Silk Road Sitar

The Silk Road and the Sitar: Finding Centuries of
Sociocultural Exchange in the History of an Instrument
James A. Millward
Journal of Social History, Volume 52, Number 2, Winter 2018, pp. 206-233
(Article)
Published by Oxford University Press
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JAMES A. MILLWARD
The Silk Road and the Sitar:

Finding Centuries of Sociocultural Exchange
in the History of an Instrument
Abstract
This article uses the history and development of the sitar and its music 1) to argue
for the neglected importance to historical studies of music as a central aspect of
human culture; 2) to provide a case study of cultural exchange across what is
known as the “Silk Road” over time and geography; and 3) to demonstrate the
qualitative equivalence of phenomena we associate with “the Silk Road” and with
“globalization.” Lutes appear in Indian iconography from the first centuries CE,
probably inspired by Buddhist art from North India and Central Asia. They then
disappear, replaced in the same contexts by tube zithers. Lutes were reintroduced
from the thirteenth century or before by regimes with Persian and Central Asian
cultural background. The rawabs and tamburs thus imported developed in India
and borrowed features and performance techniques from Indian zither-type
instruments. The further elaboration of Indian lutes, including the sitar (as well
as sarod, surbahar, bı̄n and others), paralleled the development of various forms
of North Indian music, especially under the patronage of Mughal emperors and
regional monarchs, including Wajid ‘Ali Shah of Awadh. The process was con-
scious and driven by individual musicians and lutiers but likewise strongly influ-
enced by sociopolitical vicissitudes, including the decline of Mughal central
power, British colonial encroachment and annexation of Awadh, and the rise of
Calcutta as a global, commercial city. The sitar reflects this lineage of historical
and personal interventions in its technical features, playing technique, musical
style, and accompanying lore and literature.
Prologue: Historicizing Music and Musicalizing History
Music as a sphere of knowledge is deeply historical. It is self-evident that music

consists of (sonic) events ordered over time. As disciplines, music theory, com-
position, and “music appreciation” are usually approached historically. Even for
performers, engagement with history is a desideratum, whether to be authentic
to tradition (in baroque ornamentation, rendition of muqam, or soulful blues
Journal of Social History vol. 52 no. 2 (2018), pp. 206–233

doi:10.1093/jsh/shy050
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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The Silk Road and the Sitar 207
phrasing) or to rebel against it (minimalism, punk rock, the later Beethoven

string quartets, or Watazumido zen flute).

It is thus somewhat surprising that historians have paid relatively little at-
tention to music as a realm of human activity, especially for earlier periods.
There is of course the discipline known as “history of music,” roughly parallel to
“history of art” or “history of science” but arguably more Eurocentric and high
cultural, with its focus on composers and elite art music of Europe. Yet while we
may now find historians of labor, war, gender, environment, food, disease, reli-
gion, and certain other general aspects of human society along the same corri-
dors and published in the same textbooks and journals as geographically
identified historians, music—and especially non-Western music—is seldom inte-
grated into the general study of history in the same way these concerns are. If it
is, music figures as part of a broader notion of “culture” or “popular culture.”
Why do historians tend to treat music as an autonomous, often alien, realm
or ignore it altogether? There are some obvious reasons. First of all, music can
be a highly specialized, technical field; while it is easy enough to study lyrics as
texts, without training, many historians would be uncomfortable analyzing non-
textual aspects of music as part of a broader historical argument regarding, say,
the influence of Islamic lands on late-medieval Europe. Second, the subdisci-
plines of musical study are awkwardly bifurcated along class and ethnonational
lines.
Western art music is largely taught as history and biography. When the field
of “ethnomusicology” seceded from “musicology,” however, it modeled itself on
ethnography, which required contemporary fieldwork among living people. This
mapped a methodological difference onto the West-versus-the-rest dichotomy:
Western music was history; non-Western music was anthropology. Only recently
has this has been changing: just as anthropology is no longer a field dedicated to
the study of non-Western “natives,” ethnomusicology is not the study of ethnic
music but rather the ethnology of musical practice, applicable to anyone’s music
anywhere. The emerging subdiscipline of “historical ethnomusicology,” more-
over, in a manner parallel to historical anthropology, considers music of past so-
cieties and dead musicians, even those beyond the reach of a microphone.1
Third, historians may shy away from music due to a perceived lack of sour-
ces. Leaving aside early automata that could make sounds mechanically, the ear-
liest actual recorded sound dates only from the latter half of the nineteenth
century. How can we write about music when we don’t know what it sounded
like? We do have extant texts (historians’ bread and butter) in the form of writ-
ten musical transcriptions. Almost all of the world’s cultures with written scripts
to express language also developed musical notation systems that at least sug-
gested aspects of the sounds of vocal or instrumental music, or tablatures that in-
dicate how they were played on a particular instrument. But here again
historians face technical difficulties. Early music notations are problematic sour-
ces even to professional musicologists. They are often spottily preserved; their
symbols or syllables may be impossible or controversial to interpret and convert
back into music; and even unlocked, these codes generally furnish at best only a
hint of what the music actually sounded like, often leaving out key
information—about rhythm, for example, or the absolute pitch of the notes
sounded, or whether and how melodies were harmonized or accompanied—
which contemporary musicians were expected to know as a matter of course or
208 Journal of Social History Winter 2018
learn from a teacher. Today’s staff notation, the culmination of centuries of de-
velopment, is dense in information about instrument, note value, tempo,

rhythm, full polyphony, volume dynamics, tone quality, articulation, and other
specific details; it allows, at least in theory, more or less standardized performan-
ces faithfully reproducing the composer’s intent.2 But the staff notation system is
a modern exception to the rule of most notation systems across the world and
over time. Moreover, despite its utility for Western art music, the European
score has proven an inadequate format for notating non-European music charac-
terized by rhythmic complexity, tonal variety, nonstandard temperaments, and
so on.3
Thus, music was everywhere in the past, but historians hoping to study mu-
sical practice or at least bring it into their narratives face the old bugbear of
scarce texts, along with technical hurdles even where sources exist. Given these
difficulties, I would like to suggest some methods and ways of thinking about
music, musicians, musical performance, and musical instruments that I have
been implementing in my own research on lute-type instruments on the Silk
Road. While they are neither especially innovative nor profound, these
approaches are worth articulating, as I have found that they allow me to bring
music into history, even without reproducing its notes.
First, an obvious methodological work-around: if one cannot hear the mu-
sic, then look at it or read about it. While the historical sonic record may be
poor, the visual and textual record is full of depictions of and references to mu-
sic. We have the poetry of the lyrics; we have descriptions of musicians and mu-
sical gatherings; we have court records of musical patronage and royal
instrumentaria; and we have players, ensembles, and many musical instruments
depicted in artwork. Such sources cannot tell us what the notes were but do sug-
gest, often better than notation, what the music sounded like: we see the skin
stretched over frames, the wire and silk strung over wooden boxes, the breadth
and spacing of holes on pipes. The dimensions and materials of organic, non-
electric instruments are good guides to timbre, range, volume, and other aural
characteristics. This was likely the artists’ point: to give sound to an image, as it
were, just as the inclusion of a dancer, a galloping horse, or bird on the wing
gives it movement. Moreover, images of musical instruments, especially when
faithfully rendered, yield a wealth of information of potential interest to the his-
torian. The field of organology (the study of the history and development of mu-
sical instruments) is seen as somewhat fusty; it has not shaken its association to
the Sachs-Hornbostel classification system, which can elicit snickers from
today’s ethnomusicologists more concerned with people and culture than with
classifying the world’s instruments with a decimal number as Linnaeus or Dewey
might have.4 Yet the shape, construction, decoration, and other physical details,
whether revealed by extant instruments or iconography in artworks, provide
critical clues to an instrument’s relationship to instruments of other times and
places, and thus to cultural exchange. Why does the West African xalam so re-
semble the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian long-necked lute, even down
to the needlessly long tassels hanging from the neck? Where did that python-
skin on a north Chinese sanxian come from? How did the tropical rain-forest
tone-woods on a sixteenth century vihuela get to the luthier’s shop in Spain?
Organology need not be directed at a positivistic study of the evolution of
instruments into their modern form nor even simply at figuring out modern
instruments’ ancestors. Instruments, like any art motif or transferred technology,

embody in themselves evidence of connections between societies across space

and over time. In this and other ways, then, music and musical instruments in
iconography are subject to the gamut of material culture analysis.
An art image offers more than physical information, of course. Both art and
written texts, especially literary texts, often evoke music and musical instru-
ments in contexts dense with social meaning and affect. The settings suggest
whether a certain instrument or type of song belong in a temple or in a brothel;
whether they are played by pampered courtiers or blind bards in the market-
place; whether such music serves as pastime for children, a lothario’s seduction
aid or a morale-booster regulating the tramp of war-bound soldiers. That shared
music (often combined with bodily movement) enhances group solidarity is but
one of its apparent psychological and spiritual effects;5 a variety of past cultures
have likewise taken for granted not only that music can be therapeutic but that
it harmonizes nature, tames wild beasts, streamlines the Way, or resonates with
the celestial spheres. References to such Orphic, lyrical, and psychophysical
powers of music in art and literature tell us much about past worldviews.
In short, music is a potent signifier of social and cultural meaning. Its pres-
ence in a scene or description speaks of more than the music itself. The poet Bai
Juyi’s encounter with a lonely woman playing the pipa in a south China back-
water uncovers layers of class and gender consciousness as well as the extent of
commercial activity in the ninth-century Tang empire. The poem’s narrator
learns that the woman, once renowned in the capital for her beauty and exqui-
site musicality, had been forced, as her youth waned, to marry a boorish tea mer-
chant who, during his long business trips, left her all alone on a damp
houseboat.6 Dutch Golden Age paintings frequently feature musical subjects in
ambiguous allegories of learned sophistication, bourgeois respectability, familial
harmony, or as dolorous reminders that transient pleasure paves the path to cor-
ruption and death—an apt reflection of the contradictions of a Calvinist society
pioneering the routes of global commerce.7
The music of the past, then, can be seen (if not directly heard), its meanings
read and its passions felt. These insights are more likely found in iconography and
literary texts than in official documents, though those too may touch on musical
topics. Historians simply need to find and read such sources creatively.
More than that, though, as the examples above suggest, it helps us bring
music into history if we think about music and musical instruments in a certain
way: as enmeshed in physical and social networks (of materials, instrument deal-
ers, performers, consumers, divine and human patrons) and semantic and cul-
tural webs. Every instrument is linked to other instruments before it and in
other places through its mode of construction, technical features, stylistic details,
and the like. Every performer learned from other players, as every composer bor-
rows from the work of others. Instruments and musical genres are coded by class,
gender, ethnicity, and social venue, and these codings link them to discourses
about music in society, about spirituality, pleasure, propriety, solidarity, and
other concerns.8
In this essay, I will follow the approach outlined above to narrate part of
the story of the development of the sitar, in concert with the formation of what
we now call Hindustani classical music and a shift of the social position of art
music and musician in north India from royal to bourgeois. This research is part
of my larger project using lute-type instruments as a vehicle to examine cultural

exchange on “the Silk Road.” Here, I hope it will demonstrate how one can

study music and musical instruments as a component of political, cultural, and
social history and, likewise, how music and instruments were themselves shaped
by that history.
By 1849, Major General Sir William Henry Sleeman, Knight Commander

of the Bath, had “extended the Aegis of British power over the afflicted and
oppressed” of India for four decades and “was deservedly much beloved by them
for his earnest desire to promote their welfare.” He had distinguished himself as
special commissioner for the suppression of thuggism and dacoity, contributed to
science through his investigations of native zoology and paleontology, and capti-
vated the British public with a curious study of Indian boys nurtured by
wolves—a phenomenon that would later inspire Rudyard Kipling’s man-cub in
The Jungle Book stories.9 Now in his sixties, Sleeman might have expected his
current posting, as Resident of Lucknow, capital of the princely state of Awadh,
to comfortably crown his decades of effectual service to the British East India
Company. And yet Sleeman grew increasingly alarmed with the situation in
Awadh, where his position remained “disagreeable and unsatisfactory.” He op-
posed creeping British territorial annexation of Indian princely states, which he
viewed as an unnecessary and dangerous assumption of burdens best left to na-
tive land-holding elites. And yet, his own reports on what he saw as rampant
misgovernment and unconscionable dereliction of duty by Awadh’s native rulers
were leading Sleeman’s superior, Governor-General Lord Dalhousie, closer to
the conclusion that annexation was the only way to protect British interests. In
spite of his best efforts and sternest remonstrances, stiffened by the corps of
British cavalry with whom he toured the kingdom, Resident Sleeman was un-
able to address the “prevailing anarchy and lawlessness” in Awadh. Why not? In
his own valedictory assessment, the problems in Awadh came down to this: “we
have a fool of a king, a knave of a minister, and both are under the influence of
one of the cleverest, most intriguing, and most unscrupulous villains in India.”10
And who was this villain frustrating the modern major general’s best inten-
tions for the state of Awadh? A sitar-player named Ghulam Raza Khan.
The Indian Lute as Buddhist Icon
The sitar, almost synonymous with Indian classical music among casual lis-
teners, is considered a traditional Indian instrument. This is not incorrect, but if
“traditional,” it is hardly “pure” or uniquely monocultural. Rather, the sitar and
its music grew out of multiple Central Asian and Indian lineages, combining in
themselves Hindu, Muslim, Persian, and Turko-Mongol Central Asian cultural
elements and historical traditions. We often view eclectically cross-cultural, syn-
cretized new things as archetypically modern, the many-parented issue of global-
ization, and by this reasoning, the sitar is “modern” as well. I would argue,
however, that most musical instruments have always been hybrids, nodes in
wide cultural networks extending over regions and continents and reaching
back in time. And as such, instruments are simultaneously traditional and
modern, both local and trans-geographic. The “Silk Road” connective processes
that brought about the sitar are qualitatively no different from those of

globalization.
There was a Sumerian word, pan, meaning a bow (hunting and musical),
which in that form and in the compound *pan-tur has left an abundant progeny
of instrument names across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.11 One of those cog-
nates was the Sanskrit term vina (vı̄na, veena), which becomes bı̄n in modern
Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu). As often _ happens with instrument names, the
word vina has been applied to different instruments in India over time, some-
times modified by another word to distinguish among them. The term appears
in the Vedas (first millennium BCE), most likely referring to arch-harps (or per-
haps simple musical bows), which, presumably, ultimately came to India from
Mesopotamia.12 In the Guttila-Jataka (one of a storehouse of tales about the
Buddha’s past lives as Bodhisattva), a master musician, Guttila (the
Bodhisattva) competes on a stringed instrument in the court of King Sakka13
against his own upstart student. Though translated as “lute” in the standard
English edition of the story, this “vina” would have been a harp.14 Indeed, this
arch-harp vina appears in southern Indian sculpture from the second century
BCE and after.
“Vina” thus became a generic Indian term for stringed instruments. Over
the centuries, the name was applied to a succession of chordophones, suggesting
that the term retained ancient gravity while its referent changed, thus reflecting
the shifting significance of different instruments in India over time as well as pe-
riodic foreign interactions.
In the first centuries CE, lutes (stringed instruments with a neck and dis-
tinct body, probably called citra-vı̄na) began appearing in Indian icononography.
The main representations of these_ first southern Indian lutes are sculptures from
Amaravati,15 Nagarjunakonda,16 and Pawaya17 and wall-paintings from the
Ajanta cave temple complex.18 The instruments in these carvings and paintings
are all quite similar, representing ovoid lutes with bodies tapering into slender
necks that terminate in straight head-stocks.19
The question of where these lutes in southern Indian Buddhist iconography
came from, and their relationship to somewhat earlier ovoid lutes in north India
and Central Asia, as well as to later lutes in China, is not of primary interest to
us here. It could be, however, that lutes were not widely played in India in the
first centuries CE. Those represented in the temples may have been inspired by
other iconography, rather than created in imitation of locally known physical
instruments.20 Moreover, in the latter half of the first millennium, the lute dis-
appears altogether from south Indian iconography, as do arch-harps.21 In their
place we find stick- or tube-zithers, which may have come to the subcontinent
from Southeast Asia, either by sea or overland via Yunnan and Assam.22
At this point, then, the meaning of the term “vina” changed again, coming
to stand for varieties of this relatively small tubular instrument, which was held
nearly vertically, often with bowl-shaped resonators or gourds at one or both
ends. This instrument became the characteristic Indian chordophone in medie-
val times, and its descendants continue into modern times as regional folk
instruments.23 Often with only one string, many varieties have a broad, convex
bridge that produces the buzzing sound we associate with South Asian classical
music. This stick-zither vina is frequently found in Pala period sculpture (eighth
to twelfth centuries). The zither vina is a common attribute of the goddess

Sarasvati (Saraswati) when she appears either on her own or, along with

Lakshmi, as a consort to Shiva. Attendants and yakshis playing stick-vinas fre-
quently decorate the space surrounding larger images of Hindu or Jain gods.24
Scholars have suggested that the medieval Indian transition from harps and lutes
to the stick-zither may be related to the growing importance of a “universal
pitch,” or basic drone note, in Indian music. A stick-zither vina, held and played
as in the sculptures, provides a reference note to a singer and works well to es-
tablish a single ground note from which a raga, a systematized sequence of notes,
can be sung.25
Return of the Lutes
Whether the early lute was commonly played or primarily iconographic in

southern India, it disappears from Indian iconography by around 700 CE, and its
niche came to be occupied by the stick-zither. This marks a curious retreat, but
it is not the end of the story. Lutes took up residence in India again centuries
later, starting in the courts of Central Asian conquerors who brought lutes along
with musical and religious practices. The ultimate result of this reintroduction
was the musical and organological expression of Indo-Islamic culture, and a co-
evolution of syncretic musical forms with adaptive, hybrid instruments to pro-
duce the new sounds that musicians and their sponsors were aiming for. We can
track this synthesis26 both in the series of design innovations of the instruments
themselves and in the careers and genealogies of musicians. The musical and
organological innovators were often one and the same people. We can see in
much more detail how the Silk Road transculturation that ultimately produced
the modern sitar (and its cousins the tambura, surbahar, sarod, and others) in-
volved a continuous process of cultural marking and remarking, of defining and
redefining the instruments’ meaning, carried out within networks of people in a
historical context in which Muslims, Hindus, Indians, Central Asians, and even
the British interacted. The history of this cultural confluence is concretely em-
bedded in physical features of South Asian instruments today and audible in
aspects of musical form and performance style.
Following in the footsteps of the Greeks, the Scythians (Sakas), the
Kushans, and others, from the thirteenth century CE, successions of tribal states
invaded India from the northwest. Some occupied parts of northern and central
of India for centuries, including the Ghaznavids (977–1186), the several dynas-
ties known as the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526), and the Timurid-Mongol dy-
nasty of the Mughals (1526–40, 1555–1857). While these regimes are
sometimes collectively referred to as “Muslim conquests,” and their elites were
largely adherents of Islam, to simply call them “Muslim” oversimplifies and con-
fuses their cultural backgrounds. These groups did not represent offshoots of
Arab culture from the Middle East, for example. Rather, they brought into
India, in varied proportions, blends of Persian language and civilization; the
folkways of the steppes and oases of Central Asia, Xinjiang, and Mongolia; and
the synthesis of Irano-Turkic Central Asian Islamic culture created by the
Mongol empire and especially the Timurid dynasty. Islam as a religion took root
in India during this period and is reflected in the large Indian Muslim popula-
tion today (189 million in 2017), but the broader cultural confluence pervaded
all aspects of society in profound ways. To say, as some “Hindu nationalists” in

the twenty-first century have taken to saying, that Indian Muslims should “go

home” is as ridiculous as suggesting that Buddhists in China or Japan should go
home to India, where Buddhism began.
Lutes reappeared in India in the courts of these Persianized, Islamic Central
Asian rulers during the Delhi Sultanate or some time before. There are referen-
ces to the Central Asian tambur (another cognate of Sumerian *pan-tur) at the
Ghaznavid court in Lahore (ca. 1076). More about this instrument appears in
the writings of the poet Amir Khusrau (1252–1325), who describes a slender,
long-necked ovoid lute with tuning pegs, called tambur.27 The son of a Central
Asian Turkic soldier who had fled the invasions of Genghis Khan, Amir
Khusrau was an honored scholar in the Delhi court. He is, apocryphally, cred-
ited with creating the classical vocal genre known as khayal (khayal, khyal, about
which more below). Texts of many ghazals (rhymed couplets of Persian verse di-
rected to God as a beloved one) and qawali (qawali, qavali) (devotional songs
sung to a Sufi saint) are attributed to him, and he is also said to have invented
the sitar by merging features of Central Asian lutes with the Hindustani rudra-
vina, a stick or tube zither. This, too, is a mistake perpetuated by later writers
but a meaningful one: all of these elements—Persian poetry, Sufi mysticism, and
hybridized Central Asian and Indian instruments—are streams that would flow
together in the new currents of Indian high culture, albeit fully so only after
Amir Khusrau’s time.28
Timur (Tamerlane) sacked Delhi in 1398. In flight from the chaos, the
Delhi Sultanate’s musicians moved to Bengal, Jaunpur, Gujerat, and Gwailor,
whose rulers sponsored them in their own courts. This diaspora deepened the
penetration of Central Asian and Persian music within India and encouraged its
ongoing dialogue with local musical forms. When Delhi reemerged as a locus of
musical patronage, we know that Sultan Sikander Lodi (r. 1489–1517) kept four
slaves to play each of four instruments: the Central Asian tambur, the rabab (a
lute with a hide soundboard and notched body), the chang (a harp), as well as
the north Indian bı̄n zither. Though he is noted for persecuting Hindus,
Sikander Lodi’s court music was culturally integrated.
Around the same time, several varieties of plucked and bowed chordo-
phones were prominent in the instrumentarium of the Timurid courts of
Samarkand and Herat. These included the ‘ud (oud; a descendent of ovoid short
lutes), as well as the long-necked sihtar or sehtar (“three string”) and dutar (“two-
string”), both Central Asian long lute cousins in the tambur family.29 Babur
(1483–1530), the Timurid prince and warlord who conquered north India and
established what is now known as the Mughal Empire, makes it clear in his col-
orful autobiography that musicianship, including composition and skill perform-
ing on chordophones, were highly regarded talents in his world. He mentions
several musicians whom he encountered in Kabul and critiques their composi-
tions and playing ability with a connoisseur’s ear:
Husayn the lutenist [‘udi] composed tasteful tunes on the lute. He could make
all its strings play as one. His flaw lay in that he performed too coquettishly. He
once made a big fuss when Shaybani Khan ordered him to play, and not only
played badly but also did so on an inferior instrument instead of his own.
Shaybani Khan caught on and ordered him to be severely beaten right in the
assembly. It was the one good deed Shaybani Khan did in this world.
Temperamental fellows deserve such punishment.

Babur was more impressed by the “incomparable” Muhammad Bu-Sa’id, a
noted pugilist who also composed music, including “a beautiful naqsh in the
chargah mode.” Though both a warrior and a poet himself, Babur thought it a
“marvel” for Muhammad Bu-Sa’id to “have such accomplishments and be a
wrestler too.”30
The Mughal courts under Babur’s successors thus naturally continued to
support both Central Asian and Persian musicians and to that interest added a
growing appreciation of local Indian instruments and musical forms. Bonnie
Wade has traced this process in Mughal paintings. She finds, for example, the
north Indian bı̄n played together in a novel ensemble with the West Asian na’i
(vertical flute) and daf (frame drum) and, in another late sixteenth century
painting, bı̄n and na’i players in Indian dress accompanying a dancer in Central
Asian (Turki) costume.31
Under the Mughals, such Silk Road mash-ups were not accidental but in-
tentional outcomes of policy and taste. The emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), in
particular, deliberately summoned Indian musicians to court to join the Persian
and Central Asian entertainers assembled by his predecessors. Akbar actively
sought an Indo-Muslim synthesis in music, as in painting, architecture, litera-
ture, religion, and other cultural spheres. He deployed a range of symbols to por-
tray himself as a universal ruler who rose above, and in himself unified, the
communal and ethnic differences of his growing, multicultural empire. Thus, he
sponsored literary projects in Sanskrit, Urdu, and other languages, as well as
Persian. He promoted a syncretic state religion, Din-i-Ilahi, with elements of
Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Jainism. The doctrine’s key
principle of ecumenical tolerance—albeit centered on the all-powerful figure of
the emperor himself—was reflected in the palace complex Akbar built at
Fatepur Sikri, on a rocky ridge outside Agra. Its architecture combined Persian
and Indian elements in a layout inspired by Central Asian tents and included a
mosque, a shrine to a saint of the Chisti order (a Sufi order that itself explicitly
welcomed people of all religions), and his own hall for religious discussions, the
Diwan-i Khas. The single central pillar of this hall focused the building’s elabo-
rate geometric complexity inward upon a circular platform where the emperor
would sit alone while listening to religious discourses from holy men of diverse
faiths.
Music, too, fit into this ideological system of symbol and metaphor. To the
Mughals, it was more than entertainment. Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58), Akbar’s
grandson and the fifth Mughal emperor, sat upon a throne (now on display in
Delhi’s Red Fort) inlayed with a precious stone panel from Florence depicting
Orpheus bowing a lute to an audience of wild beasts.32 Orpheus’ musical power
over animals was a potent metaphor in early modern Italy: for example, a six-
teenth century painting of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus at the gates of Hades
taming Cerberus with a viol proclaimed the Florentine lord a good prince who
inaugurated a peaceful age.33 In the cosmopolitan Mughal court, this musical
message inscribed on Shah Jahan’s throne was amplified by several familiar he-
roic narratives: the Biblical Solomon and David (known in Delhi from the
Islamic tradition as well as from European Jesuits at court) and the mythological
Persian kings Gayumarth and Jamshid, all of whom had tamed wild creatures or
presided over golden ages when the lion lay down with the lamb. In the ancient

love story of Layla and Majnun, retold in Nizami’s Khamsa (Quintet) as well as
by Amir Khusrau, the hero Majnun retreats to the wilderness, driven mad by his
impossible love for Layla. There, even the fiercest predators grow docile in his
Solomonic presence.34 It was likewise a Hindu and Jain tradition to depict
Krishna pacifying animals with music.
This is the lens, then, through which we should consider Mughal court mu-
sic. Akbar’s vizier, Abu’l Fazl, wrote his influential history of the empire up to
his day, the Akbar-nama, in such a way as “to define Mughal ideology in imperial

rather than in communal terms.”35 In the A’ı̄n-i Akbar-ı̄, a statistical compen-
dium that concludes the Akbar-nama, Abu’l Fazl writes that Akbar kept numer-
ous “Hindus, Iranis, Turanis [Central Asians], Kashmiris, both men and women”
as court musicians. He lists thirty-six principal musicians; most of the Indians
were singers from Gwailor; two Indian instrumentalists played the bı̄n and the
svaramandal (a box zither). There were also musicians from Mashhad (Persia),
Khorasan (northeastern Persia, bordering on Central Asia), Herat, and Kipchap
(the Kazakh steppe, extending eastward from the Volga). Non-Indians played
qanun (a hammered dulcimer), na’i, ghichak (a bowed spike-lute), karna (a wind
instrument), rabab, tambur and qubuz (another Central Asian lute).36
Figures 1a and b show us one pairing of the Central Asian tambur-type lute
and the Indian bı̄n, accompanying two voices in performance for prince Murad
Baksh (the youngest son of emperor Shah Jahan) and his consort, Mumtaz
Mahal.37
Bonnie Wade has examined the Central Asian and Persian lutes in Mughal
paintings. When they first appear, in the Babur reign (1526–30), they do so as
melody instruments in ensemble. By the Akbar period (1556–1605), she found
paintings where the tambur lute was played solo; later, that practice gives way to
rabab lute and frame drum performance. By the early seventeenth century, in
paintings from the atelier of Jahangir (1605–27), Wade observed the practice
captured by the painting in figure 1: the tambur is not being played in the con-
ventional way but rather strummed as a drone, the way Indian stick zithers were
traditionally played. This is clear from how the woman rests the tambur neck on
her right shoulder, plucking its open strings with her right hand, while she ges-
tures with her left hand and sings. Supporting the instrument one-handed in
this way, she could not be stopping the strings to play melody notes. Nor does
the bı̄n-player across from them seem to be fingering melody notes on her instru-
ment, though it has many raised frets.38
Here, then, is a case of complex lute transculturation: this long-necked,
ovoid lute from Persianate Central Asia, the tambur, when brought into India
was repurposed as a drone to provide a reference tone for a singer. This was the
predecessor of the modern Indian tambura (the final “a” marks the linguistic ab-
sorption of the word “tambur” into Urdu, an inflecting Indo-European lan-
guage). By the nineteenth century, the tambura had grown into a super-sized,
deeply resonant, wide-necked fretless long lute with a large gourd body. Today,
the open strings of the tambura are patiently plucked in fixed order by an aco-
lyte at the rear of the stage while the ustad (master) performs a raga. (For those
modern students of Hindustani or Karnatak music who lack their own acolytes,
an electronic box called a “Raagini” serves as a convenient substitute: “Light
216
Journal of Social History
Figure 1a. Detail from lower section of a collage, “Murad Baksh (1624-61) with a Procession of Female Servants at a Musical Performance.” Two
women sing and make hand gestures; one simultaneously thrums a lute in the left foreground; players across from them accompany on bı̄n and dou-
ble-headed drum (pakhavaj). Figure 1b: detail showing tambur-type Central Asian lute used as a drone accompaniment to singing. Ink and opaque
watercolour on paper, collage of five late 17th century Mughal miniatures with overpaintings and additions by an Austrian artist, 1760-62. Both
from a collage repasted in a wooden wall panel in the “Millionenzimmer” at Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna. Copyright Schloss Schönbrunn Kultur-
und Betriebsges.m.b.H./Scan: Salon Iris.
Winter 2018

Weight & Compact. It’s an Acknowledged Fact the Raagini Digital Helps
Improve the Mood & Scope of Practice & Performance Vastly.”39 A knob on

these clever analog devices dials the tone between “Ladies” and “Gents”
settings.)
The Birth of Indo-Persian-Islamic Music
Central Asian lutes Indianized in other ways as well, developing along with
Indian music itself, which over these centuries was absorbing scales, modes, and
melodies from Persian and Central Asian traditions and taking in regional, de-
votional, and folk Indian styles. As a somber and austere tradition based on con-
templative singing incorporated faster, more rhythmically complex, and
ostentatiously improvisational phrases, musicians pioneering the parallel instru-
mental styles needed new instruments capable of simultaneously maintaining a
meditative ground while executing flashy runs. We are often impressed with the
technological developments of Western European instruments, especially key-
board instruments, which tracked the expanding harmonic complexity and ris-
ing technical demands of European art music from Renaissance through
Romantic eras. But similarly ingenious and ongoing innovation—though di-
rected at different goals—marked the coevolution of Indian music and lute-type
musical instruments from the seventeeth through twentieth centuries.
What were the women in figure 1 singing? The Indian singers and bı̄n-play-
ers from Gwailor in Akbar’s court were likely trained in a school of singing
known as dhrupad. Dhrupad singers and instrumentalists performed ragas, which
are systematized sequences of notes, each sequence with its own name and un-
derstood to project a certain mood. Ragas are like scales or modes, in that each
raga uses a fixed set of (usually seven) notes, with certain pitch-values, and de-
fined intervals between the pitches. No accidentals are permitted (except some-
times to very great masters who purposefully break the rules). Ragas are in some
respects also like melodies, with groups of notes to be played in a certain order.
For example, some ragas require musicians to climb up the scale one way and de-
scend another way, adding or subtracting a note, or playing them in slightly dif-
ferent order. Besides these rules about the order in which notes are played, some
ragas customarily include short melodic motifs that identify the raga and set its
mood.
Ragas seem indefinable (a bit like a scale, a bit like a mode, a bit like a mel-
ody) because our musical vocabulary in European languages largely derives from
notated Western art music, which is organized differently and which, since the
baroque period, has moved away from improvisation. Ragas also may seem mys-
terious due to an unfortunate tendency among Western and Indian commenta-
tors and performers alike to shroud discussion of them in metaphysical
verbiage.40 De-Orientalized, a raga in and of itself is no less accessible for a neo-
phyte listener than other types of music, in the sense that an attentive listener
can recognize melodic elements and, once the raga’s characteristic features have
been pointed out, follow what’s happening during a performance. (Sophisticated
musicological appreciation takes more study, just as it would for European art
music, jazz, or even popular musical forms.)
The most illustrious musician in Akbar’s court was a dhrupad singer and in-
strumentalist from Gwailor known by the sobriquet “Tansen” (fl. c. 1545), to
whom Akbar granted the title miyam: (master, also spelled mian), a term that
appears in the names of several ragas associated with Tansen. Much legend sur-

rounds this man, and many famous Indian musicians are said by one source or
another to be his descendants. Among the many accomplishments attributed to
Tansen, his singing of certain ragas could heal the sick, bring on the monsoon
rains, break a wild elephant for the howdah, or ignite votive lamps spontane-
ously. Magic aside, Tansen formalized and institutionalized the dhrupad school
of raga performance as it came from Gwailor to Delhi.
The principal structural feature of the dhrupad approach as practiced by
Tansen and his chains of descendants and students down to the present is the
slow alap, a free-tempo, systematically improvised introduction of the notes and
motifs of the raga, moving up and then back down the “scale.” Alap is followed
by faster sections with a rhythmic pulse and then a fixed rhythmic cycle called a
tala. Usually the exposition of the raga culminates in one or two compositions—
a poetic text sung with a composed melody that highlights characteristic features
of that raga. Stylistically, dhrupad performance was relatively free of ornament,
valuing precise intonation and mindful articulation of the raga rather than issu-
ing volleys of notes. That said, dhrupad singers sometimes connected notes with
sliding glissandi, a technique called a meend (mı̄nd), and passages could occa-
sionally be elaborated by a rapid alternating shake between two pitches, known
as a gamak.
Dhrupad was originally vocal music, with lyrics (at first secular poetry,
though dhrupad is now seen as a spiritual music) sung to rhythmical accompani-
ment on the pakhavaj, two-sided drum. But Tansen is said to have led the way
in instrumentalizing dhrupad: performing ragas with dhrupad structure and style
on melody instruments rather than with the voice. Tansen pioneered the dhru-
pad performance of ragas on the rabab lute; his daughter, appropriately named
Sarasvati, did so on the bı̄n, which was, as we’ve seen, the main Indian instru-
ment favored in the Mughal courts.41
Other schools of singing and types of performance were also represented in
the Mughal courts at Fatepur Sikri, Agra, and Delhi, as well as those in regional
kingdoms and sultanates. One of these was khayal—from a Persian word for
“thought, fancy, fantasy.” The lyrics of khayal songs were usually two lines of
rhyming Hindi verse set to ragas and either slow or fast talas, sung and then im-
provised on; they were performed without an alap and provided a showcase for
the singer to demonstrate his or her technical virtuosity with fancy ornamenta-
tion and melodically and rhythmically dazzling runs, called tans. Meanwhile,
Sufis, especially those of the Chisti order (of which Amir Khusrau was a devo-
tee), were developing a form of devotional singing known as qawali, initially
sung at the shrine of a saint. A qawali performance involved a small group of
men singing a series of different types of Arabic, Persian, or Urdu songs, accom-
panied by a drum and the sarangi fiddle (today often replaced by harmonium)
and culminating in the lead singer’s impassioned and powerful improvisations
on the composition. Stylistically, qawali singers adopted an approach similar to
khayal, and devotional songs from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in
turn, became part of the khayal repertoire.42 The myths that attribute the crea-
tion of so many genres, instruments, and styles to Amir Khusrau and Tansen,
then, reflect the reality of mutually influencing emergence, and convergence, of
different musical forms combining elite, devotional, folk, Hindu, and Muslim
music in India’s royal courts over several centuries.

Chordophonic Coevolution
This, then, is the world that gave birth to the sitar. We saw above how
long tambur-type lutes from Central Asia and Persia were repurposed in India to
serve as drone accompaniment for singers, a role that ultimately brought about
today’s large, fretless drone instrument, the tambura.
But long lutes were used in India to play melody as well. Derivatives of the
Persian name sihtar (“three-string”) attached to this type of lute used for this pur-
pose. It was in the court of Muhammad Shah (1719–48), the last great Mughal
patron of music, that this instrument came into its own as a vehicle for emerging
Indian (as opposed to Persian or Central Asian) art music. Delhi was by then a
center for khayal; qawali singers, too, performed at shrines and house concerts.
Dhrupad was also present, though perhaps more respected than popular. Hindu
religious singing in the Bhakti devotional tradition could be heard in the capital.
And the sources depict—while denigrating it as low-class and immoral—a pro-
liferation of “popular” music that enlivened the demimonde of courtesans and
dancing girls.43 One well-known blind percussionist accompanied dancers by
drumming on his own belly; he could sound like the dholak or pakhavaj, but the
skin across his abdomen had turned “as black as his luck.” British accounts and
drawings reveal that a type of sitar was also then used to accompany dancers in
“nautch” performances that fascinated even as they scandalized British and
Indian elites. 44
We learn from a Persian account of Delhi life under Muhammad Shah45
that the preeminent musician at court, Na’mat Khan (known by the sobriquet
Sadarang), was performing innovative khayal style ragas with “dhrupad ele-
ments” on the bı̄n. At his residence, he held monthly all-night performances
(mah: fil—the same term used for qawali “gatherings”) for the respectable popu-
lace of Delhi—in itself, a significant development crossing over between the
realms of religious and secular music and foreshadowing the later popularization
of music performance, patronage, and appreciation in Calcutta and other cities.
The author of this portrait of Delhi, Dargah Quli Khan, wrote of Na’mat:
Felicitous is that bin player, whose mere placing of the bin on the shoulder ema-
nated harmonious sounds and exhilarated the people. The gourd of his bin
[sounds] as intoxicating as wine, and the touch of the finger-nails on the strings
animates the people. The music of the bin makes the people listless with ecstasy
and the sounds of appreciation rent the air.46
Na’mat’s nephew, Firoz (also known as Adarang), had developed new ways
of playing the “sitar,” which allowed his lute to play anything other instruments
could play. He, too, was a famous composer of khayal, dhrupad, and taranas (a
song form using meaningless syllables as rhythmical lyrics). Firoz’s mahfils, too,
continued until dawn despite the chaos following Nadir Shah’s invasion and
sack of Delhi (1739). Another member of this talented family, Na’mat’s brother,
had reportedly mastered all instruments. According to oral accounts, the brother
was named Khusrau: this may be one reason for the common misapprehension
that the famous poet Amir Khusrau had “invented” the sitar five centuries
earlier.47

Players of other lute-types—tambur, rabab, and sarangi—were also active in
the Delhi milieu, where musicians incorporated the terms for instruments within
their own names: Baqir Tamburchi (“the gourd of his tambura is like a cup of
wine, while the neck of the instrument is more attractive than the stem of a
goblet”), Hasan Khan Rebabi (back bent like a harp, thin as a chord on his in-
strument, “caught in the clutches of poverty”), Ghulam Muhammad Sarangi
Nawaz (the sounds from his bowed strings “are like arrows piercing the heart”;
though respected by all the city-folk, this frugal man preferred the company of
saints).48
What kinds of music all these instrumentalists were playing, precisely what
features distinguished their instruments (especially contemporary tambur and si-
tar), and, indeed, precisely how dhrupads, khayals, and qawwalis were related to
and distinguished from each other is only sketchily and contradictorily suggested
in the sources. (Allyn Miner has traced and discussed the available references in
detail.)49 What does emerge, however, is that even while the sources, contem-
porary and later, endeavor to precisely label music types and credit innovations
to defined genealogies of musicians, in Muhammad Shah’s—or, perhaps it is bet-
ter to say, Na’mat Khan’s—Delhi, the established elite singing genres of dhru-
pad, khayal, and qawali were interacting dynamically with each other, with
famous courtesans and “catamites” who sang and danced, and with solo instru-
mental music on various instruments: khayal became “classicized”; instrumental
music imitated dhrupad, which had been enlivened by khayal; court musicians
wrote popular compositions and gained popular followings outside of court; and
the worlds of renowned musicians, courtesans, dancers, and their followers over-
lapped, perhaps more than it was polite to admit. The result was not a homoge-
nization so much as an overlap and sharing of vocabulary and reference points;
the distinct genre labels are still used today with the understanding that they
represent distinct traditions, but each borrows freely from the other.50
A few years after the sack of Delhi, with the death of Muhammad Shah in
1748, the influence, prosperity, and independence of the Mughal court suc-
cumbed rapidly to corruption, intrigue, and invasion, undermining its ability to
support a large musical retinue. Musicians fled the capital to seek patronage in
regional royal courts—to one of which, Lucknow, we will shortly follow them.
Delhi’s link to the development of the sitar was not quite over, however. Firoz
Khan remained in the crumbling capital. Masit Khan (who may have been
Firoz’s son), systematically applied bı̄n techniques to the sitar. Each in their way
contributed to Hindustani classical and sitar repertoire by experimenting with
different ways to use gats—a term, perhaps originally from dance vocabulary,
used for compositions set to a raga and a tala with a fixed pattern of rhythmic
strokes. Gat compositions were one way to combine dhrupad attentiveness to
contemplative articulation with virtuosic embellishment in a single raga per-
formance and to bring the sitar further into the respectable world of solo mu-
sic.51 Many later musicians trace their lineages to these innovators, and
Firozkhani and especially Masitkhani gats—each named after their fabled crea-
tors, Firoz Khan and Masit Khan—still figure in the north Indian classical
repertoire.
We do not know what the individual sitars of particular famous musicians

looked like, but generally speaking, sitars of Firoz Khan’s day were still little dif-

ferent from the slim Central Asian tambur lute shown in figure 1. The instru-
ment would not have had much sustain, and due to its thin neck, one would
not have been able to bend a string far to produce a meend. A generation later,
by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, descriptions of
Masit Khan’s playing indicate that he was applying to a sitar the string bending
techniques first used on the bı̄n. To do this required a sitar with a wider neck
and probably metal frets and strings, which some contemporary drawings of sitars
reflect. Other modifications followed. By the 1830s at the latest, playing on
metal strings (brass and steel) had led to adoption of a wire pick, called mizrab,52
worn over the tip of the right index finger. Unlike the hooked metal or plastic
fingerpicks used by players of guitar or banjo today, which only work in one di-
rection, the sitar mizrab can pick a string either up or down, either by pulling in
or flicking out the finger. A mizrab-clad finger, flashing back and forth, can pro-
duce loud but precise and potentially very fast single-note runs. Played with a
mizrab, the sitar stood out in performance of the new combined dhrupad and
khayal styles.
Through the course of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries,
while the sitar’s popularity grew across India, the instrument changed in still
other ways. The neck widened further, and the strings were positioned to run
over only the upper portion of that new width, leaving the lower half free. This
space allowed for deep downward pulls on the playing string, stretching it and
thus raising the pitch of a note after it had been struck. Meends executed in this
way on the modern sitar can raise or lower a pitch by up to a fifth or more. The
wide neck, moreover, was hollow, giving the sitar more resonance. On larger va-
rieties of sitar, the small wooden sound-box of Central Asian tambur-type lutes
was replaced with gourds like those on the bı̄n, allowing for richer harmonics
(some added a second gourd at the head, which makes the sitar’s profile resem-
ble that of the bı̄n). But although it borrowed bı̄n features, the sitar remained a
lute, not a zither: its soundboard gave it a robust, projecting volume that the bı̄n
as a stick zither could not achieve even with its double gourds (the southern
Indian sarasvati vina has a soundboard—it, like the sitar, is a zither-lute blend).
The sitar gathered still more features that make it unique among lutes. Also
from Indian instruments, sitars adopted the wide, slightly arched bridge called a
javarı̄, carved from a hard material such as ivory, bone, or ebony. When expertly
filed and shaped, the javari affords the slightly buzzing sound that we now in-
stantly associate with Indian music. Many British visitors, encountering this tim-
bre for the first time in the nineteenth century, hated it. A century later, British
bands, including the Kinks, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, incorporated
the sound into rock songs.
Raised metal frets on the sitar (called purda in Persian, meaning “veil” and,
by extension, “division” or “scale”) were tied on with silk thread and easily
moveable. Notes on the sitar could thus be simply adjusted to the intervals and
note-values of different ragas, as they can be with the human voice. Thanks to
this flexibility, the sitar is among that subset of instruments world-wide to have
escaped the homogenizing juggernaut of “equal” or “even” temperament, a
scheme that divides the sound spectrum into eleven semitones of precisely equal
frequency intervals, as on a piano today. (The Arabic ’ud, which has no frets,
likewise, has no predefined temperament. Fixed frets on European lutes, on the

other hand, were one factor that was pushing Europeans to settle on fixed equal
temperament even before keyboard instruments.)53

Despite the original meaning of sitar as “three-string,” its strings multiplied
fantastically: a modern sitar can have up to twenty, arranged in three sets serv-
ing four different purposes. The number of main strings settled at around five,
though with a good deal of variation; they are generally tuned to the basic note
of the raga, sa (the tonic), as well as pa or ma (the fifth or fourth). Melodies are
played on two or three of the main strings, while the rest fill in a droning chord
around the raga melody. (These strings can be micro-tuned with beads inge-
niously placed beyond the bridge or nut.) From at least the middle of the nine-
teenth century, some sitars added cikarı̄ strings: two or more short strings
attached with pegs halfway up the neck and tuned high to serve as a high drone
and rhythmical accompaniment to notes played on the main strings. (“Cikari”
means “mosquito” or “gnat.”) Cikaris are positioned above the rank of the main
strings, so the back-and-forth motion of the right-hand index finger with its miz-
rab can catch them naturally in between picking out melody notes. Besides these
two groups of strings, pictures from the 1830s and text descriptions from the
1870s speak of the attachment of yet another set, the tarabs. These nine or more
strings run underneath, between the main strings and the soundboard, over their
own little javari bridge, and are tuned to the several notes of whatever raga the
sitarist is playing. They are sympathetic strings, and when strummed with a
reach of the right-hand little finger, they make the harp-like sound one often
hears at the beginning of a raga performance. But their main purpose is to spon-
taneously vibrate an instant after a player strikes a given note on the playing
string. The tarab tuned to that note will sound, as will other tarab strings whose
frequencies are mathematical multiples of the note. Tarab means “excitement,”
“joy” in Persian, and that is indeed what the attentive player or listener experi-
ences when tarabs blossom into sound after a precisely executed note, and espe-
cially a meend. Players of plucked stringed instruments have always regretted
the fact that the note of a plucked string starts to decay as soon as it is plucked,
unlike a sung, blown, or bowed note on voice or other instruments. By putting a
set of tarab strings on a sitar, Indian lutiers partially defeated this problem, pro-
viding notes that magically swell after they are played.
Varieties of sitars proliferated though the nineteenth century, and addition
of some of these new features to the increasingly large instruments favored for
dhrupad and khayal performance did not preclude the continued use of smaller,
simpler sitar lutes. It was a period of vigorous ongoing experimentation, with
ideas for lute innovation—unique tweaks on the ancient lute idea—both in-
spired by older Indian instruments and freshly invented. In India, the Central
Asian sihtar gathered a bouquet of special features found on lutes nowhere else,
resulting in a new instrument, the sitar, that while remaining roughly familiar in
form (body, neck, strings) is also startlingly evolved. Arguably, only electrifica-
tion in the twentieth century would comprise a more revolutionary remaking of
lute-type instruments. Moreover, a similar process reshaped the rabab, which de-
veloped into the steel-clad sarod; the tabla double drum emerged in this period
as well, becoming the standard companion for sitar, just as the pakhavaj had ac-
companied the bı̄n in dhrupad performance. What are often thought of as
ancient or traditional Indian instruments are in fact quite modern, the product
of focused creativity.54

Singers, Fiddlers, and Eunuchs
The decline of the capital in Delhi from the mid-eighteenth century

launched a diaspora of elite musicians to regional polities. One of the richest of
these princely courts was Awadh (Oudh or Oude in older texts), east of Delhi in
what is now the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and Tharuhat state in Nepal.
Awadh was ruled from the early eighteenth century by an old and highly cul-
tured Persian family that had immigrated to India and found favor with the
Mughals. Muhammad Shah granted the family the hereditary governorship of
Awadh in 1722, and they thereafter emerged as its autonomous nawabs. This
dynasty welcomed musicians, dancers, poets, and artists to their court, first in
Faizabad and then, after 1775, in Lucknow, which succeeded Delhi as the cul-
tural capital of north India. Though independent of the Mughals, the nawabs of
Lucknow were increasingly hemmed in by the British East India Company,
which, after a coerced treaty in 1801, took over tracts of rich farmland, required
Lucknow to pay for British troops stationed in Awadh, and from its “residency”
in Lucknow steered the succession of nawabs. The Company recruited heavily
in Awadh for its own sepoy army stationed in Bengal and further undermined
the position of the nawabs by selling bonds to Awadh’s nobles, thus siphoning
off capital and in effect putting the state’s elites on the Company payroll
through the bond dividends.55
It was under these compromised circumstances that Nawab Wajid ‘Ali
Shah (1822–87; r. 1847–56) assumed the throne. He had not been groomed as
heir apparent; rather, rich but with no real official responsibility vouchsafed to
him, he had devoted his early life to literary and musical pursuits: composing,
choreographing, and writing poetry and treatises on music and dance. And, of
course, he supported large numbers of musicians and dancers. Besides the elite
performers from Delhi, many of them real or purported descendants of Tansen,
lower status musicians from other cities and skilled in other genres and styles
found a home in Lucknow as well—including even a European brass band.
The centerpiece of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s musical and terpsichorean enterprise,
however, was the Pari-khana, the “Fairie House,” something of a college where
young women singers, instrumentalists, and dancers of Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s court
studied with the top masters from all over Hindustan. Wajid ‘Ali Shah was an
aficionado of dance, especially that accompanied by the paired tabla drums. In
the twentieth century, a dance form known as kathak emerged that is similarly
associated with the tabla: kathak shares the tabla’s vocabulary of bols (rhythmic
syllables representing different sounding beats) used to verbally represent a
dance passage. In another synergy with the forms of North Indian classical music
emerging since the nineteenth century, kathak dancers execute elaborately
choreographed tans, often ending with the same kind of bravura triple figure
(tihai) that khayal musicians executed to the delight of audiences. Many scholars
consider the dance at Lucknow as a principal ancestor of today’s kathak.56
Dance at the Lucknow court was particularly expressive; it developed in
association with the singing of thumri, a vocal song form with origins in Uttar
Pradesh folk and devotional music. Thumris are often called “light” or
“semi-classical” because they are written to ragas with fewer rules than those fa-
vored in the formal dhrupad style, because they often used talas with a lilting

backbeat, and because their content, though originally religious, perhaps inevi-
tably progressed from the topic of Radha’s or the gopi milkmaids’ devotion to
Krishna to sing of love and sensuality more generally. But thumris are highly in-
tricate, delicately ornamented music and are “light” simply in cultural status
compared to the austere dhupad, rather than light in their demands on the per-
former. Performances of north Indian classical music today, after a long, struc-
tured exploration of a raga, will often end with improvisations on a thumri, as a
sweet dessert follows a substantial meal.57
Instrumentalists among the Delhi refugees and Tansen lineage at Lucknow
continued to play and instruct students in dhrupad and khayal, though they did
so on sitar (or on the newly invented “bass” sitar, known as a surbahar) rather
than on the less accessible bı̄n. Meanwhile, other musicians from less elite back-
grounds accompanied dancers and specialized in thumris. Foremost among these
was Ghulam Raza Khan, son of a court musician from Rampur and a member of
the d: harı̄ musician’s caste. Ghulam Raza became the paris’ (fairies’) head teacher
_
and a favorite of Wajid ‘Ali Shah, who granted him the title Razi ad-Daula.
Renowned as an innovative sitarist who integrated thumri style into his playing,
Ghulam Raza is memorialized by a kind of fast composition, the razakhani gat,
which together with Masit Khan’s eponymous masitkhani gat make up the two
most common varieties of instrumental composition in north Indian classical
music today. As in European art music the sonata form cannot be disassociated
from Haydn and Mozart in eighteenth-century Vienna, for lovers of Indian clas-
sical music a razikhani gat invokes the memory Ghulam Raza in Lucknow’s
flourishing garden of dance and music.58
Major General Sleeman, however, was not impressed. Perhaps it was be-
cause, as a biographer noted approvingly, he had “never Hindooized,” but from
his Residency in Lucknow Sleeman saw only a plague of “singers and fiddlers”;
the skilled women executing deft footwork to complex sixteen-beat rhythms on
tabla, sitar, or sarangi were simply “nautch girls”—in Victorian eyes, little more
than prostitutes.59 The lavish operatic productions of conjoined music, dance,
and poetry (another new genre, called rahas), which Wajid ‘Ali Khan staged for
the Lucknow public in a specially built hall, left no positive impression on the
resident. As Sleeman wrote to the viceroy, the Marquess of Dalhousie, upon as-
suming his position in Lucknow,
He [the nawab] eats, drinks, sleeps and converses with the singers and eunuchs
and females alone, and the only female who has any influence over him is the
sister of the chief singer, Rusee-od Dowlay [Ghulam Raza Khan], whom he calls
his own sister. No member of the royal family or aristocracy of Oude is ever ad-
mitted to speak to or see his Majesty, and these contemptible singers are admit-
ted to more equality and familiarity than his own brothers or sons ever were;
they go out, too, with greater pomp than they or any of the royal family can;
and are ordered to be received with more honours as they pass through the dif-
ferent palaces. The profligacy that exists within the palace passes all belief, and
these things excite . . . disgust of the aristocracy of the capital. Should your
Lordship resolve upon interposing effectually to remedy these disorders, I think
it will be necessary to have at Lucknow, for at least the first few months, a corps
of irregular cavalry.60
Had Sleeman visited Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent, he might

have complained that the fifteenth-century Medici ruler was wasting his time

with a gang of oil daubers and stone chippers. The resident was appalled to find
in Lucknow “a score of fiddlers and eunuchs as privy councilors. Something
must be done to unthrone these wretches, or things will be worse and worse.”61
To be fair, Sleeman was not entirely wrong in his observations. The aes-
thete Wajid ‘Ali Shah exhibited little interest in weighty affairs of state (that is,
intensifying tax collection in order to make more payments to the British). And
there were curious goings on at court. The prime minister, a sitarist and singer
named Ali Naqi Khan, lacked political experience. Ghulam Rasa Khan, as dep-
uty prime minister, was far shrewder, and together with his sister and another
low-caste sitarist, Qutub ud-Daula, formed an intimate circle around Wajid ‘Ali
Shah. They even ran a con on the nawab, who feared poisoning and suffered
from chronic health concerns. Ghulam, Qutub, and the sister arranged for a
doctor to provide the king with special, very expensive, long-term treatment.
The doctor then kicked back a portion of his fees to the sitarist clique, who
transferred their earnings outside Awadh.
And the court sitarist, Ghulam Raza Khan, was sleeping with one of the
nawab’s wives. Sleeman, of course, took pains to bring this to the attention of
Wajid ‘Ali Shah, who dutifully divorced and packed the erring wife off on hajj
to Mecca and banished the court sitarist—only to change his mind shortly after
and recall Ghulam Raza Khan to the presence. Later, when Wajid ‘Ali learned
that his former wife had never left and was now living with Ghulam Raza in pal-
ace rooms, the nawab first jailed the sitarists and all their relatives and then ban-
ished them definitively in 1850—but only after a poignant farewell audience to
see off the great musician.62
Ghulam Raza Khan ultimately settled to the east, in Patna. Wajid ‘Ali Khan
would be heading eastward himself just a few years later: Sleeman retired in 1854,
and two years later, the British finally annexed Awadh, exiling Wajid ‘Ali Shah
and placing the state under direct rule of the East India Company. A year later,
with the outbreak of the Indian Great Rebellion, the Awadi sepoys in the Bengal
army mutinied en masse, and some of the bloodiest fighting of the revolt took place
in Uttar Pradesh. Though incarcerated during the rebellion, the former nawab of
Awadh survived in Calcutta, still enjoying a generous stipend, and again gathered
musicians and artists, this time to his mansions on the banks of the Houghly
River. In so doing, even while extending the aristocratic musical life for another
three decades, he contributed to the invention of a new business model for north
Indian classical music though his contacts with colonial Bengali society. The era
of musical patronage by royal courts was nearly over; elite sitarists and other musi-
cians would increasingly draw support and recruit students from well-off families
in modernizing urban India, even while perpetuating certain traditions of Mughal
and Central Asian elite culture in the context of “Indian classical music.”63
The mixed ancestry of the sitar is apparent in the terms still used for its
parts, its techniques, and its music, a colorful lexicography in Arabic, Persian,
Hindi-Urdu, Sanskrit, and Bengali. The Silk Road brought the idea of the lute
to India not once, but twice. The second time, imported lutes developed in
conjunction with a similarly syncretic “Indo-Islamic” music, and after numerous

modifications based on borrowings from older Indian instruments and the inspi-

ration of creative inventor-musicians, the lutes took new shapes: as the sitar, the
tambura, the sarod, the surbahar, and other instruments. Movement and interac-
tion of networks of musicians—from Central Asia and Persia to Mughal Delhi,
from Delhi to capitals like Lucknow, and from princely states to emergent global
cities like Calcutta—stimulated cross-fertilization in both musical and organo-
logical realms.
Yet even as this mobility thoroughly mixed up music and musicians in a
manner defying fine distinctions of geography, religion, language, caste, and
class, textually and orally conveyed knowledge about music obeyed an old
Indian penchant for systematic categorization: musicians and scholars generated
a panoply of labels for musical genres, styles, and types, as well as for schools of
musicians themselves. Lineages of musical teacher and student, known as ghar-
ana, were identified, conceptualized along the lines of Sufi silsilla and chains of
Hindu devotional gurus and disciples.64 This impulse to embed north Indian
classical music, sitar playing in particular, within historical networks is so perva-
sive that even a non-Indian student of modest talent and limited attainment,
studying sitar in Washington, DC, in the twenty-first century, will learn that he
is studying with a teacher from the Imdad Khan gharana and is striving to play
gayaki ang on a type of sitar named after Vilayat Khan, this gharana’s most fa-
mous son.65 (Nor should this style or sitar type ever be confused with those
named for Ravi Shankar!)
Both Vilayat Khan and Ravi Shankar designed and popularized new types
of sitar in the twentieth century to match their own playing styles, just as had
their predecessors since the late eighteenth century. When and where does the
Silk Road journey stop? The nineteenth and twentieth century introduction of
railway, printing, broadcast, recording technology, and international air travel
expanded the mobility and contacts of the sitar—and got sitars into rock
songs.66 Are these communicative processes fundamentally different from those
that brought the lute to India in the first place? If pressed to draw a line, one
might paraphrase Lenin to posit that “the Silk Road plus electrification equals
globalization.” Still, it sounds like a distinction without a difference. Just as try-
ing to separate the “Hindu” from the “Muslim” in the classical music of north
India is like parsing the currents in a single river, to divide “Silk Road” from
“globalization” is like specifying where the river ends and where the broader sea,
into which its water flows, begins.
Endnotes
I would like to acknowledge the help of Shubha Sankaran and Brian Silver for much in-
struction over the years regarding the sitar, dhrupad, and other North Indian classical mu-
sic. Also, I am grateful for the suggestions of two anonymous reviewers—and especially
for their understanding, given that I am neither a musicologist nor a historian of India.
Address correspondence to James Millward, Department of History, ICC 610,
Georgetown University, 37th and O Streets, Washington, DC 20057. Email: millwarj@
georgetown.edu.
1. A “special interest group for historical ethnomusicology” has met under the rubric of
the Society for Ethnomusicology’s annual meetings since 2005.
2. Ian D. Bent, et al., “Notation,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford,
2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.20114. There are large anthol-
ogies of Chinese music in gongche notation extant from the Qing imperial period (espe-

cially eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), which support, among other things, studies
of the bourgeoning regional genres of musical theatre and their patronage in the capital.
Joseph Lam, “Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368–1911),” in Alan R. Thrasher, et al.,
“China.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2011), https://doi.org/10.
1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.43141. That the “composer’s intent” as reflected in a
score should be the primary consideration when studying music has been famously chal-
lenged in favor of multidimensional study of performance as social process or activity. See
Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT,
1998): 1–18.
3. Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford, 1997): chapters 1 and 2.
4. The Sachs-Hornbostel system, published in German in 1914 and translated into
English in 1961, organizes the instruments along functional-morphological lines, accord-
ing to what generates the sound: idiophones, membranophones, chordophones, aero-
phones, electronophones. They are then subclassified according to other principles,
including how they are played, their structure, or certain other features. Decimal numbers
are assigned to each class and subclass. Jeremy Montagu, “Instruments, classification of,”
in The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2011), http://www.
oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199579037.001.0001/acref-9780199579037-
e-3431. Thus, a modern American flat-backed mandolin is 321.322-6 (necked lute with a
body shaped like a box and played with a pick), while an older style Italian mandolin is
321.321-6 (necked lute with a body shaped like a bowl, played with a pick).
5. Daniel Levitin, This is your Brain on Music (New York: Dutton, 2006), 285–60.
6. Bai Juyi’s Pipa xing is much anthologized, including in Ding Ruming, Nie Shimei, ed.,
Bai Juyi quanji [complete works of Bai Juyi] (Shangha, 1999). Convenient Chinese text
and English translation may be found at http://www.philmultic.com/pipa/pipa_song.html.
7. Of Johannes Vermeer’s thirty-six extant paintings, twelve feature musical subjects.
Twelve percent of seventeenth century Dutch paintings include musical references.
Marjorie E. Wieseman, Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure (London and New
Haven, 2013), 9, 25–29.
8. In developing this approach, I am influenced by the Arjun Appadurai’s concept of the
“social life of things,” particularly Igor Kopytoff’s chapter in that volume, “The Cultural
Biography of Things.” Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in
Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), 64–91. Likewise, the broad ideas of Bruno
Latour’s “Actor Network Theory” inspired me to think of musical instruments as
enmeshed in networks, much like his example of the Space Shuttle. Bruno Latour,
“Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist,” keynote ad-
dress for “International Seminar on Network Theory: Network Multidimensionality in
the Digital Age,” February 19, 2010, Annenberg School for Communications and
Journalism, Los Angeles. After I had begun this project on Silk Road chordophones, I
came across Eliot Bates’ excellent articulation of a very similar network approach in “The
Social Life of Musical Instruments,” Ethnomusicology 56, no. 3 (2012): 363–95. Also rele-
vant here is Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking”—the process or activity of writ-
ing, making, consuming, or in other ways being involved with music (Small, Musicking).
When viewed this way, musical events and practices of all sorts are open to Geertzian
“thick description.” My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing Small’s book, well-
known to musicologists, to my attention.
9. Anonymous, “Biographical Sketch of Major-General Sir W. H. Sleeman, K.C.B.,” in

W. H. Sleeman, A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849–1850 (London, 1858),
xii–xvi, 208–22.

10. Sleeman, Journey, xxii.
11. Henry George Farmer, “Musical Instruments of the Sumerians and Assyrians,” in
Oriental Studies: Mainly Musical, ed. Henry George Farmer (London, 1953), 17–18,
reprinted in Henry George Farmer, Studies in Oriental Music, (Frankfurt am Main, 1997):
vol 2, 257–58. More detailed etymological tracings, as well as some competing views, are
discussed and cited in Louise Wrazen, “The Early History of the Vı̄na and Bı̄n in South
and Southeast Asia,” Asian Music 18, no. 1 (1986): 47n2. Because_ Egyptian terms for
bow-harp in various eras and regions (bjn-t, oine, voini, bajne, bajna) are close to both
Persian and Sanskrit terms for the same thing (von, vun, vin, etc.), the linguistic evidence
of a connection between Sumerian ban, Persian von, and Sanskrit vı̄na / bı̄n is convincing.
Through a sound change known as metathesis, consonants in *pan-tur _ flipped, yielding
tambur and many variants in Asian and European names for lutes and drums.
12. Alastair Dick et al., “Vı̄na.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford,
_
2001), https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.51149.
13. The Saka (Skythians) were a nomadic or seminomadic people who conquered Bactria
before the Kushans. The name King Sakka possibly echoes that history.
14. “Gutilla Jataka,” in The Jataka, ed. E. D. Cowell, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, vol. II, no.
243 (Cambridge, 1895), http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/j2/j2096.htm. Richard
Widdess, “North India,” in The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions, new edi-
tion, ed. Michael Church (Rochester, NY, 2015), 140.
15. The Amaravati stupa (in Andhra Pradesh, southeastern India, built between 2nd cen-
tury BCE and 3rd century CE) was decorated with densely carved marble “drum slabs”
around its exterior base and with similar slabs forming a railing that surrounded it. Some
of these may be viewed in room 33a of the British Museum, a section depicting many
lutes. Walter Kaufman, et al., Altindien. Musikgeschichte in Bildern. Band II: Musik des
Altertums. Lieferung 8 (Leipzig, 1981), 100–1, Abb. 56 and 57, reproduces two examples
of lute-players from Amaravati.
16. Nagarjunakonda (Macherla, Andhra Pradesh) was a complex of Buddhist monastic
colleges (viharas) in the early centuries CE, the largest center of Buddhist learning in
south India. It was excavated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The original site is now
underwater, flooded by a local dam. Kaufman et al., Altindien, 112–15, Abb. 67–70 repro-
duces two examples of lute-players from Nagarjunakonda, with details.
17. The Pawaya site (near Gwailor in Madya Pradesh) consists of a temple platform and
surrounding excavations. A relief excavated from near the temple-platform, dated to the
first centuries CE, shows a dancer accompanied by a troupe of female musicians, including
drummers behind her, a cross-legged lute-player to her right, and an arch-harp player to
her left. This foregrounding of lute and harp suggests the paired roles of both types of vina
in India. The piece is now in the Gujari Mahal Museum, Gwalior. It is reproduced in
Curt Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (New York, 1943;
reprinted in 2008), 193, plate 7b, and in Kaufman et al., Altindien,160, Abb. 117.
18. The Buddhist cave-temple complex of Ajanta is in Maharashtra, west central India,
near Aurangabad. The clearest depictions of lutes at Ajanta are in sculptural decorations
of the capitals of columns in cave 4 (one of which shows a plump boy with flowing curls
playing a short ovoid five-string lute) and three wall paintings from cave 1. Kaufman,
Altindien, 172–75, Abb. 130, 131, and 132. Behl, The Ajanta Caves, Ancient Paintings of
Buddhist India (New York, 2005), 68–71.
19. Kaufman, Altindien, 100–1, Abb. 56. A slight variation is found in Pattaldakkal
Temple (700 CE). See Karaikudsi Subramanian, “An Introduction to the Vina,” Asian
Music 16, no. 2 (1985): fig. 9.

20. The full argument requires more space than I can devote to it here. I develop it in
James Millward, “Travels of the Eurasian Lute: A Silk Road Story,” in-progress book man-
uscript, chapters 3 and 4.
21. A few images of long-necked ovoid lutes, quite different from the earlier short ovoid
lutes, are found in south Indian temple reliefs in Pattadakal and Cidambaram dating to
the tenth century. They are “rare in comparison to stick zithers.” Allyn Miner, Sitar and
Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Wilhelmshaven, 1993; Delhi, 1997), 26–27 and fig. 1.
22. Louise Wrazen, “The Early History of the Vı̄na and Bı̄n in South and Southeast
Asia,” 40–42. _
23. Dick et al., “Vı̄na.” See illustrations in Subramanian, “An Introduction to the Vina,”
10–11, figs. 10–13._ Ultimately, by the sixteenth century, the larger, double-gourded
Hindustani bı̄n or rudravina emerged, a zither with large resonator gourds at either end
_
played horizontally with the gourds resting on the ground. The south Indian vina or saras-
wati vina developed around the seventeenth century as a hybrid zither-lute, with a body
and neck similar to that of lutes (but no soundboard), a gourd at the head, and a sound-
box frequently carved with an animal motif. The lutiform aspects of this modern instru-
ment derived from the Afghan rabab, which entered India from Central Asia and was
popular in the Deccan Muslim courts before Mughal times (Dick et al., “Vı̄na.”) They are
_
not holdovers from the ovoid lutes of the early first millennium in south India but new
hybrid zither-lutes.
24. Wrazen, “The Early History of the Vı̄na and Bı̄n” lists many examples of the stick
_
zither in medieval Indian and South East Asian iconography.
25. Bonnie C. Wade, “Performing the Drone in Hindustani Classical Music: What
Mughal Paintings Show Us to Hear,” The World of Music 38, no. 2 (January 2010)
(Florian Noetzel GmbH Verlag, VWB - Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, Schott
Music GmbH & Co. KG, B€arenreiter, 1996), 56, where she cites John Andrew Grieg,
“Tarı̄kh-i Sangı̄ta: The Foundations of North Indian Music in the Sixteenth Century”
(Ann Arbor, _1987): 17.
26. Katherine Brown Schofield prefers to avoid general claims of “synthesis” when discus-
sing Hindustani music as it emerged in the Mughal period, as it is impossible to define a
“Persian” or “Indian” or “foreign” or “local” style in absence of concrete examples of the
music itself, let alone a process whereby two discrete styles “synthesized” to create a new,
third style. She uses the term “appropriation” to describe concrete, documentable borrow-
ings by Indian musicians and theorists of music-technical and ideational elements from
Iranian, Arabic, and Central Asian music. She writes that “this was not so much a conver-
gence as a deliberate transferal of tanbur techniques and methods onto the rudra vina for
pragmatic and ideational reasons” (92). Katherine Butler Brown (Schofield), “Evidence
of Indo-Persian Musical Synthesis? The Tanbur and Rudra Vina in Seventeenth-Century
Indo-Persian Treatises,” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 36–37 (2006): 89–102.
27. Miner, Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries, 28–29.
28. “Sitar,” Grove Music Online / Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2011), https://doi.org/10.
1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.J411800. See also entries for “Amir Khusrau,” “khyal,”
“ghazal,” and “qawwali.” For Amir Khusrau, see also Amal Das Sharma, Musicians of
India, Past and Present: Gharanas of Hindustani Music and Genealogies (Calcutta, 1993),
29, who stresses Amir Khusrau’s role in introducing Persian melodies and “Muslim music”
to Indian music.
29. “Sitar,” Grove Music Online; Owen Wright, “On the Concept of a ‘Timurid Music,’”
Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, Anno 15 (76), Nr. 2 (1996): 665–81.

30. Zahiru’d-din Mubammad Babur, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and
Emperor, trans., ed., and annotated by Wheeler M. Thackston (Washington, DC, 1996):
227–28, original folio 182. Chargah (chargah) refers to one of the modes of Persian dastgah
or Central Asian muqam music. To be able to compose a tune obedient to the rules of
such a mode is a sign of sophistication. A naqsh in the fifteenth century was “the introduc-
tion to a vocal composition” (225, Thackston note 144). Rian Thum looked at the
nasta’lı̄q script of the facsimile of folio 182 for me and identified the word that Thackston
translated as “lute” and “lutenist.”
31. Bonnie Wade, “The Meeting of Musical Cultures in the 16th-century Court of the
Mughal Akbar,” The World of Music 32, no. 2 (1990): 16 et passim.
32. The argument and associations in this paragraph come from Ebba Koch, Shah Jahan
and Orpheus: The Pietre Dure Decoration and the Programme of the Throne in the Hall of
Public Audiences at the Red Fort of Delhi (Graz, Austria,1988), and Ebba Koch, “The
Mughal Emperor as Solomon, Majnun, and Orpheus, or the Album as a Think Tank for
Allegory,” Muqarnas 27 (2010): 277–311. Surrounding the Orpheus panel are many other
pietre dure decorations of birds and flowers.
33. Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, c. 1537–1539,
Philadelphia Museum of Art accession number 1950-86-1.
34. See the illumination of the story from a Mughal version of Amir Khusrau’s Khamsa
held by the Walters Art Museum. Narsang (?), “Layla visits Majnun in the Wilderness,”
Walters Manuscript W.624, fol. 115a.
35. Eaton, R. M. “Akbar-Nama,” Encyclopædia Iranica, I/7 (London, 1982–): 714–15.
36. Abu ‘l-Fazl ‘Allami, The A‘in-I Akbari, 680–82; Wade, “The Meeting of Musical
Cultures in the 16th-century Court,” 13, 23n4.
37. The full wall decoration is reproduced with a detail of the musicians in Gian Carlo
Calza, Akbar: The Great Emperor of India, (Milan, Italy, 2012), plate I 24, bottom, and de-
tail, 108–9, description of plate, 241. Murad Baksh was identified by an inscription for-
merly on the verso of the painting. The figures pasted on the sides comprise a genealogy
of the Mughal rulers: Timur on the right side, with golden nimbus, and on the left side
are (from right to left) Babur’s father, Babur, Humayun, and Akbar.
38. The bı̄n is little played today, but modern versions of the instrument have larger
gourd-resonators. They are held across the body like a lute or with one end over the left
shoulder (not the right, as in figure 1). Wade reproduces an example of a tambur and bı̄n
duet similar to my figure 1; hers is from an illuminated manuscript of the Tuti-nama
(Tales of a Parrot) and a painting illustrating the story “The Invention of Instruments
from Monkey Intestines.” Bonnie Wade, “The Meeting of Musical Cultures in the 16th
Century Court of the Mughal Akbar,” 17, ill. 6.
39. Advertisement for 3D Sound Labs Raagini Digital Electronic Tampura, Amazon.com,
accessed May 13, 2016, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ragini-Sruthi-Box-Digital-Tambura/
dp/B012CEKF1K.
40. Examples are ubiquitous. Inayat Khan’s Music is one example (“Music, the word we
use in our everyday language, is nothing less than the picture of our Beloved”), notable
for its ecumenical embrace of Hindu, Sufi, and other theological as well as popular scien-
tific perspectives by which to complicate, and perhaps deepen, the discussion of music.
Sufi Inayat Khan, Music (Surrey, UK, 1962),1.
41. For my general description and attempt to demystify ragas, I draw upon my own rela-
tively short but enlightening experience studying Hindustani classical music on sitar. For
discussion of dhrupad and Tansen, I have drawn on Widdess, “North India”; Jon Barlow

and Lakshmi Subramanian, “Music and Society in North India: from the Mughals to the
Mutiny,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 19 (May 12–18, 2007): 1779–87;
Jonathan Katz, “Tansen,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford, 2011),
https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.48862; Wade, “The Meeting of
Musical Cultures,” 16; and Amal Das Sharma, Musicians of India, Past and Present:
Gharanas of Hindustani Music and Genealogies (Calcutta, 1993), 35–36.
42. Widdess, “North India,” 153; Barlow and Subramanian, “Music and Society in North
India,” 1782–83. On qawwali generally, see Regula Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and
Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali (Chicago, 1995).
43. On Mughal era North Indian courtesans or tawa’if dancers (called nautch girls by the
colonial British), see Margaret E. Walker, “The ‘Nautch’ Reclaimed: Women’s
Performance Practice in Nineteenth-Century North India,” South Asia: Journal of South
Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (2014): 551–67, and Katherine Butler Schofield, “The Courtesan
Tale: Female Musicians and Dancers in Mughal Historical Chronicles, C.1556–1748,”
Gender & History 24, no. 1 (2012): 150–71.
44. Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa-e-Dehli: The Mughal Capital in Muhammad Shah’s Time
(Delhi, [1748] 1989): 94; Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 37.
45. Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa’-i Dehlı̄, cited in Miner, Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and
19th Centuries, 82ff.
46. Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa-e-Dehli, 76. Brackets in original.
47. Allyn Miner, “The Sitar: An Overview of Change,” The World of Music 32, no. 2
(1990): 27–28; Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 85–87.
48. Dargah Quli Khan, Muraqqa-e-Dehli, 79–81.
49. Miner, Sitar and Sarod. See also Brown, “Evidence of Indo-Persian Musical
Synthesis?” on the fretting system and temperaments of the tambur and their transfer to
the rudravina in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
50. Miner, Sitar and Sarod, especially 89.
51. Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 90–93; Barlow and Subramanian, “Music and Society in
North India,” 1785. On the gat as a dance, see Margaret Walker, “The ‘Nautch’
Reclaimed.”
52. The word is originally Arabic and was used for plectra used to play Afghan rababs and
tamburs.
53. That European fretted lutes played a generally neglected role in locking in and dis-
seminating equal temperament is an argument I am developing in my broader book re-
search. I first advance the idea in James A. Millward, “Chordophone Culture in Two
Early Modern Societies: A Pipa-Vihuela Duet,” Journal of World History 23, no. 2 (2012):
237–78, based on evidence from Fray Juan Bermudo’s sixteenth century attempt to design
a Pythagorean-tempered vihuela (248–50).
54. This discussion of changes to the sitar is based mainly upon Allyn Miner’s deeply
researched Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries, where a scrupulously compiled
chrestomathy of sitar-related textual and iconographic sources anchors a story so often
shrouded in legend.
55. Madhu Trivedi, The Making of Awadh Culture (Delhi, 2010), 1–2, 110–11; Sleeman,
Journey, lvi–lvii; P. D. Reeves, “Introduction,” in Sleeman in Oudh: An Abridgement of W.
H. Sleeman’s A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849–50 (Cambridge, 1971),

19; Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 109–11.
56. Margaret Walker argues that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was no
“single, identifiable performance practice that can be identified as the irrefutable ancestor
of today’s [kathak] dance” but, rather, that many performance practices from that era
share features with modern kathak: see “The ‘Nautch’ Reclaimed,” 4ff., and Margaret E.
Walker, India’s Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective, SOAS Musicological Series
(London, 2014), 8 et passim. Moreover, she writes that “nothing taught at this [Lucknow]
school resembles present-day kathak in any way”; nor does Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s own dance
treatise mention people called “Kathaks” (Walker, India’s Kathak Dance, 30, 67). I follow
Walker’s argument that kathak dance (but not yet known by that name) arose in the
eighteenth through nineteenth centuries in a process parallel to that by which sitar, sarod,
tabla, and other instruments took their current forms and that kathak is not an ancient
classical dance. Similar mythologizing, with nationalist, colonialist, and anti-Islamic over-
tones, enshrouds the history of the sitar. I thus avoid using the term “kathak” for the spe-
cific dance at Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s court. However, other literature emphasizes the
interconnections of musical forms with dance at Lucknow in a manner clearly like that
evident today in kathak. My description of those connections thus follows the other liter-
ature (cited in specific situ) on this point.
57. Wajid ‘Ali Shah himself wrote thumris. One, “Babul Mora Naihar Chhooto Jay,”
used the metaphor of a bride’s going-away song to lament his own exile from Lucknow
following British annexation of Awadh in 1856. The song became a standard and has
been sung in Bollywood movies.
58. Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 112–13; Trivedi, The Making of Awadh Culture, ch. 4, espe-
cially 108–111; Martin Clayton, “Khan, Ghulam Raza,” Grove Music Online; Oxford
Music Online (Oxford, 2001), http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/gmo/
9781561592630.article.48674.
59. For more accurate discussion of female dancers and singers and their status in Mughal
society, see Schofield, “The Courtesan Tale,” 150–71, and Margaret Walker, India’s
Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective.
60. Sleeman, Journey, lxxv–lxxvi.
61. Sleeman, Journey, lvii, from a letter written in 1849.
62. Sleeman, Journey, 45–49, 104–5; Miner, Sitar and Sarod, 115–17.
63. Richard Williams’s dissertation discusses the transition of Hindustani music and
dance to Calcutta and Bengal and the development of north Indian musical culture in
the east from both a musical and a sociological point of view. He cautions against overem-
phasis on “disjuncture” in this journey: previous literature has cast the musical migration
from Mughal North India to Bengal as simultaneously a dramatic shift away from aristo-
cratic tradition to modernity and public culture, while Williams, based on extensive read-
ings in both Urdu and Bengla texts, notes the continuation of aspects of the elite ustad
tradition in new environment. He also challenges the topos of late Mughal Muslim
“decadence,” especially when imagined in Wajid ‘Ali Shah’s Lucknow court or suburban
Calcutta palace, as an echo of British colonial sensibilities. Richard David Williams,
“Hindustani Music between Awadh and Bengal, C.1758–1905” (PhD dissertation, King’s
College, London, 2014).
64. The word appears first in a treatise on dance by Wajid ‘Ali Khan.
65. Amal Das Sharma, Musicians of India, Past and Present, 222–26.
66. The first sitar in Western popular music featured in the Beatles song “Norwegian

Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” on Rubber Soul (London, 1965), when that band was near
the peak of its popularity and influence. Indian sounds in rock became such a fad that by
1966 pop singer Steve Marriott joked in Melody Maker that “We’ll be able to get plastic
sitars in our cornflakes soon.” See Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West, chapter 6
(quotation from head of chapter). See also Christopher Partridge, The Lyre of Orpheus:
Popular Music, the Sacred and the Profane (Oxford, 2013), 186–87.

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The Silk Road and the Sitar: Finding Centuries of

Sociocultural Exchange in the History of an Instrument

Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article

The Silk Road and the Sitar:

Prologue: Historicizing Music and Musicalizing History

Music as a sphere of knowledge is deeply historical. It is self-evident that music

Journal of Social History vol. 52 no. 2 (2018), pp. 206–233

phrasing) or to rebel against it (minimalism, punk rock, the later Beethoven

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instruments’ ancestors. Instruments, like any art motif or transferred technology,

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of my larger project using lute-type instruments as a vehicle to examine cultural

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By 1849, Major General Sir William Henry Sleeman, Knight Commander

The Indian Lute as Buddhist Icon

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to twelfth centuries). The zither vina is a common attribute of the goddess

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Return of the Lutes

Whether the early lute was commonly played or primarily iconographic in

all aspects of society in profound ways. To say, as some “Hindu nationalists” in

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The Birth of Indo-Persian-Islamic Music

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We do not know what the individual sitars of particular famous musicians

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likewise, has no predefined temperament. Fixed frets on European lutes, on the

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The decline of the capital in Delhi from the mid-eighteenth century

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Had Sleeman visited Florence under Lorenzo the Magnificent, he might

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conjunction with a similarly syncretic “Indo-Islamic” music, and after numerous

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9. Anonymous, “Biographical Sketch of Major-General Sir W. H. Sleeman, K.C.B.,” in

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