TY - JOUR
AU1 - A, Millward, James
AB - Abstract This article uses the history and development of the sitar and its music 1) to argue for the neglected importance to historical studies of music as a central aspect of human culture; 2) to provide a case study of cultural exchange across what is known as the “Silk Road” over time and geography; and 3) to demonstrate the qualitative equivalence of phenomena we associate with “the Silk Road” and with “globalization.” Lutes appear in Indian iconography from the first centuries CE, probably inspired by Buddhist art from North India and Central Asia. They then disappear, replaced in the same contexts by tube zithers. Lutes were reintroduced from the thirteenth century or before by regimes with Persian and Central Asian cultural background. The rawabs and tamburs thus imported developed in India and borrowed features and performance techniques from Indian zither-type instruments. The further elaboration of Indian lutes, including the sitar (as well as sarod, surbahar, bīn and others), paralleled the development of various forms of North Indian music, especially under the patronage of Mughal emperors and regional monarchs, including Wajid ‘Ali Shah of Awadh. The process was conscious and driven by individual musicians and lutiers but likewise strongly influenced by sociopolitical vicissitudes, including the decline of Mughal central power, British colonial encroachment and annexation of Awadh, and the rise of Calcutta as a global, commercial city. The sitar reflects this lineage of historical and personal interventions in its technical features, playing technique, musical style, and accompanying lore and literature. Prologue: Historicizing Music and Musicalizing History Music as a sphere of knowledge is deeply historical. It is self-evident that music consists of (sonic) events ordered over time. As disciplines, music theory, composition, and “music appreciation” are usually approached historically. Even for performers, engagement with history is a desideratum, whether to be authentic to tradition (in baroque ornamentation, rendition of muqam, or soulful blues phrasing) or to rebel against it (minimalism, punk rock, the later Beethoven string quartets, or Watazumido zen flute). It is thus somewhat surprising that historians have paid relatively little attention to music as a realm of human activity, especially for earlier periods. There is of course the discipline known as “history of music,” roughly parallel to “history of art” or “history of science” but arguably more Eurocentric and high cultural, with its focus on composers and elite art music of Europe. Yet while we may now find historians of labor, war, gender, environment, food, disease, religion, and certain other general aspects of human society along the same corridors and published in the same textbooks and journals as geographically identified historians, music—and especially non-Western music—is seldom integrated into the general study of history in the same way these concerns are. If it is, music figures as part of a broader notion of “culture” or “popular culture.” Why do historians tend to treat music as an autonomous, often alien, realm or ignore it altogether? There are some obvious reasons. First of all, music can be a highly specialized, technical field; while it is easy enough to study lyrics as texts, without training, many historians would be uncomfortable analyzing nontextual aspects of music as part of a broader historical argument regarding, say, the influence of Islamic lands on late-medieval Europe. Second, the subdisciplines of musical study are awkwardly bifurcated along class and ethnonational lines. Western art music is largely taught as history and biography. When the field of “ethnomusicology” seceded from “musicology,” however, it modeled itself on ethnography, which required contemporary fieldwork among living people. This mapped a methodological difference onto the West-versus-the-rest dichotomy: Western music was history; non-Western music was anthropology. Only recently has this has been changing: just as anthropology is no longer a field dedicated to the study of non-Western “natives,” ethnomusicology is not the study of ethnic music but rather the ethnology of musical practice, applicable to anyone’s music anywhere. The emerging subdiscipline of “historical ethnomusicology,” moreover, in a manner parallel to historical anthropology, considers music of past societies and dead musicians, even those beyond the reach of a microphone.1 Third, historians may shy away from music due to a perceived lack of sources. Leaving aside early automata that could make sounds mechanically, the earliest actual recorded sound dates only from the latter half of the nineteenth century. How can we write about music when we don’t know what it sounded like? We do have extant texts (historians’ bread and butter) in the form of written musical transcriptions. Almost all of the world’s cultures with written scripts to express language also developed musical notation systems that at least suggested aspects of the sounds of vocal or instrumental music, or tablatures that indicate how they were played on a particular instrument. But here again historians face technical difficulties. Early music notations are problematic sources even to professional musicologists. They are often spottily preserved; their symbols or syllables may be impossible or controversial to interpret and convert back into music; and even unlocked, these codes generally furnish at best only a hint of what the music actually sounded like, often leaving out key information—about rhythm, for example, or the absolute pitch of the notes sounded, or whether and how melodies were harmonized or accompanied—which contemporary musicians were expected to know as a matter of course or learn from a teacher. Today’s staff notation, the culmination of centuries of development, is dense in information about instrument, note value, tempo, rhythm, full polyphony, volume dynamics, tone quality, articulation, and other specific details; it allows, at least in theory, more or less standardized performances faithfully reproducing the composer’s intent.2 But the staff notation system is a modern exception to the rule of most notation systems across the world and over time. Moreover, despite its utility for Western art music, the European score has proven an inadequate format for notating non-European music characterized by rhythmic complexity, tonal variety, nonstandard temperaments, and so on.3 Thus, music was everywhere in the past, but historians hoping to study musical practice or at least bring it into their narratives face the old bugbear of scarce texts, along with technical hurdles even where sources exist. Given these difficulties, I would like to suggest some methods and ways of thinking about music, musicians, musical performance, and musical instruments that I have been implementing in my own research on lute-type instruments on the Silk Road. While they are neither especially innovative nor profound, these approaches are worth articulating, as I have found that they allow me to bring music into history, even without reproducing its notes. First, an obvious methodological work-around: if one cannot hear the music, then look at it or read about it. While the historical sonic record may be poor, the visual and textual record is full of depictions of and references to music. We have the poetry of the lyrics; we have descriptions of musicians and musical gatherings; we have court records of musical patronage and royal instrumentaria; and we have players, ensembles, and many musical instruments depicted in artwork. Such sources cannot tell us what the notes were but do suggest, often better than notation, what the music sounded like: we see the skin stretched over frames, the wire and silk strung over wooden boxes, the breadth and spacing of holes on pipes. The dimensions and materials of organic, nonelectric instruments are good guides to timbre, range, volume, and other aural characteristics. This was likely the artists’ point: to give sound to an image, as it were, just as the inclusion of a dancer, a galloping horse, or bird on the wing gives it movement. Moreover, images of musical instruments, especially when faithfully rendered, yield a wealth of information of potential interest to the historian. The field of organology (the study of the history and development of musical instruments) is seen as somewhat fusty; it has not shaken its association to the Sachs-Hornbostel classification system, which can elicit snickers from today’s ethnomusicologists more concerned with people and culture than with classifying the world’s instruments with a decimal number as Linnaeus or Dewey might have.4 Yet the shape, construction, decoration, and other physical details, whether revealed by extant instruments or iconography in artworks, provide critical clues to an instrument’s relationship to instruments of other times and places, and thus to cultural exchange. Why does the West African xalam so resemble the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian long-necked lute, even down to the needlessly long tassels hanging from the neck? Where did that python-skin on a north Chinese sanxian come from? How did the tropical rain-forest tone-woods on a sixteenth century vihuela get to the luthier’s shop in Spain? Organology need not be directed at a positivistic study of the evolution of instruments into their modern form nor even simply at figuring out modern instruments’ ancestors. Instruments, like any art motif or transferred technology, embody in themselves evidence of connections between societies across space and over time. In this and other ways, then, music and musical instruments in iconography are subject to the gamut of material culture analysis. An art image offers more than physical information, of course. Both art and written texts, especially literary texts, often evoke music and musical instruments in contexts dense with social meaning and affect. The settings suggest whether a certain instrument or type of song belong in a temple or in a brothel; whether they are played by pampered courtiers or blind bards in the marketplace; whether such music serves as pastime for children, a lothario’s seduction aid or a morale-booster regulating the tramp of war-bound soldiers. That shared music (often combined with bodily movement) enhances group solidarity is but one of its apparent psychological and spiritual effects;5 a variety of past cultures have likewise taken for granted not only that music can be therapeutic but that it harmonizes nature, tames wild beasts, streamlines the Way, or resonates with the celestial spheres. References to such Orphic, lyrical, and psychophysical powers of music in art and literature tell us much about past worldviews. In short, music is a potent signifier of social and cultural meaning. Its presence in a scene or description speaks of more than the music itself. The poet Bai Juyi’s encounter with a lonely woman playing the pipa in a south China backwater uncovers layers of class and gender consciousness as well as the extent of commercial activity in the ninth-century Tang empire. The poem’s narrator learns that the woman, once renowned in the capital for her beauty and exquisite musicality, had been forced, as her youth waned, to marry a boorish tea merchant who, during his long business trips, left her all alone on a damp houseboat.6 Dutch Golden Age paintings frequently feature musical subjects in ambiguous allegories of learned sophistication, bourgeois respectability, familial harmony, or as dolorous reminders that transient pleasure paves the path to corruption and death—an apt reflection of the contradictions of a Calvinist society pioneering the routes of global commerce.7 The music of the past, then, can be seen (if not directly heard), its meanings read and its passions felt. These insights are more likely found in iconography and literary texts than in official documents, though those too may touch on musical topics. Historians simply need to find and read such sources creatively. More than that, though, as the examples above suggest, it helps us bring music into history if we think about music and musical instruments in a certain way: as enmeshed in physical and social networks (of materials, instrument dealers, performers, consumers, divine and human patrons) and semantic and cultural webs. Every instrument is linked to other instruments before it and in other places through its mode of construction, technical features, stylistic details, and the like. Every performer learned from other players, as every composer borrows from the work of others. Instruments and musical genres are coded by class, gender, ethnicity, and social venue, and these codings link them to discourses about music in society, about spirituality, pleasure, propriety, solidarity, and other concerns.8 In this essay, I will follow the approach outlined above to narrate part of the story of the development of the sitar, in concert with the formation of what we now call Hindustani classical music and a shift of the social position of art music and musician in north India from royal to bourgeois. This research is part of my larger project using lute-type instruments as a vehicle to examine cultural exchange on “the Silk Road.” Here, I hope it will demonstrate how one can study music and musical instruments as a component of political, cultural, and social history and, likewise, how music and instruments were themselves shaped by that history. By 1849, Major General Sir William Henry Sleeman, Knight Commander of the Bath, had “extended the Aegis of British power over the afflicted and oppressed” of India for four decades and “was deservedly much beloved by them for his earnest desire to promote their welfare.” He had distinguished himself as special commissioner for the suppression of thuggism and dacoity, contributed to science through his investigations of native zoology and paleontology, and captivated the British public with a curious study of Indian boys nurtured by wolves—a phenomenon that would later inspire Rudyard Kipling’s man-cub in The Jungle Book stories.9 Now in his sixties, Sleeman might have expected his current posting, as Resident of Lucknow, capital of the princely state of Awadh, to comfortably crown his decades of effectual service to the British East India Company. And yet Sleeman grew increasingly alarmed with the situation in Awadh, where his position remained “disagreeable and unsatisfactory.” He opposed creeping British territorial annexation of Indian princely states, which he viewed as an unnecessary and dangerous assumption of burdens best left to native land-holding elites. And yet, his own reports on what he saw as rampant misgovernment and unconscionable dereliction of duty by Awadh’s native rulers were leading Sleeman’s superior, Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, closer to the conclusion that annexation was the only way to protect British interests. In spite of his best efforts and sternest remonstrances, stiffened by the corps of British cavalry with whom he toured the kingdom, Resident Sleeman was unable to address the “prevailing anarchy and lawlessness” in Awadh. Why not? In his own valedictory assessment, the problems in Awadh came down to this: “we have a fool of a king, a knave of a minister, and both are under the influence of one of the cleverest, most intriguing, and most unscrupulous villains in India.”10 And who was this villain frustrating the modern major general’s best intentions for the state of Awadh? A sitar-player named Ghulam Raza Khan. The Indian Lute as Buddhist Icon The sitar, almost synonymous with Indian classical music among casual listeners, is considered a traditional Indian instrument. This is not incorrect, but if “traditional,” it is hardly “pure” or uniquely monocultural. Rather, the sitar and its music grew out of multiple Central Asian and Indian lineages, combining in themselves Hindu, Muslim, Persian, and Turko-Mongol Central Asian cultural elements and historical traditions. We often view eclectically cross-cultural, syncretized new things as archetypically modern, the many-parented issue of globalization, and by this reasoning, the sitar is “modern” as well. I would argue, however, that most musical instruments have always been hybrids, nodes in wide cultural networks extending over regions and continents and reaching back in time. And as such, instruments are simultaneously traditional and modern, both local and trans-geographic. The “Silk Road” connective processes that brought about the sitar are qualitatively no different from those of globalization. There was a Sumerian word, pan, meaning a bow (hunting and musical), which in that form and in the compound *pan-tur has left an abundant progeny of instrument names across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.11 One of those cognates was the Sanskrit term vina (vīṇā, veena), which becomes bīn in modern Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu). As often happens with instrument names, the word vina has been applied to different instruments in India over time, sometimes modified by another word to distinguish among them. The term appears in the Vedas (first millennium BCE), most likely referring to arch-harps (or perhaps simple musical bows), which, presumably, ultimately came to India from Mesopotamia.12 In the Guttila-Jataka (one of a storehouse of tales about the Buddha’s past lives as Bodhisattva), a master musician, Guttila (the Bodhisattva) competes on a stringed instrument in the court of King Sakka13 against his own upstart student. Though translated as “lute” in the standard English edition of the story, this “vina” would have been a harp.14 Indeed, this arch-harp vina appears in southern Indian sculpture from the second century BCE and after. “Vina” thus became a generic Indian term for stringed instruments. Over the centuries, the name was applied to a succession of chordophones, suggesting that the term retained ancient gravity while its referent changed, thus reflecting the shifting significance of different instruments in India over time as well as periodic foreign interactions. In the first centuries CE, lutes (stringed instruments with a neck and distinct body, probably called citrā-vīṇā) began appearing in Indian icononography. The main representations of these first southern Indian lutes are sculptures from Amaravati,15 Nagarjunakonda,16 and Pawaya17 and wall-paintings from the Ajanta cave temple complex.18 The instruments in these carvings and paintings are all quite similar, representing ovoid lutes with bodies tapering into slender necks that terminate in straight head-stocks.19 The question of where these lutes in southern Indian Buddhist iconography came from, and their relationship to somewhat earlier ovoid lutes in north India and Central Asia, as well as to later lutes in China, is not of primary interest to us here. It could be, however, that lutes were not widely played in India in the first centuries CE. Those represented in the temples may have been inspired by other iconography, rather than created in imitation of locally known physical instruments.20 Moreover, in the latter half of the first millennium, the lute disappears altogether from south Indian iconography, as do arch-harps.21 In their place we find stick- or tube-zithers, which may have come to the subcontinent from Southeast Asia, either by sea or overland via Yunnan and Assam.22 At this point, then, the meaning of the term “vina” changed again, coming to stand for varieties of this relatively small tubular instrument, which was held nearly vertically, often with bowl-shaped resonators or gourds at one or both ends. This instrument became the characteristic Indian chordophone in medieval times, and its descendants continue into modern times as regional folk instruments.23 Often with only one string, many varieties have a broad, convex bridge that produces the buzzing sound we associate with South Asian classical music. This stick-zither vina is frequently found in Pala period sculpture (eighth to twelfth centuries). The zither vina is a common attribute of the goddess Sarasvati (Saraswati) when she appears either on her own or, along with Lakshmi, as a consort to Shiva. Attendants and yakshis playing stick-vinas frequently decorate the space surrounding larger images of Hindu or Jain gods.24 Scholars have suggested that the medieval Indian transition from harps and lutes to the stick-zither may be related to the growing importance of a “universal pitch,” or basic drone note, in Indian music. A stick-zither vina, held and played as in the sculptures, provides a reference note to a singer and works well to establish a single ground note from which a raga, a systematized sequence of notes, can be sung.25 Return of the Lutes Whether the early lute was commonly played or primarily iconographic in southern India, it disappears from Indian iconography by around 700 CE, and its niche came to be occupied by the stick-zither. This marks a curious retreat, but it is not the end of the story. Lutes took up residence in India again centuries later, starting in the courts of Central Asian conquerors who brought lutes along with musical and religious practices. The ultimate result of this reintroduction was the musical and organological expression of Indo-Islamic culture, and a coevolution of syncretic musical forms with adaptive, hybrid instruments to produce the new sounds that musicians and their sponsors were aiming for. We can track this synthesis26 both in the series of design innovations of the instruments themselves and in the careers and genealogies of musicians. The musical and organological innovators were often one and the same people. We can see in much more detail how the Silk Road transculturation that ultimately produced the modern sitar (and its cousins the tambura, surbahar, sarod, and others) involved a continuous process of cultural marking and remarking, of defining and redefining the instruments’ meaning, carried out within networks of people in a historical context in which Muslims, Hindus, Indians, Central Asians, and even the British interacted. The history of this cultural confluence is concretely embedded in physical features of South Asian instruments today and audible in aspects of musical form and performance style. Following in the footsteps of the Greeks, the Scythians (Sakas), the Kushans, and others, from the thirteenth century CE, successions of tribal states invaded India from the northwest. Some occupied parts of northern and central of India for centuries, including the Ghaznavids (977–1186), the several dynasties known as the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), and the Timurid-Mongol dynasty of the Mughals (1526–40, 1555–1857). While these regimes are sometimes collectively referred to as “Muslim conquests,” and their elites were largely adherents of Islam, to simply call them “Muslim” oversimplifies and confuses their cultural backgrounds. These groups did not represent offshoots of Arab culture from the Middle East, for example. Rather, they brought into India, in varied proportions, blends of Persian language and civilization; the folkways of the steppes and oases of Central Asia, Xinjiang, and Mongolia; and the synthesis of Irano-Turkic Central Asian Islamic culture created by the Mongol empire and especially the Timurid dynasty. Islam as a religion took root in India during this period and is reflected in the large Indian Muslim population today (189 million in 2017), but the broader cultural confluence pervaded all aspects of society in profound ways. To say, as some “Hindu nationalists” in the twenty-first century have taken to saying, that Indian Muslims should “go home” is as ridiculous as suggesting that Buddhists in China or Japan should go home to India, where Buddhism began. Lutes reappeared in India in the courts of these Persianized, Islamic Central Asian rulers during the Delhi Sultanate or some time before. There are references to the Central Asian tambūr (another cognate of Sumerian *pan-tur) at the Ghaznavid court in Lahore (ca. 1076). More about this instrument appears in the writings of the poet Amir Khusrau (1252–1325), who describes a slender, long-necked ovoid lute with tuning pegs, called tambur.27 The son of a Central Asian Turkic soldier who had fled the invasions of Genghis Khan, Amir Khusrau was an honored scholar in the Delhi court. He is, apocryphally, credited with creating the classical vocal genre known as khayal (khayāl, khyal, about which more below). Texts of many ghazals (rhymed couplets of Persian verse directed to God as a beloved one) and qawali (qawāli, qavali) (devotional songs sung to a Sufi saint) are attributed to him, and he is also said to have invented the sitar by merging features of Central Asian lutes with the Hindustani rudra-vina, a stick or tube zither. This, too, is a mistake perpetuated by later writers but a meaningful one: all of these elements—Persian poetry, Sufi mysticism, and hybridized Central Asian and Indian instruments—are streams that would flow together in the new currents of Indian high culture, albeit fully so only after Amir Khusrau’s time.28 Timur (Tamerlane) sacked Delhi in 1398. In flight from the chaos, the Delhi Sultanate’s musicians moved to Bengal, Jaunpur, Gujerat, and Gwailor, whose rulers sponsored them in their own courts. This diaspora deepened the penetration of Central Asian and Persian music within India and encouraged its ongoing dialogue with local musical forms. When Delhi reemerged as a locus of musical patronage, we know that Sultan Sikander Lodi (r. 1489–1517) kept four slaves to play each of four instruments: the Central Asian tambur, the rabab (a lute with a hide soundboard and notched body), the chang (a harp), as well as the north Indian bīn zither. Though he is noted for persecuting Hindus, Sikander Lodi’s court music was culturally integrated. Around the same time, several varieties of plucked and bowed chordophones were prominent in the instrumentarium of the Timurid courts of Samarkand and Herat. These included the ‘ud (oud; a descendent of ovoid short lutes), as well as the long-necked sihtār or sehtar (“three string”) and dutar (“two-string”), both Central Asian long lute cousins in the tambur family.29 Babur (1483–1530), the Timurid prince and warlord who conquered north India and established what is now known as the Mughal Empire, makes it clear in his colorful autobiography that musicianship, including composition and skill performing on chordophones, were highly regarded talents in his world. He mentions several musicians whom he encountered in Kabul and critiques their compositions and playing ability with a connoisseur’s ear: Husayn the lutenist [‘ūdi] composed tasteful tunes on the lute. He could make all its strings play as one. His flaw lay in that he performed too coquettishly. He once made a big fuss when Shaybani Khan ordered him to play, and not only played badly but also did so on an inferior instrument instead of his own. Shaybani Khan caught on and ordered him to be severely beaten right in the assembly. It was the one good deed Shaybani Khan did in this world. Temperamental fellows deserve such punishment. Babur was more impressed by the “incomparable” Muhammad Bu-Sa’id, a noted pugilist who also composed music, including “a beautiful naqsh in the chargah mode.” Though both a warrior and a poet himself, Babur thought it a “marvel” for Muhammad Bu-Sa’id to “have such accomplishments and be a wrestler too.”30 The Mughal courts under Babur’s successors thus naturally continued to support both Central Asian and Persian musicians and to that interest added a growing appreciation of local Indian instruments and musical forms. Bonnie Wade has traced this process in Mughal paintings. She finds, for example, the north Indian bīn played together in a novel ensemble with the West Asian na’i (vertical flute) and daf (frame drum) and, in another late sixteenth century painting, bīn and na’i players in Indian dress accompanying a dancer in Central Asian (Turki) costume.31 Under the Mughals, such Silk Road mash-ups were not accidental but intentional outcomes of policy and taste. The emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), in particular, deliberately summoned Indian musicians to court to join the Persian and Central Asian entertainers assembled by his predecessors. Akbar actively sought an Indo-Muslim synthesis in music, as in painting, architecture, literature, religion, and other cultural spheres. He deployed a range of symbols to portray himself as a universal ruler who rose above, and in himself unified, the communal and ethnic differences of his growing, multicultural empire. Thus, he sponsored literary projects in Sanskrit, Urdu, and other languages, as well as Persian. He promoted a syncretic state religion, Din-i-Ilahi, with elements of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Jainism. The doctrine’s key principle of ecumenical tolerance—albeit centered on the all-powerful figure of the emperor himself—was reflected in the palace complex Akbar built at Fatepur Sikri, on a rocky ridge outside Agra. Its architecture combined Persian and Indian elements in a layout inspired by Central Asian tents and included a mosque, a shrine to a saint of the Chisti order (a Sufi order that itself explicitly welcomed people of all religions), and his own hall for religious discussions, the Diwan-i Khas. The single central pillar of this hall focused the building’s elaborate geometric complexity inward upon a circular platform where the emperor would sit alone while listening to religious discourses from holy men of diverse faiths. Music, too, fit into this ideological system of symbol and metaphor. To the Mughals, it was more than entertainment. Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58), Akbar’s grandson and the fifth Mughal emperor, sat upon a throne (now on display in Delhi’s Red Fort) inlayed with a precious stone panel from Florence depicting Orpheus bowing a lute to an audience of wild beasts.32 Orpheus’ musical power over animals was a potent metaphor in early modern Italy: for example, a sixteenth century painting of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus at the gates of Hades taming Cerberus with a viol proclaimed the Florentine lord a good prince who inaugurated a peaceful age.33 In the cosmopolitan Mughal court, this musical message inscribed on Shah Jahan’s throne was amplified by several familiar heroic narratives: the Biblical Solomon and David (known in Delhi from the Islamic tradition as well as from European Jesuits at court) and the mythological Persian kings Gayumarth and Jamshid, all of whom had tamed wild creatures or presided over golden ages when the lion lay down with the lamb. In the ancient love story of Layla and Majnun, retold in Nizami’s Khamsa (Quintet) as well as by Amir Khusrau, the hero Majnun retreats to the wilderness, driven mad by his impossible love for Layla. There, even the fiercest predators grow docile in his Solomonic presence.34 It was likewise a Hindu and Jain tradition to depict Krishna pacifying animals with music. This is the lens, then, through which we should consider Mughal court music. Akbar’s vizier, Abu’l Fazl, wrote his influential history of the empire up to his day, the Akbar-nāma, in such a way as “to define Mughal ideology in imperial rather than in communal terms.”35 In the Ā’īn-i Akbar-ī, a statistical compendium that concludes the Akbar-nāma, Abu’l Fazl writes that Akbar kept numerous “Hindus, Iranis, Turanis [Central Asians], Kashmiris, both men and women” as court musicians. He lists thirty-six principal musicians; most of the Indians were singers from Gwailor; two Indian instrumentalists played the bīn and the svaramandal (a box zither). There were also musicians from Mashhad (Persia), Khorasan (northeastern Persia, bordering on Central Asia), Herat, and Kipchap (the Kazakh steppe, extending eastward from the Volga). Non-Indians played qanun (a hammered dulcimer), na’i, ghichak (a bowed spike-lute), karnā (a wind instrument), rabab, tambur and qubuz (another Central Asian lute).36 Figures 1a and b show us one pairing of the Central Asian tambur-type lute and the Indian bīn, accompanying two voices in performance for prince Murad Baksh (the youngest son of emperor Shah Jahan) and his consort, Mumtaz Mahal.37 Figure 1a. View largeDownload slide Detail from lower section of a collage, “Murad Baksh (1624-61) with a Procession of Female Servants at a Musical Performance.” Two women sing and make hand gestures; one simultaneously thrums a lute in the left foreground; players across from them accompany on bīn and double-headed drum (pakhavaj). Figure 1b: detail showing tambur-type Central Asian lute used as a drone accompaniment to singing. Ink and opaque watercolour on paper, collage of five late 17th century Mughal miniatures with overpaintings and additions by an Austrian artist, 1760-62. Both from a collage repasted in a wooden wall panel in the “Millionenzimmer” at Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna. Copyright Schloss Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H./Scan: Salon Iris. Figure 1a. View largeDownload slide Detail from lower section of a collage, “Murad Baksh (1624-61) with a Procession of Female Servants at a Musical Performance.” Two women sing and make hand gestures; one simultaneously thrums a lute in the left foreground; players across from them accompany on bīn and double-headed drum (pakhavaj). Figure 1b: detail showing tambur-type Central Asian lute used as a drone accompaniment to singing. Ink and opaque watercolour on paper, collage of five late 17th century Mughal miniatures with overpaintings and additions by an Austrian artist, 1760-62. Both from a collage repasted in a wooden wall panel in the “Millionenzimmer” at Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna. Copyright Schloss Schönbrunn Kultur- und Betriebsges.m.b.H./Scan: Salon Iris. Bonnie Wade has examined the Central Asian and Persian lutes in Mughal paintings. When they first appear, in the Babur reign (1526–30), they do so as melody instruments in ensemble. By the Akbar period (1556–1605), she found paintings where the tambur lute was played solo; later, that practice gives way to rabab lute and frame drum performance. By the early seventeenth century, in paintings from the atelier of Jahangir (1605–27), Wade observed the practice captured by the painting in figure 1: the tambur is not being played in the conventional way but rather strummed as a drone, the way Indian stick zithers were traditionally played. This is clear from how the woman rests the tambur neck on her right shoulder, plucking its open strings with her right hand, while she gestures with her left hand and sings. Supporting the instrument one-handed in this way, she could not be stopping the strings to play melody notes. Nor does the bīn-player across from them seem to be fingering melody notes on her instrument, though it has many raised frets.38 Here, then, is a case of complex lute transculturation: this long-necked, ovoid lute from Persianate Central Asia, the tambur, when brought into India was repurposed as a drone to provide a reference tone for a singer. This was the predecessor of the modern Indian tambura (the final “a” marks the linguistic absorption of the word “tambur” into Urdu, an inflecting Indo-European language). By the nineteenth century, the tambura had grown into a super-sized, deeply resonant, wide-necked fretless long lute with a large gourd body. Today, the open strings of the tambura are patiently plucked in fixed order by an acolyte at the rear of the stage while the ustad (master) performs a raga. (For those modern students of Hindustani or Karnatak music who lack their own acolytes, an electronic box called a “Raagini” serves as a convenient substitute: “Light Weight & Compact. It’s an Acknowledged Fact the Raagini Digital Helps Improve the Mood & Scope of Practice & Performance Vastly.”39 A knob on these clever analog devices dials the tone between “Ladies” and “Gents” settings.) The Birth of Indo-Persian-Islamic Music Central Asian lutes Indianized in other ways as well, developing along with Indian music itself, which over these centuries was absorbing scales, modes, and melodies from Persian and Central Asian traditions and taking in regional, devotional, and folk Indian styles. As a somber and austere tradition based on contemplative singing incorporated faster, more rhythmically complex, and ostentatiously improvisational phrases, musicians pioneering the parallel instrumental styles needed new instruments capable of simultaneously maintaining a meditative ground while executing flashy runs. We are often impressed with the technological developments of Western European instruments, especially keyboard instruments, which tracked the expanding harmonic complexity and rising technical demands of European art music from Renaissance through Romantic eras. But similarly ingenious and ongoing innovation—though directed at different goals—marked the coevolution of Indian music and lute-type musical instruments from the seventeeth through twentieth centuries. What were the women in figure 1 singing? The Indian singers and bīn-players from Gwailor in Akbar’s court were likely trained in a school of singing known as dhrupad. Dhrupad singers and instrumentalists performed ragas, which are systematized sequences of notes, each sequence with its own name and understood to project a certain mood. Ragas are like scales or modes, in that each raga uses a fixed set of (usually seven) notes, with certain pitch-values, and defined intervals between the pitches. No accidentals are permitted (except sometimes to very great masters who purposefully break the rules). Ragas are in some respects also like melodies, with groups of notes to be played in a certain order. For example, some ragas require musicians to climb up the scale one way and descend another way, adding or subtracting a note, or playing them in slightly different order. Besides these rules about the order in which notes are played, some ragas customarily include short melodic motifs that identify the raga and set its mood. Ragas seem indefinable (a bit like a scale, a bit like a mode, a bit like a melody) because our musical vocabulary in European languages largely derives from notated Western art music, which is organized differently and which, since the baroque period, has moved away from improvisation. Ragas also may seem mysterious due to an unfortunate tendency among Western and Indian commentators and performers alike to shroud discussion of them in metaphysical verbiage.40 De-Orientalized, a raga in and of itself is no less accessible for a neophyte listener than other types of music, in the sense that an attentive listener can recognize melodic elements and, once the raga’s characteristic features have been pointed out, follow what’s happening during a performance. (Sophisticated musicological appreciation takes more study, just as it would for European art music, jazz, or even popular musical forms.) The most illustrious musician in Akbar’s court was a dhrupad singer and instrumentalist from Gwailor known by the sobriquet “Tansen” (fl. c. 1545), to whom Akbar granted the title miyāṃ (master, also spelled mian), a term that appears in the names of several ragas associated with Tansen. Much legend surrounds this man, and many famous Indian musicians are said by one source or another to be his descendants. Among the many accomplishments attributed to Tansen, his singing of certain ragas could heal the sick, bring on the monsoon rains, break a wild elephant for the howdah, or ignite votive lamps spontaneously. Magic aside, Tansen formalized and institutionalized the dhrupad school of raga performance as it came from Gwailor to Delhi. The principal structural feature of the dhrupad approach as practiced by Tansen and his chains of descendants and students down to the present is the slow alap, a free-tempo, systematically improvised introduction of the notes and motifs of the raga, moving up and then back down the “scale.” Alap is followed by faster sections with a rhythmic pulse and then a fixed rhythmic cycle called a tala. Usually the exposition of the raga culminates in one or two compositions—a poetic text sung with a composed melody that highlights characteristic features of that raga. Stylistically, dhrupad performance was relatively free of ornament, valuing precise intonation and mindful articulation of the raga rather than issuing volleys of notes. That said, dhrupad singers sometimes connected notes with sliding glissandi, a technique called a meend (mīnd), and passages could occasionally be elaborated by a rapid alternating shake between two pitches, known as a gamak. Dhrupad was originally vocal music, with lyrics (at first secular poetry, though dhrupad is now seen as a spiritual music) sung to rhythmical accompaniment on the pakhavaj, two-sided drum. But Tansen is said to have led the way in instrumentalizing dhrupad: performing ragas with dhrupad structure and style on melody instruments rather than with the voice. Tansen pioneered the dhrupad performance of ragas on the rabab lute; his daughter, appropriately named Sarasvati, did so on the bīn, which was, as we’ve seen, the main Indian instrument favored in the Mughal courts.41 Other schools of singing and types of performance were also represented in the Mughal courts at Fatepur Sikri, Agra, and Delhi, as well as those in regional kingdoms and sultanates. One of these was khayal—from a Persian word for “thought, fancy, fantasy.” The lyrics of khayal songs were usually two lines of rhyming Hindi verse set to ragas and either slow or fast talas, sung and then improvised on; they were performed without an alap and provided a showcase for the singer to demonstrate his or her technical virtuosity with fancy ornamentation and melodically and rhythmically dazzling runs, called tans. Meanwhile, Sufis, especially those of the Chisti order (of which Amir Khusrau was a devotee), were developing a form of devotional singing known as qawali, initially sung at the shrine of a saint. A qawali performance involved a small group of men singing a series of different types of Arabic, Persian, or Urdu songs, accompanied by a drum and the sarangi fiddle (today often replaced by harmonium) and culminating in the lead singer’s impassioned and powerful improvisations on the composition. Stylistically, qawali singers adopted an approach similar to khayal, and devotional songs from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in turn, became part of the khayal repertoire.42 The myths that attribute the creation of so many genres, instruments, and styles to Amir Khusrau and Tansen, then, reflect the reality of mutually influencing emergence, and convergence, of different musical forms combining elite, devotional, folk, Hindu, and Muslim music in India’s royal courts over several centuries. Chordophonic Coevolution This, then, is the world that gave birth to the sitar. We saw above how long tambur-type lutes from Central Asia and Persia were repurposed in India to serve as drone accompaniment for singers, a role that ultimately brought about today’s large, fretless drone instrument, the tambura. But long lutes were used in India to play melody as well. Derivatives of the Persian name sihtār (“three-string”) attached to this type of lute used for this purpose. It was in the court of Muhammad Shah (1719–48), the last great Mughal patron of music, that this instrument came into its own as a vehicle for emerging Indian (as opposed to Persian or Central Asian) art music. Delhi was by then a center for khayal; qawali singers, too, performed at shrines and house concerts. Dhrupad was also present, though perhaps more respected than popular. Hindu religious singing in the Bhakti devotional tradition could be heard in the capital. And the sources depict—while denigrating it as low-class and immoral—a proliferation of “popular” music that enlivened the demimonde of courtesans and dancing girls.43 One well-known blind percussionist accompanied dancers by drumming on his own belly; he could sound like the dholak or pakhavaj, but the skin across his abdomen had turned “as black as his luck.” British accounts and drawings reveal that a type of sitar was also then used to accompany dancers in “nautch” performances that fascinated even as they scandalized British and Indian elites. 44 We learn from a Persian account of Delhi life under Muhammad Shah45 that the preeminent musician at court, Na’mat Khan (known by the sobriquet Sadarang), was performing innovative khayal style ragas with “dhrupad elements” on the bīn. At his residence, he held monthly all-night performances (maḥfil—the same term used for qawali “gatherings”) for the respectable populace of Delhi—in itself, a significant development crossing over between the realms of religious and secular music and foreshadowing the later popularization of music performance, patronage, and appreciation in Calcutta and other cities. The author of this portrait of Delhi, Dargah Quli Khan, wrote of Na’mat: Felicitous is that bin player, whose mere placing of the bin on the shoulder emanated harmonious sounds and exhilarated the people. The gourd of his bin [sounds] as intoxicating as wine, and the touch of the finger-nails on the strings animates the people. The music of the bin makes the people listless with ecstasy and the sounds of appreciation rent the air.46 Na’mat’s nephew, Firoz (also known as Adarang), had developed new ways of playing the “sitār,” which allowed his lute to play anything other instruments could play. He, too, was a famous composer of khayal, dhrupad, and taranas (a song form using meaningless syllables as rhythmical lyrics). Firoz’s mahfils, too, continued until dawn despite the chaos following Nadir Shah’s invasion and sack of Delhi (1739). Another member of this talented family, Na’mat’s brother, had reportedly mastered all instruments. According to oral accounts, the brother was named Khusrau: this may be one reason for the common misapprehension that the famous poet Amir Khusrau had “invented” the sitar five centuries earlier.47 Players of other lute-types—tambur, rabab, and sarangi—were also active in the Delhi milieu, where musicians incorporated the terms for instruments within their own names: Baqir Tamburchi (“the gourd of his tambura is like a cup of wine, while the neck of the instrument is more attractive than the stem of a goblet”), Hasan Khan Rebabi (back bent like a harp, thin as a chord on his instrument, “caught in the clutches of poverty”), Ghulam Muhammad Sarangi Nawaz (the sounds from his bowed strings “are like arrows piercing the heart”; though respected by all the city-folk, this frugal man preferred the company of saints).48 What kinds of music all these instrumentalists were playing, precisely what features distinguished their instruments (especially contemporary tambur and sitar), and, indeed, precisely how dhrupads, khayals, and qawwalis were related to and distinguished from each other is only sketchily and contradictorily suggested in the sources. (Allyn Miner has traced and discussed the available references in detail.)49 What does emerge, however, is that even while the sources, contemporary and later, endeavor to precisely label music types and credit innovations to defined genealogies of musicians, in Muhammad Shah’s—or, perhaps it is better to say, Na’mat Khan’s—Delhi, the established elite singing genres of dhrupad, khayal, and qawali were interacting dynamically with each other, with famous courtesans and “catamites” who sang and danced, and with solo instrumental music on various instruments: khayal became “classicized”; instrumental music imitated dhrupad, which had been enlivened by khayal; court musicians wrote popular compositions and gained popular followings outside of court; and the worlds of renowned musicians, courtesans, dancers, and their followers overlapped, perhaps more than it was polite to admit. The result was not a homogenization so much as an overlap and sharing of vocabulary and reference points; the distinct genre labels are still used today with the understanding that they represent distinct traditions, but each borrows freely from the other.50 A few years after the sack of Delhi, with the death of Muhammad Shah in 1748, the influence, prosperity, and independence of the Mughal court succumbed rapidly to corruption, intrigue, and invasion, undermining its ability to support a large musical retinue. Musicians fled the capital to seek patronage in regional royal courts—to one of which, Lucknow, we will shortly follow them. Delhi’s link to the development of the sitar was not quite over, however. Firoz Khan remained in the crumbling capital. Masit Khan (who may have been Firoz’s son), systematically applied bīn techniques to the sitar. Each in their way contributed to Hindustani classical and sitar repertoire by experimenting with different ways to use gats—a term, perhaps originally from dance vocabulary, used for compositions set to a raga and a tala with a fixed pattern of rhythmic strokes. Gat compositions were one way to combine dhrupad attentiveness to contemplative articulation with virtuosic embellishment in a single raga performance and to bring the sitar further into the respectable world of solo music.51 Many later musicians trace their lineages to these innovators, and Firozkhani and especially Masitkhani gats—each named after their fabled creators, Firoz Khan and Masit Khan—still figure in the north Indian classical repertoire. We do not know what the individual sitars of particular famous musicians looked like, but generally speaking, sitars of Firoz Khan’s day were still little different from the slim Central Asian tambur lute shown in figure 1. The instrument would not have had much sustain, and due to its thin neck, one would not have been able to bend a string far to produce a meend. A generation later, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, descriptions of Masit Khan’s playing indicate that he was applying to a sitar the string bending techniques first used on the bīn. To do this required a sitar with a wider neck and probably metal frets and strings, which some contemporary drawings of sitars reflect. Other modifications followed. By the 1830s at the latest, playing on metal strings (brass and steel) had led to adoption of a wire pick, called mizrāb,52 worn over the tip of the right index finger. Unlike the hooked metal or plastic fingerpicks used by players of guitar or banjo today, which only work in one direction, the sitar mizrab can pick a string either up or down, either by pulling in or flicking out the finger. A mizrab-clad finger, flashing back and forth, can produce loud but precise and potentially very fast single-note runs. Played with a mizrab, the sitar stood out in performance of the new combined dhrupad and khayal styles. Through the course of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, while the sitar’s popularity grew across India, the instrument changed in still other ways. The neck widened further, and the strings were positioned to run over only the upper portion of that new width, leaving the lower half free. This space allowed for deep downward pulls on the playing string, stretching it and thus raising the pitch of a note after it had been struck. Meends executed in this way on the modern sitar can raise or lower a pitch by up to a fifth or more. The wide neck, moreover, was hollow, giving the sitar more resonance. On larger varieties of sitar, the small wooden sound-box of Central Asian tambur-type lutes was replaced with gourds like those on the bīn, allowing for richer harmonics (some added a second gourd at the head, which makes the sitar’s profile resemble that of the bīn). But although it borrowed bīn features, the sitar remained a lute, not a zither: its soundboard gave it a robust, projecting volume that the bīn as a stick zither could not achieve even with its double gourds (the southern Indian sarasvati vina has a soundboard—it, like the sitar, is a zither-lute blend). The sitar gathered still more features that make it unique among lutes. Also from Indian instruments, sitars adopted the wide, slightly arched bridge called a jāvarī, carved from a hard material such as ivory, bone, or ebony. When expertly filed and shaped, the javari affords the slightly buzzing sound that we now instantly associate with Indian music. Many British visitors, encountering this timbre for the first time in the nineteenth century, hated it. A century later, British bands, including the Kinks, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, incorporated the sound into rock songs. Raised metal frets on the sitar (called purda in Persian, meaning “veil” and, by extension, “division” or “scale”) were tied on with silk thread and easily moveable. Notes on the sitar could thus be simply adjusted to the intervals and note-values of different ragas, as they can be with the human voice. Thanks to this flexibility, the sitar is among that subset of instruments world-wide to have escaped the homogenizing juggernaut of “equal” or “even” temperament, a scheme that divides the sound spectrum into eleven semitones of precisely equal frequency intervals, as on a piano today. (The Arabic 'ud, which has no frets, likewise, has no predefined temperament. Fixed frets on European lutes, on the other hand, were one factor that was pushing Europeans to settle on fixed equal temperament even before keyboard instruments.)53 Despite the original meaning of sitar as “three-string,” its strings multiplied fantastically: a modern sitar can have up to twenty, arranged in three sets serving four different purposes. The number of main strings settled at around five, though with a good deal of variation; they are generally tuned to the basic note of the raga, sa (the tonic), as well as pa or ma (the fifth or fourth). Melodies are played on two or three of the main strings, while the rest fill in a droning chord around the raga melody. (These strings can be micro-tuned with beads ingeniously placed beyond the bridge or nut.) From at least the middle of the nineteenth century, some sitars added cikārī strings: two or more short strings attached with pegs halfway up the neck and tuned high to serve as a high drone and rhythmical accompaniment to notes played on the main strings. (“Cikari” means “mosquito” or “gnat.”) Cikaris are positioned above the rank of the main strings, so the back-and-forth motion of the right-hand index finger with its mizrab can catch them naturally in between picking out melody notes. Besides these two groups of strings, pictures from the 1830s and text descriptions from the 1870s speak of the attachment of yet another set, the tarabs. These nine or more strings run underneath, between the main strings and the soundboard, over their own little javari bridge, and are tuned to the several notes of whatever raga the sitarist is playing. They are sympathetic strings, and when strummed with a reach of the right-hand little finger, they make the harp-like sound one often hears at the beginning of a raga performance. But their main purpose is to spontaneously vibrate an instant after a player strikes a given note on the playing string. The tarab tuned to that note will sound, as will other tarab strings whose frequencies are mathematical multiples of the note. Tarab means “excitement,” “joy” in Persian, and that is indeed what the attentive player or listener experiences when tarabs blossom into sound after a precisely executed note, and especially a meend. Players of plucked stringed instruments have always regretted the fact that the note of a plucked string starts to decay as soon as it is plucked, unlike a sung, blown, or bowed note on voice or other instruments. By putting a set of tarab strings on a sitar, Indian lutiers partially defeated this problem, providing notes that magically swell after they are played. Varieties of sitars proliferated though the nineteenth century, and addition of some of these new features to the increasingly large instruments favored for dhrupad and khayal performance did not preclude the continued use of smaller, simpler sitar lutes. It was a period of vigorous ongoing experimentation, with ideas for lute innovation—unique tweaks on the ancient lute idea—both inspired by older Indian instruments and freshly invented. In India, the Central Asian sihtar gathered a bouquet of special features found on lutes nowhere else, resulting in a new instrument, the sitar, that while remaining roughly familiar in form (body, neck, strings) is also startlingly evolved. Arguably, only electrification in the twentieth century would comprise a more revolutionary remaking of lute-type instruments. Moreover, a similar process reshaped the rabab, which developed into the steel-clad sarod; the tabla double drum emerged in this period as well, becoming the standard companion for sitar, just as the pakhavaj had accompanied the bīn in dhrupad performance. What are often thought of as ancient or traditional Indian instruments are in fact quite modern, the product of focused creativity.54 Singers, Fiddlers, and Eunuchs The decline of the capital in Delhi from the mid-eighteenth century launched a diaspora of elite musicians to regional polities. One of the richest of these princely courts was Awadh (Oudh or Oude in older texts), east of Delhi in what is now the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and Tharuhat state in Nepal. Awadh was ruled from the early eighteenth century by an old and highly cultured Persian family that had immigrated to India and found favor with the Mughals. Muhammad Shah granted the family the hereditary governorship of Awadh in 1722, and they thereafter emerged as its autonomous nawabs. This dynasty welcomed musicians, dancers, poets, and artists to their court, first in Faizabad and then, after 1775, in Lucknow, which succeeded Delhi as the cultural capital of north India. Though independent of the Mughals, the nawabs of Lucknow were increasingly hemmed in by the British East India Company, which, after a coerced treaty in 1801, took over tracts of rich farmland, required Lucknow to pay for British troops stationed in Awadh, and from its “residency” in Lucknow steered the succession of nawabs. The Company recruited heavily in Awadh for its own sepoy army stationed in Bengal and further undermined the position of the nawabs by selling bonds to Awadh’s nobles, thus siphoning off capital and in effect putting the state’s elites on the Company payroll through the bond dividends.55 It was under these compromised circumstances that Nawab Wajid ‘Ali Shah (1822–87; r. 1847–56) assumed the throne. He had not been groomed as heir apparent; rather, rich but with no real official responsibility vouchsafed to him, he had devoted his early life to literary and musical pursuits: composing, choreographing, and writing poetry and treatises on music and dance. And, of course, he supported large numbers of musicians and dancers. Besides the elite performers from Delhi, many of them real or purported descendants of Tansen, lower status musicians from other cities and skilled in other genres and styles found a home in Lucknow as well—including even a European brass band. The centerpiece of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s musical and terpsichorean enterprise, however, was the Pari-khana, the “Fairie House,” something of a college where young women singers, instrumentalists, and dancers of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s court studied with the top masters from all over Hindustan. Wajid ‘Ali Shah was an aficionado of dance, especially that accompanied by the paired tabla drums. In the twentieth century, a dance form known as kathak emerged that is similarly associated with the tabla: kathak shares the tabla’s vocabulary of bols (rhythmic syllables representing different sounding beats) used to verbally represent a dance passage. In another synergy with the forms of North Indian classical music emerging since the nineteenth century, kathak dancers execute elaborately choreographed tans, often ending with the same kind of bravura triple figure (tihai) that khayal musicians executed to the delight of audiences. Many scholars consider the dance at Lucknow as a principal ancestor of today’s kathak.56 Dance at the Lucknow court was particularly expressive; it developed in association with the singing of thumri, a vocal song form with origins in Uttar Pradesh folk and devotional music. Thumris are often called “light” or “semi-classical” because they are written to ragas with fewer rules than those favored in the formal dhrupad style, because they often used talas with a lilting backbeat, and because their content, though originally religious, perhaps inevitably progressed from the topic of Radha’s or the gopi milkmaids’ devotion to Krishna to sing of love and sensuality more generally. But thumris are highly intricate, delicately ornamented music and are “light” simply in cultural status compared to the austere dhupad, rather than light in their demands on the performer. Performances of north Indian classical music today, after a long, structured exploration of a raga, will often end with improvisations on a thumri, as a sweet dessert follows a substantial meal.57 Instrumentalists among the Delhi refugees and Tansen lineage at Lucknow continued to play and instruct students in dhrupad and khayal, though they did so on sitar (or on the newly invented “bass” sitar, known as a surbahar) rather than on the less accessible bīn. Meanwhile, other musicians from less elite backgrounds accompanied dancers and specialized in thumris. Foremost among these was Ghulam Raza Khan, son of a court musician from Rampur and a member of the ḍhāṛī musician’s caste. Ghulam Raza became the paris’ (fairies’) head teacher and a favorite of Wajid ‘Ali Shah, who granted him the title Razi ad-Daula. Renowned as an innovative sitarist who integrated thumri style into his playing, Ghulam Raza is memorialized by a kind of fast composition, the razakhani gat, which together with Masit Khan’s eponymous masitkhani gat make up the two most common varieties of instrumental composition in north Indian classical music today. As in European art music the sonata form cannot be disassociated from Haydn and Mozart in eighteenth-century Vienna, for lovers of Indian classical music a razikhani gat invokes the memory Ghulam Raza in Lucknow’s flourishing garden of dance and music.58 Major General Sleeman, however, was not impressed. Perhaps it was because, as a biographer noted approvingly, he had “never Hindooized,” but from his Residency in Lucknow Sleeman saw only a plague of “singers and fiddlers”; the skilled women executing deft footwork to complex sixteen-beat rhythms on tabla, sitar, or sarangi were simply “nautch girls”—in Victorian eyes, little more than prostitutes.59 The lavish operatic productions of conjoined music, dance, and poetry (another new genre, called rahas), which Wajid ‘Ali Khan staged for the Lucknow public in a specially built hall, left no positive impression on the resident. As Sleeman wrote to the viceroy, the Marquess of Dalhousie, upon assuming his position in Lucknow, He [the nawab] eats, drinks, sleeps and converses with the singers and eunuchs and females alone, and the only female who has any influence over him is the sister of the chief singer, Rusee-od Dowlay [Ghulam Raza Khan], whom he calls his own sister. No member of the royal family or aristocracy of Oude is ever admitted to speak to or see his Majesty, and these contemptible singers are admitted to more equality and familiarity than his own brothers or sons ever were; they go out, too, with greater pomp than they or any of the royal family can; and are ordered to be received with more honours as they pass through the different palaces. The profligacy that exists within the palace passes all belief, and these things excite . . . disgust of the aristocracy of the capital. Should your Lordship resolve upon interposing effectually to remedy these disorders, I think it will be necessary to have at Lucknow, for at least the first few months, a corps of irregular cavalry.60 Had Sleeman visited Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent, he might have complained that the fifteenth-century Medici ruler was wasting his time with a gang of oil daubers and stone chippers. The resident was appalled to find in Lucknow “a score of fiddlers and eunuchs as privy councilors. Something must be done to unthrone these wretches, or things will be worse and worse.”61 To be fair, Sleeman was not entirely wrong in his observations. The aesthete Wajid ‘Ali Shah exhibited little interest in weighty affairs of state (that is, intensifying tax collection in order to make more payments to the British). And there were curious goings on at court. The prime minister, a sitarist and singer named Ali Naqi Khan, lacked political experience. Ghulam Rasa Khan, as deputy prime minister, was far shrewder, and together with his sister and another low-caste sitarist, Qutub ud-Daula, formed an intimate circle around Wajid ‘Ali Shah. They even ran a con on the nawab, who feared poisoning and suffered from chronic health concerns. Ghulam, Qutub, and the sister arranged for a doctor to provide the king with special, very expensive, long-term treatment. The doctor then kicked back a portion of his fees to the sitarist clique, who transferred their earnings outside Awadh. And the court sitarist, Ghulam Raza Khan, was sleeping with one of the nawab’s wives. Sleeman, of course, took pains to bring this to the attention of Wajid ‘Ali Shah, who dutifully divorced and packed the erring wife off on hajj to Mecca and banished the court sitarist—only to change his mind shortly after and recall Ghulam Raza Khan to the presence. Later, when Wajid ‘Ali learned that his former wife had never left and was now living with Ghulam Raza in palace rooms, the nawab first jailed the sitarists and all their relatives and then banished them definitively in 1850—but only after a poignant farewell audience to see off the great musician.62 Ghulam Raza Khan ultimately settled to the east, in Patna. Wajid ‘Ali Khan would be heading eastward himself just a few years later: Sleeman retired in 1854, and two years later, the British finally annexed Awadh, exiling Wajid ‘Ali Shah and placing the state under direct rule of the East India Company. A year later, with the outbreak of the Indian Great Rebellion, the Awadi sepoys in the Bengal army mutinied en masse, and some of the bloodiest fighting of the revolt took place in Uttar Pradesh. Though incarcerated during the rebellion, the former nawab of Awadh survived in Calcutta, still enjoying a generous stipend, and again gathered musicians and artists, this time to his mansions on the banks of the Houghly River. In so doing, even while extending the aristocratic musical life for another three decades, he contributed to the invention of a new business model for north Indian classical music though his contacts with colonial Bengali society. The era of musical patronage by royal courts was nearly over; elite sitarists and other musicians would increasingly draw support and recruit students from well-off families in modernizing urban India, even while perpetuating certain traditions of Mughal and Central Asian elite culture in the context of “Indian classical music.”63 The mixed ancestry of the sitar is apparent in the terms still used for its parts, its techniques, and its music, a colorful lexicography in Arabic, Persian, Hindi-Urdu, Sanskrit, and Bengali. The Silk Road brought the idea of the lute to India not once, but twice. The second time, imported lutes developed in conjunction with a similarly syncretic “Indo-Islamic” music, and after numerous modifications based on borrowings from older Indian instruments and the inspiration of creative inventor-musicians, the lutes took new shapes: as the sitar, the tambura, the sarod, the surbahar, and other instruments. Movement and interaction of networks of musicians—from Central Asia and Persia to Mughal Delhi, from Delhi to capitals like Lucknow, and from princely states to emergent global cities like Calcutta—stimulated cross-fertilization in both musical and organological realms. Yet even as this mobility thoroughly mixed up music and musicians in a manner defying fine distinctions of geography, religion, language, caste, and class, textually and orally conveyed knowledge about music obeyed an old Indian penchant for systematic categorization: musicians and scholars generated a panoply of labels for musical genres, styles, and types, as well as for schools of musicians themselves. Lineages of musical teacher and student, known as gharana, were identified, conceptualized along the lines of Sufi silsilla and chains of Hindu devotional gurus and disciples.64 This impulse to embed north Indian classical music, sitar playing in particular, within historical networks is so pervasive that even a non-Indian student of modest talent and limited attainment, studying sitar in Washington, DC, in the twenty-first century, will learn that he is studying with a teacher from the Imdad Khan gharana and is striving to play gayaki ang on a type of sitar named after Vilayat Khan, this gharana’s most famous son.65 (Nor should this style or sitar type ever be confused with those named for Ravi Shankar!) Both Vilayat Khan and Ravi Shankar designed and popularized new types of sitar in the twentieth century to match their own playing styles, just as had their predecessors since the late eighteenth century. When and where does the Silk Road journey stop? The nineteenth and twentieth century introduction of railway, printing, broadcast, recording technology, and international air travel expanded the mobility and contacts of the sitar—and got sitars into rock songs.66 Are these communicative processes fundamentally different from those that brought the lute to India in the first place? If pressed to draw a line, one might paraphrase Lenin to posit that “the Silk Road plus electrification equals globalization.” Still, it sounds like a distinction without a difference. Just as trying to separate the “Hindu” from the “Muslim” in the classical music of north India is like parsing the currents in a single river, to divide “Silk Road” from “globalization” is like specifying where the river ends and where the broader sea, into which its water flows, begins. Footnotes I would like to acknowledge the help of Shubha Sankaran and Brian Silver for much instruction over the years regarding the sitar, dhrupad, and other North Indian classical music. Also, I am grateful for the suggestions of two anonymous reviewers—and especially for their understanding, given that I am neither a musicologist nor a historian of India. 1 A “special interest group for historical ethnomusicology” has met under the rubric of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s annual meetings since 2005. 2 Ian D. Bent, et al., “Notation,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.20114. There are large anthologies of Chinese music in gongche notation extant from the Qing imperial period (especially eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), which support, among other things, studies of the bourgeoning regional genres of musical theatre and their patronage in the capital. Joseph Lam, “Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368–1911),” in Alan R. Thrasher, et al., “China.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.43141. That the “composer’s intent” as reflected in a score should be the primary consideration when studying music has been famously challenged in favor of multidimensional study of performance as social process or activity. See Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT, 1998): 1–18. 3 Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford, 1997): chapters 1 and 2. 4 The Sachs-Hornbostel system, published in German in 1914 and translated into English in 1961, organizes the instruments along functional-morphological lines, according to what generates the sound: idiophones, membranophones, chordophones, aerophones, electronophones. They are then subclassified according to other principles, including how they are played, their structure, or certain other features. Decimal numbers are assigned to each class and subclass. Jeremy Montagu, “Instruments, classification of,” in The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2011), http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199579037.001.0001/acref-9780199579037-e-3431. Thus, a modern American flat-backed mandolin is 321.322-6 (necked lute with a body shaped like a box and played with a pick), while an older style Italian mandolin is 321.321-6 (necked lute with a body shaped like a bowl, played with a pick). 5 Daniel Levitin, This is your Brain on Music (New York: Dutton, 2006), 285–60. 6 Bai Juyi’s Pipa xing is much anthologized, including in Ding Ruming, Nie Shimei, ed., Bai Juyi quanji [complete works of Bai Juyi] (Shangha, 1999). Convenient Chinese text and English translation may be found at http://www.philmultic.com/pipa/pipa_song.html. 7 Of Johannes Vermeer’s thirty-six extant paintings, twelve feature musical subjects. Twelve percent of seventeenth century Dutch paintings include musical references. Marjorie E. Wieseman, Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure (London and New Haven, 2013), 9, 25–29. 8 In developing this approach, I am influenced by the Arjun Appadurai’s concept of the “social life of things,” particularly Igor Kopytoff’s chapter in that volume, “The Cultural Biography of Things.” Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), 64–91. Likewise, the broad ideas of Bruno Latour’s “Actor Network Theory” inspired me to think of musical instruments as enmeshed in networks, much like his example of the Space Shuttle. Bruno Latour, “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist,” keynote address for “International Seminar on Network Theory: Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age,” February 19, 2010, Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism, Los Angeles. After I had begun this project on Silk Road chordophones, I came across Eliot Bates’ excellent articulation of a very similar network approach in “The Social Life of Musical Instruments,” Ethnomusicology 56, no. 3 (2012): 363–95. Also relevant here is Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking”—the process or activity of writing, making, consuming, or in other ways being involved with music (Small, Musicking). When viewed this way, musical events and practices of all sorts are open to Geertzian “thick description.” My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing Small’s book, well-known to musicologists, to my attention. 9 Anonymous, “Biographical Sketch of Major-General Sir W. H. Sleeman, K.C.B.,” in W. H. Sleeman, A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849–1850 (London, 1858), xii–xvi, 208–22. 10 Sleeman, Journey, xxii. 11 Henry George Farmer, “Musical Instruments of the Sumerians and Assyrians,” in Oriental Studies: Mainly Musical, ed. Henry George Farmer (London, 1953), 17–18, reprinted in Henry George Farmer, Studies in Oriental Music, (Frankfurt am Main, 1997): vol 2, 257–58. More detailed etymological tracings, as well as some competing views, are discussed and cited in Louise Wrazen, “The Early History of the Vīṇā and Bīn in South and Southeast Asia,” Asian Music 18, no. 1 (1986): 47n2. Because Egyptian terms for bow-harp in various eras and regions (bjn-t, oine, voini, bajne, bajna) are close to both Persian and Sanskrit terms for the same thing (von, vun, vin, etc.), the linguistic evidence of a connection between Sumerian ban, Persian von, and Sanskrit vīṇā / bīn is convincing. Through a sound change known as metathesis, consonants in *pan-tur flipped, yielding tambur and many variants in Asian and European names for lutes and drums. 12 Alastair Dick et al., “Vīṇā.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.51149. 13 The Saka (Skythians) were a nomadic or seminomadic people who conquered Bactria before the Kushans. The name King Sakka possibly echoes that history. 14 “Gutilla Jātaka,” in The Jataka, ed. E. D. Cowell, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, vol. II, no. 243 (Cambridge, 1895), http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/j2/j2096.htm. Richard Widdess, “North India,” in The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions, new edition, ed. Michael Church (Rochester, NY, 2015), 140. 15 The Amaravati stupa (in Andhra Pradesh, southeastern India, built between 2nd century BCE and 3rd century CE) was decorated with densely carved marble “drum slabs” around its exterior base and with similar slabs forming a railing that surrounded it. Some of these may be viewed in room 33a of the British Museum, a section depicting many lutes. Walter Kaufman, et al., Altindien. Musikgeschichte in Bildern. Band II: Musik des Altertums. Lieferung 8 (Leipzig, 1981), 100–1, Abb. 56 and 57, reproduces two examples of lute-players from Amaravati. 16 Nagarjunakonda (Macherla, Andhra Pradesh) was a complex of Buddhist monastic colleges (viharas) in the early centuries CE, the largest center of Buddhist learning in south India. It was excavated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The original site is now underwater, flooded by a local dam. Kaufman et al., Altindien, 112–15, Abb. 67–70 reproduces two examples of lute-players from Nagarjunakonda, with details. 17 The Pawaya site (near Gwailor in Madya Pradesh) consists of a temple platform and surrounding excavations. A relief excavated from near the temple-platform, dated to the first centuries CE, shows a dancer accompanied by a troupe of female musicians, including drummers behind her, a cross-legged lute-player to her right, and an arch-harp player to her left. This foregrounding of lute and harp suggests the paired roles of both types of vina in India. The piece is now in the Gujari Mahal Museum, Gwalior. It is reproduced in Curt Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York, 1943; reprinted in 2008), 193, plate 7b, and in Kaufman et al., Altindien,160, Abb. 117. 18 The Buddhist cave-temple complex of Ajanta is in Maharashtra, west central India, near Aurangabad. The clearest depictions of lutes at Ajanta are in sculptural decorations of the capitals of columns in cave 4 (one of which shows a plump boy with flowing curls playing a short ovoid five-string lute) and three wall paintings from cave 1. Kaufman, Altindien, 172–75, Abb. 130, 131, and 132. Behl, The Ajanta Caves, Ancient Paintings of Buddhist India (New York, 2005), 68–71. 19 Kaufman, Altindien, 100–1, Abb. 56. A slight variation is found in Pattaldakkal Temple (700 CE). See Karaikudsi Subramanian, “An Introduction to the Vina,” Asian Music 16, no. 2 (1985): fig. 9. 20 The full argument requires more space than I can devote to it here. I develop it in James Millward, “Travels of the Eurasian Lute: A Silk Road Story,” in-progress book manuscript, chapters 3 and 4. 21 A few images of long-necked ovoid lutes, quite different from the earlier short ovoid lutes, are found in south Indian temple reliefs in Pattadakal and Cidambaram dating to the tenth century. They are “rare in comparison to stick zithers.” Allyn Miner, Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Wilhelmshaven, 1993; Delhi, 1997), 26–27 and fig. 1. 22 Louise Wrazen, “The Early History of the Vīṇā and Bīn in South and Southeast Asia,” 40–42. 23 Dick et al., “Vīṇā.” See illustrations in Subramanian, “An Introduction to the Vina,” 10–11, figs. 10–13. Ultimately, by the sixteenth century, the larger, double-gourded Hindustani bīṇ or rudravina emerged, a zither with large resonator gourds at either end played horizontally with the gourds resting on the ground. The south Indian vina or saraswati vina developed around the seventeenth century as a hybrid zither-lute, with a body and neck similar to that of lutes (but no soundboard), a gourd at the head, and a sound-box frequently carved with an animal motif. The lutiform aspects of this modern instrument derived from the Afghan rabab, which entered India from Central Asia and was popular in the Deccan Muslim courts before Mughal times (Dick et al., “Vīṇā.”) They are not holdovers from the ovoid lutes of the early first millennium in south India but new hybrid zither-lutes. 24 Wrazen, “The Early History of the Vīṇā and Bīn” lists many examples of the stick zither in medieval Indian and South East Asian iconography. 25 Bonnie C. Wade, “Performing the Drone in Hindustani Classical Music: What Mughal Paintings Show Us to Hear,” The World of Music 38, no. 2 (January 2010) (Florian Noetzel GmbH Verlag, VWB - Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Bärenreiter, 1996), 56, where she cites John Andrew Grieg, “Tārīkh-i Saṇgīta: The Foundations of North Indian Music in the Sixteenth Century” (Ann Arbor, 1987): 17. 26 Katherine Brown Schofield prefers to avoid general claims of “synthesis” when discussing Hindustani music as it emerged in the Mughal period, as it is impossible to define a “Persian” or “Indian” or “foreign” or “local” style in absence of concrete examples of the music itself, let alone a process whereby two discrete styles “synthesized” to create a new, third style. She uses the term “appropriation” to describe concrete, documentable borrowings by Indian musicians and theorists of music-technical and ideational elements from Iranian, Arabic, and Central Asian music. She writes that “this was not so much a convergence as a deliberate transferal of tanbur techniques and methods onto the rudra vina for pragmatic and ideational reasons” (92). Katherine Butler Brown (Schofield), “Evidence of Indo-Persian Musical Synthesis? The Tanbur and Rudra Vina in Seventeenth-Century Indo-Persian Treatises,” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 36–37 (2006): 89–102. 27 Miner, Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries, 28–29. 28 “Sitar,” Grove Music Online / Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.J411800. See also entries for “Amir Khusrau,” “khyal,” “ghazal,” and “qawwali.” For Amir Khusrau, see also Amal Das Sharma, Musicians of India, Past and Present: Gharanas of Hindustani Music and Genealogies (Calcutta, 1993), 29, who stresses Amir Khusrau’s role in introducing Persian melodies and “Muslim music” to Indian music. 29 “Sitar,” Grove Music Online; Owen Wright, “On the Concept of a ‘Timurid Music,’” Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, Anno 15 (76), Nr. 2 (1996): 665–81. 30 Zahiru’d-din Mubammad Babur, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans., ed., and annotated by Wheeler M. Thackston (Washington, DC, 1996): 227–28, original folio 182. Chargah (chārgāh) refers to one of the modes of Persian dastgah or Central Asian muqam music. To be able to compose a tune obedient to the rules of such a mode is a sign of sophistication. A naqsh in the fifteenth century was “the introduction to a vocal composition” (225, Thackston note 144). Rian Thum looked at the nasta’līq script of the facsimile of folio 182 for me and identified the word that Thackston translated as “lute” and “lutenist.” 31 Bonnie Wade, “The Meeting of Musical Cultures in the 16th-century Court of the Mughal Akbar,” The World of Music 32, no. 2 (1990): 16 et passim. 32 The argument and associations in this paragraph come from Ebba Koch, Shah Jahan and Orpheus: The Pietre Dure Decoration and the Programme of the Throne in the Hall of Public Audiences at the Red Fort of Delhi (Graz, Austria,1988), and Ebba Koch, “The Mughal Emperor as Solomon, Majnun, and Orpheus, or the Album as a Think Tank for Allegory,” Muqarnas 27 (2010): 277–311. Surrounding the Orpheus panel are many other pietre dure decorations of birds and flowers. 33 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, c. 1537–1539, Philadelphia Museum of Art accession number 1950-86-1. 34 See the illumination of the story from a Mughal version of Amir Khusrau’s Khamsa held by the Walters Art Museum. Narsang (?), “Layla visits Majnun in the Wilderness,” Walters Manuscript W.624, fol. 115a. 35 Eaton, R. M. “Akbar-Nama,” Encyclopædia Iranica, I/7 (London, 1982–): 714–15. 36 Abu ‘l-Fazl ‘Allami, The A‘in-I Akbari, 680–82; Wade, “The Meeting of Musical Cultures in the 16th-century Court,” 13, 23n4. 37 The full wall decoration is reproduced with a detail of the musicians in Gian Carlo Calza, Akbar: The Great Emperor of India, (Milan, Italy, 2012), plate I 24, bottom, and detail, 108–9, description of plate, 241. Murad Baksh was identified by an inscription formerly on the verso of the painting. The figures pasted on the sides comprise a genealogy of the Mughal rulers: Timur on the right side, with golden nimbus, and on the left side are (from right to left) Babur’s father, Babur, Humayun, and Akbar. 38 The bīn is little played today, but modern versions of the instrument have larger gourd-resonators. They are held across the body like a lute or with one end over the left shoulder (not the right, as in figure 1). Wade reproduces an example of a tambur and bīn duet similar to my figure 1; hers is from an illuminated manuscript of the Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) and a painting illustrating the story “The Invention of Instruments from Monkey Intestines.” Bonnie Wade, “The Meeting of Musical Cultures in the 16th Century Court of the Mughal Akbar,” 17, ill. 6. 39 Advertisement for 3D Sound Labs Raagini Digital Electronic Tampura, Amazon.com, accessed May 13, 2016, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ragini-Sruthi-Box-Digital-Tambura/dp/B012CEKF1K. 40 Examples are ubiquitous. Inayat Khan’s Music is one example (“Music, the word we use in our everyday language, is nothing less than the picture of our Beloved”), notable for its ecumenical embrace of Hindu, Sufi, and other theological as well as popular scientific perspectives by which to complicate, and perhaps deepen, the discussion of music. Sufi Inayat Khan, Music (Surrey, UK, 1962),1. 41 For my general description and attempt to demystify ragas, I draw upon my own relatively short but enlightening experience studying Hindustani classical music on sitar. For discussion of dhrupad and Tansen, I have drawn on Widdess, “North India”; Jon Barlow and Lakshmi Subramanian, “Music and Society in North India: from the Mughals to the Mutiny,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 19 (May 12–18, 2007): 1779–87; Jonathan Katz, “Tānsen,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.48862; Wade, “The Meeting of Musical Cultures,” 16; and Amal Das Sharma, Musicians of India, Past and Present: Gharanas of Hindustani Music and Genealogies (Calcutta, 1993), 35–36. 42 Widdess, “North India,” 153; Barlow and Subramanian, “Music and Society in North India,” 1782–83. On qawwali generally, see Regula Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali (Chicago, 1995). 43 On Mughal era North Indian courtesans or tawa’if dancers (called nautch girls by the colonial British), see Margaret E. Walker, “The ‘Nautch’ Reclaimed: Women’s Performance Practice in Nineteenth-Century North India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (2014): 551–67, and Katherine Butler Schofield, “The Courtesan Tale: Female Musicians and Dancers in Mughal Historical Chronicles, C.1556–1748,” Gender & History 24, no. 1 (2012): 150–71. 44 Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa-e-Dehli: The Mughal Capital in Muhammad Shah’s Time (Delhi, [1748] 1989): 94; Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 37. 45 Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa’-i Dehlī, cited in Miner, Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries, 82ff. 46 Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa-e-Dehli, 76. Brackets in original. 47 Allyn Miner, “The Sitar: An Overview of Change,” The World of Music 32, no. 2 (1990): 27–28; Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 85–87. 48 Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa-e-Dehli, 79–81. 49 Miner, Sitar and Sarod. See also Brown, “Evidence of Indo-Persian Musical Synthesis?” on the fretting system and temperaments of the tambur and their transfer to the rudravina in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 50 Miner, Sitar and Sarod, especially 89. 51 Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 90–93; Barlow and Subramanian, “Music and Society in North India,” 1785. On the gat as a dance, see Margaret Walker, “The ‘Nautch’ Reclaimed.” 52 The word is originally Arabic and was used for plectra used to play Afghan rababs and tamburs. 53 That European fretted lutes played a generally neglected role in locking in and disseminating equal temperament is an argument I am developing in my broader book research. I first advance the idea in James A. Millward, “Chordophone Culture in Two Early Modern Societies: A Pipa-Vihuela Duet,” Journal of World History 23, no. 2 (2012): 237–78, based on evidence from Fray Juan Bermudo’s sixteenth century attempt to design a Pythagorean-tempered vihuela (248–50). 54 This discussion of changes to the sitar is based mainly upon Allyn Miner’s deeply researched Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries, where a scrupulously compiled chrestomathy of sitar-related textual and iconographic sources anchors a story so often shrouded in legend. 55 Madhu Trivedi, The Making of Awadh Culture (Delhi, 2010), 1–2, 110–11; Sleeman, Journey, lvi–lvii; P. D. Reeves, “Introduction,” in Sleeman in Oudh: An Abridgement of W. H. Sleeman’s A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849–50 (Cambridge, 1971), 19; Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 109–11. 56 Margaret Walker argues that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was no “single, identifiable performance practice that can be identified as the irrefutable ancestor of today’s [kathak] dance” but, rather, that many performance practices from that era share features with modern kathak: see “The ‘Nautch’ Reclaimed,” 4ff., and Margaret E. Walker, India’s Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective, SOAS Musicological Series (London, 2014), 8 et passim. Moreover, she writes that “nothing taught at this [Lucknow] school resembles present-day kathak in any way”; nor does Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s own dance treatise mention people called “Kathaks” (Walker, India’s Kathak Dance, 30, 67). I follow Walker’s argument that kathak dance (but not yet known by that name) arose in the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries in a process parallel to that by which sitar, sarod, tabla, and other instruments took their current forms and that kathak is not an ancient classical dance. Similar mythologizing, with nationalist, colonialist, and anti-Islamic overtones, enshrouds the history of the sitar. I thus avoid using the term “kathak” for the specific dance at Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s court. However, other literature emphasizes the interconnections of musical forms with dance at Lucknow in a manner clearly like that evident today in kathak. My description of those connections thus follows the other literature (cited in specific situ) on this point. 57 Wajid ‘Ali Shah himself wrote thumris. One, “Babul Mora Naihar Chhooto Jay,” used the metaphor of a bride’s going-away song to lament his own exile from Lucknow following British annexation of Awadh in 1856. The song became a standard and has been sung in Bollywood movies. 58 Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 112–13; Trivedi, The Making of Awadh Culture, ch. 4, especially 108–111; Martin Clayton, “Khan, Ghulam Raza,” Grove Music Online; Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2001), http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.48674. 59 For more accurate discussion of female dancers and singers and their status in Mughal society, see Schofield, “The Courtesan Tale,” 150–71, and Margaret Walker, India’s Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective. 60 Sleeman, Journey, lxxv–lxxvi. 61 Sleeman, Journey, lvii, from a letter written in 1849. 62 Sleeman, Journey, 45–49, 104–5; Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 115–17. 63 Richard Williams’s dissertation discusses the transition of Hindustani music and dance to Calcutta and Bengal and the development of north Indian musical culture in the east from both a musical and a sociological point of view. He cautions against overemphasis on “disjuncture” in this journey: previous literature has cast the musical migration from Mughal North India to Bengal as simultaneously a dramatic shift away from aristocratic tradition to modernity and public culture, while Williams, based on extensive readings in both Urdu and Bengla texts, notes the continuation of aspects of the elite ustad tradition in new environment. He also challenges the topos of late Mughal Muslim “decadence,” especially when imagined in Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s Lucknow court or suburban Calcutta palace, as an echo of British colonial sensibilities. Richard David Williams, “Hindustani Music between Awadh and Bengal, C.1758–1905” (PhD dissertation, King’s College, London, 2014). 64 The word appears first in a treatise on dance by Wajid ‘Ali Khan. 65 Amal Das Sharma, Musicians of India, Past and Present, 222–26. 66 The first sitar in Western popular music featured in the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” on Rubber Soul (London, 1965), when that band was near the peak of its popularity and influence. Indian sounds in rock became such a fad that by 1966 pop singer Steve Marriott joked in Melody Maker that “We’ll be able to get plastic sitars in our cornflakes soon.” See Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West, chapter 6 (quotation from head of chapter). See also Christopher Partridge, The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular Music, the Sacred and the Profane (Oxford, 2013), 186–87. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. 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TI - The Silk Road and the Sitar: Finding Centuries of Sociocultural Exchange in the History of an Instrument
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shy050
DA - 2018-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-silk-road-and-the-sitar-finding-centuries-of-sociocultural-Uga0r3s7Vy
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VL - 52
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DP - DeepDyve
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