Review: The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal by Richard David Williams

This review was originally published in SAMAJ on January 13 ,2025

Richard David Williams’s The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal examines the Calcutta-based court-in-exile of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah (1822-1887), the last ruler of Awadh who was deposed by the British in 1856. The book is based on Williams’s doctoral thesis “Hindustani music between Awadh and Bengal, c. 1758-1905.” It develops a social history of how Hindustani classical music and dance responded to the transition from the Mughal Empire to British colonialism. Using previously unexplored sources in Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi, Williams aims to demonstrate the importance of Wajid Ali Shah’s exile in Calcutta in enabling the rise of that city as a celebrated center of Hindustani music. As he writes in the introduction:

Establishing the connections between Lucknow in Hindustan and Calcutta in Bengal challenges the notion of distant, regional performance cultures, and underlines the importance of aesthetics and the performing arts to mobile elite societies. Since Lucknow is associated with late Mughal or nawabi society, and Calcutta with colonial modernity, examining the relationship between the two cities sheds light on forms of continuity and transition over the nineteenth century, as artists and their patrons navigated political ruptures and social transformations (p. 3).

Most previous studies of Wajid Ali Shah treat his thirty years of exile as a footnote to the culture of Lucknow.1 In contrast, Williams focuses on the court-in-exile at Matiyaburj (located in southwestern Calcutta) in order to examine the impact of the nawab’s presence in Calcutta on the development of Hindustani music in Bengal. He examines the circulation of musicians between the transposed court and musical soirees in North Calcutta. Through his reconstruction of musical life at Matiyaburj, Williams demonstrates that the nawab’s musical innovations continued in Bengal and that he was engaged with his surrounding environment—for example, by composing lyrics in a mixed Bengali-Hindustani register.

Williams provides a nuanced perspective on Wajid Ali Shah. He writes:

[W]hile he persists in popular memory as a musical genius and a bridge between courtly Lucknow and colonial Calcutta, he is also condemned as a political failure who lost his crown to the British, and therefore personifies the weaknesses of the Indian ruling classes in the nineteenth century. While these two storylines are repeated across textbooks, films and novels, his own contributions to musical thought and practice, and the history of the musicians around him, have largely been neglected (p. 22).

Through his meticulous recreation of the musical activities at the nawab’s courts in Lucknow and Calcutta, Williams focuses on redressing this neglect.

A noteworthy element of the study is its focus on the satellite court of Begum Khas Mahal, Wajid Ali Shah’s senior queen. Through an in-depth analysis of Khas Mahal’s musical activities using her own music notebooks, Williams counters the traditional narrative that “respectable” women did not engage with music performance. Ethnomusicologists and historians have mainly focused on the activities of courtesans, since these were the women whose musical activities are the most well-documented.2 In contrast, Begum Khas Mahal was an aristocrat who lived her life according to traditional norms of purdah (seclusion from unrelated men). However, she was deeply engaged with music, writing compositions in Brajbhasa as well as Hindustani. In fact, the nawab’s own music books indicate that many compositions were either written by Khas Mahal or in collaboration with her. The focus on the musical activities at her court makes it a particularly important contribution.

Examining Khas Mahal also allows Williams to develop a valuable revisionist biography of Pyare Sahab, one of the queen’s relatives who later became one of India’s first gramophone celebrities. Pyare Sahab was known for his well-developed falsetto and expertise in traditionally “female” genres such as thumri and ghazal.3 Williams argues that Pyare Sahab’s expertise in those genres was due to the fact that he had learned music from Khas Mahal’s ladies-in-waiting. The biography of Pyare Sahab also demonstrates the connections between music making in courtly households and the commercial recording industry.

In my opinion, Williams’s most important contribution is in tracing the activities of individual musicians who were involved in both court activities at Matiyaburj and the wider musical world of Calcutta. Some of Wajid Ali Shah’s court musicians were also involved with Sourindro Mohun Tagore’s Bengal Music School, despite that institution’s very different ideological focus. Williams notes that the new repertoire of the Bengal Music School “was another way to distance the respectable Bengali performers from their professional Hindustani and lower-status counterparts” (p. 169). In addition, Tagore attempted to gain support from Calcutta’s influential British population by incorporating Western instruments and dedicating songs to European rulers.

A number of Wajid Ali Shah’s court musicians performed at private musical soirees in North Calcutta, which Williams refers to as the “networked sphere,” defining it as “one which was not wholly private or wholly public, but one which required a point of access or a personal introduction to unlock, and which operated through interconnected circles of musical professionals and enthusiasts playing host to each other in their own residences” (p. 184). In contrast to institutions such as the Bengal Music School, many of Calcutta’s elite continued to study music from ustads, the traditional way of learning Hindustani music. This exchange demonstrated the Bengali elite’s fascination with Mughal Hindustan and their sense that they were now the caretakers of the tradition. Williams writes: “Bengali accounts of this sphere foregrounded the bhadralok as the last witnesses of Mughal Hindustan, permitting the Bengali to share in the traumas of, and nostalgia for, a courtly world that was not originally their own”’ (p. 191).

Williams’s work is an important contribution to the field, one that offers a nuanced take on the traditional understanding of how Hindustani music was transformed by colonialism. As he writes in his conclusion:

[W]hen it comes to music it is more pertinent to consider a longer conversation between Bengal and other regions of South Asia, especially upper India: works of scholarship, patterns in patronage, and new forms of performance speak to a renegotiation of authority and cultural prestige within the vernacular communities of the subcontinent. Though such renegotiations were undoubtedly influenced by the politics and social transformations wrought by colonialism […] they cannot be seen purely in terms of a conversation between colonizer and colonized. By moving beyond English-language works, restoring colonial-era musicology to its longer history, and acknowledging the changing connotations of region and language, we can nuance and expand the remit of the history of north Indian art music (p. 197).

Those interested in Hindustani music and, more broadly, colonialism in India will certainly gain much by engaging with this study.

Bibliography

Du Perron, Lalita. 2002. “‘Thumrī’: A Discussion of the Female Voice of Hindustani Music.” Modern Asian Studies 36(1):173–93.
DOI : 10.1017/S0026749X02001051

Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie. 2014. The Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah, 1822-1887. London: Hurst & Company.

Peara Saheb ji. 2023. Raag Desh – Dadra. YouTube. Retrieved May 14, 2024.

Post, Jennifer. 1987. “Professional Women in Indian Music: The Death of the Courtesan Tradition.” Pp. 97-109 in Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Ellen Koskoff. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Notes

1 A notable exception is Llewellyn-Jones (2014).

2 See, for example, Post (1987) and Du Perron (2002).

3 Pyare Sahab’s recordings are available on Youtube.