Katherine Schofield on The Hidden History of Music in Mughal India

SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Welcome to Ideas of India, where we examine the academic ideas that can propel India forward. My name is Shruti Rajagopalan, and I am a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Today my guest Katherine Butler Schofield who is a professor of South Asian Music and History at King’s College London. She is the author of the recent book Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858.  She also hosted a podcast series called The Histories of the Ephemeral on the same theme.

We talked about the history of classical music in India - from Natyasastra to Dhrupad and to khayals and qawallis, about Aurangzeb’s relationship with music, the sacking of Delhiand, it’s influence on hindustani classical music, the powerful tawaifs of that time, and much more. 

For a full transcript of this conversation, including helpful links of all the references mentioned, click the link in the show notes or visit mercatus.org/podcasts. 

Hi, Katherine, welcome to the show. I am just so delighted that you’re here with us.

KATHERINE SCHOFIELD: Hi, Shruti. It is fantastic to be here. I think I’m equally excited.

RAJAGOPALAN: Today, I want to talk to you about your book, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India. This is just one of the loveliest books I’ve read in recent times. It looks like this fat, clunky University Press hardback, but you open it, and it’s so musical and so beautifully written. You just give us a slice of a time that is very hard to find normally. We can get into all of that.

Before we talk about the Mughal period, the period that you’re talking about is between the Battle of Plassey and the mutiny. Before you walk us through the decline of the Mughals and Hindustani classical music during that time, can you tell us a little bit about Hindustani classical music before that period, which you’ve also written about in your other work? Maybe start us out with Khusrau or Tansen, or feel free to go quite far back, so that we just know what we are dealing with.

The Nāṭyaśāstra and Tasting Music

SCHOFIELD: Sure. Thank you for that fantastic introduction. If we’re going to go right back, we really need to go back to the Nāṭyaśāstra, to the Sanskrit tradition of writing about music because it’s not that well known that there is a long continuous tradition of writing about music in India, both in north and south, dating back at least two millennia, or approximately two millennia, to the very first of these treatises the Nāṭyaśāstra, which is not just about music.

Of course, the word sangeet doesn’t just mean music or didn’t mean just music then; it includes music, dance, and drama. It’s really about all the performing arts and how they should be performed. It set the basis for the melodic entities that become known as ragas, but they didn’t have that name yet. It set the aesthetic principles behind what become North Indian and South Indian classical music much later, which is this idea of the rasa, the juice or the essence of affect, of emotion.

Music and dance and drama are all about moving the emotions, and the way performers do this is that they distill many transient emotions called pal into these nine emotional essences that are then tasted by the listener or the viewer, who becomes known as the rasika, the one who tastes the rasa. This becomes the foundational principles for the next 2,000 years of writing about music. It’s still there.

There’s this fantastic book recently about Bollywood called A Bollywood State of Mind written by a fantastic person called Sunny Singh here in the U.K. She actually takes rasa theory and applies it to Hindi film today in the most beautiful, convincing way. This idea that between us, between listener and performer, we taste this thing that moves us, that’s just fundamental and has been for 2,000 years. It didn’t look anything like it does today.

Some listeners will probably know the instruments, the veena, and you might know the Saraswati veena in South India. You might know the Rudra veena or the Bīn in North India—so it’s sticks either with these big pumpkins or gourds. Back in the Nāṭyaśāstra time, veena didn’t mean this. It was a harp, so even the veena was a completely different thing in the Nāṭyaśāstra to what it is today.

The period where what we now know as Hindustani music begins to coalesce really in the 16th century, and really starting with the idea that you have these entities called ragas, that there are six male ragas, each of them with these five wives called raginis. They have this special affective essence built into their notes, and the patterns of notes, and the sound marks that those notes create, that also correspond with these beautiful painted icons of ragas and raginis as heroes and heroines and yoginis and nayak and nayikas and so on.

We begin to get a split between the north and the south in about 1550 when Ramamatya writes about the scales of the South Indian ragas. They begin to drift apart. We get into the Mughal period. You mentioned Amir Khusrau. Amir Khusrau, one of the most important figures in North Indian classical music history, his really important intervention was to systematize what becomes known as qawwali, the arts of the qawwals of Delhi, the ones who are at the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya.

Mughals, their journey come lately into the scene. They don’t appear until 1526. Babur is only there for five years before he dies, and then Humayun spends most of his reign in exile in Iran. It’s really with Akbar, that Akbar begins to really patronize these local musicians who were singing songs in raga and tala, and playing instruments like the Rudra veena, the Indian rabab, which has really almost died out now, but it’s this really big, fat, round instrument that you see in paintings.

RAJAGOPALAN: With bass tones that just linger on for a long time. There’s nothing else quite like it.

SCHOFIELD: Yes. It is really amazing. It’s a little bit like a surbahar, but even bigger and boomier, and of course, sarangi, pakhawaj, and dholak. It’s actually even later. It’s in the 18th century that the sitar and tabla appear.

RAJAGOPALAN: They appear in your story, right?

SCHOFIELD: They do.

RAJAGOPALAN: This is part of the story on how what we now consider as the classical instruments are actually very late entrants. 

SCHOFIELD: Yes, absolutely. Actually, by the time you get to the period I’m talking about, the 18th century, you have all the ragas, you have all the talas. They’re not quite the same in the 16th and 17th century as they are by the end of the 18th century. That’s when they really formulate what we know today.

You have dhrupad, you have khayal, you have tappa, you have the sung ghazal sung in Persian, and then increasingly in this language that becomes known as Urdu. By the end of the 17th century, you have the great-great-grandson of the great Tansen of Gwalior, a man called Ras Baras Khan, who says, “The way these ragas and raginis are related to each other doesn’t make sense. I’m going to make up my own musical connections, and this is my raga, raginis system.”

He says, “The 92 talas, they don’t make any sense. Nobody plays the 92 talas. Here are the 11 that are actually in current practice.” He says, “Nobody understands what the syllables of tarana mean. This is what they mean.” He gives these sufi understandings of the syllables of nom-tom alap for the first time in the 17th century. After that, in the early 18th century, we get the sitar and the tabla.

The early 19th century, we get the sarod, Sarangi continues. Rudra veena continues, but it’s actually really after 1857 that it disappears because it is the instrument associated with the Mughal musicians, and they refuse to teach it to people who are not members of the family.

Raga Style and Persian Influences

RAJAGOPALAN: I want to get into all the delicious stories in the book, including Tansen’s grandson, great-grandson, great-great-grandson, all of those things. Before that, can you talk to us a little bit about the raga style and the Persian influences that started coming in?

The cliffs notes version that I understand is the Sanskritized idea of the raga is very sonic and very much about the rasa, which is what you were describing, but the Persian influences started coming in. It almost becomes this fantastical metaphysical thing. The raga is now its own thing, which may be quite different from what was on paper or what it is sonically or methodically. How does this come about and why does it still persist in what’s going on today?

SCHOFIELD: This is super complicated, of course. It’s complicated by the fact that when we say Persian, we are actually referring to the language, and what we forget is that India was part of Persianate world. Persian was spoken and used extremely widely in India from about 1,000 CE, or Christian era, right through until 1837 when it was still the official language of the East India Company. They only replaced it with English in 1837, and there are still people who read Persian throughout the Indian subcontinent—nowhere near as many as used to.

Persian was this enormous lingua franca that crossed from what is now Xingcheng in China all the way across to Turkey, where it was extremely important to the Ottoman court, right down into the south of India. The nawabs of Arcot and the Marathas in Thanjavur were conversant in Persian. It’s a language, rather than it being necessarily what we’re talking being about Iranian culture, or even the maqam.

There’s a whole set of melodic modes belonging to west and central Asia, or what we now think about as Iran and the -stans and so on, called maqam. It’s also the word that’s used for Arabic classical maqam and also Turkish. There’s an amazing section in one 17th-century Persian-language music treatise on Hindustani music, the Tuḥfat al-Hind, chapter 5, where it sets out all the Persian maqams that this author knew about that were being used in India.

He uses the word ajam, which means that he’s actually talking about the ones coming from Iran. We do know a little bit about that, but basically what happens is musicians love novelty. You’ve got these kalāwants sitting around playing the rabab, and they’ve got this guy there who’s just arrived from Herat in Afghanistan, or from Mashhad in Iran. We know these people were there because they’re in the Ain-i-Akbari. Abul Fazl writes about them being present at Akbar’s court. They’re hanging around, and they’re jamming together.

One of them goes, “there’s this really cool maqam that’s got a three-quarter tone Ri, second scale degree, and this is what it sounds like.” This then enters the record as something that some of these Persian writers were called ghazal thaath  as in ghazal scale. You can play maqams on the Bin. You can play raga on the Persian tanboor.

You get this mixing, and it’s about what people like. There are ragas like Zeelaf, for example, and Hameer, and Hijaj which actually come from the maqams. Hijaj  is hijaz maqam, but completely modified into Hindustani style, and used to sing dhrupad to Krishna or whatever. You get talas as well. Sūrfākhta which is really common among the qawwals, it comes from usūl-fākhta which is the Persian usul, or rhythmic cycle,fākhta and it’s the same, but again, used to perform Hindustani music. You get this incredible mixing there on a practical basis.

In terms of ideology, I think what you have is this mixing. There’s a book called Tellings and Texts, which I co-edited with a beautiful colleague of mine, Francesca Orsini, who’s a professor of Hindi and Urdu. My piece is called “Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika.” The question I asked there—what did it mean for somebody who’s not originally born in India necessarily, what does it mean for them to actually really understand what it feels like, what it should feel like to listen to raga Dhanashree or Kedar, which had this very specific emotional affix?

I came up with this idea of affinity. There’s this kind of experiential common ground between performers and listeners of raga, and performers and listeners of maqam, which centers on the idea of—in, Persian ishq and in Sanskrit, sringara.

RAJAGOPALAN: Sringar ras.

SCHOFIELD: Right. In fact, the late Harold Powers, who’s an expert on raga and ragamala, used to say, actually, the ragas and raginis, they’re really all about one rasa. They’re all different aspects of sringara. We can see this too with things like the nayika-bheda, this idea that you have this catalog of heroines in poetry. Of course, this ragamala poetry as well, which is incredibly beautiful, and Sanskrit and Brajbhasha. 

You describe a particular heroine in a particular moment of sringara. Is this love in separation? Is this love in union? Is this the moment when the lover comes? Is this the moment, like in raag Lalit where they’ve had a night of passion, he’s sneaking out of the bed to go back to his other wife?

RAJAGOPALAN: They’re all shades, but we call it Virah rasa or we call it Veer raas or we call it Shringar raas and so on.

SCHOFIELD: Yes. There’s this emotional common ground there, and I think that’s a big part of it. I think also there’s another thing going on, which is that, the idea that ragas and raginis have power, and that they have specific types of affective power, is rooted in this 15th and 16th century locally in Shaivism and in Tantra. If you go further south to the Deccan, you find these paintings and these descriptions of ragas and raginis that are extremely tantric. 

And if you look at paintings of raga sāvēri—if you look at one in the 18th century, yes, she will be enticing snakes, but she may also have some other animals at her feet or so. She may have a top, and she may be very beautiful, but in paintings from the Deccan, she is a yogini, and she is floating, and she’s got these huge cobras, and red vermilion background, and dreadlocks, and she is absolutely a powerful divine tantric being.

I think what you get with the coming of the Mughals is the transformation of these ideas of power into something that’s much more about worldly power, and beautiful clothes, and extremely expensive pearls, and extremely refined painting. For both Rajput and Mughal painting, you get a great refinement. It dilutes the actual genuine power to move.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, but this not surprising. In every kind of society where there is a turning of power or there’s a new elite in town, they will appropriate some of the high culture and merge it with whatever they consider the high status, high culture of their own. 

How much is it about hallucinogens and intoxicants? Were they all just drunk? [I] imagine these ragas to take some other kind of bodily, almost humanly form, or am I over-reading it?

The Influence of Intoxicants

SCHOFIELD: Well, there are some actually great books about intoxicants in the Rajput and Mughal world, because of course, wine was readily available and used as a means of approaching the divine beloved. There was Persian poetry that’s all about what is not just metaphorical.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, they were consuming a lot of it.

SCHOFIELD: Of course, everybody was consuming bhang, and hashish, et cetera, opium, Jehangir  notoriously addicted to it. This was a problem. It was regarded as a problem. You shouldn’t be giving away all your worldly power to drugs or to women or, indeed, to music. You need to have control over these things otherwise you’re not a worthy prince. Basically, you should have your kingdom stripped from you if you spend too much time doing these things, but nonetheless, that is there. There is a question, if you’re a real music lover, do you actually need these things to go into an ecstatic stage just by listening?

RAJAGOPALAN: No, you’re absolutely right. It’s just a question of the people who are writing about it, it’s like, what are they smoking?

SCHOFIELD: Oh, it’s wild.

Aurangzeb and Other Courtly Characters

RAJAGOPALAN: I want to pick up on something you said at the end, which is, you shouldn’t be addicted to opium and drowning in music. You should have your princely powers stripped away from you. This is a pretty controversial thing in India even today. The central figure there is Aurangzeb. The first question is, did Aurangzeb just kill all the arts and the music of that time? There are multiple versions of this. One is absolutely he did. In fact, his name is now [a] metaphor for someone who snubs the arts.

The other version is that no, he was actually quite the music lover and patronized a lot of these musicians and poets in his court, but it was much later in his life that he changed and had a very different religious and spiritual experience and also a different relationship with power. What is going on with Aurangzeb? Maybe now we can talk a little bit more about all these folks in the court and who’s singing and what’s going on and Khushal Khan and all of those fun characters in your book.

SCHOFIELD: I need to preface this by saying that what I’m about to say does not mean that Aurangzeb was a good person. In fact, my view is that they were all awful in comparison to modern understandings of what makes a good ruler.

RAJAGOPALAN: Even a good person; they all kill their brothers and things like that. These are not pleasant people.

SCHOFIELD: These are not pleasant people. It is actually the latter. The sources are really, really clear on this. Actually, even if you just look at how the modern-day gharānās talk about their ancestry, they all trace their ancestors, father and son, back to the code of Akbar and to Tansen. 

In an orally transmitted tradition, if you kill music entirely for 50 years—that’s not possible. It’s not possible to have an unbroken transmission. I actually went into this for my Ph.D. with an open mind thinking about, what did happen? It turns out that it’s really clear from all of the sources that music continued without any hindrance. Aurangzeb himself was a great music lover. He married no fewer than three courtesans tawaif. They weren’t called tawaif at the time. One of whom, Udaipuri Bai, became the darling of his old age. One of whom, of course, Hirabai Zainabadi, had an incredibly important and influential role in his decision the year he turned 50 to turn his ears and eyes away from worldly things. He loved music. He was extremely knowledgeable about it.

There were several treatises in Persian written to him and dedicated to him throughout his reign. The last one being by Tansen’s great-great-grandson, Ras Baras Khan in 1697, and he died 10 years later, so it’s really late. What happens? So the solar year that a man turned 50 in Mughal India was the year that they believed was the threshold of old age, which I’ve just passed, by the way. 

RAJAGOPALAN: You don’t look it.

SCHOFIELD: I’m now on the threshold of old age. What do you do if you are somebody who cares about their legacy and somebody who cares about what they’re going to say to the Almighty if they’re a Muslim or about their reincarnation? What do you do when you are facing old age? You get your worldly affairs in order. You stop doing the things that are distracting you from your worldly duty and your piety. If you are an alcoholic, you give up alcohol.

What he does is he gives up listening to—it’s a really complicated thing—not to singing. He continues to listen to recitation and commends to his sons listening to qawwals in the evening, but he stops listening to music that’s accompanied by instruments. Of course, this then has a knock-on effect because he decides to stop doing all sorts of things, and he’s the emperor. He’s the arbiter of what everybody else is supposed to do, and so this becomes a big deal that he’s given up music.

All that actually happens is that cultural arbitration, the person who is the main patron, becomes his son, Muhammad Azam Shah, who is famous as a khayal singer, and he also hosted in his atelier a young sadarang who becomes the greatest dhrupad singer and khayal composer of the 18th century. He got his start with Muhammad Azam Shah, the royal prince, in the late 17th century under Aurangzeb during the time when he supposedly banned music.

He didn’t ban it, he stopped listening to it himself, which had a really important ideological impression, but if it were, I don’t know, the North Korean dictator saying there will be no more music, then there would be no more music, right?

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.

SCHOFIELD: It wasn’t that. It was, “I personally am addicted to music. I love music so much that it’s such a distraction. I’m giving it up.”

RAJAGOPALAN: I think I completely understand your point about how now this is changing the relative status of how music is heard and experienced, not just in his court, but also all his courtiers because they are the patrons of all these musicians. The way I interpreted what’s in your book is the patronage didn’t end. It was just the audience changed, but it’s not like they were suddenly out of a home. In fact, the role also changed.

When I read modern-day commentary on the great musicians and dancers of that time, we read a lot about the tawaifs and the courtesans and how they exerted this very important power. They were power brokers of their time through sexual favors and just the way they networked through that particular society. But also, the male musicians seem to have been important power brokers because in your book, you talk about how Khushal Khan Gunsamundra actually tips the odds in favor of Aurangzeb over his brother, Dara Shikoh. This is a story I had never heard before.

SCHOFIELD: It’s an amazing story, isn’t it? It’s when I actually found in these tazkiras, in these lives of people, in this case, tazkiras of musicians, lives of musicians. Nobody had ever heard this story before. You know what? I don’t even know whether or not it’s true because all I know is that this was something that everybody a generation later firmly believed about Khushal Khan. For those of you who’ve not cared to read the book, Khushal Khan was the great-grandson of Tansen.

RAJAGOPALAN: Great-grandson of Tansen.

SCHOFIELD: He was the chief musician to Shah Jahan, and hugely fated, but an incredible musician. His son was Ras Baras Khan, who I’ve already talked about, who was Aurangzeb’s chief musician and also wrote the Shams al-Aswāt, the treatise. He was also the teacher of another major theorist who was a nobleman called Mirza Raushan Zamir, who wrote the most beautiful translation of a Sanskrit work, Ahobala Sangīta-pārijāta, which is just amazing. Working in this very intellectual milieu—but he loved money, so he would get showered in rupees whenever he performed. It was huge sums of money.

The story goes that in 1653, he saw a way to make quite a bit of money because Shah Jahan had this bit with his commander in chief, Amir-ul-mulk, about who would become the next emperor after Shah Jahan. Of course, Shah Jahan favored Dara Shikoh for fairly obvious reasons.

RAJAGOPALAN: He had four sons.

SCHOFIELD: He had four sons. The Mughals did not practice primogeniture, so it could actually have been any of them. For a Mughal prince, what you had to do, and this is Munis Faruqui’s brilliant book on the Mughal princes that I’m talking about, you had to start building alliances and making friends with all the powerful noblemen and so on, and you had to have really good emotional intelligence. Plus, you had to impress people with your knowledge of both sword and pen. You had to show that you were a really amazing military commander.

Shah Jahan kept Dara at court and didn’t really let him display his—but he was perfectly fine with the sword, but he was kept at court, and he was pampered. He was also really arrogant and rude to all of Shah Jahan’s nobles, so they didn’t like him very much. This did not set him up well. Whereas, Aurangzeb was a real scrapper, and Shah Jahan didn’t like him, so kept sending him to the Deccan to fight his wars, where he did a very good job of fighting wars. He was much better placed to become the emperor in the inevitable war of succession that broke out in 1657.

RAJAGOPALAN: Went on for about what, a year, two years?

SCHOFIELD: Went on for a year. Then Aurangzeb I [Alamgir I] killed all his brothers and put Shah Jahan in Agra Fort for the rest of his life but didn’t kill his father, interestingly. Anyway, the story goes, Shah Jahan has this bet with the commander in chief, and he says, “Who is going to become the emperor?” The commander in chief thinks to himself, “It’s going to be Aurangzeb, but I can’t say that because I’ll get my head chopped off by Shah Jahan.” He says, “Whoever has this particular brilliant revenue officer called Murshid Quli Khan in his retinue will become emperor.”

Shah Jahan puts him into Dara Shikoh’s entourage. Murshid Quli Khan is treated really badly by Dara and so goes back to the commander in chief. Anyway, Aurangzeb hears about this guy who’s really good with running revenue departments, and he wants him in the Deccan to run things. The commander in chief doesn’t know what to do and doesn’t want to ask Shah Jahan because he will be making his own prophecy come true if he asks Shah Jahan, “Can you give him to Aurangzeb?” 

At a drunken party, the chief musician Khushal Khan hears about this. He overhears this and he said, “Oh, by the way, I can fix that for you. If you give me 100,000 rupees, then I’ll fix it for you.” What he does is on Nowruz, the Persian New Year, he’s standing in his appointed place on the carpet in front of the throne, and he looks at the commander in chief and says, “Okay.” He plays ragini todi. Of course, what todi does is calms everything down, puts everybody into an ecstatic trance state, like the animals that she’s supposed to seduce with her rudra veena and everything.

While Shah Jahan is in this trance, Khushal Khan, the musician, indicates now is the time to get him to sign the piece of paper. He signs the piece of paper not knowing what he’s doing. The next day, the revenue officer comes up and says, “Thank you for my release. I’m going to go to Aurangzeb now. Can I have my robe?” Because they had these official robes of release. Shah Jahan went, “What have I done?” He couldn’t do anything because he would be admitting that Khushal Khan had so much power over him that he’d made him do something against his will.

RAJAGOPALAN: Or that he doesn’t read his papers, both of which are terrible.

SCHOFIELD: Both of which are terrible. For me, the moral of the story is, don’t sign anything without reading the fine print.

RAJAGOPALAN: Don’t sign anything while listening to really great music. I think that might be part two.

SCHOFIELD: Yes. If you’re off your head on music, don’t sign the piece of paper. Of course, what he’s done, what Shah Jahan’s done, is he’s signed his favorite son’s death warrant by giving the revenue officer to Aurangzeb. Yes, then that’s it.

RAJAGOPALAN: What happens to Khushal Khan after that? At some point, the jig is up, right?

SCHOFIELD: Oh, absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: Shah Jahan eventually figures out what happens.

SCHOFIELD: Yes. He’s completely out of favor. He’s out of favor for the last few years of Shah Jahan’s reign. Of course, Aurangzeb, when he comes to the throne, showers him with favors and money and everything else, at least into the 1670s. There’s documented records of him giving him gifts for the death of his brother, Bhupat, and so on.

RAJAGOPALAN: Also, his son is completely patronized through the court, who eventually writes and so on.

SCHOFIELD: Yes. Ras Baras Khan then, after Khushal Khan dies, and we don’t know exactly when he dies, becomes chief musician, and then writes this treatise where this is three pages of praise to Aurangzeb on the front.

Aurangzeb’s Demise and Its Effect on Music

RAJAGOPALAN: You’ve set us up in a really nice way because we think of the decline of the Mughal Empire with Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, but it takes a while. It’s not overnight. Part of it happens through the sacking of Delhi and all the pillage and plunder of, first, Nadir Shah, and then Abdali. This is all happening over a period of decades, so somewhere between 1707 and Battle of Plassey. That’s 50 years. That’s a really long time.

The weird thing is, it seems like the courtesans, the musicians, the artists, the poets are doing great during this time. What is going on after the decline of Aurangzeb? Is there any truth to the fact that it’s actually Aurangzeb’s demise which makes it suddenly okay and high status to bring all these musicians back into vogue, or is it just that was the time? What is going on?

SCHOFIELD: It’s business as usual, really. Do you mind if I read a little bit?

RAJAGOPALAN: I would love for you to read.

SCHOFIELD: This is the opening of the first chapter. This is where I start, and I start in 1753. This is just before it all goes really horribly wrong: “It was the fifth year of Ahmad Shah’s reign. Half a decade had passed since the last Mughal emperor to hold any real power, Muhammad Shah Rangile, who died in 1748, had died. Sitting at home in Panipat, north of Delhi, Inayat Khan Rasikh had just finished putting the final touches to his latest literary work: a set of musical biographies. It was something entirely new in Hindustan. Given the enthusiastic reception of the first-ever biographies of Urdu poets that had just stormed through the Delhi salons, he hoped it would prove popular. For times were uncertain in the Mughal capital. The urbane residents of this cosmopolitan city had shrugged off the 1739 invasion of the Persian Emperor Nadir Shah with sangfroid, his attempted massacre of Delhi’s population notwithstanding. The 1730s and ’40s burst with new life on the cultural front, with waves of innovation in Urdu poetry, musical composition, and painting, enrapturing audiences on a daily basis in Delhi’s select assemblies. This was the age of the poets Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda; of musicians Nimat Khan Sadarang and Firoz Khan Adarang; of courtesan Nur Bai, and of Taqi bhagat; of painters Kalyan Das and Mir Kalan Khan—a golden age looked back upon with bittersweet delight half a century later as the last embers of precolonial power sputtered and died. 

“But Nadir Shah’s brief incursion had exposed the threadbare nature of the Mughal emperor’s new clothes for all to see. By the 1730s the resurgent Marathas had already diverted the rivers of revenue from central India that had once poured into Mughal coffers. Nadir Shah may have torn away the best of the Mughal treasures, but it was his stripping of Muhammad Shah’s dignity that triggered the Mughals’ own provincial viceroys in Hyderabad, Awadh, and Bengal likewise to look to their own interests—from 1739, they no longer remitted taxes back to the center. The denizens of Delhi kept calm and largely carried on, at least until Muhammad Shah’s death. But it wasn’t long before the effects of this disappearing revenue made themselves felt keenly in the pockets, indeed the very bones, of Delhi’s cultivated elites.”

RAJAGOPALAN: I started reading some of the poetry from that time after I read your book the first time, and it reminds me of Mir Taqi Mir’s lines: Dil O Dilli dono agar hain kharab, par kuch luft iss ujde ghar mein bhi hain. How do I translate that? “Both my heart and Delhi may be completely in ruins, but there’s some delight one can take in this ravaged ruination.”

SCHOFIELD: Yes, absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: Is that a good translation?

SCHOFIELD: It’s a beautiful translation. I’ve actually written another article about the anxieties of all of these, of Mir, but also a minor Mughal official who is a musician called Ziauddin, about the devastation of Delhi because what happens in this time? 1753, everything’s still basically intact and then Abdali invades and invades and invades, and then you get the Battle of Panipat in 1761, which actually causes basically everybody who’s got any prospects to leave.

They don’t necessarily all leave, that’s one of the points of the book, is that there’s still a substantial number of people who stay in Delhi, but anybody who’s got any prospects elsewhere goes to Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur, everywhere but Delhi, at least for a period of time. Even Shah Alam II, the emperor, is exiled from Delhi between 1759 and 1772, and he’s placed back on the throne by the Marathas and then is blinded in his own throne room in 1788 by Ghulam Qadir. It’s a mess.

RAJAGOPALAN: I don’t mean to take Mir’s line so seriously, but if I pull on that thread, was the plunder by Nadir Shah and Abdali, in hindsight, one of the best things that happened to Hindustani classical? What it seems to have done is it’s just spread it across North India. It’s going now from Delhi to Calcutta, even to Thanjavur in the south. All of these musicians, they need patrons. Now these patrons—because all the local chieftains, there’s the power struggle, and whether it’s Lucknow or Awadh or Calcutta, they all have important zamindars, minor monarchs, even some East India Company officials who are fluent in Persian and want to have these big durbars and courts of their own.

It seems like all these musicians went to these places and kicked off their own gharanas of sorts and assimilated the local influences. In hindsight, now, Hindustani music is, one, so much more diverse, so much more rooted, not in one place, but across a number of places, and so much more syncretic.

SCHOFIELD: Yes, absolutely. That’s exactly it. It’s two things. Actually, Nadir Shah doesn’t seem to be a problem. Nobody really cares about that, which is interesting, because we always say, “Oh, it was Nadir Shah.” Actually, it was Ahmad Shah Abdali Durrani, the Afghan warlord. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, so Nadir Shah basically is just exposing the weakness, that there’s a really big problem, and takes all the money away. The emperor has no clothes.

SCHOFIELD: Yes, and takes the best treasures and so on. The Marathas had already stopped that coming back. Murshid Quli Khan, [a] different Murshid Quli Khan.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, [a] different one. Yes.

SCHOFIELD: Bengal has already stopped sending stuff back.

RAJAGOPALAN: The one who set up Murshidabad after his name.

SCHOFIELD: Yes, exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: That one.

SCHOFIELD: Exactly. Safdar Jang, of course, who is the nawab of Awadh, is actually the prime minister. He’s the vizier. He’s still there, but Imad-ul-Mulk sends him away and he dies in 1752, ’53. Basically, what happens, if we just wind things back a little bit to 1707, there’s a series of emperors, and weak ones, that are puppets for various factions. There’s a great book by Abhishek Kaicker on this period. What happens when you get to Muhammad Shah is all of a sudden you get this 20-year period, from 1719 to ’48, 30 years—not 20, yes, nearly 30 years—where everything is calm again and all the culture is still pretty much intact, so you get this new golden age.

They’re all, of course, looking back and going, “Oh, well, wasn’t everything wonderful in the 17th century when everything was really great?” Which is why they write these biographies of musicians. Then you get the Nadir Shah to Abdali, and particularly Abdali invasions and they all scatter. What happens is they scatter to places with money and particularly, if you take Lucknow and Hyderabad. Mir and Surda, they both go to Lucknow, so do a lot of the best musicians and courtesans go to Lucknow. A number go to Hyderabad.

They set up shop there and they start innovating in ways that are attractive to the local nawabs, nizams, rajas, because they want their own stamp on this tradition, but they also want the traditions of local Delhi because they’re setting themselves up as the new Mughals. The nizams in Hyderabad continue to call themselves Mughals right into the 19th century. They want this prestige product from Mughal Delhi.

RAJAGOPALAN: Is this one of the reasons why dhrupad becomes less relevant and khayal becomes more relevant? Because it’s more lyrical and lends itself more to different kinds of interpretations and improvisations in a way that dhrupad seems very classical?

Traveling Musicians and the Spread and Rise of Different Forms

SCHOFIELD: Yes, that’s really complicated, because, actually, khayal rises to popularity in the middle of the 17th century, the 1660s. It’s actually before all of this. What happens is that Sadarang, who was a kalawant—so the kalawants are the hereditary musicians who own dhrupad, rudra veena, Indian rabab, and dhrupad-related genres like holi, et cetera. They only sing that in the 17th century. In the 17th century, the qawwals—they’re the ones who own khayal and tappa and other related genres, and the singing of the ghazal in a classical form. Sadarang learns khayal and he writes his new style of khayal, and it becomes all the rage in the middle of the 18th century.

RAJAGOPALAN: He’s really it.

SCHOFIELD: He is it.

RAJAGOPALAN: I wouldn’t even call him a trendsetter. He’s almost like the father of the school that emerges for the next 200 years after him.

SCHOFIELD: There was a big rivalry in the middle of the 20th century between Vilayat Khan and Ravi Shankar. He’s like the Ravi Shankar or the Vilayat Khan, or like the-- [crosstalk]

RAJAGOPALAN: Actually, he’s like Baba Allauddin Khan, right. The guy who sprouts this entire tree of musicians. 

SCHOFIELD: Yes, exactly. If Baba Allauddin Khan was as famous as Ravi Shankar. 

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s true, yes, which is a shame that he’s not as famous. I think that’s people’s fault, but yes.

SCHOFIELD: Oh, yes, absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: Also, recording technology and stuff like that. Yes, never mind that. Sorry, I sidetracked you.

SCHOFIELD: Yes. You’ve got Sadarang doing this with khayal and teaching the courtesans this particular style of khayal and what you get in the 18th century with all this movement. It’s important to know that this movement was there before. You have people moving around. Mirza Nathan, general in Shah Jahan’s army in the 1630s, goes to Bengal where he’s fighting in Arakan, which is now Rakhine in Myanmar, and a really long way from Delhi. He takes his kalawants with him and he uses them as emissaries back to the center.

Musicians travel with their patrons, and they travel on their own, and qawwals travel from shrine to shrine, and so on. This always happened. There were always travel routes. What happens is they’re all on the move in this period. This means that there’s all sorts of extremely talented people who were not necessarily originally regarded as elite, but who can make names for themselves and they can pretend to be something that they’re not when they reach Murshidabad or whatever.

You get these troops of courtesans who are unbelievably talented and who travel, and they start out in Punjab or whatever. By the time they get to Hindustan, they’re Kashmiri, because if they’re Kashmiri, they’re more beautiful, and they’re better singers and they have more—et cetera.

RAJAGOPALAN: I love that these stereotypes have lasted 250 years.

SCHOFIELD: I know, it’s great, isn’t it? Like all the Circassians who were so spectacularly beautiful. This, therefore, is the century where you get the rise and rise and rise of the sitar, the tabla, and dancers of tawaif, who all have this composition that they use called the gat. This is the rise of the gat. It starts in the early part of the 18th century. You can trace it through work of people like Allyn Miner, Jim Kippen, Margaret Walker, with dancers, sitar players, and tabla players. This completely transforms how taal is written about and thought about in the century, completely.

It’s originally based on Sanskrit - divisive feet and meters, a little bit like the meter of an Urdu poem or whatever. It’s divisive by the time you get to the 18th century. It’s additive in the 17th century. That’s all because of this: It’s the rise of the gat. 

RAJAGOPALAN: We’re still playing that. That’s literally like what all your kathak players, tabla players—everyone will learn the gat.

SCHOFIELD: They’re learning Masitkhani gat, and they’re learning Firozkhani gat from this period. You get that. You also get things like tappa, which was originally a form of khayal in Punjabi and part of the qawwals.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. It’s still sung today at weddings and by women, and the folk is all tappas, even now.

SCHOFIELD: Oh, it’s fantastic.

RAJAGOPALAN: I love it.

SCHOFIELD: I love tappa.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s very naughty. 

SCHOFIELD: Oh, so naughty. It’s wonderful. It becomes gentrified, and it becomes all the rage in Lucknow because what happened is there’s a man called Taj Khan qawwal, and he is the chief qawwal in Delhi in the 1740s. An extremely racy travel writer, Dargah Kuli Khan, writes all about Taj Khan qawwal, and his three sons, go to Lucknow where they set up as the main khayal singers in Lucknow in Asif Ud-Daulah’s time. One of their sons, Ghulam Nabi Shauri becomes famous for completely rewriting tappa, and he does so because he’s this kind of charismatic genius, but he also rewrites it in several different languages. It’s no longer just in Punjabi, it’s now in Khari Boli, it’s now in Brajbhasha, it’s now in Kashmiri. It’s now in all of these other languages, and it becomes something that Lucknow can call its own.

Something similar then happens to thumri, which starts out in Delhi, as far as we can work out, in the first part of the 19th century, and it’s a gentrified folk form. Then these two tawaif from Rampur turn up at the court of Wajid Ali Shah in the 1830s and ’40s, and he falls in love with them and he marries them because he married basically everybody with all his muta wives.

Tomri then becomes associated with Wajid Ali Shah, but what’s really interesting—and this is from a book called The Scattered Court by Richard David Williams, which is about Hindustani music in Bengal, fabulous book. He found that Wajid Ali Shah actually kept writing dhrupads and khayals, and all sorts of things. In fact, his senior wife Khasmahal, who went with him to Meteer Burj, wrote more thumri than Wajid Ali Shah did.

Development of Tomri

RAJAGOPALAN: Tell me a little bit more about thumri because this is one thing where the thumri that were sung a couple hundred years ago are still sung today. The ones in Brajbhasha, I can listen to that stuff today on YouTube and Spotify, that took place in a concert maybe 20–25 years ago. What is going on with this incredibly tight continuation of the thumri in multiple languages? The language somehow doesn’t seem to matter but the style has really, really persisted.

SCHOFIELD: Tomri, the ang of thumri is incredibly influential, in part, because it gets associated with tawaif. Again, the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise of the tawaif, and then, of course, the Lucknow tawaif gets huge buckets of nostalgia poured all over her.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, they are the Meena Kumari and the Madhubala of their time, right? They are the absolute heroines.

SCHOFIELD: Then they’re played by Meena Kumari and Madhubala. 

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s true actually, that’s hilarious. 

SCHOFIELD: They’re just incredibly important, but the thing about the thumri and other kinds of genres that are sung in thumri style within these courtesan lineages, and then by people they train and so on, is that they are very, very emotional in a way that khayal and dhrupad are not. With dhrupad and khayal, what’s really, really important is the raag. The raag is fundamentally important and expressing its drama. 

The raag is the most important thing with dhrupad and khayal, and it’s conveying the emotions of the raag through perfect sonic representation. With dhrupad, yes, the song lyrics are also really important in dhrupad, and they help to convey the meaning of the raag, but it really is fundamentally important—it’s about the raag.

With khayal, it’s also about the raag. The raag is also important. The lyrics are less important depending on your gharana, but what’s really important is the virtuosity with which you sing the raag. With thumri, the raag is important, but it’s less important than the emotional expression of the words.

I have recently been studying the ghazal, not in any formal way, with the incredible thumri singer, Vidya Rao, and her teacher was Naina Devi, and Naina Devi’s teacher, of course, was Begum Akhtar. It’s this incredible lineage going back to the last great Lucknow courtesan. I’m really, at this point, trying to understand how the Urdu ghazal works traditionally as a song form.

What does the addition of raag do to poetry? How does it change its meaning or constrain its meaning, et cetera? What’s revelatory about Vidya Rao’s singing, but also her writing about thumri and other forms, is her focus on crafting the words of a really simple thumri or a really complex ghazal. You sing each of the words to bring out different meanings, and you can bring out all of these songs. All of these song lyrics have multiple meanings, multiple layers of meanings.

When you have a really opaque line, if you just pull out the meaning of the first word, it could be in a different relation to the next word, and so, because it’s so much about expressing emotion—

RAJAGOPALAN: Through lyrically and not just through music.

SCHOFIELD: —the emotion of the lyrics, as well as through the song, it becomes the basis of popular form. That’s why it’s so popular.

RAJAGOPALAN: Is this like the thumri is the equivalent of the poetry leaving the court and being recited by fakirs, right? This also is, I wouldn’t exactly say a dilution, but it’s just making a very classical form so much more accessible to people who don’t know high music and high culture. Then that’s what becomes mainstream and takes off. Is that a good way of thinking about it?

SCHOFIELD: It’s actually more complicated than that because it starts out as a folk song, and in Bhojpuri, a lot of them—

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, that’s right.

SCHOFIELD: —starts out as folk and then it becomes classicized, and then it’s gentrified, and then it becomes huge. Then with the advent of the recording and recording technology, and the first gramophone recordings in 1902, the first people who are singing on those are these very entrepreneurial women we know as tawaif. They’re the ones who embrace gramophone technology. The dhrupad singers aren’t doing it because no way they’re going to have anything to do with that.

RAJAGOPALAN: They have this idea that nothing can quite capture the sound and the spirituality of what’s going on and put it in a box, right? There’s a different problem going on with the dhrupad gharanas, and it’s not just about not teaching people the rubab or something. It’s like what they’re doing is like this divine connection that should not be adulterated in any form, which is so strange.

SCHOFIELD: Absolutely, but to give them their due, they’re also right because putting it on record completely transforms it into something else. It makes it a commodity. We are so used to thinking of music as a commodity. It’s actually really hard to think back to a time where you couldn’t buy and sell a record.

This means that it’s thumri and ghazal and these forms that are going into middle-class households, minus the slightly decadent body of the tawaif, which you might not want in your sitting room. That is what makes these lighter forms, regardless lighter forms that aren’t really, they’re really difficult.

RAJAGOPALAN: They’re very classical and difficult. 

SCHOFIELD: That’s what makes them huge.

What Makes Punjab So Different

RAJAGOPALAN: I want to talk about two different things. I’ll come to the tawaif in a minute, and you have some great stories in the book. I want to talk a little bit about Punjab for a minute. Punjab seems to be quite different. I can see a very clear connection of everything from Delhi to all the way to Calcutta, and even further south. What transmits from Delhi to Punjab and Lahore seems to be quite different.

One is, of course, the qawwal and the qawwali element. Second is the layakari, which is the rhythm, and the taal seems to be much more important and very different in Punjab and Lahore than what it is in other parts. Is this because of all the Sikh revolts and what’s going on in the politics there? Is it the language? Is it this interesting Sufi culture?

Why does rhythm become so important for the qawwals and the Punjabi music in a way that even now when you hear Bade Ghulam Ali Khan or someone, that style of layakari is just completely different from anything you would hear from people further east?

SCHOFIELD: I’m not sure there is an answer to the “why” question or that I have an answer to the “why” question, but what’s really important to note is that it’s pretty certain that the tabla originated in Punjab. The very first painting of tabla that we know of is by Nainsukh of Gulair in the Punjab Hill States. There’s a couple of beautiful paintings. One is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and it’s this beautiful painting of a tawaif on horseback following a prince. I can’t remember who it is. I think it’s from Jasruta actually, and she’s followed by a man who is playing tabla.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, lovely.

SCHOFIELD: On horseback. The best person writing about this is Jim Kippen. He writes about the evolution and the emergence of the tabla. It’s almost certain that it comes from Punjab. You actually have these really strong and different drumming traditions in Punjab coming through there.

RAJAGOPALAN: Which is interesting because the Punjab gharana is actually a pakhawaj gharana. It’s interesting that Punjab is also where the tabla originated.

SCHOFIELD: Pakhawaj also being huge. The other taal that seems to come from Punjab and then just becomes one of these pan-Indian taals is keharwa taal, which obviously we associate with Bhangra, but we have these fantastic paintings from the late 18th century of tawaif dancing keharwa, dressed as men. It’s the masculine. They hoist up their skirts, they tie them up with their dupattas like a kama band, and they put a turban on, and they dance as men to keharwa taal. This is coming from Punjab.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, fantastic.

SCHOFIELD: The other thing you need to remember too is that after 1857, Delhi is actually run from Punjab. Delhi is so close to Punjab. The distance to Lahore is not very far, and there were qawwals moving backwards and forwards between Delhi and Lahore all of the time. There’s a lot of connections there. There’s a really, really great book by a woman called Radha Kapuria on music in colonial Punjab. It’s Oxford University Press. She writes about the period from Ranjit Singh onwards. Certainly, this period, it’s where the innovation is coming from.

The Tawaif

RAJAGOPALAN: Now, I want to go back to the tawaif. You have this fantastic chapter on Khanum Jan and Mrs. Sophia Plowden. Again, honestly, Katherine, some of the stories in this book—we’ve never heard of these names. We never heard of these people. I didn’t even know that someone like Sophia Plowden existed until I read your book.

She is the wife of an East India Company officer who meets Khanum Jan, who’s one of the great tawaifs, and they seem to strike this incredible relationship. To our great fortune, Plowden is also a great diary and journal writer and seems to have preserved all of that stuff that you’ve somehow managed to unearth.

SCHOFIELD: I know. I was actually fortunate because musicologists found her tune book back in the early ’90s. It’s in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, which is actually where I live. Along with the tune book, there were these loose-leaf folios, which [have] beautiful little miniature paintings on them. Everybody just said, “Oh, it’s a series of miniature paintings, which might have lyrics on them that might be related to the songs.”

Anyway. I thought I’d go and have a look. Lo and behold, through a series of detective work that is described in the book, I identified the lyrics. They are the lyrics to the tunes that are in the tune book and have been able to reconstruct about a quarter of the songs and what they would have sounded like maybe to European ears.

The point being, it’s actually impossible to get back to the originals by just having the notation and the lyrics. We can have a go, but it will never be what it actually sounded like. It’s just too far. The Europeans made too many mistakes in writing down the tunes. I think mostly in terms of taal because they just didn’t understand any taals that were anything apart from three-three or four-four. 

RAJAGOPALAN: No. Also, Indian music doesn’t lend itself well to whatever the piano scale is. We have these tones and microtones between notes, and that’s where all the action is. Even if they put down the raag in some kind of a basic scale on paper, it’s not going to sound anything like what it actually sounds like. You’ve still managed to do something quite extraordinary.

SCHOFIELD: There was a huge amount of fun work that I did. I did it with a harpsichordist called Jane Chapman.

RAJAGOPALAN: Tell us the whole story about the harpsichord and what’s going on. It sounds like crazy historical fiction that I would watch on a Netflix show. Tell us the whole story.

The Stories of Sophia Plowden and Khanam Jan

SCHOFIELD: Basically, we’re at the court of Asif Abdullah in 1787–’88 and you have this English woman called Sophia Plowden. I have to remember to get her name right because her descendants are still with us. They still live in London. Her descendant, Geoffrey Plowden, and his daughter, Sophie—hello, if you’re listening. Geoffrey’s well into his 90s now.

It is amazing. Sophia, she was married to an East India Company officer. She was a very, very keen and talented amateur harpsichordist. The other thing that she did during her time in India was have seven children.

RAJAGOPALAN: I thought ten. Is it ten or seven?

SCHOFIELD: She had ten in total and she had—

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, wow.

SCHOFIELD: —seven while she was in India.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, my God.

SCHOFIELD: She must have been constantly breastfeeding and nursing. The most remarkable thing—so when I first was reading her journals, it was when I’d actually very recently given birth to my own son, so I was still nursing him. I was reading her accounts. So all her children came down with measles. Then they all came down with smallpox. Then everybody would come and have their children inoculated from the smallpox variolas. Then, “six o’clock in the morning, brought to bed of my seventh child. This time I’ve decided that I’m not going to give the child to the dai [nurse/nanny]. I’m going to nurse him myself.” I’m just reading this and just having so much sympathy with this woman and this precarious situation. All of her children survived, which is amazing.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, wow.

SCHOFIELD: The rest of her time she went around collecting the songs of what the British called nautch girls—from the Hindi word, nautch, for dance—and writing them down in her songbook and then learning them and singing them herself in the original languages, which she didn’t understand. Sometimes to harpsichord accompaniment. Sometimes in masquerade with a little band of Europeans all dressed up as tabla players and sarangi players and things. To our minds, it sounds absolutely dreadful. It sounds like blackface or something.

RAJAGOPALAN: Actually, I think it sounds fantastic. I want to be friends with her. I want to know what’s going on in that household. I want to be a fly on the wall. I want to hang out with this merry band of recreators. It sounds so fabulous.

SCHOFIELD: Mad people. I think the thing is, at the time, Shah Alam II, the emperor, actually made her a begum on the strength of her attempts for this kind of cultural rapprochement. It was actually really regarded as an amazing thing at the time. She goes to Lucknow with her husband, which is where she’s picked up all her best songs in the past. She wants to reconnect with Antoine Paulier, the Swiss mercenary. He had a really amazing nautch set or tawaifan.

She wants to reconnect with them to collect more of their songs. There was this new star diva in town called Khanam Jan. She just fell in love with Khanam Jan’s songs. She got Khanam Jan to come and sing all of these songs to her and write them down. There was a Goan Portuguese man there called John Braganza who helped her add a bass line. We have all of these songs, including a song that was written by Asaf-ud-daula, the nawab himself, which is in the collection. We have the tune for that. It is completely mad.

Khanam Jan herself was this extraordinary woman. We have what I believe is actually a novelized version of her life. She actually started out when she first appears on the scene in Kanpur, which of course the British called Cawnpore, in the British cantonment as a tawaif working to entertain the British officers and troops there. Then, of course, Lucknow calls. It’s much, much more glamorous, and, of course, it’s the success [crosstalk].

RAJAGOPALAN: Much more money. 

SCHOFIELD: Much more money. She moves there. There’s actually a satirical poem in verse written about her departure from Lucknow, which is in a fantastic book by Ian Woodfield called Music of the Raj, where he talks about her departure, and, in the book, she dies when she gets to Lucknow because—

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, no.

SCHOFIELD: —of course, the courtesan has to have a tragic ending. You can’t have a happy ending for a tawaif.

RAJAGOPALAN: Because otherwise, how can Meena Kumari perform her life if she has a happy ending?

SCHOFIELD: Exactly. Actually, in real life she goes on to have this incredibly successful career in Lucknow with this mixed environment. If anybody knows the famous painting, which is now in Tate Britain of Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, she went to those cock matches with all of those Europeans—

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, wow.

SCHOFIELD: —and nawabs and aristocrats and tawaif.

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s the interesting thing. All these nautch girls and tawaifs, they were not stuck in that gendered box that all the other women were stuck in. They could actually go from court. They could go to the races. They could do all of these interesting things, which makes them very fun characters.

SCHOFIELD: Oh, they’re great. What’s really amazing is that the Europeans actually recognized that they weren’t like wives in the Zenana, and they also weren’t “prostitutes.” This attitude, of course, changes dramatically by the time you get to the 19th century when the British lump them in with common prostitutes in the most appalling way. In the 1780s they’re regarded much like opera divas: really glamorous, really successful, you really want them at your parties, all of this kind of thing. They might be mistresses to men, but that doesn’t matter.

RAJAGOPALAN: That’s allowed too.

SCHOFIELD: It is allowed.

RAJAGOPALAN: It’s respectable in society, in fact—

SCHOFIELD: Absolutely.

RAJAGOPALAN: —in high society.

SCHOFIELD: Yes. Completely respectable and respected, and that’s fine. She’s much fun to write about, the pair of them.

RAJAGOPALAN: I love that chapter so much.

SCHOFIELD: There are of course, two more tawaif in the book. One of whom is of course the famous Mah Laqa Bai Chanda in Hyderabad. Which is really about her relationship with her ustad, who was one of these Delhi kalawants in Hyderabad. We’ve got this amazing collection of this man called Khushhal Anup—not to be confused with the previous Khushhal Khan—who puts together this incredible album of songs at about 2,000 in day and night raags, which tell us huge amounts actually about what was being performed and at what times and for whom at the court of the nizam of Hyderabad.

There’s also this incredible illustrated ragavala from the time, which is dedicated to this Maratha general Raja Raavrambha, who was the first joint patron of both Mahlaqa Bai and Khushhal Khan. It’s just fascinating. How do you get social and cultural history out of these quite technical materials? 

The other tawaif, of course, is the great Mayalee dancing girl from Jaipur and from Sambhar Salt Lake about whom—we know a lot about what kind of person she was. She was a bhagtan, an auspicious, a richly auspicious courtesan.

RAJAGOPALAN: Which the equivalent of the devdasis or something like that. 

SCHOFIELD: Exactly.

RAJAGOPALAN: Because that word, we hardly use that word anymore, but I think people are more familiar with devdasis. At that time, the Sambhar Lake was a really important place and—

SCHOFIELD: Hugely.

RAJAGOPALAN: —just massive amount of trade, and how it was basically providing salt across the board because salt mining was disgusting and expensive.

SCHOFIELD: Yes, exactly. Basically, if you don’t know Sambhar Salt Lake, it’s a lake that lies between Jaipur and Jodhpur. It was originally held in common by the two states. One of the things that my research shows, through this amazing person, is that it was a commons. Gandhiji also argued that salt is common. It’s needed for life on earth. It should be held in common by everybody. All the plants and animals and human beings that rely on salt to survive. We all have to have salt. We’d die without it. 

RAJAGOPALAN: [It] also had lots of issues. The Jodhpur and the Jaipur princes were constantly fighting over the share and the route it would take.

SCHOFIELD: Oh, my goodness.

RAJAGOPALAN: Salt was a meaningful commodity.

SCHOFIELD: It’s hugely a meaningful commodity, but it replenishes itself at the Salt Lake.

RAJAGOPALAN: Which is an advantage.

SCHOFIELD: Which is an advantage. Also of course the British recognized it as a moneymaking scheme.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, yes.

SCHOFIELD: They actually, a little bit later than this period grew a massive salt hedge.

RAJAGOPALAN: Oh, yes.

SCHOFIELD: A thousand miles long between them. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Do you know Anton Howes? He is a historian who’s been on the podcast, and he talked about the salt hedge and the salt mines in Bengal, and all the crazy things that happened. I think the listeners are familiar with this crazy story by now.

SCHOFIELD: This is prehistory to the salt hedge, which is basically the East India Company essentially operated as a protection racket like the mafia. What they would do is they’d take their superior army and plant them on your territory and say, “We will offer you military protection if you pay us heavy tribute and help us to quell thugy,” which was banditry. The British made up this weird ritual tantric murdery thing. If anybody’s seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and “Kali Ma, Shakti De.” He’s meant to be a thug. 

They did that to Jaipur and Jodhpur, and the other Rajput states in 1818. By 1835, Jaipur and Jodhpur basically had enough and were not giving them money. The East India Company went, “We are taking your one source of industrial revenue, Sambhar Salt Lake, until you pay us back.” The whole story unfolds out of the name of this bhagtan Mayalee dancing girl.

She appears in the margins of an account book from Sambhar Salt Lake, written by the superintendent of the lake. [There] is this weird note, which says she was paid in salt when she was supposed to have her salt stipend taken away from her and she was supposed to be paid in cash. Then six months later, he said, “We gave cash to Jaipur and Jodhpur, and then Jaipur and Jodhpur paid her in salt.”

I was like, okay, how is this woman so powerful? What does this salt mean if not only she defies the British superintendent of the lake and makes him give her 25 maunds , which is about 1,000 pounds of annual salt stipend in salt and not cash. Jaipur and Jodhpur make sure she gets it. She’s got control there too.

The whole story unfolds that there’s this incredible reliance on the salt, but it’s not just about money, and it’s not just about life. It’s actually a gift from the goddess of the lake to the people. They exist in a relationship of namak-halālī with the goddess and with the states of Jaipur and Jodhpur. If you break that salt bond of faithfulness to the salt and become namak-harāmī, then that’s horrific.

This woman, this auspicious woman, I have this hunch that actually when she was performing in her auspicious role at Sambhar Salt Lake, during all the festivals and things, she became in some sense an avatar of the goddess herself.

RAJAGOPALAN: My sense was, it would be her court or her mehfil where all the deals were being brokered.

SCHOFIELD: Oh, I bet. 

RAJAGOPALAN: Because it’s this neutral important place where no one can really fool around, and she’s also a divine presence. You can’t really shed blood and do other terrible things.

SCHOFIELD: Oh, I love that idea. The thing is, we can say anything we like, because literally all we know about—

RAJAGOPALAN: Let’s sell it to Netflix.

SCHOFIELD: I think it would make the best Netflix series. Because of course, there’s this whole other thing which happens. Which is that the young maharaja is assassinated by Jhuta Ram, who is the prime minister. Then Jhuta Ram tries to assassinate the agent Rajputana, Major Alves, and murders Martin Blake instead. Martin Blake is married to Wazir Khanum, who is the mother of Dagh Dehlavi , and of course her husband is Shams-ud-din, who murders William Fraser, the resident in Delhi.

There’s this real moment here in Delhi and Jaipur of rebellion against the British and trying to assassinate. Anyway, the British get on back on top of that but then there’s this series of strikes by the—I think they’re bā’orī, actually, kind of well builders and dam builders, and so on—at some point. Because Lieutenant Robert Morrieson, the last superintendent of the lake, is a horrific person. I’m perhaps not allowed to swear, but I would prefer to call him an extremely rude name on this podcast.

RAJAGOPALAN: You can swear.

SCHOFIELD: He was an asshole.

RAJAGOPALAN: We’ll keep it. We might have to bleep part of it, but we’ll keep most of it.

SCHOFIELD: He was so severe and horrendous to Indian people. He hated them, and he was part Indian himself, hated them so much that in 1857, in the middle of the mutiny, Sir Henry Lawrence sacked him as agent to Bharatpur because he was so awful to the locals. Imagine how bad you would have to be to be sacked in the middle of the mutiny.

Anyway, he’s the last superintendent of Sambhar Lake. They all go on strike against him. Then he has to row it back. It’s just this extraordinary series of things that are just revealed by the name of this one really important woman in the margins of an account.

RAJAGOPALAN: No, I really love it. One, I love learning about these people that we really don’t know that much about. The other part of it is, I think we always think of music and poetry and culture as entertainment, which is happening on the sidelines—nautch girls and tawaifs. I think we just forget how much it is part of the fabric of everyone’s day-to-day lives. Whether it is the qawwals, whether it is the fakirs, whether it is the nautch girls, whether it is the high priests of dhrupad, they’re all incredibly important, multifaceted people walking in and out of court and hanging out with the regular people and informing how something is written and how you can tell truth to the king but in the form of poetry or song, but you can’t quite say it directly.

This is the stuff that is just so delicious in your book and all your other work. Thank you so much for doing this. This was such a pleasure.

SCHOFIELD: Oh, I’m so glad you enjoyed it. I wrote it so that people would read it and enjoy it.

RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, [I] strongly recommend everyone reads this and all your other work. It’s very, very readable. Thank you, Katherine, for doing this. This was really such a joy to finally get to chat with you.

SCHOFIELD: It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.