Chief musicians to the Mughal emperors:
the Delhi kalāwant birādarī, 17th to 19th centuries. Revised edition, 2015.
Katherine Butler Schofield1
It so happened that some of my friends whose entire pleasure is in music came and insisted
upon having a copy of the first draft […] To any of my friends […] and to all men of
discernment, a humble request is made to discard it.
~ Saif Khan “Faqirullah”, Rāg darpan, 16662
Introduction
For the past few years I have been leading a major project funded by the European Research
Council at King’s College London entitled “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in
the Eastern Indian Ocean”.3 As part of this project I and a small team of researchers are
reconstructing from written sources the history of North Indian classical music and dance
c.1750-1900 primarily in the regions then known as Hindustan and Bengal, but also
encompassing places as far-flung as Kathmandu and Hyderabad. One of our objectives is the
collection of bibliographical information on all substantial writings on Hindustani music and
dance produced in this region c.1700-1900, primarily in Sanskrit, Brajbhasha/Hindavi,
Persian, and modern Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and English. We have been overwhelmed by the
number of unique musical writings we have found so far – over 300 and counting.
Information about and (where possible) digital copies of these are being collated into a
database called SHAMSA: Sources for the History and Analysis of Music/Dance in South
Asia,4 which will be made available to the general public for consultation in 2016.
In this paper I will present one set of findings from an initial analysis of some of these
writings on Hindustani musical culture, particularly manuscripts in the Persian language;
Persian, although obsolete in India now, was the official language of both the Mughal empire
and its successors, including the British, until well into the 1800s.5 One of the changes in the
way Hindustani music was written about beginning in the mid eighteenth century was an
1
Formerly known as Katherine Butler Brown.
Saif Khan “Faqirullah”, Tarjuma-i Mānakutūhala & Risāla-i-Rāgadarpaṇa, ed. and tr. Shahab Sarmadee
(New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1996), pp. 222-5.
3
This research was funded by the European Research Council. I am grateful for the input of James Kippen,
David Lunn, Allyn Miner, Margaret E Walker, Richard D Williams, Richard Widdess, Max Katz, Ustad Irfan
Muhammad Khan, Amlan Das Gupta, Phalguni Mitra, and especially Parmis Mozafari and Shri Arvind Parikh. I
would also like to thank the British Library, the Salar Jung Museum Library, the Edinburgh University Library,
the Bodleian Library, the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library University of Madras, the Andhra Pradesh
Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, and the University of Pennsylvania Rare Books and Manuscripts
Library. The first edition of this paper was published in: ITC Sangeet Research Academy (Kolkata), ed.,
Dhrupad, its future: proceedings of the 2013 ITC-SRA (West) seminar, held at NCPA, Nariman Point, Mumbai
(ITC-SRA: Mumbai, 2013).
4
Deriving from 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 or portrait. The name SHAMSA also pays homage to
the first Indo-Persian treatise written by a hereditary musician, the Shams al-aswāt by Ras Baras Khan (1698),
in which he named shams as the presiding star of the swara Ma; British Library, I O Islamic 1746, f. 19r.
5
Persian was replaced by English as the official language in British India only in 1837; John F Riddick, The
history of British India: a chronology (Westport: Praeger, 2006), p. 161. See also Muzaffar Alam, The
languages of political Islam in India, c. 1200-1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).
2
upsurge in the writing of tazkiras (biographical compendia) and genealogies of musicians.6
Through collating the information found in a series of these genealogies and tazkiras written
between 1593 and 1869 it has been possible to trace the complete lineage of the chief
kalāwants to the Mughal emperors all the way down from Akbar (r. 1556-1605) to the last
Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837-58). I have called this lineage of closely
related and intermarried dhrupad (and later khayāl) singers, bīnkārs, and rabābiyas the Delhi
kalāwant birādarī.
I must stress at the outset that the Delhi kalāwant birādarī is not the only genealogy
represented in the written sources that we currently have access to, and I am sure there are
many more yet to be found: this is only one genealogy among many. Nor is it yet entirely
clear how the written genealogy overlaps with the more familiar oral histories of Seniya
lineages.7 Moreover, these written tazkiras and genealogies were no less political and
manipulated than their orally preserved counterparts, concerned as they were with presenting
only one group exclusively among many competitors as the authoritative lineage.8 But the
Delhi kalāwant birādarī is a critically important lineage to the history of Hindustani music
because of its known links with the Mughal court, and it is certainly the genealogy that
writers in Delhi, Lucknow, Patna and Hyderabad writing before the trauma of 1857 chose to
emphasise.
The previous edition of this paper, published in the Proceedings of the ITC SRA
Seminar on Dhrupad in 2013, contained a few small errors, and was produced before I came
across the revelatory Hayy al-arwāh.9 I have thus made some adjustments in this revised
edition, and humbly request my friends and all men and women of discernment to discard the
first version. As Saif Khan’s example shows above, I am in venerable company.
The sources
Before laying out the written genealogy of the Delhi kalāwant birādarī, let us take a closer
look at the sources we have used to reconstruct this lineage (in chronological order):
1. Abu’l Fazl, Ā’īn-i Akbarī (1593), dedicated to Emperor Akbar
2. Islam Khan, introduction to the Sahasras, or Hazār dhurpad-i Nāyak Bakhshū (163746), dedicated to Emperor Shah Jahan
3. ‘Abdu’l Hamid Lahori, Pādishāhnāma (1639-57), dedicated to Emperor Shah Jahan
4. Saif Khan “Faqirullah”, Rāg darpan (1666), dedicated to Emperor Aurangzeb
‘Alamgir
5. Ras Baras Khan Kalawant, Shams al-aswāt (1698) dedicated to Emperor Aurangzeb
‘Alamgir
6. Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa‘-i Dehlī (1739-41)10
6
For contextual histories of the tazkira genre in early-modern India, see the work of Stefano Pellò, Mana Kia,
Arthur Dudney, Prashant Keshavmurthy, and Nathan Tabor.
7
e.g. Vīrendrakiśora Rāyacaudhurī, Hindusthānī saṅgīta meṃ Tānasena kā sthāna, Hindi trans. Madanalāla
Vyāsa (New Delhi: Vāṇī Prakāśana, 1996); the Bengali original, based on oral histories, was published in 1938.
8
See Katherine Butler Schofield, “Genealogy, geography, and gharānā in paracolonial perspective,” in
Schofield, ed. Hindustani music between empires: alternative histories, c.1750-1900 (forthcoming).
9
Ziauddin, Hayy al-arwāh (c.1785), John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Persian 346. Our dating
of this manuscript is based on Ziauddin’s entry for the musician Muhammad Qasim, who “worked for Nawab
Asafuddaula [of Lucknow (r. 1775-98)] for a time. It is nearly ten years since he passed away;” f. 56r. See also
the biography of Ziauddin’s patron, Muhammad Quli Khan “Mushtaq”, who completed a tazkira of poets in
1779 that Ziauddin mentions; A Sprenger, A catalogue of the Arabic, Persian and Hindu’sta’ny manuscripts, of
the libraries of the King of Oudh (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1854), vol. i, p. 182, 265; Ziauddin, Hayy alarwāh, f. 62v.
10
The name of the manuscript of this work, British Library Add. 26,237, is Risāla-yi Sālār Jang. The
Muraqqa‘-i Dehlī or “Delhi Album” was the name given to the work for its first published edition (1926);
Abishek Kaicker, “The colonial entombment of the Mughal habitus: Delhi in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries,” unpublished MA thesis (University of British Columbia, 2006), p. 10.
7. Inayat Khan “Rasikh”, Risāla-yi zikr-i mughanniyān-i Hindūstān (1753)11
8. Anonymous, Risāla dar ‘ilm-i mūsīqī (1770, Salar Jung Library)12
9. Ziauddin, Hayy al-arwāh (c.1785), dedicated to Emperor Shah ‘Alam II and the
author’s patron, Muhammad Quli Khan, darogha of the governor of Patna
10. Anonymous kalāwant, treatise on tāl (1787, Edinburgh University Library)13
11. Nawab Mazhar Khan Bahadur, Khulāsat al-‘aish-i ‘Ālam Shāhī (1798), dedicated to
Emperor Shah ‘Alam II14
12. Khushhal Khan “Anup”, Hindavi Rāg darshan (April-May 1800)15
13. Abd-ur-rahman Shah Nawaz Khan, Mir’āt-i āftāb-numā (1803), dedicated to Emperor
Shah ‘Alam II
14. Muhammad Nasir Muhammadi “Ranj” with Miyan Himmat Khan, Asl al-usūl
(c.1815)
15. James Skinner, Tashrīh al-aqwām (1825)
16. Bahadur Singh, Yādgārī Bahādurī (1833)
17. Muhammad Riza Tabataba, Naghma-yi ‘andalīb (1845), dedicated to Nawab Wajid
‘Ali Shah
18. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Āsār us-sanādīd (1847)
19. Copies of three Persian treatises on Hindustani music (July-August 1856),
commissioned by Basit Khan Kalawant16
20. Hakim Muhammad Karam Imam, Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī (1856/1869)17
21. Sadiq ‘Ali Khan, Sarmāya-yi ‘Ishrat (1869)
Many of these (no.s 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20, 21) are works entirely on music
that include tazkiras or genealogical information; some include musicians among more
general biographical or ethnographic collections (notably Muraqqa‘-i Dehlī, Tashrīh alaqwām and Āsār us-sanādīd); and others include sections on music as part of encyclopedic
11
This work was written in the fifth regnal year of Ahmad Shah (r.1748-54). The date 1734-5 given in some
secondary sources is, in fact, the catalogue number of the Khuda Bakhsh Library copy of the manuscript.
12
The author gives the year of composition as the twelfth regnal year of Shah ‘Alam, i.e. 1770; Anonymous,
Risāla dar ‘ilm-i mūsīqī, Salar Jung Museum Library, Hyderabad, P Kash 38 [ff. 369v-387r], f. 387r.
13
The date of this manuscript, AH 1202, is given as a chronogram; Anonymous, Treatise on tāl (1787),
Edinburgh University Library, Or. MS 585 [ff. 37v-66r], f. 50r.
14
Confusingly, there is also a 1763-4 Persian translation by the same author of a kokaśāstra (sex manual) also
called Khulāsat al-‘aish-i ‘Ālam Shāhī; the two are entirely distinct and separate texts. See Ed Sachau &
Hermann Ethé, Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindûstânî, and Pushtû manuscripts in the Bodleian Library
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1889), pp. 977 & 1069, contra Mohsen Mohammadi, “Qand-i Parsi: an introduction to
twenty Persian texts on Indo-Persian music,” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 36-7 (2006) [pp. 4061] pp. 53-4. The India Office Library catalogue mistransliterates the name Mazhar as Mutahhwar; Hermann
Ethé & Edward Edwards, Catalogue of the Persian manuscripts in the Library of the India Office, vol. ii
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1937), p. 26.
15
This Hindavi work (text April-May 1800, paintings 1804) has hitherto been catalogued as an anonymous
rāgamāla in the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Lawrence J Schoenberg
Collection, LJS 63. Chander Shekhar has recently demonstrated that Khushhal Khan subsequently prepared not
one but two quite different Persian Rāg darshans: the 1223/1808 (contra Shekhar, not 1229) copy for Nizam
Sikander Jah Asaf Jah III (r.1803-29), represented by D515 & D1024 P Ms in the Government Oriental
Manuscripts Library, University of Madras; and a fascinating bilingual Persian-Hindavi version of 1230/1815
for the famous courtesan Mahlaqa Bai “Chanda”, the manuscript copy of which came down to Ustad Fayyaz
Khan; Khushhal Khan bin Karim Khan, Rag darshan, ed. and intro. Chander Shekhar (New Delhi: National
Mission for Manuscripts, 2014).
16
The Shams al-aswāt (1698), Ghulam Raza Sabir ‘Ali’s Usūl al-naghmāt-i Āsafī (1793) and Rashik Kalyan’s
19C Sangīt-sarāvartī [-sarāvalī]. I am indebted to Ustad Irfan Muhammad Khan for giving us access to this
unique privately held manuscript.
17
The Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī has always been cited as predating the 1857 Uprising, and certainly the author claims
that he completed it in 1272-3 AH [1855-7 CE]; Hakim Muhammad Karam Imam, Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī
(Lucknow: Hindustani Press, 1925), p. 8 passim. But many comments throughout show that it was reworked
after the Uprising, and, crucially, the autograph manuscript is dated 1869; British Library, MSS Urdu 143.
compendia of knowledge (Ā’īn-i Akbarī, Mir’āt-i āftāb-numā, Yādgārī Bahādurī and
Naghma-yi ‘andalīb). Significantly, several of the musical works were written by or for
members of the birādarī or their disciples – Ras Baras Khan Kalawant’s Shams al-aswāt
(1698), Ziauddin’s Hayy al-Arwāh (1780), the Edinburgh tāl treatise (1787), Khushhal Khan
“Anup’s” three Rāg darshans (Hindavi, 1800; Persian, 1808; bilingual Persian-Hindavi,
1815), the Asl al-usūl (c.1815) co-written with Miyan Himmat Khan, and the treatises copied
for Basit Khan (1856). These in particular demonstrate that some at least of the Delhi
kalāwant lineage were highly literate in at least three languages: Sanskrit, Brajbhasha and
Persian, including possessing expert knowledge of Braj and Persian/Urdu prosody and how to
map poetic metre onto tāl.18 Until well into the nineteenth century the Delhi kalāwants were,
in other words, vāggeyakāras.19
It is important, though, that the writings of the Delhi kalāwant birādarī themselves
are not our only genealogical sources. Key to their credibility is the fact that many other
authors who were in no way related to the lineage also wrote about it, and that the
genealogical relationships these other authors describe are generally consistent with the
kalāwants’ own representations. One such tazkira was particularly popular throughout this
period, the Risāla-yi zikr-i mughanniyān-i Hindūstān, written in Persian in 1753 by a minor
nobleman and man of letters Inayat Khan “Rasikh”, son of one of emperor Muhammad
Shah’s (r. 1719-48) amīrs, Lutfullah Khan Sadiq.20 To my knowledge, this is the only
original stand-alone tazkira of musicians from the Mughal period; it includes biographical
notices going back as far as Amir Khusrau and extends down to the time of Rasikh’s famed
contemporary, Ni‘mat Khan “Sadarang” (flourished c.1690-1748).21 On occasion, later
writers inserted the whole of Rasikh’s tazkira into larger works on music, such as the
Khulāsat al-‘aish (1798), and updated it with additional entries for later musicians in the
lineage.22 The additions in the Khulāsat al-‘aish are particularly noteworthy because of the
author, Mazhar Khan’s, close connection with the Mughal court: Mazhar Khan’s father was
Muhammad Shah’s most trusted and influential amīr, and the man responsible for both
introducing musicians to court and paying them:23 Nawab Raushan-ud-daula Zafar Khan
Bahadur Rustam Jang, bakhshī ul-mulk.24
Most of the genealogies and tazkiras are, however, independent of Rasikh’s key text.
The most important and detailed is found in Ziauddin’s Hayy al-arwāh, written in Patna
(Azimabad) around c.1780 for Muhammad Quli Khan “Mushtaq”, the darogha of Patna’s
governor and a well-known poet and amateur musician.25 This work is a completely original
music treatise, mostly on Hindustani music, that includes as its final chapter a fifty-page
tazkira of mostly eighteenth-century musicians. Although Ziauddin was himself a disciple of
the great Delhi kalāwant Anjha Baras Khan (see below), his tazkira includes entries for many
18
See also Khushhal Khan “Anup’s” massive compendium of the song repertoire of the Delhi kalāwants, the
Rāg rāginī roz o shab (1818-34); Salar Jung Museum Library, Hyderabad, Urdu Mus 2.
19
Literate poet-composers; for a full explanation of the term vāggeyakāra in relation specifically to Delhi
kalāwants see Françoise “Nalini” Delvoye, “Les chants dhrupad en langue braj des poètes-musiciens de l'Inde
Moghole,” in Françoise Mallison, ed., Littératures médiévales de l'Inde du Nord, (Paris: École Française
d'Extrême-Orient, 1991) [pp. 139-59], pp. 141-43.
20
Muhammad Shah conferred on Lutfullah Khan the title Shams-ud-daula Bahadur Mutahawwar Jang and a
mansab of 6000; Nawwab Samsamuddaula Shah Nawaz Khan & ‘Abdul Hayy, The Maāthir-ul-umarā, trans. H.
Beveridge (Patna: Janaki Prakashan, 1979), vol. i, p. 840.
21
Inayat Khan “Rasikh”, Risāla-yi zikr-i mughanniyān-i Hindūstān, ed. Syed Ali Haider (Patna: Arabic and
Persian Research Institute, 1961), pp. 10-11, 30-31. According to the entry for Ni‘mat Khan, he died towards
the end of Muhammad Shah’s reign (r.1719-48); p. 31. This is confirmed by Ziauddin; Hayy al-arwāh, f. 44r.
22
Nawab Mazhar Khan Bahadur, Khulāsat al-‘aish-i ‘Ālam Shāhī (1798), Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ouseley
Add. 123, ff. 22r-37r; Anon, Risāla dar ‘ilm-i mūsīqī, Salar Jung, ff. 386r-7r.
23
Mazhar Khan, Khulāsat al-‘aish, f. 3a; see also William Irvine, “The army of the Indian Moghuls: its
organization and administration,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, July (1896) [pp. 509-70], pp. 539-44.
24
Zafar Khan’s biography is in the Ma’āsir al-umarā’; Khan & Hayy, vol. ii, pp. 605-8.
25
See fn. 9 above.
other professional musicians especially important qawwāl lineages, notably of Lahore,
Sirhind and Kirana, as well as, for the first time, a whole section on amateur musicians from
noble backgrounds.26 Despite his close connections with the Delhi kalāwant birādarī,
Ziauddin’s entries display considerable evenhandedness in his treatment of different
communities and types of musician.
The relative consistency of genealogical information across both familial and nonfamilial accounts of the Delhi kalāwant birādarī testifies to the reliability of the information
they contain. This reliability is strongly reinforced by the fact that from 1740 onwards, at
least one new tazkira or genealogy was produced every 10-15 years. In other words,
descriptions of this lineage over several generations were written down at regular intervals
within the lifetimes of all the people named in it, and frequently in works either written by or
for the musicians themselves or for their patrons, all of whom would have known personally
whether or not the genealogical relationships were accurately described. This means that the
genealogy of the Delhi kalāwant birādarī that I am about to lay out is likely to be highly
reliable (albeit skeletal), especially for the period between 1740 and 1857.
The genealogy
Figure 1 depicts the genealogy of two interrelated families of kalāwants whose heads
successively acted as chief musicians to the Mughal emperors over 300 years from Akbar (r.
1556-1605) to Bahadur Shah Zafar (r.1837-58). According to the Tuhfat al-Hind, written
c.1675 for Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir’s son Muhammad A‘zam Shah:
Firstly, those who know both mārga rāgs, i.e. ancient rāgs, and desī rāgs, i.e. modern
rāgs,27 are called gandharps; and if they only know desī rāgs and not mārga they are
called gunkārs [...] Gandharps and gunkārs who possess expertise in singing dhrupad and
tīvat, etc., are called kalāwants. Those [gandharps and gunkārs] that possess expertise in
singing qaul and tarāna and khayāl, etc., are named qawwāls.28
That is to say, kalāwants at the height of the Mughal empire were elite vocalists who
specialised in dhrupad singing. We also know from paintings and other sources that
alongside singing and composing dhrupad, kalāwants at the Mughal court specialised in the
playing of the bīn and the Indian rabāb.29 Kalāwant lineages remained exclusive specialists
in dhrupad and related genres until the greatest of the eighteenth-century kalāwants, Ni‘mat
Khan “Sadarang”, began to compose khayāls, which had previously been exclusive to the
qawwāls; by the reign of Muhammad Shah, Sadarang’s khayāls had become “all the rage”.30
From at least this point onwards, kalāwant composers in the Delhi lineage composed both
dhrupads and khayāls, and other related repertoire.
26
Ziauddin, Hayy al-arwāh, f. 45v; f. 49r passim; f. 57r passim.
These explanations of the meaning of mārga and desī are in the original Persian itself; for an exploration of
the ramifications of this see Katherine Butler Schofield, “Reviving the Golden Age again: ‘classicization,’
Hindustani music and the Mughals,” Ethnomusicology 54:3 (2010) [pp. 484-517] pp. 491-501.
28
Mirza Khan Muhammad ibn Fakhruddin, Tuhfat al-Hind, ed. N Ansari (Tehran: Bunyād-i Farhang-i Īrān,
1968), vol. i, pp. 358-9.
29
See examples in Joep Bor, Phillipe Bruguiére & Allyn Miner, “Des premiers sultanats à l’empire Moghol,” in
Joep Bor & Philippe Bruguiére, eds., Gloire des princes, louange des dieux: patrimoine musical de
l’Hindoustan du xive au xxe siècle (Paris: Musée de la Musique, Paris, 2003), pp. 16-55 especially p. 29; and
Andrew Topsfield, “The kalavants on their durrie: portraits of Udaipur court musicians, 1680-1730,” in
Rosemary Crill, et al, eds., Arts of Mughal India: studies in honour of Robert Skelton (London: Victoria &
Albert Museum, 2004), pp. 248-63.
30
Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa‘-i Dehlī, ed. Khaliq Anjum (New Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqī-yi Urdu, 1993), p.
102; Katherine Butler Brown [Schofield], “The origins and early development of khayal,” in Joep Bor,
Françoise “Nalini” Delvoye, Jane Harvey & Emmie te Nijenhuis, eds., Hindustani music: thirteenth to twentieth
centuries (New Delhi: Manohar, 2010), pp. 159-91.
27
What is more, from the abundant sources I am addressing in this paper, it is obvious
that from at least the end of the seventeenth century the Delhi kalāwants identified strongly
with hereditary lineages (silsila) that, furthermore, specialised in particular performance
styles.31 It is worth pointing out in passing that the term kalāwant had quite different valences
elsewhere in India, especially in the west and south, as the work of Davesh Soneji, Janaki
Bakhle and Anjali Arondekar has shown.32 But in the Mughal north, by the end of the
seventeenth century, kalāwant had come exclusively to signify a musician belonging to a
hereditary lineage tied to the Mughal court, whose intellectual property was the repertoire
and performance practice of dhrupad, bīn and rabāb.
In this paper I am going to focus just on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
lineage, as the earlier generations are relatively well known. Starting from the top on the lefthand side of Figure 1 is the genealogy of those direct descendents of Tansen who were
considered in their lifetimes to be the chief kalāwants of successive Mughal emperors. This
line descends via Bilas Khan’s daughter, whom he married to his chief disciple La‘l Khan
Kalawant “Gunasamudra”,33 who in turn was chief musician to Jahangir and Shah Jahan. La‘l
Khan’s son, the first Khushhal Khan, was chief musician to Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb
‘Alamgir, and inherited his father’s title “Gunasamudra”; and Khushhal Khan’s son Ras
Baras Khan was in turn chief kalāwant to Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir.34 It was Ras Baras Khan who
became the first known kalāwant author of a musical treatise, the Shams al-aswāt, which he
wrote and dedicated to his imperial patron in 1698.35 This work is a translation of
Damodara’s c.1625 Sanskrit treatise, the Saṅgītadarpaṇa, interspersed with Ras Baras
Khan’s own hereditary knowledge as the recognised current head of the family of Tansen.36
The family line of Ras Baras Khan, his brother Anand Baras Khan and their
noteworthy descendents and disciples is most clearly drawn in the anonymous 1787 treatise
on tāl in the Edinburgh University Library,37 which was patently written by a member or
disciple of the lineage. Descendents of this line that I will not discuss in this paper include 1)
the descendents of Anand Baras Khan: his sons Mansur Khan and Mahmud Khan
Muhammad Shahi, Mansur Khan’s son Taj Khan and disciple Daulat Khan (of the Sadarang
lineage), and Taj Khan’s son Muzaffar Khan; and 2) Ras Baras Khan’s son Bada Baras Khan
and grandson Abu Baras Khan. Considerably more detail on several of these figures appears
in the Hayy al-arwāh, as do the four brothers mentioned in the Muraqqa‘-i Dehli as key
descendents of Tansen: Rahim Sen, Udit Sen, Afat Sen and Tan Sen II.38 Rahim Sen later
went into the service of Nawab Safdar Jang of Awadh (r. 1739-54), and became his ustād,
dying in the late 1760s under Nawab Shuja‘-ud-daula (r. 1754-75); Afat Sen died in Delhi in
31
The anonymous tāl treatise of 1787 details different styles, called vṛtt-bānī, that particular kalāwants
specialised in; ff. 58v-60r.
32
Davesh Soneji, “Memory and recovery of identity: living histories and the kalavantulu of coastal Andhra
Pradesh,” in Indira Peterson & Davesh Soneji, eds., Performing pasts: reinventing the arts in modern South
India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 283-312; Janaki Bakhle, Two men and music:
nationalism in the making of an Indian classical tradition (New York: Oxford University Press: 2005), pp. 2335; Anjali Arondekar, “In the absence of reliable ghosts: sexuality, historiography, South Asia,” differences: a
journal of feminist cultural studies 25.3 (2015), pp. 98-122.
33
guṇa-samūdra, “ocean of virtues”.
34
For the earlier generations, see Ritwik Sanyal & Richard Widdess, Dhrupad: tradition and performance in
Indian music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 45-57 & 320.
35
The spurious Budh-prakaś of Tansen notwithstanding; Hakim Muhammad Arzani, Tashrih-ul-moosiqui:
Persian translation of Tansen’s original work ‘budh prakash’, trans. N P Ahmad (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012).
36
The Shams al-aswāt has recently been published in English translation by Mehrdad Fallahzadeh (Uppsala:
Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2012). Fallahzadeh is incorrect that this work is a translation of the thirteenthcentury Saṅgītaratnākara; a close comparison shows that Ras Baras Khan’s debt is to the Saṅgītadarpaṇa;
Shams al-aswāt, I O Islamic 1746; cf. Catura Dāmōdara, Sangita Darpanam, ed. K Vasudeva Sastri (Tanjore:
Saraswathi Mahal, 1952).
37
Anon, treatise on tāl, ff. 58v-60r.
38
The last brother is nameless in the Hayy al-arwāh, but Tan Sen (II) is named as Rahim Sen’s brother and
singing partner, and the other two numbered but not named, in Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa‘-i Dehlī, p. 93.
emperor Ahmad Shah’s reign (r. 1748-54); while Rahim Sen’s children and the other brothers
were still alive in 1780, probably in the east (purāb) from where Ziauddin was writing.
Rahim Sen’s grandson, Musahib Khan, son of Fazil Khan Kalan (below), left Delhi after
Ahmad Shah Abdali’s invasion in 1760 to join Rahim Sen in the service of Nawab Shuja‘-uddaula, where he became famed as a marsīya-khwān. Sometime in the 1770s, he then went
with his son Ghulam Hussain to serve a local zamīndār in Mathura, where both died.39 This
family seems not to have belonged to the Tansen à Ras Baras Khan family line, but it is
unclear at this stage how they were descended from Tansen.
Returning to Figure 1: Ras Baras Khan had a brother, Anand Baras Khan, with whom
he performed,40 thus representing what seems to be a very old tradition of pairs of brothers
performing dhrupad together (as their father, Khushhal Khan, had likewise done with his
brother, Bisram Khan41). Ras Baras Khan had two sons, Bada Baras Khan and Anjha Baras
Khan Muhammad Shahi “Saraparas” or “Chunparas”.42 Anjha Baras Khan was renowned in
the late eighteenth century as “a Tansen of his time”. 43 According to the Khulāsat al-‘aish,
written for Shah ‘Alam II (r.1759-1806) by one of his amīrs Nawab Mazhar Khan Bahadur,
Anjha Baras Khan and Firoz Khan “Adarang” were together Emperor Muhammad Shah’s
chief musicians,44 and I am told that some of Anjha Baras Khan’s compositions are still in the
repertoire.45 Our most extensive information on him comes from the pen of his disciple
Ziauddin. It appears that after Nadir Shah’s sacking of Delhi in 1739-40, referred to in the
Hayy al-arwāh as the “imperial turmoil” (hangāma), one of Muhammad Shah’s favourite
officials Amir Khan Umdat al-Mulk took Anjha Baras Khan under his wing, and asked and
received permission to take the musician with him when he was sent to Allahabad as
governor in the early 1740s, from whence he soon returned to Delhi.46 Nineteenth-century
sources suggest, possibly spuriously, that towards the end of his life Anjha Baras Khan
entered the employ of Shuja‘-ud-daula, Nawab of Awadh.47 We do know that he performed
at the third anniversary of emperor Ahmad Shah’s coronation in 1751, remained resident in
Delhi, and died in the 1760s.48
Almost no-one today, however, remembers Anjha Baras Khan, because he was
unfortunate to be eclipsed in fame and innovation in his own lifetime by a legendary older
genius, the dhrupad singer, bīn maestro, and khayāl innovator Ni‘mat Khan “Sadarang” (d. c.
1748), who late in his life graced Muhammad Shah’s court, and who according to Ziauddin is
buried at Hazrat Nizamuddin Dargah in Delhi “below his master’s grave”.49 From
Muhammad Shah’s time onwards it was Sadarang’s lineage that took over as chief musicians
to the Mughal emperors. From a genealogical perspective, however, there remain two
important things to note about Anjha Baras Khan. The first is that he seems to have been a
39
Ziauddin, Hayy al-arwāh, ff. 43v, 47r-8r.
Anon, treatise on tāl, f. 58v.
41
Rasikh, Risāla-yi zikr-i mughanniyān, pp. 14-19; also Bor et al, “Des premiers sultanats,” image on p. 29.
42
sarā-pāras, “complete touchstone”; ćūn-pāras, “choice touchstone”; Richard D Williams, translations; titles
are found in Anon, treatise on tāl, f. 59v, marginalia. Anjhā, “postponement”, possibly should be an-icchā,
“absence of desire”. Persian manuscripts of this period often do not differentiate between ‫ ﺝج‬jim and ‫ ﭺچ‬che.
43
ibid.
44
Mazhar Khan singled out Anjha Baras Khan and Firoz Khan as the ustāds of “all the kalawants perfect in this
art and [all] the accomplished ones of the time” in the Emperor’s service; Khulāsat al-‘aish, ff. 3r-v. Weirdly,
neither of them are named in Dargah Quli Khan’s Muraqqa‘-i Dehlī (1739-41).
45
Amlan Das Gupta and Phalguni Mitra, personal communications 2013.
46
Ziauddin, Hayy al-arwāh, ff. 44r-6r.
47
Muhammad Riza bin Abu’l Kasim Tabataba, Naghma-yi ‘andalīb (1845), British Library, Or. 1811, f. 211v.
48
Ziauddin, Hayy al-arwāh, f. 45r-6r; Anon, Risāla dar ‘ilm-i mūsīqī, f. 387r. According to the latter, Anjha
Baras Khan died in Shah ‘Alam’s reign (r. 1759-1806), but we can narrow the timeframe to the 1760s because
this source was completed in 1770.
49
Sadarang’s biography is well known; see e.g. Allyn Miner, Sitar and sarod in the 18th and 19th centuries (New
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993), pp. 80-8; Rasikh, Risāla-yi zikr-i mughanniyān, pp. 30-1; Dargah Quli Khan,
Muraqqa‘-i Dehlī, pp. 90-1.
40
seminal teacher in the mid-century kalāwant lineage: he taught his great-nephew, Muzaffar
Khan; Sadarang’s nephew Fazil Khan (not to be confused with Fazil Khan Kalan; see both
below); the then-famous qawwāl Muhammad Panah Khan, who went with him to Allahabad;
and a number of other professional musicians and Mughal nobles, including Ziauddin.50 But
the most important thing is that Sadarang married Anjha Baras Khan to his daughter, in a
dynastic arrangement designed to ensure the preservation of the musical heritage of both
lineages. It seems likely from all the evidence that Sadarang did not have any sons, or any
that he considered musically worthy to carry on his traditions. His principal disciple was his
brother’s son Firoz Khan “Adarang”, who was also his son-in-law, but Sadarang also trained
(tarbiyat) his other son-in-law, Anjha Baras Khan, in the specialties of his family line.51
One of the beneficiaries of this dynastic marriage of the “Ras Baras” and Sadarang
traditions was Anjha Baras Khan’s disciple Karim Sen, a direct descendent of Bilas Khan’s
brother Surat Sen and thus already a close relative. We know that Karim Sen’s son Pyar Sen
was at the peak of his musical powers in 1787 so Karim Sen was most likely active in the
second half of the eighteenth century.52 There is considerable circumstantial evidence that for
some time Karim Sen was an important dhrupad singer in the court of Kathmandu in this
period. More tentatively, he may have been the same person as another key figure active at
the same time, Karim Khan; just as Anjha Baras Khan received training from Sadarang, so
Karim Khan was trained by Adarang as his “special disciple” (shāgird-i khāss).53 Regardless
of whether or not they were the same person, what we are seeing in the late eighteenth
century is an intensifying series of familial and discipular links between the Ras Baras and
Sadarang family lines, designed to shore up the authority of the Delhi kalāwant birādarī as
the legitimate representatives of Mughal courtly traditions, at a time when members of the
lineage began to spread far and wide across the subcontinent and became subject to more
intensive competition from outside the qaum.54
Several important pieces of evidence unearthed by Richard Widdess55 indicate that
Karim Sen was employed at the court of Kathmandu sometime before c.1788. A late
eighteenth-century tambūra belonging to him survives in private hands in Kathmandu, with
an inscription around the neck stating that Karim Sen, a descendent of Tansen, presented this
tambūra to the Maharaja of Kathmandu. That he was the same Karim Sen who was Anjha
Baras Khan’s shāgird is strongly suggested by his pen-name, Nad Baras, under which he
composed and performed in Kathmandu as revealed in a late eighteenth-century collection of
dhrupads now held in the Kathmandu National Archive.56 According to the manuscript these
compositions were authored by Jagadguru Miyan Tan Sen, Maha Ustad Miyan Fazil Khan,
pen-name “Tan Baras”, and Miyan Karim Sen, pen-name “Nad Baras”. Who then was Fazil
Khan? His pen-name Tan Baras indicates he was another member of the Ras Baras lineage.
We know from the Hayy al-arwāh that there were two Fazil Khans active in this period. The
senior-most of the two, Fazil Khan Kalan, son of Rahim Sen, is a tempting candidate, as
more than one source notes a fraternal or father-son pair Rahim Sen and Karim Sen who
performed together in the late eighteenth century, including at the Kathmandu court; this
50
Ziauddin, Hayy al-arwāh, ff. 43v, 45v, 46r-47r, 58r.
Anon, Risāla dar ‘ilm-i mūsīqī, f. 386v; Qazi Muhammad Nasir Muhammadi “Ranj” with Miyan Himmat
Khan, Asl al-Usūl (c.1815), Andhra Pradesh Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Hyderabad, falsafa 326,
ff. 1r-v; Mazhar Khan, Khulāsat al-‘aish, ff. 36v-7r; also Ziauddin, Hayy al-arwāh, ff. 44r-v.
52
Anon, Treatise on tāl (1787), ff. 58v-9r, 60r. The author states that at the time of writing Pyar Sen son of
Karim Sen was the unrivalled exponent of dhrupad in fast laya, and that he had heard him sing.
53
Khushhal Khan “Anup”, Persian Rāg Darshan, p. 3; Anon, Treatise on tāl, f. 60r.
54
See Schofield, “‘Words without songs’: the social history of Hindustani song collections in India’s Muslim
courts c. 1770-1830,” in Rachel Harris & Martin Stokes, eds., Tuning the past: essays in honour of Owen
Wright (Farnham: Ashgate, forthcoming).
55
Personal communication 2010. I am grateful to Richard Widdess for supplying me the factual information
here on Karim Sen’s connection with Kathmandu; any errors of interpretation are my own.
56
The manuscript is undated, but includes one dhrupad text that lists the Mughal emperors up to 1788.
51
would make the two singers brothers.57 But Fazil Khan Kalan was almost certainly too old to
qualify, and resided in Delhi.58 The more likely candidate was Sadarang’s nephew Miyan
Fazil Khan,59 one of his brother Bhupat Khan’s sons, a bīn-player and “peerless” dhrupad
singer who was trained in both the Ras Baras and Sadarang family styles, and who died no
earlier than 1780 having been based for a long time in Benares.60 Crucially, like Karim Sen,
Fazil Khan was Anjha Baras Khan’s disciple. Two gurū-bhā’īs working together in
Kathmandu would fit precisely with what we know of performance practice, now as well as
then.
Anjha Baras Khan’s and Fazil Khan’s marital, blood, and discipular ties with the
Sadarang lineage bring us to the rather too tempting question of whether or not Karim Sen
and Karim Khan were the same person (I am leaning towards “not”). Within the Ras Baras
bloodline in this period the titles Sen and Khan do seem to have been somewhat
interchangeable.61 Karim Khan’s son Khushhal Khan “Anup”,62 a prolific and authoritative
author in both Hindavi and Persian (see below), claimed that Karim Khan was both the
special disciple (shāgird-i khāss) of Firoz Khan “Adarang” and a direct inheritor of the
traditions of Tansen, linking Karim Khan, like Karim Sen, to both lineages.63 Due to “the
changing fortunes of the times and [new] decisions of the sultanat,”64 by 1800 at the latest65
Karim Khan and his son Khushhal Khan were in Hyderabad, where they entered the
patronage of Raja Rao Ranbha Bahadur, a Maratha general who fought in the armies of
Nizam ‘Ali Khan of Hyderabad (r.1762-1803) in the 1790s.66 Karim Khan died before his
son wrote his Persian Rāg darshan in 1808, meaning that the timeframe of his life and career
matched that of Karim Sen closely. Khushhal Khan nowhere mentions his father having spent
time in Nepal, skating over the pre-Hyderabad period with vague references to Muhammad
Shah’s court (d. 1748); furthermore, official letters exist dated February 1798 appointing
Miyan Karim Sen, Qayoom Khan and Nur Khan to the service of Rana Bahadur Shah of
Kathmandu (r.1775-99, 1804-6).67 However, this late date is not necessarily incompatible
with a move to Hyderabad around the turn of the century; in early 1799 Rana Bahadur Shah
abdicated his throne and went into exile in India for five years, which would fit with
Khushhal Khan’s “changing fortunes”.68 More pointedly, in the Hindavi Rāg darshan,
57
Madhu Bhatt Tailang in Sanyal & Widdess, Dhrupad, p. 66.
Ziauddin met and heard him in Delhi and was thus well informed; Hayy al-arwāh, f. 47r.
59
Mazhar Khan gives him the title Miyan; Khulāsat al-‘aish, f. 3v.
60
Ziauddin, Hayy al arwāh, ff. 43v, 46v; Anon, Risāla dar ‘ilm-i mūsīqī, f. 387r. His death date is based on the
fact that Ziauddin states he died five years before the completion of the Hayy al-arwāh. The most reliable
genealogy of the Sadarang lineage, the Asl al-Usūl, written with Bhupat Khan’s grandson, confirms the Hayy alarwāh’s account that Bhupat Khan was Ni‘amat Khan’s brother; Muhammad Nasir “Ranj”, Asl al-Usūl, ff. 1r-v.
But it is possible that Bhupat Khan was Sadarang’s nephew and Fazil Khan the latter’s grandson via Sadarang’s
daughter; the Risāla dar ‘ilm-i mūsīqī has “Fazil Khan nawāsa-yi Ni‘amat Khan ibn Bhupat Khan”.
61
e.g. Bilas Khan is called Bilas Sen in the 1787 tāl treatise; Anon, f. 58v.
62
Not to be confused with the seventeenth-century Khushhal Khan “Gunasamudra”.
63
Khushhal Khan “Anup”, Persian Rāg darshan, p. 3; Hindavi Rāg darshan, ff. 3v-4r, particularly the
remarkable genealogical painting of Tansen, Sadarang, Adarang, Karim Khan and Khushhal Khan, f. 3v.
64
Khushhal Khan “Anup”, Persian Rāg darshan, p. 3.
65
The date of the completion of the text of the Hindavi Rāg darshan, ff. 24r-v.
66
According to the colonial records, “Row Rumba Jaiah Row Rumba [was] a brave Officer in the Nizam’s
Army, who served against Tippoo Sultaun in 1790 [...] He bore a consipcuous part in the battle of Koordla
[1790-2], in which he wounded Purserama Bow with his own hand, and was himself wounded in the same
conflict [...] He advised the Nizam to risk another Battle with the Marattas rather than comply with the terms
dictated by them to him. He was afterwards deputed to the Maratta Camp for the purpose of negotiation.” India
Office Records Home Miscellaneous H/563, p. 505.
67
Mahesh Chandra Regmi, Kings and political leaders of the Gorkhali empire, 1768-1814 (New Delhi: Orient
Longman, 1995), p. 30.
68
Mahesh C Regmi, “Preliminary notes on the nature of Rana law and government,” Contributions to Nepalese
studies 2.2 (1975) [pp. 103-15], p. 103.
58
Khushhal Khan names Nur Khan as Karim Khan’s only brother, who like him received
training from Adarang.69
Militating against the easy assumption that Karim Sen and Karim Khan were the same
person are the obvious absence of Karim Sen’s famous son Pyar Sen from Khushhal Khan’s
genealogy – given they would have been brothers – and a court order dated 1800 granting
Miyan Karim Sen exemption from certain taxes and duties on his jagīr (gift of crown land) in
Bariyarpur pargana, Kathmandu.70 All things being equal, I do not think there is sufficiently
convincing evidence that they were the same person. What we can say, though, is that literate
musicians belonging to the Delhi kalāwant birādarī revered as great in their own lifetimes,
and who possessed indisputable and substantial familial and discipular connections to the
inheritances of both Tansen and Sadarang, fanned out from Delhi across India in the late
eighteenth century, receiving patronage, prestige and considerable wealth in powerful
traditional courtly centres as far apart as Kathmandu and Hyderabad and from Mathura to
Patna via Lucknow and Benares.
In the early nineteenth century, Khushhal Khan “Anup” entered the employ of Nizam
Sikander Jah Asaf Jah III (r.1803-29) alongside the famous Hyderabadi courtesan Mahlaqa
Bai “Chanda”,71 who was Khushhal Khan’s shāgird. Khushhal Khan is a highly significant
player in this narrative. He left behind at least four important musical texts: a lavishly
illustrated verse treatise in Hindavi, the Rāg darshan, written in 1800 for Raja Rao Ranbha
and based on the canonical Mughal Persian treatise, the Tuhfat al-Hind (c. 1675); a Persian
recension of the Rāg darshan in 1808 for the Nizam; a bilingual Persian-Hindavi version of
the same work in 1815 for Mahlaqa Bai “Chanda”; and a massive compendium of the song
repertoire of the lineages of Tansen and Sadarang, the Rāg rāginī roz o shab (1818-34). The
Hindavi Rāg darshan includes a genealogy of both sides of Khushhal Khan’s lineage in
written and visual forms, with a particular focus on the Sadarang side, including what are, to
my knowledge, the only near-contemporary portraits of Sadarang and Adarang (Figure 2).72
More importantly, the written genealogy includes, also for the first time that I know of,
reference to all four kalāwant bānīs, including naming Tansen as the progenitor of Gorari. At
this stage, though, they are not called bānīs but referred to as subdivisions of the kalāwant
jāt. It is the family of Sadarang – Khushhal Khan’s own musical lineage – that he refers to as
Khandari, and he states that the progenitor of this lineage was a Rajput, Miyan Kunhi Khan.73
The earliest reference that I know of to the lineage of Sadarang as constituting the
Khandari bānī is in the Hayy al-arwāh, and betrays a level of competition between the two
main families of the birādarī. In the biography of Fazil Khan son of Bhupat Khan, Ziauddin
notes that he started out performing the bīn according to the style of the brītt-i khandārī,74
which he inherited; but that when he went to learn with Miyan Anjha Baras, he had to write a
note of agreement (mućalkā) stating that his forefathers had no musical integrity, and were
servants of Anjha Baras Khan’s lineage (to which Anjha Baras (of course!) responded
generously “He who makes himself a servant shall become master”).75 This reference is
69
Please note, my speculative placement of Karim Khan in Nepal before going to Hyderabad is nothing to do
with a “misreading” of Raja Rao’s putative title Nimbalkar, as one scholar has suggested, but on the
accumulation of this other evidence.
70
Regmi Research (Private) Ltd, Regmi research collection (Kathmandu, 1979), vol. xxiv, p. 16.
71
For more information on Mahlaqa “Chanda” Bai and her literary output as an Urdu ghazal poet, see Scott
Kugle, “Mahlaqa Bai and gender: the language, poetry, and performance of a courtesan in Hyderabad,”
Comparative studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30.3 (2010), pp. 365-85.
72
The whole manuscript is available to view in digital form on the University of Pennsylvania Library website:
<http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/medren/pageturn.html?q=LJS%2063&id=MEDREN_4952995& > [last
accessed 4 July 2013].
73
Khushhal Khan “Anup”, Hindavi Rāg darshan, f. 3v-4r. The first appearance of Raja Samokhan Singh as the
progenitor of the Khandari bānī is really late; Karam Imam, Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī, p. 24.
74
vṛitt? see below. Can also be read as barbat.
75
Ziauddin, Hayy al arwāh, 46v.
reinforced by a remarkable and wholly original treatise on the tāl systems of Delhi kalāwants
and qawwāls, the Asl al-usūl, written in Delhi about 1815 in close collaboration with
Sadarang’s blind great-nephew Miyan Himmat Khan by the current sajjāda-nishīn of the
shrine of Khwaja Mir Dard, Qazi Muhammad Nasir Muhammadi “Ranj”.76
According to this text, Ni‘mat Khan Sadarang’s brother Bhupat Khan (whose
timeframe matches that of the ustād of the Darbhanga dhrupad lineage) had two sons, Miyan
Lal Khan, pen-name “Parb Lal”, and the famous Firoz Khan “Adarang”, Muhammad Shah’s
chief musician, who died in the 1760s. (We also know that he had another son, Miyan Fazil
Khan, above). Likewise, Miyan Lal Khan had two sons, Miyan Nur Khan, pen-name “Nur
Rang”, and Miyan Himmat Khan, who by 1798 were young rising stars of singing and bīnplaying at the court of Shah ‘Alam II (r. 1759-1806).77 When Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan
published his survey of the monuments and famous characters of Delhi in 1847, the Āsār ussanādīd, at the head of his list of musicians he placed a lengthy biography of Miyan Himmat
Khan who had recently died at a venerable age, having been Bahadur Shah Zafar’s (r. 18371858) chief bīnkār, and blind long before long-term Delhi resident James Skinner
commissioned a painting of him in 1825 to illustrate his entry on kalāwants in his Tashrīh alaqwām.78 It is Miyan Himmat Khan’s hereditary knowledge of tāl in the Delhi kalāwant and
qawwāl lineages that his interlocutor, Muhammad Nasir “Ranj”, wrote down on his behalf.
And just as in Khushhal Khan’s Rāg darshan, the Asl al-usūl refers to Himmat Khan’s family
line from his great-uncle Sadarang as the qaum-i kalāwant-i Khandar. (Although there is a
much earlier reference, in the 1787 Edinburgh tāl treatise, to different ways of singing
dhrupad being called vṛtt-bānī,79 it was not until Karam Imam’s Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī
(1856/1869) that the different dhrupad families were referred to as “bānīs” for the first time.)
One mystery remains – what happened to the Ras Baras–Sadarang lineage of
kalāwants in the aftermath of 1857? It is true to say that the mists descend somewhat at this
point, and Karam Imam is not much help; when it came to Delhi he got a lot of things
wrong.80 We do know that some Delhi kalāwants moved to Lucknow in the reign of Asaf-uddaula in Awadh (r.1775-98) and emperor Shah ‘Alam II. Chief amongst these must be Miyan
Chajju Khan, singer, whose brother Jivan Khan was a rabāb player, and whose sons Basit
Khan, Pyar Khan and Jaffar Khan flourished under the patronage of Nawab Wajid ‘Ali Shah
(r. 1847-56, d. 1887).81 The author of the Naghma-yi ‘andalīb, which he wrote for Wajid ‘Ali
Shah in 1845 in the lifetime of Chajju Khan’s sons, not only states that Firoz Khan
“Adarang” was Chajju Khan’s father, but links Chajju Khan firmly into the Sadarang–
Adarang–Lal Khan–Himmat Khan–Nur Khan dynasty.82 His son, the rabāb maestro Basit
Khan, famously went with Wajid Ali Shah into exile in Calcutta in 1856.83 So important was
the written knowledge of his lineage that as he departed, he commissioned a scribe in haste to
76
It is clear from various sources that at least three to four generations of the Sadarang and Khwaja Mir Dard
families had exceptionally close mutual relations of pīr-murīdī––ustād-shāgirdī; for more detailed references to
the relationships between individuals in these families see Homayra Ziad, “‘I transcend myself like a melody’:
Khwājah Mīr Dard and music in eighteenth-century Delhi,” The Muslim world 97 (2007), pp. 548-70 and
“Poetry, music and the Muḥammadī path: how Khvājah Mīr Dard brought three worlds together in eighteenthcentury Delhi,” Journal of Islamic studies 21.3 (2010), pp; 345-76; and Gulfishan Khan, “Sayyid Ahmad
Khan’s representations of Sufi life of Shahjahanabad (Delhi),” Indian historical review 36.1 (2009), pp. 81-108.
77
Mazhar Khan, Khulāsat al-‘aish, f. 4r.
78
Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Āsār us-sanādīd (Delhi: Central Book Depot, 1925), pp. 685-6; James Skinner,
Tashrīh al-aqwām (1825), British Library, Add. 27,255, f. 134v. The British Library has digitised this portrait of
Miyan Himmat Khan; Filename K90086-07 <http://imagesonline.bl.uk> [last accessed 4 July 2013].
79
These refer to different laya of dhrupad in which particular lineages specialised.
80
Karam Imam even got the relationship between Sadarang and Adarang wrong; Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī, p. 239.
81
ibid, pp. 32-3.
82
Muhammad Riza, Naghma-yi ‘andalīb, ff. 211r-v
83
For more information on Basit Khan’s life in Bihar, Benares and Calcutta after the Uprising, see Richard D
Williams, “Hindustani music between Awadh and Bengal, c.1758-1905,” unpublished PhD thesis (King’s
College London, 2015), pp. 212-14.
write out for him three major Persian treatises, including Ras Baras Khan’s Shams al-Aswāt,
that were sent to him in transit in Sahibganj, Bihar, in late 1856.84 They remain to this day in
the possession of his disciple Niamatullah Khan’s direct descendent Ustad Irfan Muhammad
Khan of the Lucknow-Shahjahanpur gharānā.
What then of Delhi? Like his great-uncle Sadarang, Miyan Himmat Khan seems not
to have had any sons worthy of inheriting his tradition. According to the Naghma-yi ‘andalīb,
his brother Nur Khan had a son Rag Ras Khan, who also features in the Āsār us-sanādīd; Sir
Sayyid Ahmad Khan stated that he received training from his uncle Himmat Khan.85 But we
don’t know what happened to Rag Ras Khan after 1857. We do know, on the other hand, that
another member of the younger generation of musicians at Bahadur Shah Zafar’s court, Mir
Nasir Ahmad, who received high praise from Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, survived 1857 and is
mentioned as a prominent Delhi bīnkār in both the Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī and the Sarmāya-yi
‘ishrat (1869). It is less well known that, in yet another dynastic arrangement, Miyan Himmat
Khan married his daughter, Buland Akhtar, to a Mughal nobleman, and made their son, his
grandson Mir Nasir Ahmad, his special shāgird.86 The latter seems to have spent some time
from the 1840s in Awadh, and passed away in Delhi a few years before the Sarmāya was
published in 1869.87 By his death Mir Nasir Ahmad was regarded as the greatest master of
the Khandari bānī of dhrupad singing and bīn playing of his generation.88
There is a lot more still to be said about the conjoined extended lineage of the Delhi
kalāwant birādarī, not least of which is that their traditions survived and even thrived all the
way down to the exile of the last Mughal emperor in 1858 at the very least. While a small,
highly elite number remained at the Mughal court in Delhi from Akbar down to Bahadur
Shah Zafar, many highly distinguished members of the lineage made successful and
memorialised careers in other major centres of high culture such as Hyderabad, Lucknow,
Patna, Benares and Kathmandu. Musicians, then as now, preserved their oral heritage when
necessary through strategic marital and discipular alliances, predominantly between Delhi
kalāwant family lines, and sometimes between Delhi kalāwants and qawwāls, an important
subject for future research. But they also preserved their heritage in written form through
genealogies, tazkiras, song collections and music treatises. The very existence of this large
literary corpus should be the final nail in the coffin of the myth of the “illiterate ustād”.
Finally, it should be clear now that the primary historical sources we possess for the history
of Hindustani musicians, their lineages and their musical inheritance are far richer and more
numerous than we have hitherto even hoped to imagine. I have barely scratched the surface
of this material in this paper; it is my most profound hope that the research of the Musical
Transitions project, and the SHAMSA database of major primary sources, will encourage an
equally rich new cultural history of Hindustani music and dance in the twenty-first century.
84
Basit Khan’s treatises, private collection of Ustad Irfan Muhammad Khan, pp. 30, 102.
Muhammad Riza, Naghma-yi ‘andalīb, f. 211v; Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Āsār us-sanādīd, p. 686.
86
Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Āsār us-sanādīd, p. 687.
87
ibid, p. 687; Karam Imam, Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī, p. 43-4; Sadiq ‘Ali Khan, Sarmāya-yi ‘ishrat (Delhi: Faiz-e
‘ām, 1869), p. 12. The account in the Ma‘dan al-mūsīqī is unreliable and designed to denigrate Delhi musicians
vis a vis Lucknow musicians.
88
Sadiq ‘Ali Khan, Sarmāya-yi ‘ishrat, pp. 11-12.
85
Figure 1 – Simplified genealogy of the Delhi kalāwant birādarī
Tansen
Bilas Khan (and brothers)
Daughter m. Lal Khan
Khushhal Khan (and brothers)
Nirmol Khan
Ras Baras Khan
Anand Baras Khan
Ni’amat Khan Sadarang
Bada Baras Khan
Bhupat Khan
Anjha Baras Khan m. Daughter
Firoz Khan Adarang
Abu Baras Khan
Karim Sen?––?Karim Khan
Miyan Chajju Khan
Piyar Sen
(alive 1787)
Lal Khan Purb Lal
Fazil Khan
Nur Khan Nur Rang
Miyan Himmat Khan
(alive 1847)
Khushhal Khan
(c.1800-30)
Basit Khan & bros
Rag Ras Khan
Sayyid m. Daughter*
Ghazi Khan
Niamatullah Khan Muhammad ‘Ali
Karamatullah Khan Asadullah Khan “Kaukab”
* Buland Akhtar
Father-son relationship
Ustād-shāgird relationship
Unclear relationship
Mir Nasir Ahmad
Figure 1 – Khushhal Khan’s visual genealogy
Clockwise from top left: Miyan Tansen; Shah Adarang Sahib, i.e. Miyan Firoz Khan; Shah
Sadarang Sahib, i.e. Miyan Ni‘mat Khan; Khushhal Khan “Anup” (identifiable from other
paintings in the codex); Miyan Karim Khan (his father).
Khushhal Khan “Anup”, Rāg darshan (1800; illustrated 1804 by Haji Mir Ghulam Hasan).
University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Lawrence J Schoenberg
Collection, LJS 63, f. 3v.