Khushhal Khan ‘Gunasamudra’ was the most feted court singer of the mid-seventeenth century. Great-grandson of the most famous Mughal musician of all time, Tansen, and chief musician to the emperors Shah Jahan (r.1627−1658) and Aurangzeb (r.1658−1707), he was written about extensively in his lifetime as a virtuoso of exceptional merit. Yet this was not how he was memorialised in the 1750s, when legends of the great Mughal musicians of past and present were first compiled into biographical collections. Rather, he was remembered as the instigator of a shocking political scandal that supernaturally sealed Shah Jahan’s downfall. In this chapter I retell Khushhal’s story from the vantage point of the 1750s, in the light of the canonical Mughal music treatises of Shah Jahan’s and Aurangzeb’s reigns. I consider what they together tell us about the role and power of music in the Mughal empire, just before everything began to unravel.

In 1799, Mahlaqa Bai “Chanda”, “The Moon”, presented a book of her songs to the Deputy British Resident of Hyderabad, John Malcolm, in the middle of a music and dance party. Renowned as the first Indian courtesan to write a collection of Urdu poetry, she was equally famous for her affairs with powerful men at the Nizam’s court. Obscured by Mahlaqa Bai’s luminescence today is the man behind the Moon, her ustād (master-teacher) Khushhal Khan “Anup”. A hereditary musician in exile from Mughal Delhi, Anup left behind an enormous corpus of songs, several music-technical treatises, and an illustrated rāgamālā. In this chapter I use the illustrated writings of this single hereditary musician to unravel the stories of musical life, and the lives of these two extraordinary figures and their patrons, in Nizami Hyderabad c.1780−1830.

The summative discussion opens with the dethronement of major music impresario and last King of Lucknow, Wajid ‘Ali Shah, and the canonical treatises his chief rabab player Basit Khan took with him into exile in 1856. I then synthesise the findings of the previous chapters to explore the reasons why both colonial and Indian/mixed-race figures wrote about music during this transitional period. For the coloniser, I argue, the reasons were a hunger to collect the auditory picturesque and, later, to control musical communities. Mughal writers, in contrast, were grappling with significant change as well as trying to mitigate the loss those changes threatened to their beloved musical culture. I conclude with the aftermath of the devastating 1857 Uprising as the reason we have forgotten these musicians and their writings, and point to the lingering echoes of the late Mughal in the classical music of today.

In 1835, the East India Company sequestered the salt lake at Sambhar from the Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, until 1842. This historical footnote left behind a set of financial accounts in the Company records that are alive with musicians and dancers and the cycle of the ritual year in Rajasthan. One courtesan stands forth as exceptional: Mayalee “dancing girl”. Her insistence on being paid in salt reveals the extraordinary stories the fleeting appearance of performers in the official records of the East India Company can tell about relations between the British and the princely states in the 1830s and 40s, about the Rajput notions of prosperity and sovereignty invested in courtesans and in salt, and the existence of a salt commons at Sambhar before the ill-informed interference of the Company there.

Khanum Jan was a celebrity courtesan at the court of Lucknow in the 1780s. She became famous again in twentieth-century musicology because of her musical interactions with an Englishwoman, Sophia Plowden. Plowden’s involvement in the “Hindustani Airs” episode has been told before from the European side. In this chapter, I focus instead on Plowden’s collection of song lyrics in Persian and Indian languages, alongside writings by Indian musicians and patrons about their views of Europeans and their music. Reading Indian-language sources and European papers and notations together make it possible to get much closer to how songs from the Lucknow court may have sounded in the 1780s. But it also gives us a much richer understanding of Lucknow courtesan culture between late Mughal and early colonial patronage.

I introduce the geographical and chronological frames of the book in terms of the current historiography of the transition from Mughal to British rule and of music history. I lay out the book’s conceptual framework: 1) the use of musicians’ stories to illuminate the changes wrought in the transition; 2) the examination of several types of Indian and European writing on music prominent at this time, most of which have been overlooked, that reveal these changes; and 3) my deeper interest in why writers tried to capture music in words when they knew it was impossible. I contextualise the sources on which my history is based within a consideration of the concept of paracolonial knowledge systems and social networks. And I introduce my overarching philosophical question: whether it is ever possible for Orpheus (writing on music) to bring Eurydice (music and its experience) back from the dead.