This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Hindustani music between Awadh and Bengal, c.1758-1905 Williams, Richard David Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 09. Oct. 2021 Hindustani music between Awadh and Bengal, c.1758-1905 RICHARD DAVID WILLIAMS Submitted in FulFilment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor oF Philosophy KING’S COLLEGE LONDON DECEMBER 2014 ABSTRACT This thesis explores the interaction between Hindustani and Bengali musicians and their patrons over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the convergence of Braj, Persianate, and Bengali musical cultures in Bengal after 1856. I stress how their intersection in Calcutta directed the course of Hindustani music from late Mughal to late colonial forms, and cultivated a sense of custodianship among elite Bengalis over the heritage of Hindustan. This thesis aims 1) to challenge the established narrative of total transformation from courtly musical patronage to a “modern” overtly “public” colonial sphere in the nineteenth century; 2) to draw attention to the importance of innovations in musical performance and epistemology in this period; 3) to engage a multilingual vernacular archive as evidence of the role of non-Bengali culture and connoisseurs in the formation of a Bengali cultural identity; and 4) to critique the historiography of “Muslim decadence” in late Mughal culture, and to qualify the marginalisation of Muslims in late nineteenth-century Hindu vernacular public spheres. Chapter One introduces the main themes of the thesis and its historiographical context. Chapter Two reconstructs the geography of musical circulation between Hindustan and eastern India over the eighteenth century as a background for subsequent developments. Chapter Three re-evaluates late Mughal and Nawabi aesthetics in relation to musical patronage, with a focus on Wajid cAli Shah (1822-1887), the last Nawab of Lucknow. Chapter Four reconstructs the Nawab’s court-in-exile in Calcutta (1856-1887) as a forum for innovation and interregional exchange. Chapter Five underlines the role of elite women in musical patronage, with a focus on the Queen of Lucknow, Khas Mahal, and her relationship to the gramophone recording artist Pyare Saheb. Chapter Six details how musicians from the Nawabi court found patrons in Bengal, and were instrumental to the cultivation of Calcutta’s music scene. Chapter Seven provides the first comprehensive critical reading of nineteenth- century Bangla writings on music (treatises and song collections). I conclude this thesis with a summary of how late Mughal musical knowledge and practices (in Hindustani, Persianate, and Bengali arenas) developed under colonialism, and complicate our sense of the formation of Indian “classical” music. 1 CONTENTS ABSTRACT 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 NOTES ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION 7 LIST OF FIGURES 10 MAP 11 CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 12 CHAPTER TWO: GeograpHies of musicaL excHange, c.1700-1830 37 c CHAPTER THREE: Wajid Ali SHaH and Nawabi decadence 82 CHAPTER FOUR: Music at Matiyaburj, 1856-1887 127 CHAPTER FIVE: Pardanishīn househoLds and music after Matiyaburj 176 CHAPTER SIX: Hindustani musicians and tHeir BengaLi patrons 207 CHAPTER SEVEN: Writing Hindustani MusicoLogy as BangLa Literature, 1818-1905 254 CHAPTER EIGHT: ConcLusion 298 APPENDIX: Summary BiograpHies of Musicians 305 BIBLIOGRAPHY 311 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS यों जग जो#त !पयूष मयूष उगे तम तौम नसे ततकालिहं । यों रतु ीषम भानु उगैं पुन सुषत ष र सारस जालिहं । बुंद परै बरषा रतु यों जर जात जवास कषी परपालिहं । यों कवदास कासक हैं सब व#न नसैं सुिमरे गनपालिहं । As the radiant light of immortality rises over the world And at once obliterates the mass of darkness, As the sun rises in the hot season Then dries up trees and lotuses in a blaze, As the raindrops fall in the wet season, Which protect the crops while the javāsa thistle dies, Such is the Illuminator, says Kavidas: All obstacles are destroyed when one invokes Ganesa. -- OPENING VERSE OF RĀGAMĀLĀ OF YASODANANDA SUKLA “KAVIDAS”, 1758 In the established tradition of the authors I have read over the course of researching this thesis, I would like to thank my patrons and teachers. This work was generously supported by the European Research Council, and is submitted as an output of the collaborative project “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the eastern Indian Ocean”. I am enormously grateful to the Principal Investigator of this project and my Supervisor, Katherine Butler Schofield for guiding me through this process with limitless enthusiasm, support, and cupcakes. Katherine and the rest of the team opened my ears to Hindustani music and I would like to thank Jim Sykes, Jim Kippen, Allyn Miner, and Margaret Walker in particular for helping me take my first steps (gats). Many people have helped me in the build up to this thesis, and countless others have had to listen to me talk about it. A huge thank you, to everyone named and unnamed. Without my languages this would be a very different piece of work, and I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my language teachers, especially Imre Bangha, Kalpana Pant, Aishwarj Kumar, and on the Bangla side Protima Dutt and Hasna Hena Khala. For inspiring and informing my first forays into South Asian Cultural History I would like to thank Polly O’Hanlon, Alexis Sanderson, Gavin Flood, Jessica Frazier, and Johannes Zachhuber. 3 Researching in London has allowed me to discuss my work with individuals from across the city’s institutions. At King’s I would like to thank other members of the Music Department, especially Martin Stokes, Frederick Moehn, Emma Dillon, Matthew Head and Michael Fend; as well as Jon Wilson, Javed Majeed, Kriti Kapila and the India Institute. I have also benefitted hugely from discussing my work with our neighbours at SOAS, especially Francesca Orsini, Jan-Peter Hartung, Roy Fischel, Avril Powell, James Caron, Richard Widdess, and Nicolas Magriel. From Royal Holloway I would like to thank Anna Morcom, Francis Robinson, and Tina Ramnarine. I am also very grateful for advice and encouragement from the individual scholars I have met on my travels or correspondence, especially (and in no particular order): Carla Petievich, Frances Pritchett, Allison Busch, Ramya Sreenivasan, Monika Horstmann, Margrit Pernau, Ken Bryant, Kathryn Hansen, Indrani Chatterjee, Ulrike Stark, Jack Hawley, Davesh Soneji, David Irving, Robert Skelton, Rosemary Crill, Yuthika Sharma, Amlan Das Gupta, Lakshmi Subramanian, Jon Barlow, Vidya Rao, Lalita du Perron, Regula Qureshi, Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, Swarup Roy, Geeta Patel, Anindita Ghosh, Saqib Baburi, Justin Jones, Françoise Nalini Delvoye, Danuta Stasik, Richard Wolf, Tiziana Leucci, and Richard Blurton. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues who I have met through the international Brajbhasha and Early Hindi workshop series: too many to mention here, alas! I spoke about this project at an early stage with Kumkum Chatterjee who was very encouraging and had some extremely helpful advice; I hope that she would have been happy with the final product. I am grateful to Kalyan Chatterjee for making Kumkum Di’s papers available. I would like to thank Ustad Wajahat Khan for taking me on as a somewhat inept student in ḵẖayāl. While I stumbled over the intricacies of rāga, he gave me a significant insight into the life of Hindustani music and its practitioners, that has been invaluable towards this historical project. I am also grateful to Muhammad Ahmedullah and members of the Brick Lane Circle for their encouragement at various stages of my research. I am extremely thankful to all the libraries and archives in India, the UK, and the USA that gave me permission to consult their collections. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the directors and staff of the following institutions for their help, who are unfortunately too many to list individually: the National Archives of India, New Delhi; Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi; Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New 4 Delhi; the Uttar Pradesh State Archives, Lucknow; the West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata; Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata; Indian National Library, Kolkata; Ramakrishna Mission, Kolkata; Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Kolkata; School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University; CSSSC Archive, Kolkata; Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, Patna; Salar Jung Museum Library, Hyderabad; Houghton and Widener Libraries, Harvard University; Butler Library, Columbia University; Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania; the British Library, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Maughan Library, King’s College London; and the School of Oriental and African Studies.