Katherine Schofield on tazkiras, the poignant biographies of the Mughal court’s musicians

Delhi or Shahjahanabad of the mid-18th century was a place of terrible instability with frequent raids on the city. The Mughal rulers were often in exile, and the court musicians had to scramble for cover and patronage. It was at this time that there was an explosion in the writing of tazkiras — genealogies and short biographies — of the court’s musical geniuses.

Katherine Schofield, senior lecturer, department of music, King’s College, London, describes tazkiras as “human documents” that offer insights into the music, politics and society of the dying Mughal empire. Schofield is an exceptionally good raconteur too, bringing alive lost worlds of courtesans, musicians and kings in exquisite detail not only in her books and blogposts but also in her podcasts for the British Library. In Delhi recently for the Prof. Abidi Memorial Lecture on tazkiras, she speaks of the rich genealogies.

What drew your attention to the musical tazkiras?

One of the most interesting things about the culture surrounding Hindustani music today are the anecdotes about memorable performances, a rivalry between masters, one’s own guru, about a

Katherine Schofield

legend of the past. These generally spring from a real event, but are often mythologised to educate students and audiences, and thus reveal a great deal about musicians and patrons. Although I love the music, I am more interested in what music means to people, to society and culture. And it turns out that these stories are not just in the oral tradition but also recorded in collections of biographies.

The tazkira or “reminiscences” genre is a very old one in Persian literature, and later in other languages, and is essentially a collection of life stories or biographies put together on a theme. Persian stories and short biographies of Hindustani musicians go back to the late 16th century and the court of Akbar, but the first such standalone tazkira that I know of was written by Inayat Khan Rasikh in 1753.

The musicians’ tazkiras were a new thing in the late 18th century, and they tell the story of musicians on the move, under threat from the political and social upheaval suffered by the Mughal court in Delhi between Nadir Shah’s invasion in 1739 and Shah Alam II’s return from exile in 1772. Most are written from the perspective of musicians of the Mughal court who ended up all over India. They capture the stories of a musical world under threat, but also keep track of where the musicians went, which ones died.

What do they tell us of the cultural milieu of the time?

They tell us in minute detail where the new centres of cultural power were — and it was not just obvious places like Lucknow. Musicians went in droves to Murshidabad, Patna, Benaras, Kathmandu, Hyderabad, Rohilkhand, but also to smaller places like Mathura, Rewa and Banda. They tell us who the key supporters of music were — princely and aristocratic patrons, of course, but also Sufi shrines and hospices, and a whole new culture of gentlemen amateur musicians training with ustads, when a century previously this would have been done only by the boldest and those careless of their reputation. Most importantly to me, they reveal the emotions of the time in a way I think no other literature does.

How did tazkiras capture the tumult of the 1700s in Delhi?

On the one hand, they memorialised the culture of the “golden age” of Hindustani musicians — those musicians who were thriving in the courts of the “great” Mughal emperors, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb, through to the mini golden age at the court of Muhammad Shah Rangeela. On the other, they tried to hold on to the tradition and keep track of it in as orderly a fashion as possible as musicians moved all over India. But music is never just about music — it embodies the emotions and dreams and power of a whole world, in this case the Mughal empire crumbling before its people’s eyes. In some sense, the writing of the tazkiras was an attempt to hold the broken world together with nothing but the “sibilant scratches of a broken pen” (as the Mughal writer Sher Khan Lodi once described the act of trying to describe music in words).

Were these court musicians ‘professionals’ in the sense we know today despite their dependence on the court?

An artist’s job was then, as it is now, to serve their patron, not to play politics. And a number of musicians were formally attached to the imperial atelier or to their patron’s department of entertainment — for example, the Murshidabad nawab’s Arbab-i Nishat or the Jaipur maharaja’s Gunijankhana. These positions were of full-time service to the court. But musicians were always mobile, and even court musicians could ask permission to perform outside or indeed to leave service. Even Tansen was born and served in Gwalior, moved to the court of Rewa, and only in his senior years was he commandeered by emperor Akbar. It was normal for musicians to move to new patrons. Muhammad Shah’s chief musician Anjha Baras Khan, for instance. After Nadir Shah’s invasion, Muhammad Shah’s nobleman, Amir Khan, asked permission to take Anjha Baras with him to Allahabad where he was being stationed as governor, and as Muhammad Shah was in mourning (he had lost much of his treasury), he agreed. Younger brothers often moved to new patrons, while the head of the family stayed with the hereditary patron.

Any passages in these tazkiras that particularly moved you?

The most moving for me is the Delhi-born official Ziauddin’s short biography of Chabbar Khan, who was from Delhi and 20 years past had frequented Ziauddin’s mehfils at his new home in Patna. He writes that some years ago, Chabbar Khan had gone to Murshidabad, but that he hadn’t heard from him or the other kalawants since. A terribly poignant moment. And the probable reason was that in 1772 an ignorant East India Company official had reduced the budget of the Murshidabad Arbab-i Nishat to almost nothing — ₹16 per annum! — because he thought music was an unnecessary frippery for a Nawab Nazim of Bengal who, now that the British were in charge of Bengal, was a pensioner of the East India Company. The musicians, including most likely Chabbar Khan, lost their livelihoods with the stroke of a British quill pen. There is no record of where they went after that.

The interviewer writes on and lives for music, dance, theatre, and literature.