Katherine Butler Schofield
Katherine Schofield is Professor of South Asian Music and History and Head of the Department of Music at King's College London; and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Historical Society. She is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean, and her new monograph "Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858" came out with Cambridge University Press in 2024. This book grew out of her recent British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2018) presenting a series of public lectures and conversations at the British Library, and a set of podcasts, "Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India" available via Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/user-513302522. Katherine's first book, an edited volume with Francesca Orsini, "Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India," was published in 2015 by Open Book Press. Her second book, "Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain," edited with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau, was published by Niyogi Books in 2018.
In 2011–16 she was Principal Investigator of a €1.18M European Research Council grant, “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean”, which examined the history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in India and the Malay world c.1750-1900 through multilingual, intermedial, and stereophonic research methods. The final report summary, in which we make sense of what we found using a new concept, the paracolonial, is available here: http://cordis.europa.eu/result/rcn/183458_en.html . She continues to curate the SHAMSA database funded through this grant, which describes well over 300 major written sources c. 1700–1900 for the history and analysis of North Indian music and dance in Mughal and British-colonial South Asia. The SHAMSA digital collection already constitutes the largest single repository of primary written sources on Indian music and dance in the world, and is available here: https://zenodo.org/record/1445775.
Katherine originally trained as a viola player, before embarking on her doctoral work at SOAS University of London in the cultural history of North Indian music, followed by a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. Katherine’s research interests lie generally in the areas of South Asian music, the history of Mughal India (1526-1858), Islam, empire, and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural. Working largely with Persian, and latterly Urdu, sources for Hindustani music c.1570-1860, in recent work she has established music as central to Mughal technologies of sovereignty and selfhood, identified classicisation processes at work in early-modern Indian arts, located the relationship of ragamala paintings to their melodic inspirations in shared notions of power, told tales about ill-fated courtesans and legendary ustads, and traced the lineage of the chief musicians to the Mughal emperors from Akbar to Bahadur Shah Zafar.
She has been working since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021 to support her music professor and musician colleagues there and in exile through the coordination effort she co-leads with Mirwaiss Sidiqi and Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, the International Campaign for Afghanistan's Musicians https://www.icfam.info
Katherine is the process of establishing the Musicians, Artists and Writers At Risk Network (MAWARN) at King's College London, to act as a hub for practical and policy oriented research on and by creative workers at risk. Her new research project is The Singer and the Song in South Asia (SASISA), including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
Please contact her via email [email protected] if you are interested in participating in either or both of these new projects.
Katherine was formerly known as Katherine Butler Brown.
.
Supervisors: Professor Emeritus Richard Widdess (PhD 2003)
Phone: +44 20 7848 6252
Address: Department of Music
King's College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS
In 2011–16 she was Principal Investigator of a €1.18M European Research Council grant, “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean”, which examined the history of transitions from pre-colonial to colonial musical fields in India and the Malay world c.1750-1900 through multilingual, intermedial, and stereophonic research methods. The final report summary, in which we make sense of what we found using a new concept, the paracolonial, is available here: http://cordis.europa.eu/result/rcn/183458_en.html . She continues to curate the SHAMSA database funded through this grant, which describes well over 300 major written sources c. 1700–1900 for the history and analysis of North Indian music and dance in Mughal and British-colonial South Asia. The SHAMSA digital collection already constitutes the largest single repository of primary written sources on Indian music and dance in the world, and is available here: https://zenodo.org/record/1445775.
Katherine originally trained as a viola player, before embarking on her doctoral work at SOAS University of London in the cultural history of North Indian music, followed by a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. Katherine’s research interests lie generally in the areas of South Asian music, the history of Mughal India (1526-1858), Islam, empire, and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural. Working largely with Persian, and latterly Urdu, sources for Hindustani music c.1570-1860, in recent work she has established music as central to Mughal technologies of sovereignty and selfhood, identified classicisation processes at work in early-modern Indian arts, located the relationship of ragamala paintings to their melodic inspirations in shared notions of power, told tales about ill-fated courtesans and legendary ustads, and traced the lineage of the chief musicians to the Mughal emperors from Akbar to Bahadur Shah Zafar.
She has been working since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021 to support her music professor and musician colleagues there and in exile through the coordination effort she co-leads with Mirwaiss Sidiqi and Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, the International Campaign for Afghanistan's Musicians https://www.icfam.info
Katherine is the process of establishing the Musicians, Artists and Writers At Risk Network (MAWARN) at King's College London, to act as a hub for practical and policy oriented research on and by creative workers at risk. Her new research project is The Singer and the Song in South Asia (SASISA), including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
Please contact her via email [email protected] if you are interested in participating in either or both of these new projects.
Katherine was formerly known as Katherine Butler Brown.
.
Supervisors: Professor Emeritus Richard Widdess (PhD 2003)
Phone: +44 20 7848 6252
Address: Department of Music
King's College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2LS
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Histories of the Ephemeral bit.ly/2uCsPJ1 by Katherine Butler Schofield
In this new project, through a series of public lectures at the British Library culminating in a new monograph, I aim to bring this archive to public attention; to demonstrate ways to read these diverse writings in and of themselves and in conversation; and in doing so, to tease out of them stories of musical culture that don’t just provide us with much needed new histories of music and listening in late Mughal India, but also of wider events in the critical period of regime change from Plassey to the Uprising.
Standalone Papers by Katherine Butler Schofield
In this new project, through a series of public lectures at the British Library culminating in a new monograph, I aim to bring this archive to public attention; to demonstrate ways to read these diverse writings in and of themselves and in conversation; and in doing so, to tease out of them stories of musical culture that don’t just provide us with much needed new histories of music and listening in late Mughal India, but also of wider events in the critical period of regime change from Plassey to the Uprising.
In this chapter I focus on one major treatise, Shaikh ‘Abdul Karim’s Javāhir al-Mūsīqāt-i Muḥammadī, written in Persian for Muhammad ‘Adil Shah of Bijapur (r. 1627–56) but incorporating large portions of an illustrated Dakhni music treatise composed c. 1570 probably for ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah. I then place it in dialogue with the famed Chester Beatty Nujūm al-‘Ulūm, whose paintings have been used to date the Javāhir. When read together I argue that these two manuscripts reveal the key to the link between painted and sounded renditions of the rāg—affective and supernatural power, articulated through a blend of Shaivite tantrism, Sanskrit rasa theory, and Islamicate techniques for crafting a balanced emotional self including Unani medicine and astrology. Throughout, I reflect on the complex interrelationships between music, art, and affective power in early-modern Islamicate India, especially in the Deccan and the Mughal empire.
Part 1: http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2014/10/indian-music-in-the-persian-collections-the-javahir-al-musiqat-i-muhammadi-or12857-part-1.html
Part 2: http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2014/10/indian-music-in-the-persian-collections-the-javahir-al-musiqat-i-muhammadi-or12857-part-2.html
What happened to Rag Gaund? The immense popularity of this musical mode through the course of the 18th and 19th centuries is attested by its profuse appearance in several major poetical/lyrical collections, most notably the Nādirāt-e shāhī, a compendium of the "choicest examples" of the multilingual poetry of the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II (Delhi, 1797). But by the 20th century, Gaund seems to have been confined to the Sikh tradition, preserved especially in its scriptural home, the Guru Granth Sahib.
Yet tracing the history of Rag Gaund is not merely an exercise in recovering a lost, modified, or discarded musical mode. The association of this rāga with the monsoon allows us to examine the particular associations of this mode with emotions and performance practices during the intellectual and cultural transition of paracolonial India—and in particular its place at the court of the Emperor Shah Alam II. In doing so, this paper will posit an argument for the necessity of examining multiple artistic forms—and their somewhat distinct but overlapping and inter-related genealogies of knowledge— and doing so across languages, to obtaining anything close to a nuanced picture of the intellectual and cultural endeavours that were ongoing in the transition from late Mughal to early colonial North India.
The main finding of our project was that "precolonial knowledge systems did not consecutively give way to transitional, then colonial knowledge systems. Instead, reformism was but one strand among many thriving lineages of knowledge that competed for precedence in dynamic musical economies during the colonial era. These streams were facilitated or altered in their course by colonial presence and action, but the vast majority were not beholden to colonial epistemologies. In seeking to account for these economies while never losing sight of the coercive colonial context that shaped them, we have developed the concept of “paracolonial” knowledge systems (after Stephanie Newell), denoting lineages of knowledge that continued, developed, and were born and died alongside and beyond the colonial. The paracolonial enables us to account for the many otherwise unaccountable regional musical practices and knowledges that coexisted, waxed, and waned in differing relations to European power and culture during the years conventionally marked off as the “colonial period”. It also makes sense of the persistence of older forms and ideas long after independence in India and the Malay world." (Katherine Butler Schofield, 2016)
- - - - - - - The SHAMSA* bibliographical database and digital collection has been developed as part of the European Research Council project Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean (MUSTECIO, Grant no. 263643, PI Katherine Butler Schofield, 2011–2015/16). The attached xlsx document, licensed as a CC-BY-NC resource, provides the bibliographical metadata of Version 1.0 of the database. It describes well over 300 major written sources c. 1700-1900 for the history and analysis of North Indian music and dance in Mughal and British-colonial South Asia. About one third – well over 100 – of these sources are also currently held in digital copies in the Department of Music at King’s College London. The SHAMSA digital collection already constitutes the largest single repository of major primary sources on Indian music and dance in the world, and is planned to be a major ongoing resource for future researchers on Indian music and cultural history.
The sources of SHAMSA 1.0 were located and consulted Jan 2011– Dec 2015 by members of the Awadh Case Study of the ERC Musical Transitions project, including James Kippen, David Lunn, Allyn Miner, Katherine Butler Schofield, Margaret E Walker, and Richard David Williams. The initial collection has clearly defined limits: it 1) focusses on the Gangetic plains (or Doab) region between Delhi, Lucknow, and Calcutta; 2) during the timeframe c. 1700-1900 i.e. explicitly before the era of recorded sound (but with some 17C and 20C outliers, and some materials from e.g. Hyderabad, Kashmir). 3) The linguistic focus of the collection is on works largely in Persian, Brajbhasha/Hindavi, Hindi, Urdu and Bengali, but with some works in Sanskrit, English, and other Northern Indian vernacular languages. Sources include music and dance treatises, biographical works (tazkiras), song collections, ethnographic works, department archives, encyclopedias, cosmographies, theatre scripts, moral and ethical tracts, histories, and a tiny handful of the large number of extant ragamala painting sets.
It is critically important to note that this is by no means a complete collection of everything written on music in North India in the period of transition from the Mughal to the British empires. We have been completely overwhelmed by the volume and richness of the materials we have uncovered for the history of music and dance before the period of recorded sound. This bibilography should be considered a mere starting point; we are already aware of a large number of sources, especially visual, that we have not yet included. Version 1.0 consists only of (largely) textual sources that at least one of the team members personally consulted 2011–15, and considered to include substantial and noteworthy musical and/or dance-related contents (very occasionally key sources are also included that we know about but have been unable to locate yet, despite our best efforts.)
We know that there are many more written and visual sources for North Indian music and dance beyond the geographical and temporal scope of this database – for example for Panjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, etc. – but even considering our core region and timeframe we keep uncovering more sources all the time, and aim to update the open access versions of the database periodically. We would be delighted to hear from anyone who has information about sources that are not yet in our database that we might be able to consult and include.
Well over one third of the works in the bibliographical file are already available to consult as digital copies in situ at King’s College London. The copyright statuses of these copies are exceedingly complex; but we aim to make as many of these available via Creative Commons licenses as and when we gain approval from the holders of the original documents to do so. Please do get in touch with Dr Katherine Schofield at King’s College London if you wish to consult the digital copies in the SHAMSA collection, or if you have suggestions of works whose metadata should be included in the bibliographical list. (Version 1.0 was completed 1 Jan 2016, and checked/exported 2 Oct 2018.)
*Deriving from the Persian word "shams", meaning "sun", a shamsa is both a ray of solar light often indicating the bestowal of special knowledge or enlightenment, and the technical term for an illuminated orb-like frontispiece in Islamicate manuscripts that often encloses the patron's name, titles, and/or portrait — see for example the beautiful shamsa for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan that adorns the SHAMSA Community page (Metropolitan Museum of Art). In later lithographed works on music in Urdu, the title of the manuscript would often be enclosed in a shamsa. But the name SHAMSA also pays homage to the first Persian treatise on North Indian music written by an imperial hereditary musician, the Shams al-Aswat by Ras Baras Khan (1698), in which he named shams as the presiding star of the musical note Ma, the fourth scale degree (MUSTECIO 0131/British Library, I O Islamic 1746, f. 19r).
In his important book on Ottoman song collections, Words without songs, Owen Wright noted that “it is fair to say that such works have failed to receive the attention which the evident popularity of the genre would seem to justify. Reasons for neglect would not be hard to seek: the güfte mecmuası belongs functionally to the realm of music, but the early examples, for which there is little or no access to the accompanying melodies, could now be thought of as primarily literary in relevance as well as content, while for the musicologist the crucial absence of any notation has presumably meant that they have generally been deemed insufficiently informative to warrant detailed investigation.”
This could equally be said to be true of research on pre-colonial song collections in North India. In South Asian studies, the song collection as a literary genre has received considerable attention in certain areas of scholarship, most notably in religious studies where collections of sung poetry form the major corpus for the study of bhakti and Sikh traditions. To a more limited extent, written collections of the prestigious courtly genre dhrupad have been mined for their literary implications, and more recently new social history has been drawn out of the contents of printed miscellanies of Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali songs from the nineteenth century.
What has not so far been considered is the musicological and social significance of a significant corpus of collections of lighter courtly songs, predominantly khayal, tappa, ghazal and tarana, that emerged in unprecedented number in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and circulated right across and beyond North India from Bharuch to Calcutta and from Kathmandu to Hyderabad. While many such collections were produced for Muslim elite patrons in courts such as Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad, a significant number were written for or purchased by European collectors resident in these locations, including women. In this chapter I look not so much at the song texts contained within these manuscripts, but at the different logics behind the making of such collections c.1780-1830. In doing so, I both elaborate what song collections can tell us musically even in the absence of notation, and make some preliminary observations about the changing state of patronage in the Indian musical field at a critical moment of transition for Muslim courts towards British political dominance.
It is also worth noting that a great deal of extremely interesting work has been published since 2010 on music and empire, and also on oceans as musical regions, especially by younger scholars from the global South and others who share our conviction that work in regional languages is essential to a fully rounded understanding of how colonialism affected the music and dance of colonised peoples.
This is not the full Grant Agreement, just the Research Proposal and Works Cited; and I have left off most of the section detailing the Case Studies (Awadh Case Study, Lead: Katherine Schofield; Malay Case Study, Lead: 1) David R M Irving, then 2) Julia Byl; India-Malay Case Study, Lead: 1) Jim Sykes, then 2) David Lunn). For further information, please see our archived website: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/music/research/proj/mutran/index.aspx
Recording of Sitar-been www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAJ3lXw6rdw
V&A Images to accompany the podcast collections.vam.ac.uk :
IS.83-1989 Woman playing vina; Jaipur, 1890.
IS.176-1949 Rag Megh Malhar; Deccan, mid 18C.
07365:3/(IS) A vina-player; Benares, c.1860.
IS.182-1882 Taus
IS.47-2002 Bin-sitar or Sitar-been
Written and performed by Katherine Butler Schofield and recorded under a CC–BY–NC–SA license
This paper establishes an overarching theory of the place of Hindustani music in Mughal thought and social life, roughly from the last decades of Akbar’s reign (from 1593) until the death of Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (1707). Mughal understandings of the human being, and thus of the social and political worlds, were dominated by two parallel binaries deriving from the discourse on ethics and proper governance embodied in Persianate akhlāq literature: 1) the inner struggle between reason (the practical intellect,‘aql-i ‘amalī) and the emotions anger and desire (the irascible and concupiscible faculties, quwwat-i ghaẓabī and quwwat-i shahwī); and 2) this struggle’s outworkings in the social and political world as the need to maintain balance—‘adālat/i‘tidāl—between the domains of duty and, in the case of desire, pleasure. For virtue to prevail, reason and duty must ultimately subdue desire and pleasure. But this victory did not entail the annihilation of desire and pleasure, rather mastery over these domains. This mastery had to be displayed to the world if it were to be deemed a virtue at all.
Hindustani music was understood in Mughal writings as the sonic vehicle of the emotions joy, love, and longing, all of which belonged to the domain of desire. Musical patronage and connoisseurship therefore became a major social and political arena in which the inner struggle to place desire under rational control could be outwardly manifested. Patronage and connoisseurship of music, recited poetry, dance, youthful beauty, and other evanescent phenomena were the core practices of the domain of pleasure in the Mughal world, conducted largely within the intimate social institution of the majlis or maḥfil (assembly). While listening to music in the majlis could be dangerous to the Mughal man because of its exploration of desire, at the same time music was indispensible to Mughal courtiers because of its use value in fortifying the primary Mughal virtue of male-to-male affection, as a means to spiritual union with the Divine Beloved, and as a medicinal cure for physical and mental disease.
Hindustani music was understood in Mughal writings as the sonic vehicle of the emotions joy, love, and longing, all of which belonged to the domain of desire. Musical patronage and connoisseurship therefore became a major social and political arena in which the inner struggle to place desire under rational control could be outwardly manifested. Patronage and connoisseurship of music, recited poetry, dance, youthful beauty, and other evanescent phenomena were the core practices of the domain of pleasure in the Mughal world, conducted largely within the intimate social institution of the majlis or mahfil (assembly). While listening to music in the majlis could be dangerous to the Mughal man because of its exploration of desire, at the same time music was indispensable to Mughal courtiers because of its use value in fortifying the primary Mughal virtue of male-to-male affection, and as a cure for physical and mental disease.