Seminar #2

29 October 2024 | 2:00-4:00pm on Zoom &
in Lecture Room 1, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge

Katherine Butler Schofield (King’s College London)
“Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858.”

This seminar is designed as a reading and discussion session on the book of the same name (published by Cambridge University Press in 2023), which presents the first history of music and musicians in late Mughal India c.1748–1858. Based on a vast, virtually unstudied archive of Indian writings alongside visual sources, it takes the lives of nine musicians as entry points into six prominent types of writing on music in Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu and English, moving from Delhi to Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur and among the British. It shows how a key Mughal cultural field responded to the political, economic and social upheaval of the transition to British rule, while addressing a central philosophical question: can we ever recapture the ephemeral experience of music once the performance is over? These rich, diverse sources shine new light on the wider historical processes of this pivotal transitional period, and provide a new history of music, musicians and their audiences during the precise period in which North Indian classical music coalesced in its modern form.

Katherine Butler Schofield is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean. Working 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; Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; music and musicians at risk; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural. She has been Principal Investigator of a European Research Council Starting Grant (2011–15/16) and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2018), and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Historical Society. Her books include Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (CUP, 2023), Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India, with Francesca Orsini (Open Book, 2015), and Monsoon Feelings: a History of Emotions in the Rain, with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau (Niyogi, 2018).