The 2024 edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) was, as always, bustling in the literary throes of book launches, author signings and receptive bibliophiles as audiences. Playing a subsidiary role to the literary gleanings was music, as each day began with a ‘Morning Music’ session on the front lawns of Hotel Clarks Amer Jaipur, featuring the likes of the Indian classical vocalist Kalapini Komkali, daughter of Kumar Gandharva, to jazz saxophonist Phil Scarff, whose repertoire includes Indian classical music. Evening acts were headlined by indie stars such as The Tapi Project, The Revisit Project, Alif, Prabh Deep, among others.

Two JLF sessions, both book unveilings, stood out because the books in question—Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 by Katherine Schofield and Sahela Re: A Novel by Mrinal Pande—are centred on musicians and singers of the Mughal period in India and beyond. At the JLF, Schofield described the period her book delves into as one “before recorded sound, and so we can no longer hear these worlds.” Schofield is Head of Department, Music, at King’s College, London, while veteran journalist and author Pande took after her mother, the noted Hindi writer Shivani, and chose fiction over reportage for this literary undertaking. Schofield’s book unearths accounts of nine mostly forgotten Mughal court musicians of note from the reigns of Muhammad Shah ‘Rangeela’ and the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Pande’s book is based on the lives of four tawaifs. Schofield moderated the session with Pande and noted Hindi poet and cinema scholar Yatindra Mishra. Historian Rana Safvi moderated Schofield’s session, while singer Vidya Shah rendered a few couplets of ‘Lagta Nahin Dil Mera’, sung by Mohammed Rafi for the film Lal Quila (1960), originally penned by none other than Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Safvi addressed the pertinent question first, and asked Schofield, “How does one write histories of the ephemeral of emotional and sensitive experiences, of ecstatic states and aesthetic journeys, of the live performances of music and dance, on the tangible and transient texture of the experiential moment? How do we write histories of these moments when they have been long passed into silence?” While Schofield conceded that we are not as fortunate to hear the exact compositions and throw of voice as the audiences at the Mughal courts of Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Delhi, “the journey has been worthwhile to find out what motivated people in this incredibly tumultuous period, a period when Indian classical music acquired the form [in which] we know it today,” replied Schofield. She cited the pietra dura inlay of the Greek musician Orpheus on the wall behind Shah Jahan’s Diwan-i-aam in the Red Fort at Shahjahanabad, saying that Orpheus could not bring his wife Eurydice from the dead despite playing his lyre and charming the attendants of Hades, the God of the underworld, but listening to his tragic story fascinates, even though there is no access to the music he played.

This period, Schofield added, being fairly understudied also produced a widespread belief that the ustads from the lineage-based gharanas were illiterate, and thus there would be no written records. “My job as a historian has been to find those writings, and there are huge numbers of them! In fact, hundreds of writings by patrons and by hereditary musicians that tell us some of that story, and I have been uncovering that story,” she said.

From material unearthed from India Office Records, local libraries and ragamala paintings, Schofield discovered biographical collections of musicians called tazkiras. She also came across instances when Mughal court musicians played a role in politics. Khushhal Khan ‘Gunasamudra’, the great grandson of Tansen, was used in the plot to seal the fate of heir-apparent Dara Shikoh, son of Shah Jahan, in whose court Gunasamudra was the chief musician. Legend has it that his mellifluous performance of Ragini Todi in the court on Navroz, produced Todi in human form, playing the rudra veena with enchanted deer at her feet. Gunasamudra’s performance enraptured Shah Jahan so much that he signed the petition to move the wise revenue officer Murshid Quli Khan to the retinue of Aurangzeb, who later usurped the throne by assassinating his elder brother Dara Shikoh.

The book features other amusing incidents. There is courtesan Mayali, whose name appears only once in history, on the margins of an East India Company account book. She demanded payment in salt instead of cash from the British, who had sequestered the Sambhar Salt Lake from Jaipur and Jodhpur, the two areas that refused pay ‘protection money’ to the Raj. There is a petty episode involving Anjha Baras Khan—a descendant of Tansen and chief musician at the court of Rangeela—who, on getting a chance to teach one of his rival Ni‘amat Khan Sadarang’s nephews, made him sign a letter saying that his ancestors were inferior to those of Anjha Baras Khan. There is also the story of an English memsahib, Sophia Plowden, who was fascinated with the tunes sung by Khanum Jaan, the celebrated courtesan at the court of Nawab Asafuddaula in Lucknow and had them written down in European notation. They were then turned into harmonised arrangements for the harpsichord and published in Calcutta in 1789.

While courtesans and nautch music were mentioned towards the tapering end of Schofield’s session, the subject was the central focus of the session featuring Pande. She found “a great diaspora of talent” after artistes from Mughal courts started to relocate to other parts of the country. This led to women from the Rampur Sahaswan gharana marrying into the Gwalior and Atrauli gharanas, and women from the Atrauli gharana into the Jaipur gharana, with the music from their maternal home becoming their ‘dowry’. “It felt like entering a laboratory that had been bombed. In trying to recreate this world, I found a petri dish somewhere, some shards, chemicals which I could not name, torn photographs and lots of gossip. I decided to model the central character in the book on an eccentric like me, a loner who is seeking out priceless information and contacting various interesting people. With my family being half feudal and half conservative Brahmin, the mixed heritage allowed me to be both an outsider and insider to this world of music,” said Pande. Now 78, she calls Sahela Re her “last hurrah”, adding that the theme had been building up in her mind over the last decade.

Pande discussed Bhoja, an 11th-century king of the Malwa region, who in his noted text, Shringara Manjari Katha, added a fifth varna to the varna order by Manu, that of a ‘swatantra stree’, a free woman who seeks and gives pleasure, cannot marry, but is above the law when it comes to living with any man she chooses. Pande further cited instances when the famous royal courtesan Amrapali (around 500 BC) claimed that the entire Magadha kingdom could not pay her what she could earn spending one day in Kashi. “Again, this resonated in [the context of] Gauhar Jaan (1873–1930), who told the Viceroy of India: my mujra fee is bigger than the monthly fee paid to you by the government of India.”

Interestingly, Mishra added to Pande’s point on the class system. The British Gazetteer had divided Indian women into three categories: maal jaati (liberated women/tawaifs whose earnings were equivalent to a rich merchant and paid their taxes), raees jaati (a rich man’s daughter) and sharif jaati (a commoner).

A slideshow of black-and-white images of prominent tawaifs, performances by nautch girls, the audiences’ gaze, etc. accompanied the session. When a photograph showed Gauhar Jaan, sporting a unibrow, confidently sitting cross-legged between male musicians, Pande contrasted it with the everyday life of sharif jaati women who “were always huddled, behind the purdah, watching the dances going on in the courtyard.” Gauhar Jaan was an icon in her own right. Pande’s grandmother, for instance, got frilly blouses stitched from the best fashion designers in Lahore, copying Gauhar Jaan’s sartorial style. Yet, the famous Urdu poet Akbar Allahabadi had commented that God had given Gauhar Jaan everything, except a husband. “My grandmother would say, wrestlers and tawaifs earn in lakhs, but always die weak, lonely and eaten up by relatives. You see this replicated in the Mumbai film world with Meena Kumari, Madhubala. These women had colourful lives, but their tragic end makes you think how the judiciary, administration and family were and are still controlled by men in India, because of which these women are praised outside the house for their craft, but inside, they are still looked down upon.”

While heroines working in Hindi cinema in the early 1930s and ’40s, originally from Benaras, Ratlam, Chilbila, Aligarh, Agra, Jaipur, etc., hid behind Anglo-Indian pseudonyms such as Ms Paul, Ms Rose, Ms Lotus or Ms Lobo, to protect their family name, others like thumri singer and tawaif Husanabai, openly took a stance, even if it meant going against the Father of the Nation. It is said Gandhiji had requested Husanabai to perform in Kashi to collect funds for the cause of Indian independence. She agreed on one condition—that Gandhiji must attend. He agreed but did not show up for the performance. “She raised ₹90,000… we’re talking early ’40s,” noted Pande. After the concert, freedom fighter Shaukat Ali was sent to get the mujra money. She gave him only ₹45,000, citing Gandhi’s absence as the reason.

However, despite the difficulties they faced, these women lived life on their own terms. Mishra concluded, “Today, we talk about liberalisation. Women are equipped with human rights, the Constitution, and even social media. At that time, Begum Akhtar had bouncers at her kotha (house). Visitors were screened and entertained (or not) only after a week or more of leaving their visiting cards at the entrance. This is the kind of power these women had.”