Interview: Katherine Butler Schofield, author, Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India “I am interested in what music means to people”

When I was young, I trained to be a Western classical viola player, and at the age of 19 achieved my ambition to become a professional orchestral player. But it wasn’t enough for me; it wasn’t sufficiently intellectual compelling for me, personally, to sustain a lifetime of work.

Around the same time, I was spending a lot of time with friends who had grown up in India, and I came to be fascinated by Indian history, and fell in love with the sounds of Hindustani music. When I moved to the UK (I was born in Australia) in 1996, I decided that pursuing my joint passion for Indian history and music is what I wanted to dedicate my life to – and I found out that SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, had a music department where I could do a Masters degree in Indian Musicology, combined with studies in anything to do with South Asia.

What I began to find most intriguing as I began to study seriously were the incredible master musicians who had passed their music down, father to son, all the way from the early modern period; and their close links with the elites and rulers of India’s famous courts, particularly the Mughals but also the Rajputs and the Sultans of the Deccan. And I was hooked!

These days I still play Western classical violin a bit and sing occasionally with choirs. But my life is really too busy for more than listening, but listening is so very important to the rasa being tasted! My next venture though is going to be learning how to sing the Urdu ghazal in traditional style, for a new project. With my historian’s hat on, I have recently become interested in the very long history of Gwalior in the history of Hindustani music.

How do the scholar, the musician and the rasika in you support each other?

I don’t think of myself as a rasika – I simply don’t have enough raga knowledge for that; as Tansen sang, “Music is an ocean, from which I could only ever drink a single drop”. I am an enthusiast, an aashiq; I love raga music, and all its moods. I try to listen to each raga only at its right time of day, especially as one Mughal theorist Qazi Hasan said God’s blessings will flee my house if my listening is be-waqt!

How did your latest book Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India come into being?

In a previous project I had uncovered a simply massive treasure trove of texts on Hindustani music written in Persian and Indian languages between about 1700 and 1900, that had never been read in modern times, and that tell the many stories of how the classical music we know today came into being between the reigns of Akbar the Great and Akbar Shah, who died in 1837. But it is really hard to bring the very technical details of all those music treatises to life – they are very dry!

I am more interested in what music means to people, and the human reasons why music metamorphoses over time. I thought I would introduce some of these writings on music to readers through retelling the stories of nine mostly forgotten musicians whose lives are held within those dusty pages, and in doing so breathe some life back into the emotional and social worlds of the late Mughals and the princely states of Lucknow, Hyderabad, and Jaipur.

How did it feel to present this work at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024?

It was completely wonderful. India and books are my happy place, and they all came together at JLF. It is my life’s honour and joy to have the immense privilege to work on the history of India and its beloved music, when I was not born into it; and it is even more important to me that I give everything I do back to Indian audiences as far as possible. That’s why I am so pleased that Cambridge University Press has brought out an Indian paperback edition simultaneously with the hardback that is less than a tenth of the price! Plus, if I am lucky this year, I shall get to meet my great heroes, Gulzar and Vishal Bhardwaj – I am a massive fan of Hindi cinema and its music, and will be teaching my Bollywood Sounds course again to my undergraduates next year [at the Department of Music at King’s College, London, which she heads].

Who are the musicians that readers can hope to learn about through your book?

Khushhal Khan Gunasamudra, a direct descendent of Tansen and chief musician to the emperors Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, who out of greed and through his magical singing is said in one story to have brought about the terrible fate of Dara Shukoh! Gunasamudra’s grandson Anjha Baras Khan, chief of Muhammad Shah Rangile’s court musicians but completely forgotten now because he was eclipsed by the two greatest musicians of the eighteenth century, Sadarang and Adarang, who played a huge part in sustaining music in Delhi during the upheaval, wars and massacres of Nadir Shah’s and Ahmad Shah Abdali Durrani’s invasions. The Lucknow courtesan Khanum Jan and the extraordinary memsahib Sophia Plowden, who wrote down all her songs – that’s where I get to have fun and experiment with recreating the songs themselves! The great Mahlaqa Bai of Hyderabad and her father-daughter relationship with her ustad, Khushhal Khan Anup, and his extensive musical writings. Jaipur’s and Sambhar’s very own Mayalee, a bhagtan, who defied the British and refused to accept payment in cash instead of her auspicious salt stipend from Sambhar Lake. The last kalawant beenkar to the Mughal emperor, Miyan Himmat Khan, and his amazing treatise on tala. And so many more besides!

Why did you pick these musicians in particular?

Because there was enough information on them to narrate their lives and because they span the whole time frame from the death of Muhammad Shah to the exile of Bahadur Shah Zafar. Also because, through their stories, I could reveal how to read six different types of music that arose in this period, from biographical collections (tazkiras) to songs, ragamala paintings to India Office records, and old and new treatises, and what they have to tell us about how music, musicians, and music lovers experienced and survived the violent transition from Mughal to British rule.

What aspects of their biographical information continue to remain a mystery to you?

SO much! All we know about Mayalee, for example, is her name in the margin of a set of East India Company accounts when they sequestered the salt lake and salt works at Sambhar 1835-42, and the fact that she – and Jaipur and Jodhpur on her behalf – insisted on her being paid her traditional salt stipend. Out of that, and other sources on 19th century Jaipur bhagtans (courtesans), I draw an unknown story about the existence of a salt commons between Jaipur and Jodhpur, enjoyed by everyone who relied on the Sambhar salt lake as a gift from Shakambhari Mata, the goddess of the lake, and from Jaipur’s tutelary deity, Govinddevji. But I wish we had her story in her own words! What a woman she must have been!

What do you mean by “histories of the ephemeral”?

By ephemeral I am referring to histories of the sensory, emotional, intellectual, ethical and aesthetic experience of transitory moments, experienced collectively — in this case, the experience of listening to a music performance in the period before recording technology was able to capture the sounds of the music in a more permanent form. When the last note dies away, what are we left with? Can we write down everything we and our companions experienced, individually and together? And what more permanent effect that moment had on us afterwards? Might we be able to experience today what the men and women performing and listening in those spaces felt then, when they listened? What did it mean to them? Can experiential moments have histories that can be retold? Spoiler alert: the ultimate answer is no. Orpheus cannot bring Eurydice back from the dead. But the journey of discovery is equally fascinating, and tells us a great deal about what it felt like to be swept up in the cataclysmic geopolitical change that India went through between the Mughals and the British.

What were your main research questions? What conclusions did you end up with?

The central question is about change – what changed in the Hindustani musical ecosystem when Mughal rule transitioned to British rule, and when Indian ways of thinking and systems of knowledge rubbed up against European ones that became gradually more powerful over this transitional century. What effect, for instance, did the British insistence on a nine-to-five work day and a six-day Monday to Saturday working week have on the midnight raga? Or the 3 AM or the midday raga? Why, for instance, were British residents in India so interested in collecting what I have called the “auditory picturesque” – music treatises, ragamala paintings, images of performers, songs – sometimes in their hundreds? And how and why did those things change Hindustani music itself?

The answers are many and complex, but several of them are important. Firstly, it is obviously not true that the hereditary Muslim ustads were illiterate. Many of them wrote highly erudite treatises on music in Persian and Brajbhasha that showed their excellent knowledge of Sanskrit theory and their own remarkable oral lore as performers. Secondly, Indian writers on music didn’t care what British authors thought before 1857, though they were nonetheless very interested in things like Western notations and keyboard instruments. And crucially, Hindustani music attained its modern “classical” form outside the areas under colonial control in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hindustani music was not, as has recently been believed, a product of Western educated reformers at the turn of the twentieth century like Bhatkhande and Sourindro Mohun Tagore, who were “captured” by colonial ideas.

What sort of research methodology did you use for such an ambitious project?

Firstly, you have to understand the raga and all sorts of other musical concepts from the inside — as a performing musician — to have a hope of understanding the technical aspects of early modern music treatises. Twenty years ago during my PhD, I apprenticed myself as a student of khayal to an ustad in one of India’s great hereditary traditions — never with the intention of singing in public, only ever with the intention of understanding Hindustani music from the inside. And then you ignore everyone who has ever said there are no written sources on music in the languages of early modern India (including Persian) — because it isn’t true — and you read them. You cross reference them with each other, and with paintings of the time. And then with other kinds of writing from the same time – historical chronicles, poetry, stories — you cross reference them with English writings on the music of India. And you keep looking, and the books and scraps of paper keep falling out of library catalogues until you realise that there is so much writing on Indian music, you will never get to the end of it. So then you take on students, and eventually a gharana develops. We make a joke that all of us who studied with noted Sanskrit sangita-shastra expert Richard Widdess at SOAS, and those who then studied with us, and so forth down the chain, are the “Bloomsbury Gharana” — SOAS is in Bloomsbury (and King’s is not far away). The historical work of younger scholars on this material, like Radha Kapuria, Kirit Singh, and Richard Williams, for instance, is just amazing.

Could you recall for us the most joyous and most annoying aspects of this research?

Very little is annoying! But if I had to say it is the practice of public libraries and museums charging a lot of money to reproduce images of items in their collections that are out of copyright. One historian friend was quoted £10,000 to have the library take new photography of a manuscript, when the library in question allows individual scholars to take not-for-publication photos in person for free. (I photographed it for them!)

The most wonderful thing for me is impossible to choose, but perhaps it has been finding paintings of known historical musicians! When I work in the 16th and 17th century, there are so few portraits of named musicians. But for the 18th and 19th centuries, they turn up everywhere. It is always so moving seeing their faces. And then there are the writers you come to empathise with, like the unknown hereditary musician author of Persian manuscript Edinburgh 585(4) who completely fell in love with the European harpsichord.

How did you get involved with the International Campaign for Afghanistan’s Musicians, and the Musicians, Artists and Writers At Risk Network? What does your work involve?

When Kabul fell to the Taliban again in August 2021, all of us old enough to remember their last time in power (1996–2001) knew how much they hated all music and persecuted and tortured musicians – and we also knew that they had not changed, that Taliban 2.0 was a lie or at best desperate wishful thinking on the part of governments who should know better.

I am also quite active on Twitter as someone interested in all of South Asia’s artistic and cultural heritage. So, very early on, the members of the Kabul University Music Department Faculty reached out to me and asked if I could help them get out of Afghanistan. They knew what was happening. The Head of Department, Waheedullah Saghar, who has a PhD from India in Hindustani classical music, was present in 2001 when the then-department head took all the students to the secret spot where they had previously buried all the department’s precious instruments, and he helped dig them all up again. Now, he himself was stranded in his top floor apartment with a Taliban checkpoint stationed outside his building, having destroyed his beloved harmonium and tambura, but with no way of disposing of the pieces without alerting the Taliban.

I am quite senior now in my career – I am Head of the Department of Music at King’s College London – so I found myself in a position where I had the contacts and the clout to try to do something from London. And what kind of a person would I be if I had said no? So along with hundreds of thousands of other volunteers for other at-risk groups, I tried to get their names on evacuation lists and resettlement lists and plane manifests.

Quickly it transpired that I was not alone in working to help music professors and professional musicians, so we teamed up! Mirwaiss Sidiqi, then director of the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Afghanistan, was in London when Kabul fell and he became the centre of the network. Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, an academic and orchestral conductor who had taught a lot of the young women conductors of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, turned out to be an absolute whizz at organisation. And we found colleagues in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, France, India, Pakistan, Turkey, all of whom were trying to help; so we coordinated together so that no individual would be missed, and to keep everything secure, because our friends’ lives were at risk.

We flew under the radar for a couple of months, then went public as the International Campaign for Afghanistan’s Musicians when it became clear the UK and other governments weren’t listening. The good news is that many of our colleagues did receive sanctuary, especially in Germany – where all the Kabul University Music Department faculty now are with their families – France, and Portugal. But so many remain inside, forbidden from working and in hiding. We help them by raising funds where we can.

Please tell us a bit about your new research project The Singer and the Song in South Asia (SASISA). What are you looking to study? Who are you partnering with in South Asia?

I have been fascinated by the importance of all kinds of songs to, really, everybody, right across South Asia. My own personal interest is in the ghazal, which, of course, is famous in the voices of luminaries like Mehdi Hasan, Begum Akhtar, Jagjit Singh, but which is also the foundation of the Hindi film song, and which is sung informally by really very ordinary people throughout India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (switching languages to Dari!) I am interested in what songs mean to listeners and to singers, how they are used, and simply what song is in South Asia, across all kinds of boundaries. But I am also keen to revive lost repertoire, from old manuscripts and printed texts to old recordings, and to hear such songs sung again by modern singers in new settings. I am hoping to work with academics and academic-practitioners of all kinds of songs, from qawwali and bhajan to rural folk and trade union songs to Hindustani and Carnatic compositions! But most importantly, I want to work with great innovative performers of India’s song traditions – I haven’t asked them yet, but maestros like Shubha Mudgal would be my ideal! – to recreate lost songs and hear them living again.

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer.

When and how did your lifelong love affair with Mughal history and Hindustani classical music begin?

When I was young, I trained to be a Western classical viola player, and at the age of 19 achieved my ambition to become a professional orchestral player. But it wasn’t enough for me; it wasn’t sufficiently intellectual compelling for me, personally, to sustain a lifetime of work.

Around the same time, I was spending a lot of time with friends who had grown up in India, and I came to be fascinated by Indian history, and fell in love with the sounds of Hindustani music. When I moved to the UK (I was born in Australia) in 1996, I decided that pursuing my joint passion for Indian history and music is what I wanted to dedicate my life to – and I found out that SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, had a music department where I could do a Masters degree in Indian Musicology, combined with studies in anything to do with South Asia.

What I began to find most intriguing as I began to study seriously were the incredible master musicians who had passed their music down, father to son, all the way from the early modern period; and their close links with the elites and rulers of India’s famous courts, particularly the Mughals but also the Rajputs and the Sultans of the Deccan. And I was hooked!

These days I still play Western classical violin a bit and sing occasionally with choirs. But my life is really too busy for more than listening, but listening is so very important to the rasa being tasted! My next venture though is going to be learning how to sing the Urdu ghazal in traditional style, for a new project. With my historian’s hat on, I have recently become interested in the very long history of Gwalior in the history of Hindustani music.

How do the scholar, the musician and the rasika in you support each other?

I don’t think of myself as a rasika – I simply don’t have enough raga knowledge for that; as Tansen sang, “Music is an ocean, from which I could only ever drink a single drop”. I am an enthusiast, an aashiq; I love raga music, and all its moods. I try to listen to each raga only at its right time of day, especially as one Mughal theorist Qazi Hasan said God’s blessings will flee my house if my listening is be-waqt!

How did your latest book Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India come into being?

In a previous project I had uncovered a simply massive treasure trove of texts on Hindustani music written in Persian and Indian languages between about 1700 and 1900, that had never been read in modern times, and that tell the many stories of how the classical music we know today came into being between the reigns of Akbar the Great and Akbar Shah, who died in 1837. But it is really hard to bring the very technical details of all those music treatises to life – they are very dry!

I am more interested in what music means to people, and the human reasons why music metamorphoses over time. I thought I would introduce some of these writings on music to readers through retelling the stories of nine mostly forgotten musicians whose lives are held within those dusty pages, and in doing so breathe some life back into the emotional and social worlds of the late Mughals and the princely states of Lucknow, Hyderabad, and Jaipur.

How did it feel to present this work at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2024?

It was completely wonderful. India and books are my happy place, and they all came together at JLF. It is my life’s honour and joy to have the immense privilege to work on the history of India and its beloved music, when I was not born into it; and it is even more important to me that I give everything I do back to Indian audiences as far as possible. That’s why I am so pleased that Cambridge University Press has brought out an Indian paperback edition simultaneously with the hardback that is less than a tenth of the price! Plus, if I am lucky this year, I shall get to meet my great heroes, Gulzar and Vishal Bhardwaj – I am a massive fan of Hindi cinema and its music, and will be teaching my Bollywood Sounds course again to my undergraduates next year [at the Department of Music at King’s College, London, which she heads].

Who are the musicians that readers can hope to learn about through your book?

Khushhal Khan Gunasamudra, a direct descendent of Tansen and chief musician to the emperors Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, who out of greed and through his magical singing is said in one story to have brought about the terrible fate of Dara Shukoh! Gunasamudra’s grandson Anjha Baras Khan, chief of Muhammad Shah Rangile’s court musicians but completely forgotten now because he was eclipsed by the two greatest musicians of the eighteenth century, Sadarang and Adarang, who played a huge part in sustaining music in Delhi during the upheaval, wars and massacres of Nadir Shah’s and Ahmad Shah Abdali Durrani’s invasions. The Lucknow courtesan Khanum Jan and the extraordinary memsahib Sophia Plowden, who wrote down all her songs – that’s where I get to have fun and experiment with recreating the songs themselves! The great Mahlaqa Bai of Hyderabad and her father-daughter relationship with her ustad, Khushhal Khan Anup, and his extensive musical writings. Jaipur’s and Sambhar’s very own Mayalee, a bhagtan, who defied the British and refused to accept payment in cash instead of her auspicious salt stipend from Sambhar Lake. The last kalawant beenkar to the Mughal emperor, Miyan Himmat Khan, and his amazing treatise on tala. And so many more besides!

Why did you pick these musicians in particular?

Because there was enough information on them to narrate their lives and because they span the whole time frame from the death of Muhammad Shah to the exile of Bahadur Shah Zafar. Also because, through their stories, I could reveal how to read six different types of music that arose in this period, from biographical collections (tazkiras) to songs, ragamala paintings to India Office records, and old and new treatises, and what they have to tell us about how music, musicians, and music lovers experienced and survived the violent transition from Mughal to British rule.

What aspects of their biographical information continue to remain a mystery to you?

SO much! All we know about Mayalee, for example, is her name in the margin of a set of East India Company accounts when they sequestered the salt lake and salt works at Sambhar 1835-42, and the fact that she – and Jaipur and Jodhpur on her behalf – insisted on her being paid her traditional salt stipend. Out of that, and other sources on 19th century Jaipur bhagtans (courtesans), I draw an unknown story about the existence of a salt commons between Jaipur and Jodhpur, enjoyed by everyone who relied on the Sambhar salt lake as a gift from Shakambhari Mata, the goddess of the lake, and from Jaipur’s tutelary deity, Govinddevji. But I wish we had her story in her own words! What a woman she must have been!

What do you mean by “histories of the ephemeral”?

By ephemeral I am referring to histories of the sensory, emotional, intellectual, ethical and aesthetic experience of transitory moments, experienced collectively — in this case, the experience of listening to a music performance in the period before recording technology was able to capture the sounds of the music in a more permanent form. When the last note dies away, what are we left with? Can we write down everything we and our companions experienced, individually and together? And what more permanent effect that moment had on us afterwards? Might we be able to experience today what the men and women performing and listening in those spaces felt then, when they listened? What did it mean to them? Can experiential moments have histories that can be retold? Spoiler alert: the ultimate answer is no. Orpheus cannot bring Eurydice back from the dead. But the journey of discovery is equally fascinating, and tells us a great deal about what it felt like to be swept up in the cataclysmic geopolitical change that India went through between the Mughals and the British.

What were your main research questions? What conclusions did you end up with?

The central question is about change – what changed in the Hindustani musical ecosystem when Mughal rule transitioned to British rule, and when Indian ways of thinking and systems of knowledge rubbed up against European ones that became gradually more powerful over this transitional century. What effect, for instance, did the British insistence on a nine-to-five work day and a six-day Monday to Saturday working week have on the midnight raga? Or the 3 AM or the midday raga? Why, for instance, were British residents in India so interested in collecting what I have called the “auditory picturesque” – music treatises, ragamala paintings, images of performers, songs – sometimes in their hundreds? And how and why did those things change Hindustani music itself?

The answers are many and complex, but several of them are important. Firstly, it is obviously not true that the hereditary Muslim ustads were illiterate. Many of them wrote highly erudite treatises on music in Persian and Brajbhasha that showed their excellent knowledge of Sanskrit theory and their own remarkable oral lore as performers. Secondly, Indian writers on music didn’t care what British authors thought before 1857, though they were nonetheless very interested in things like Western notations and keyboard instruments. And crucially, Hindustani music attained its modern “classical” form outside the areas under colonial control in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hindustani music was not, as has recently been believed, a product of Western educated reformers at the turn of the twentieth century like Bhatkhande and Sourindro Mohun Tagore, who were “captured” by colonial ideas.

What sort of research methodology did you use for such an ambitious project?

Firstly, you have to understand the raga and all sorts of other musical concepts from the inside — as a performing musician — to have a hope of understanding the technical aspects of early modern music treatises. Twenty years ago during my PhD, I apprenticed myself as a student of khayal to an ustad in one of India’s great hereditary traditions — never with the intention of singing in public, only ever with the intention of understanding Hindustani music from the inside. And then you ignore everyone who has ever said there are no written sources on music in the languages of early modern India (including Persian) — because it isn’t true — and you read them. You cross reference them with each other, and with paintings of the time. And then with other kinds of writing from the same time – historical chronicles, poetry, stories — you cross reference them with English writings on the music of India. And you keep looking, and the books and scraps of paper keep falling out of library catalogues until you realise that there is so much writing on Indian music, you will never get to the end of it. So then you take on students, and eventually a gharana develops. We make a joke that all of us who studied with noted Sanskrit sangita-shastra expert Richard Widdess at SOAS, and those who then studied with us, and so forth down the chain, are the “Bloomsbury Gharana” — SOAS is in Bloomsbury (and King’s is not far away). The historical work of younger scholars on this material, like Radha Kapuria, Kirit Singh, and Richard Williams, for instance, is just amazing.

Could you recall for us the most joyous and most annoying aspects of this research?

Very little is annoying! But if I had to say it is the practice of public libraries and museums charging a lot of money to reproduce images of items in their collections that are out of copyright. One historian friend was quoted £10,000 to have the library take new photography of a manuscript, when the library in question allows individual scholars to take not-for-publication photos in person for free. (I photographed it for them!)

The most wonderful thing for me is impossible to choose, but perhaps it has been finding paintings of known historical musicians! When I work in the 16th and 17th century, there are so few portraits of named musicians. But for the 18th and 19th centuries, they turn up everywhere. It is always so moving seeing their faces. And then there are the writers you come to empathise with, like the unknown hereditary musician author of Persian manuscript Edinburgh 585(4) who completely fell in love with the European harpsichord.

How did you get involved with the International Campaign for Afghanistan’s Musicians, and the Musicians, Artists and Writers At Risk Network? What does your work involve?

When Kabul fell to the Taliban again in August 2021, all of us old enough to remember their last time in power (1996–2001) knew how much they hated all music and persecuted and tortured musicians – and we also knew that they had not changed, that Taliban 2.0 was a lie or at best desperate wishful thinking on the part of governments who should know better.

I am also quite active on Twitter as someone interested in all of South Asia’s artistic and cultural heritage. So, very early on, the members of the Kabul University Music Department Faculty reached out to me and asked if I could help them get out of Afghanistan. They knew what was happening. The Head of Department, Waheedullah Saghar, who has a PhD from India in Hindustani classical music, was present in 2001 when the then-department head took all the students to the secret spot where they had previously buried all the department’s precious instruments, and he helped dig them all up again. Now, he himself was stranded in his top floor apartment with a Taliban checkpoint stationed outside his building, having destroyed his beloved harmonium and tambura, but with no way of disposing of the pieces without alerting the Taliban.

I am quite senior now in my career – I am Head of the Department of Music at King’s College London – so I found myself in a position where I had the contacts and the clout to try to do something from London. And what kind of a person would I be if I had said no? So along with hundreds of thousands of other volunteers for other at-risk groups, I tried to get their names on evacuation lists and resettlement lists and plane manifests.

Quickly it transpired that I was not alone in working to help music professors and professional musicians, so we teamed up! Mirwaiss Sidiqi, then director of the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Afghanistan, was in London when Kabul fell and he became the centre of the network. Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, an academic and orchestral conductor who had taught a lot of the young women conductors of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, turned out to be an absolute whizz at organisation. And we found colleagues in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, France, India, Pakistan, Turkey, all of whom were trying to help; so we coordinated together so that no individual would be missed, and to keep everything secure, because our friends’ lives were at risk.

We flew under the radar for a couple of months, then went public as the International Campaign for Afghanistan’s Musicians when it became clear the UK and other governments weren’t listening. The good news is that many of our colleagues did receive sanctuary, especially in Germany – where all the Kabul University Music Department faculty now are with their families – France, and Portugal. But so many remain inside, forbidden from working and in hiding. We help them by raising funds where we can.

Please tell us a bit about your new research project The Singer and the Song in South Asia (SASISA). What are you looking to study? Who are you partnering with in South Asia?

I have been fascinated by the importance of all kinds of songs to, really, everybody, right across South Asia. My own personal interest is in the ghazal, which, of course, is famous in the voices of luminaries like Mehdi Hasan, Begum Akhtar, Jagjit Singh, but which is also the foundation of the Hindi film song, and which is sung informally by really very ordinary people throughout India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (switching languages to Dari!) I am interested in what songs mean to listeners and to singers, how they are used, and simply what song is in South Asia, across all kinds of boundaries. But I am also keen to revive lost repertoire, from old manuscripts and printed texts to old recordings, and to hear such songs sung again by modern singers in new settings. I am hoping to work with academics and academic-practitioners of all kinds of songs, from qawwali and bhajan to rural folk and trade union songs to Hindustani and Carnatic compositions! But most importantly, I want to work with great innovative performers of India’s song traditions – I haven’t asked them yet, but maestros like Shubha Mudgal would be my ideal! – to recreate lost songs and hear them living again.

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer.