Katherine Butler Schofield (King's College, London)
'The Social History of North Indian Song Collections, 1780-1820'
Abstract: The song collection as a literary genre has received considerable attention in South Asian studies in certain areas of scholarship, most notably in religious studies, where collections of sung poetry form the major corpus for the study of bhakti and Sikh traditions. Likewise, collections of the early-modern courtly genre dhrupad have been mined for their literary implications by Prem Lata Sharma and Nalini Delvoye; and more recently Francesca Orsini has drawn new social history out of the contents of printed miscellanies of Hindi and Urdu songs from the nineteenth century.
What have not so far been considered are the social-historical implications of a significant upsurge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the production of manuscript collections of lighter courtly songs, predominantly khayal, tappa, ghazal and tarana. While many such collections were produced for elite patrons in Muslim courts such as Awadh and Hyderabad, a significant number were written for or purchased by European collectors resident in these locations, including women. In this paper I will be looking not so much at the courtly song texts contained within these manuscripts, but at the different logics behind the making of such collections c.1800. In so doing I hope to make some preliminary observations about the changing state of patronage in the Indian musical field at a critical moment of transition for Muslim courts towards British political dominance.
Katherine Butler Schofield (née Brown) is Lecturer in Music at King’s College London, and Principal Investigator of the €1.18M European Research Council project, “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean”. Katherine is a cultural historian whose work focuses on Islamicate South Asia. Having trained as a viola player, she embarked on postgraduate studies in North Indian music at SOAS, followed by a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. Her research interests lie generally in the areas of South Asian music, the history of Mughal India (1526-1858), Islam, and empire. They include the intersection of music with gender, friendship, love and ethics; the history of pleasure; colonial transitions; connoisseurship; social liminality; the history of North Indian performers; and Indo-Persianate musical knowledge. She is also preparing a monograph on the cultural history of music, musicians and their patrons in Mughal India, entitled The Place of Pleasure: Hindustani Music in Mughal Society, 1593–1707. Her most recent publications include “The Courtesan Tale: Female Musicians & Dancers in Mughal Historical Chronicles,” Gender & History 24/1 (2012); and “Reviving the Golden Age Again: ‘Classicization’, Hindustani Music & the Mughals,” Ethnomusicology 54/3 (2010).
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