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Music's ability to stimulate the emotions has long been fundamental to the aesthetics and reception of India's elite rāga-based traditions. These emotions are generally studied aesthetically through the lens of 'rasa': the Sanskrit theory that proposes the musician's role is to stimulate one of nine distilled emotional essences (rasas) that is 'tasted' by the audience. But here I ask the inverse question: what emotions arose when historical listeners were threatened with the loss of that crucial source of emotional stimulus; and how were those negative emotions expressed through historical texts? In this paper, I consider the Hayy al-Arwāh, a music treatise and tazkira (biographical collection) written by an ex-Mughal official from Delhi living in exile in Patna c. 1785–88, Miyan Zia-ud-din 'Zia'. Zia-ud-din's work reveals much about the emotions felt by musicians and music lovers affected by the violent political upheaval centred on late Mughal Delhi c1740–80 – but not in obvious ways. For such an emotional subject, his writing is curiously dispassionate. Nevertheless, I argue that his writing was impelled by one very powerful emotion in particular: anxiety. In order to approach the question I examine some alternative ways we might get at the emotional resonances of texts like the Hayy al-Arwāh: through genre, in this case the tazkira; the etic observations of modern neuroscience; and a turn outwards to writings of more emotionally loquacious contemporaries, here the Urdu poet Mir Taqi 'Mir'. I argue it is precisely Zia-ud-din's detatched attention to detail, as he traced hundreds of lost and scattered musicians and listeners, that reveals the emotional driving force behind the writing of the Hayy al-Arwāh to be a deep and abiding anxiety engendered by the very real existential threat of war and exile to the music of late Mughal Delhi. In writing the Hayy al-Arwāh, Zia-ud-din acted as witness and record keeper for his community to insure against the potential loss of the music of his beloved homeland. At the ...

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 by Prem Lata Sharma and Nalini Delvoye; and more recently Francesca Orsini has drawn new social history out of the contents of printed miscellanies of Hindi and Urdu 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 will be looking not so much at the song texts contained within these manuscripts, but at the different logics behind the making of such collections c.1780-1820. In doing so, I hope both to elaborate what song collections can tell us musically even in the absence of notation, and to 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.

KAVITA PANJABI, ed. Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia: Love, Loss and Liberation (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan), 2011, pp. 305. MADHU TRIVEDI, The Emergence of the Hindustani Tradition: Music, Dance and Drama in North India, 13th to 19th Centuries (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective), 2012, pp. 205. T. K. VENKATASUBRAMANIAN, Music as History in Tamilnadu (Delhi: Primus), 2010, pp. 157.

There are many problems in trying to construct a history of female musicians and dancers in Mughal North India. Such women appear frequently in Mughal writings and apparently played an important role in elite society; there is clearly much we can learn from such sources about gender and class in the empire generally, as well as female performers more specifically. However, what evidence we have is written from the perspective of their male patrons and cast according to long‐standing rhetorical and cultural conventions concerning the fateful roles of music and love in historical events. In this article I examine how Mughal historical chronicles transform named female performers into stereotyped agents of the downfall of noblemen. Using the stories of several historical courtesans, I demonstrate how stock topoi of desire, enslavement, longing, rebellion, danger, fate and above all musical and erotic power, were used to shape all stories of courtesans into tragic cautionary tales. I aim to show that the 'fictive' elements of Mughal courtesan tales furthermore reveal important cultural truths about the role and meanings of music in Mughal male society.