Author: Mufaddal Idris Khumri
-
Conclusion of Nāda Brahma: The History of Hindustani Classical Music: Raga Classification, Colonial Reform, and a Civilizational Tradition
Part X: The Evolution of Raga Classification and the Thaat System Hindustani classical music is one of the world’s oldest continuously living art traditions, and its history is far richer than any single narrative allows. This essay traces that history across several interlocking themes: the…
-
Anecdotes that tell the story of Hindustani Classical Music.
Part IX: A sacred Indic art, carried across religious lines and kept alive by devotion, patronage, discipline and no small measure of glorious eccentricity: told through thirty emblematic stories, each marked as documented fact, remembered tradition or living legend. The history of Hindustani classical music is…
-
Veiled Custodians, Public Voices – The Unsung Women Who Carried Hindustani Classical Music. Gender, Purdah, the Hereditary Gharanas, and the Tawaif Tradition, c. 1550–1970 (A Historical and Feminist Reappraisal of Women’s Place in Hindustani Classical Music)
Part VIII: “The communities of ‘dishonour’ produced almost all of them. This is the paradox quantified.” The Paradox Stated Two observations about Hindustani music before Indian independence are, taken singly, wholly uncontroversial, and, taken together, profoundly perplexing. The first concerns the custodians. The hereditary professional…
-
Music in the Mughal Era: The Rise of Khayal and the Tawaif Custodians of Hindustani Classical Music
Part VII: Introduction: Why the Mughal Era Matters in Indian Classical Music From Tansen at Akbar’s court to the courtesan salons of Lucknow and Banaras, the Mughal and post-Mughal centuries forged the genres, lineages, and gharanas that define North Indian classical music today. This essay…
-
Hindustani Vocal Tradition : Qawwali, The Oldest Branch, it’s history, lineage and its journey from zenith to near oblivion
Part VI : Qawwali, The Oldest Branch Qawwali has the strongest claim of any genre in these series of essays to be the tradition’s point of origin, and it is the one most often struck from surveys of the gharanas. The reason for the omission…
-
Pakistani Gharanas and Post-Partition Branches
Part V.VIII : Pakistani Gharanas and Post-Partition Branches Partition in 1947 cut the gharana map in two. Lahore, Multan and the Punjab courts had been integral to the tradition, and the migrations of 1947–50 carried whole lineages across: Patiala’s leading family, the Delhi gharana’s qawwals,…
-
Instrumental Gharanas: The March of the Percussionist – Tabla and Pakhawaj Gharanas
Part V.VII: Tabla Gharanas The tabla gharanas are the six great schools of the drum, each with its own baj, or playing style, its own technique and its own repertoire. They fall into two camps: band baj, the closed styles of Delhi and Ajrada, and…
-
Instrumental Gharanas: The Wind, The Struck and The Bowed (Shehnai, Santoor, Bansuri, Sarangi, Violin, Harmonium & Jaltarang)
Part V.VI: Instrumental Gharanas: The Wind, The Struck and The Bowed The instruments gathered in this Part reached the classical concert platform late, and in several cases by the labour of a single man. The shehnai was a temple and gatehouse instrument until 1937; the…
-
Instrumental Gharanas: The Plucked Strings (Sitar, Sarod, Surbahar, Rudra Veena, Vichitra Veena, Sursingar and the slide veenas)
Part V.V : Instrumental Gharanas: The Plucked Strings The instrumental gharanas carried the grammar of vocal music, and above all of dhrupad, onto the strings and, later, onto the wind and the struck instruments. From the root-stock of the Senia lineage grew the schools that…
-
Dhrupad Gharanas: The Vanis and the Hereditary Houses
Part V.IV: Dhrupad Gharanas: The Vanis and The Hereditary Houses Dhrupad, the oldest surviving form of Hindustani classical music, orders itself by the four vanis (or banis), namely Gauhar, Khandar, Nauhar and Dagar, stylistic streams attributed in retrospect to four masters of Akbar’s era (Tansen,…