirming the appointment of a man called Mohan Das to the post of qānūngō (local official maintaining tax records) of the pargana (district) Dhar.

This chapter deals with documents recording a variety of inter-personal dealings that reveal that transactional ambit of the protagonists, including sale and purchase, loans, gifts, and payment of blood-money. Structured as recognizably pan-Islamic documentary forms and sealed by the Islamic judge (qazi), these documents offer an opportunity for learning further details about the social life of the protagonists, especially the women among them, and their relations with their social equals or subordinates. This leads to a discussion about the percolation of Islamic legal forms and procedures in this pre-dominantly non-Muslim context. The documents in the collection are connected to models provided by Persian-language formularies known as munshats, showing how standardization amd popularization of legal forms may have been achieved through such non-religious manuals that formed training materials for Indo-Persian scribes, or munshis.

This chapter focusses on a prolific subset of bilingual (Persian and Hindi/Rangri) documents within the collection (designated qaul-qarar), which record contracts between individual members of the family and the state (or its jagirdars - 'fief-holders'). The contracts consisted of agreements to collect land-tax and other imposts over a finite period of time, and deposit a certain pre-determined amount into the provincial or noble's household treasury. The chapter uses these contracts and documents recording further transactions based on them, such as sub-renting, selling, standing surety for others, and foreclosures, to demonstrate how the family portfolio was built up by contracting as tax-farmers for the regime and its officials. It also adds details to the landscape of authorities that the protagonists had to contend with in order to benefit from such political-fiscal investments.

This chapter examines the effects of regime change on the family and its practices, as Maratha chieftains took over the district of Dhar in Malwa in the early eighteenth centuries, overthrowing Mughal control and institutions. Documents from this period are used to reconstruct the difficult negotiations undertaken by landed families such as our protagonists, in order to convince the new rulers to recognize their existing titles and prerogatives. The chapter then proceeds to the second regime change in the early nineteenth century, when the local Maratha chieftain-turned-king – the Puwars – came under the control of the British colonialists. Using several document types – some continuing from Mughal times and some innovations – this chapter examines how older entitlements, conceived in a Persianate cultural world, were re-stated in an altered institutional and cultural environment.

This chapter delves into specific moments of dispute among the protagonists and others. Such episodes are used to map the range of adjudicative authorities – Islamic judges (qazis), jagirdars, the imperial court, and their own peers – that was available for significant villagers in Mughal Malwa. This is used to discuss the concept of jurisdictional intertwining as an alternative to inter-jurisdictional conflict and mobility. The focus of the chapter is on an explosive contest over inheritance in the late seventeenth century, which pulled in all the institutions of state that have been discussed thus far, and forced members of the family to define the limits of their kinship and their circle of entitlements. After narrating how a Muslim man tried to argue that he was part of this Hindu family and entitled to share in its rights, the archive is examined afresh – speculating how this episode may have structured the production and preservation of a specific body of documents, aimed at establishing certain rights, and erasing those of others.

This chapter introduces the political geography of the region called Malwa in central India: a sultanate from the thirteenth century, a Mughal province from the sixteenth, a Maratha state from the eighteenth, and a British-controlled princely state from the nineteenth. It traces the area of operations of the book's protagonists, relating that area to key commercial and military routes that traversed the region, and the petty Rajput domains that dotted and shaped the territory. The chapter serves to evoke the context of entrenched knots of military-political pwer together with the shifting of empires, within which the family of landlords staked their claims.

This chapter analyzes how and why the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires were militarily powerful but economically uncompetitive and intellectually stagnant. It emphasizes that out of the three technologies Western Europeans used effectively – the printing press, nautical compass, and gunpowder – these three Muslim empires employed only gunpowder effectively. The chapter explains this situation by the dominance of the military and religious classes and the marginalization of the intellectual and bourgeois classes in the Muslim world. In Western Europe, by contrast, the intellectual and bourgeois classes were influential; they played crucial roles in overlapping processes of the Renaissance, the printing revolution, the Protestant Reformation, geographical discoveries, and the scientific revolution, which led to the “rise of Western Europe.” The chapter critically evaluates alternative explanations to both the decline of the Muslim world and the rise of Western Europe.

This chapter begins by examining Muslims’ military, commercial, and intellectual achievements between the seventh and eleventh centuries. At that time, most of Islamic scholars (ulema) were funded by commerce, while only a few of them served the state. The merchants flourished as an influential class. The chapter goes on to analyze the beginning of the intellectual and economic stagnation in Muslim lands in the eleventh century. It explains how, gradually, the ulema became a state-servant class and the military state came to dominate the economy. The alliance between the ulema and the military state diminished the influence of philosophers and merchants. This changing distribution of authority led to the long-term stagnation, if not the decline, of Muslim intellectual and economic life. This gradual process began in the eleventh century and continued for centuries, as subsequent chapters elaborate.