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The TalkIn 1799, Mahlaqa Bai “Chanda”, “The Moon”, presented a book of her songs to the Deputy British Resident of Hyderabad, John Malcolm, in the middle of a music and dance party. Renowned as the first Indian courtesan to write a collection of Urdu poetry, she was equally famous for her affairs with powerful men at the Nizam’s court. Obscured by Mahlaqa Bai’s luminescence today is the man behind the Moon: her ustad Khushhal Khan “Anup”.
A hereditary musician in exile from Mughal Delhi, Anup left behind an enormous corpus of songs, several music-technical treatises, and an illustrated ragamala. In this lecture, I will use the illustrated writings of this single hereditary musician to unravel the stories of musical life, and the lives of these two extraordinary figures and their patrons, in Nizami Hyderabad c. 1780–1830. And in focusing on Khushhal Khan’s musicological writings, I also aim to dispel the myth that the hereditary ustads of North India were “illiterate”.
Katherine Schofield
Katherine Schofield is the multi-award-winning author of Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (Cambridge, 2024). She is Head of the Department of Music at King’s College London, where she is Professor of South Asian Music and History, specialising in early modern India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean.
Katherine has been Principal Investigator of a European Research Council Starting Grant (2011–16) and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2018), and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Historical Society. Working largely with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c. 1570–1860, Katherine’s research interests lie in South Asian music, visual art, and cinema; the history of Mughal India (1526–1858); empire and the paracolonial; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural.
She is the editor, with Francesca Orsini, of Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India (Open Book, 2015), and, with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau, of Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (Niyogi, 2018). Her new edited volume, with Margaret E. Walker, will be Hindustani Music Between Empires: Relational Histories, 1750–1900 (Primus, forthcoming 2026).
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Event Venue
Vidyaranya High School, Vidyaranya High School, Green Gates, Opposite the Secretariat, Hyderabad, India
Tickets
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