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 traces that formative arc — the legend of Tansen, the disputed question of Aurangzeb and music, the layered origins of khayal, and the indispensable role of the tawaifs.

The Mughal era stands as one of the most consequential periods in the history of Hindustani classical music. Over the course of roughly three centuries — from the glittering court of Emperor Akbar to the closing years of the courtly world in the gramophone age — imperial and princely patronage nurtured the musicians, genres, and lineages that still define North Indian classical music today. This essay examines that formative age: the rise of the great vocalist Tansen at Akbar’s court, the much-debated question of Aurangzeb’s attitude towards music, the layered origins of the khayal genre, the flowering of lighter classical forms such as thumri, and the dispersal of Delhi’s musicians into the regional courts. It closes with an extended account of the tawaifs, the hereditary courtesan performers whose contribution to the tradition can neither be ruled out nor diminished.

Akbar’s Court and the Legend of Tansen

The empirical foundation for the music of this period is Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari, which catalogues thirty-six musicians of Akbar’s court arranged in order of rank. At the head of that list stands Miyan Tansen of Gwalior, described in terms suggesting that no equal had appeared in India for the previous thousand years. Tansen came to the imperial court from Rewa in 1562 and rose to become one of Akbar’s celebrated ‘nine jewels’. His compositions — dhrupads in Brajbhasha, many of them in praise of Hindu deities and others honouring his patrons together with the ragas traditionally attributed to him, such as Miyan ki Todi, Miyan ki Malhar, and Darbari Kanada, form the very heart of the kalawant patrimony. It is worth stressing that these raga attributions rest on tradition rather than on documentary proof. The Ain’s list is itself a portrait of synthesis: Hindu and Muslim names intermingle, and Gwalior-trained dhrupadiyas sit alongside Persian and Central Asian masters. This blending of traditions only deepened under the emperors Jahangir and Shah Jahan.

Music Under the Later Mughals: Did Aurangzeb Ban Music?

The reign of Aurangzeb (1658–1707) has become the setting for one of the era’s most famous historiographical corrections. In her landmark 2007 article ‘Did Aurangzeb Ban Music?’, Katherine Butler Brown drew on Persian sources to demonstrate that the emperor himself an accomplished connoisseur in his youth curtailed music at his own official court in his later years but never banned it across the empire. In fact, musical patronage among the princes and the umara flourished during his reign, and more Persian musical treatises were written in his time than in any period before it. The often-repeated anecdote in which musicians stage a mock funeral for ‘Music’ beneath the emperor’s window prompting Aurangzeb to reply that they should bury it so deep that no sound of it might ever rise again comes from a later, moralizing chronicle. It is historiographically instructive precisely because it is legend rather than documented fact.

The Origins of Khayal: Three Competing Histories

Khayal, a word meaning ‘imagination’, is the genre that dominates Hindustani vocal music today, and its origins are best understood as three overlapping layers rather than as competing rivals. The first is the qawwal-derivation thesis, which holds that khayal’s characteristic style romantic Hindavi texts, ornamental freedom, and taan virtuosity grew out of the qawwali-singing communities of Delhi, whose ‘Qawwal Bachche’ lineage claims the genre and looks to Amir Khusrau as its legendary progenitor. The second is the Sharqi thesis, in which tradition credits Sultan Hussain Shah Sharqi of fifteenth-century Jaunpur with cultivating or inventing khayal, along with ragas such as Jaunpuri. Contemporary documentation is lacking for both accounts, yet each preserves an authentic community memory of the genre’s long pre-history. The third layer is the documented crystallization of khayal, which enters the full light of history at the Delhi court of Muhammad Shah ‘Rangila’ (r. 1719–48). There the kalawant Niyamat Khan a binkar of Senia descent who composed under the pen-name Sadarang together with his nephew Firoz Khan ‘Adarang’ composed the foundational khayal repertoire, comprising hundreds of bandishes still sung today and typically invoking the phrase ‘Mohammad Shah Sadarangile’. Crucially, Niyamat Khan taught the genre to singers of the qawwal lineage rather than to his own kalawant heirs, thereby giving khayal its social carriers. Scholarly consensus, reflected in Bonnie Wade’s standard monograph Khayal, therefore dates the establishment of modern khayal to the early eighteenth century while acknowledging its older roots.

Thumri, the Tawaif Tradition, and the Later Courts

The lighter classical genres covers thumri, dadra, ghazal, and the seasonal songs chaiti and kajri crystallized in the courts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These forms, along with the women who served as their custodians, deserve their own extended treatment, which follows below. Foremost among these courts was Lucknow under Nawab Wajid Ali Shah (r. 1847–56), himself a composer under the name ‘Akhtarpiya’ as well as a dancer, and Banaras, which developed its own bol-banao thumri of slow, expressive elaboration. The principal artists of these genres were the tawaifs who were highly trained courtesan performers who were, in their era, among the most literate, propertied, and artistically authoritative women in North India, and the chief transmitters of thumri and much khayal besides. Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta, who in 1902 made India’s first commercial gramophone recordings, and later Begum Akhtar, who was born into this world, mark its artistic summit even as colonial and nationalist reform movements were destroying its social base. Any honest history must register both the tradition’s debt to these women and the deliberateness of their subsequent erasure.

Nadir Shah, the Decline of Delhi, and the Musical Dispersal

Nadir Shah’s sack of Delhi in 1739, and the empire’s subsequent unravelling, scattered the capital’s musicians across the successor states. A diaspora that seeded the map of the gharanas. Awadh, centred on Lucknow, absorbed the largest share. Rampur, under its Rohilla nawabs, became the great nineteenth-century conservatory of the Senia tradition; it was there that Wazir Khan of Rampur, a Senia binkar, would go on to teach the founders of twentieth-century instrumental music. Gwalior, Jaipur, Baroda, Hyderabad, Patiala, Indore, and dozens of smaller darbars each maintained their own atelier-courts. Schofield’s Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India reconstructs this era of ‘ephemeral’ brilliance between empires. The gharanas of the modern era are, almost without exception, the institutional residue of this dispersal.

The Tawaif Tradition: Courtesans as Custodians of the Art

No honest history of Hindustani music can rule out or diminish the contribution of the tawaifs who remained the hereditary courtesan performers of North India. Their art must be understood as what it truly was: a genre-world and a transmission system of its own, deserving a full chapter rather than a footnote. Their deserving role and stewardship is being covered under a full length essay titled “Veiled custodians of Hindustani classical music”. For roughly two centuries, from the late Mughal courts to the gramophone age, the tawaif’s salon was one of the tradition’s principal conservatories. Several of its genres were substantially created, perfected, and preserved by these women, and the story of their deliberate erasure from respectable memory is itself a central chapter of the music’s modern history. With relatively few exceptions, the most celebrated female performers before the mid-twentieth century emerged from the tawaif, kalavantin, and related hereditary female performing communities rather than from the publicly visible daughters of the major gharana lineages.

Who the Tawaifs Were

The tawaifs together with their regional counterparts and cognates, including the baijis of Banaras and Calcutta, the deredar and khanagi grades of Lucknow, and the temple-descended kalavantins of the west coast (Goa Karnataka belt) were hereditary communities of female professional performers, trained from childhood in a curriculum as rigorous as any gharana’s. They studied vocal music under the ustads of the great lineages, kathak dance, Urdu and Braj poetry and its extempore application, and adab, the cultivated etiquette that made the kotha, or salon, a school of manners for the sons of the aristocracy. They were, in their era, among the most literate, economically independent, and propertied women in North India. Veena Talwar Oldenburg’s archival work on Lucknow found the courtesans in the highest tax brackets of the colonial municipal records and as owners of substantial urban property.  Women who, in her famous formulation, practised ‘lifestyle as resistance’, their profession affording, for all its ambiguities and vulnerabilities, an autonomy that respectable marriage did not. In the matrilineal economy of the kotha, daughters inherited repertoire, property, and professional standing, forming a mirror-image on the female side of the ustad’s patriline. The two systems were closely intertwined, for the tawaifs learned from the hereditary ustads and employed their sarangi and tabla players, making the kotha a principal source of livelihood for the male accompanist lineages as well.

The Genre-World of the Kotha

The tawaif’s art centred on the expressive, text-forward genres described above: thumri above all the bol-banao art of infinitely shaded repetition, in which a single line of Braj poetry is turned through every emotional register  with dadra, ghazal, hori, chaiti, kajri, and tappa around it, and khayal within the reach of the greatest of them. This was a distinct aesthetic system, not a diluted classicism. Where the darbar prized architecture and the gharana prized lineage-correctness, the kotha prized ada and adaigi, the fusion of word, note, glance, and gesture into a single expressive act and its intimate mehfil format, its kathak partnership, and its dialogue between singer and sarangi shaped the very sound of the lighter classical genres. Musicologists, with Peter Manuel’s monograph on thumri as the standard reference, credit the nineteenth-century courtesan salons of Lucknow and Banaras with perfecting, and substantially creating, the bol-banao thumri. The ang of that art, its glide, its inflection, its way with a word passed from the kothas into khayal itself, audible in the thumri-tinged gayaki of Patiala and Banaras and in the concert thumri that now closes almost every vocal recital. When the gramophone arrived, it was the tawaifs, professionally unafraid of public performance who became recording’s first Indian stars, while respectable households still shunned the horn. The earliest recorded archive of Hindustani music is, overwhelmingly, made up of their voices.

The Great Names of the Tawaif Tradition

The roll of the tradition’s masters deserves to be named as such. Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta (1873–1930) was a polyglot composer-singer of some 600 discs, India’s first recording artist, having recorded in 1902, and one of its first modern celebrities. Her mother, Malka Jaan, was a poet and singer of the Matiyaburj circle around the exiled Wajid Ali Shah. Janki Bai ‘Chhappan Chhuri’ of Allahabad sold records across the subcontinent. Zohrabai Agrewali, whose gramophone khayals and thumris preserve the pre-microphone gayaki at its most authoritative, stands among the recorded sources of the era’s repertoire. Jaddan Bai of Allahabad and Bombay, a singer, composer, and one of Indian cinema’s first female music directors represents the kotha’s direct bequest to film music. Rasoolan Bai and Siddheshwari Devi of Banaras were sovereign artists of purab-ang thumri. And Akhtari Bai Faizabadi crossed the respectability frontier to be revered as Begum Akhtar, the century’s voice of ghazal and dadra. To these names must be added the western kalavantin stream: Anjanibai Malpekar, Kesarbai Kerkar, and Mogubai Kurdikar all rose from the hereditary performing communities of Goa to the very summit of khayal itself, proof that the women’s tradition fed not only the ‘light’ genres but the heaviest classicism in the land.

Rebellion, Reform, Erasure — and Recovery

The destruction of this world was deliberate, and the principle that the tawaif contribution cannot be ruled out or diminished requires naming its stages. After 1857, in whose rebellion the courtesans of Awadh and Kanpur were implicated as financiers and partisans (Azizun of Kanpur rode armed among the sepoys, in the records of the British themselves), the colonial state seized kotha properties, taxed and medically policed the community under the Contagious Diseases regime, and reclassified artists as prostitutes, a legal-moral demotion (The curse of Victorian prudish morality) that the anti-nautch movement then completed. Nationalist reform finished what colonial morality had begun: the very campaigns that rescued music’s respectability for the middle-class householder expelled the hereditary women who had preserved it, culminating in All India Radio’s exclusion of women ‘whose private life was a public scandal’ (The progenitor of this draconian era was Dr. B V Keskar’s India’s long serving information & Broadcasting Minister whose monstrosity aided and abetted by Jawaharlal Nehru’s studied silence) and in the quiet renaming, retraining, and unremembering of the survivors. The gains of that passage institutional access for women of all backgrounds, from Hirabai Barodekar’s generation onward were real; so too was the expropriation. Recovery has come late but decisively. Oldenburg’s archival restitution, Sampath’s biography of Gauhar Jaan, Saba Dewan’s Tawaifnama, and the renewed performance scholarship of purab-ang repertoire have restored the tawaifs to their rightful place, a place that must be stated plainly: they were not adjacent to the classical tradition; they were among its principal custodians, and several of its genres exist in their present form because these women made them.

Conclusion: The Courts and the Courtesans

Taken together, these chapters reveal the Mughal and post-Mughal centuries as the crucible in which Hindustani classical music was forged. The synthesis achieved at Akbar’s court, the resilience of musical patronage even under Aurangzeb, the crystallization of khayal in the early eighteenth century, and the scattering of Delhi’s musicians into the regional courts all shaped the tradition’s structure and repertoire. Woven through this history is the indispensable contribution of the tawaifs, whose salons preserved and perfected some of the music’s most cherished genres before their world was deliberately dismantled and, much later, restored to memory. To tell the story of Hindustani classical music honestly is to hold both truths at once: its debt to the courts, and its debt to the courtesans.

Mufaddal Idris Khumri

October 3,2026