Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India

Katherine Schofield is Head of the Department of Music at King's College London and recipient of a European Research Council Grant and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. She is co-editor of Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (2015) and Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (2018).

• Introduction: 1. Chasing eurydice: writing on music in the late Mughal world; 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 vs. 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.

'Katherine Schofield's path-breaking account of music and musicians from the late Mughal period is a lesson in music history and historiography for musicians, music scholars and students in India. Her detailed analysis of texts written in multiple languages as well as pictorial sources will enlighten students and performers like myself about trajectories that moulded Hindustani music to the shape we experience today. This book will also go a long way in breaking myths and stereotypes about Muslim practitioners of this music that have for so long coloured our understanding of the past.' Aneesh Pradhan, Tabla player, composer and author