Category: Hindustani Music
A series of essays tracing the history of Hindustani classical music across the ages — its lineages, its shrines and courts, and its enduring legacy.
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The Sikh Musical Tradition: Kirtan, Raga, and the Rababi Lineage in Hindustani Sacred Music. How performance, scripture, and a four-century Muslim–Sikh musical partnership shaped a living sacred tradition.
Part IV: The Sikh Musical Tradition: Kirtan, Raga and the Rababi Lineage in Hindustani Sacred Music How performance, scripture, and a four-century Muslim–Sikh musical partnership shaped a living sacred tradition. Sikhism is almost unique among world religions in having been founded through performance, its liturgy,…
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Conversion and Continuity: How Hereditary Muslim Families Came to Lead North Indian Classical Music
Part III: The sociology of Muslim musicianship, the evidence for conversion, and why the music never changed In brief: One of the most striking facts about North Indian classical music is that its most prestigious performing lineages came to rest, over several centuries, in the…
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Sanctified Sound Music, Faith and Cultural Synthesis in Medieval North India, circa 1200 to 1550 How the history of Hindustani classical music was shaped by the Delhi Sultanate, the Chishti Sufis, and the temple stream
Part II Introduction Few chapters in the cultural history of the Indian subcontinent are as consequential, or as persistently misunderstood, as the musical encounter between the Indic world and the Persianate civilization that arrived with the Turkic and Afghan conquests at the close of the…
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The Sound of the Sacred Land: A History of Hindustani Classical Music
Introduction to the Series This is a series of essays on Hindustani classical music, conceived to unfold across the ages and to illumine the nuances, the lineages, and the enduring legacy that adorn our musical heritage. Bharat, or Hindustan, is a land in which music…