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 twelfth century. The popular imagination often frames this encounter as a collision in which one tradition displaced another. The historical record tells a subtler and far more remarkable story: one of selective and asymmetric fusion, in which the ancient melodic grammar of India remained sovereign while acquiring an entirely new performing culture; one in which a Muslim devotional movement, far from suppressing music, elevated it into a path to God and defended it before hostile jurists; and one in which courts, shrines and temples of every confession sustained a single art through political catastrophe. This essay traces that story across three interwoven movements: the Persianate transformation of the North Indian soundscape under the Delhi Sultanate; the Chishti Sufi sanctification of music, arguably the single most important Muslim contribution to the survival and flourishing of the art in North India; and the plural ecology of patronage, courtly and devotional alike, within which Hindustani music took its enduring shape.

The Delhi Sultanate and the Persianate Soundscape

The Ghurid victories of the 1190s and the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 brought to North India a fully formed Persianate high culture, whose musical wing comprised the Perso-Arabic maqam modal system, court genres such as the qaul and the ghazal, and instruments of Central and West Asian ancestry. What unfolded over the following three centuries was not replacement but selective, asymmetric fusion. The melodic core of North Indian music, namely the raga system, the shruti and svara framework, and the tala principle, remained resolutely Indic; this is the consistent finding of modern musicology. What changed, and changed profoundly, was the performing culture that surrounded that core: new genres such as qawwali, tarana and, later, khayal; new instruments and instrument hybrids; Persian and Hindavi song texts; a novel aesthetics of virtuosic ornament; and, above all, a new patron class for whom music constituted courtly adab rather than temple seva. The standard scholarly formulation captures the matter precisely: Hindustani music is an Indic system that acquired a Persianate performance culture, exhibiting indigenous continuity in its grammar and cosmopolitan synthesis in its style.

Amir Khusrau and the Origins of Qawwali: Evidence and Legend

The emblematic figure of this synthesis is Amir Khusrau of Delhi (1253 to 1325), poet, courtier to seven successive sultans, and the most beloved disciple of the Chishti saint Nizamuddin Auliya. Careful source criticism, with respect to the instruments and by historians of the Delhi Sultanate with respect to the genres, obliges us to distinguish three evidentiary layers in his legacy. The documented layer is secure: Khusrau’s own voluminous Persian writings attest his profound engagement with, and explicit admiration for, Indian music, which he judged superior to that of any other land; and his Hindavi and Persian song texts remain the core repertoire of qawwali to the present day. A second layer consists of plausible tradition: his association with the crystallization of qawwali as the Chishti genre of sama, and with forms such as the qaul and the tarana, rests upon strong and early community memory even where contemporary documentation is thin. The third layer is legend. The attribution to Khusrau of the invention of the sitar and the tabla is demonstrably anachronistic: Research shows the sitar emerging only in the eighteenth century from Mughal-era lute practice, while the tabla is first securely documented at the turn of the eighteenth century, tradition naming the Delhi drummer Sidhar Khan as its progenitor, and a separate legend ascribing its birth to a pakhawaj split in two. Khusrau the inventor is thus a retrospective construction of the culture hero; Khusrau the synthesizer and legitimizer, however, is thoroughly historical.

A single song encapsulates his enduring presence. Seven centuries after Khusrau’s death, his Hindavi composition Chhaap Tilak Sab Chheeni, a Sufi love song addressed to his master yet written in the idiom of a Braj milkmaid addressing Krishna’s flute-playing beloved, is still sung nightly by hereditary qawwals at the Nizamuddin dargah in Delhi. The persona is Vaishnava, the theology is Sufi, the language is Hindavi, the performers are Muslim, and the audience is everyone: the entire syncretic history of Hindustani music compressed into one song.

The Divergence of Hindustani and Carnatic Music

It was during this same era that the two classical systems of the subcontinent, which share the Sangita Ratnakara as their common ancestor, gradually diverged between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The North absorbed the Persianate performance culture described above, while the South, under Vijayanagara and its successor courts and largely beyond the reach of Sultanate rule, developed along its own lines through the pedagogy of Purandara Dasa and, later, the melakarta system of Venkatamakhi. The divergence, it must be stressed, was one of style, repertoire and theoretical vocabulary rather than of fundamentals: raga and tala remain the grammar shared by both traditions.

Gwalior, Man Singh Tomar and the Consolidation of Dhrupad

The other great development of the era unfolded at Gwalior, where Raja Man Singh Tomar (reigned 1486 to 1516) presided over the consolidation of dhrupad as the premier art song of Hindustan. His court assembled the leading singers of the age, tradition naming Nayak Bakhshu, Baiju and others among them; sponsored the compilation of the Mankutuhal, a compendium of the new Brajbhasha repertoire; and deliberately elevated the vernacular dhruvapada above the Sanskrit prabandha. Gwalior thereby became the fountainhead of the tradition, celebrated in the traditional phrase as the Gangotri of Hindustani music, from which both the dhrupad lineages and, much later, the first khayal gharana descend. Significantly, this climactic Hindu consolidation of dhrupad occurred within the Sultanate world and in dialogue with it: Nayak Bakhshu’s songs subsequently entered the Mughal court repertoire, and Man Singh’s compendium was consulted by Muslim connoisseurs for centuries thereafter.

The Sufi Orders and the Sanctification of Music in Islam

Orthodox Islamic jurisprudence was, at best, ambivalent toward music, and sections of the ulema in Delhi periodically condemned sama, the practice of spiritual listening. It was the Sufi orders, above all the Chishtis, the dominant order of Hindustan, who overruled this taboo in practice, sanctified music as a devotional technology, and channelled that sanction directly into court patronage. If a single Muslim influence must be named as decisive for the survival and flourishing of music in North India, it is the Chishti order; and the proposition deserves extended treatment, for the Chishti achievement was not a passive tolerance but an active theology of music, built by a continuous lineage of saints across the thirteenth century, defended against jurists, institutionalized in shrine liturgy, and radiated outward into court patronage, popular devotion and the classical art itself.

The starting point must be stated honestly: much of orthodox Islamic jurisprudence regarded instrumental music with suspicion or outright prohibition, and the question of sama, that is, of listening, the disciplined audition of music and poetry for spiritual ends, was contested for centuries. In Delhi the debate was anything but academic. The ulema repeatedly petitioned the sultans against the Chishti assemblies, and in the most celebrated episode Nizamuddin Auliya was summoned before a hostile tribunal of jurists under Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq to defend the practice, and prevailed. The Chishti defence, articulated in the recorded conversations of the saints (the malfuzat literature, above all the Fawa’id al-Fu’ad, Nizamuddin’s table talk compiled by Amir Hasan Sijzi), was disciplined rather than libertine: sama is lawful for the purified heart, under conditions of the right listener, the right text and the right intention, because music can carry the soul toward God more swiftly than argument. Other orders drew the line elsewhere; the Suhrawardis were reserved and the Naqshbandis largely opposed. This makes the Chishti position a deliberate choice rather than an inevitability, and it was North Indian music’s great fortune that the Chishtis, and not their critics, became the dominant spiritual order of Hindustan.

The Chishti Silsila: A Lineage of Musical Sanctification

The Chishti sanction of music was transmitted, like the music itself, through an unbroken chain of master and disciple, a silsila that should be read as this history’s Sufi counterpart to the guru-shishya parampara. The chain begins with Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti of Ajmer (died 1236), the order’s founder in India, whose khanqah made sama central to Chishti practice from the very beginning, and whose dargah at Ajmer became, and remains, the liturgical capital of qawwali: the shrine to which emperors walked and at which hereditary qawwals have sung for eight centuries. His successor, Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki of Delhi (died 1235), planted the order at the capital, and his death constitutes the tradition’s ultimate testimony to the power of sama. Hearing in an assembly a Persian verse of Ahmad-i Jam concerning those slain by the dagger of surrender, the saint entered an ecstasy from which he did not return, dying days later with the verse still being sung at his request. The oldest dargah of the Qutub Minar area is his, and the tradition of Delhi qawwali begins at his tomb.

Kaki’s successor, Baba Fariduddin Ganj-i-Shakar of Ajodhan (died 1265), the great saint of the Punjab, composed Punjabi verses that passed into the devotional repertoire of the entire region and, most extraordinarily, into the Guru Granth Sahib itself, where the hymns of Sheikh Farid stand within the Sikh raga architecture: the Chishti lineage literally canonized in another faith’s scripture. Farid’s successor, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi (died 1325), the order’s summit and the Mahbub-i-Ilahi, the Beloved of God, defended sama before the jurists and made nightly music a spiritual institution at the heart of the imperial capital, in studied independence from the court itself, for Nizamuddin famously refused to wait upon sultans. The lineage reaches its artistic consummation in Amir Khusrau (died 1325), Nizamuddin’s disciple, the point at which the silsila of saints becomes a lineage of music. Poet of the court and lover of the khanqah, Khusrau poured the Chishti theology of listening into forms that professional musicians could carry: the qaul and the qawwali repertoire, and the Hindavi songs still sung nightly at his master’s shrine, where he lies buried at Nizamuddin’s feet. Here the saint’s chain and the musician’s chain fuse, for the Qawwal Bachche, the hereditary singers formed by Khusrau’s tradition, are simultaneously a Sufi liturgical institution and the ancestral community of khayal.

Read as a sequence, from Muinuddin to Kaki to Farid to Nizamuddin to Khusrau, the silsila reveals a century-long, deliberate and cumulative construction. Sanctuary by sanctuary, the Chishtis built an India in which music was not merely permitted to Muslims but was itself a path to God, and they staffed that path with hereditary musicians whose descendants still sing at the same tombs.

Overlapping Sacred Worlds: Hindu and Muslim Musical Exchange

The deeper significance of the Chishti achievement lies in what it reveals about the religious texture of the era. The cultural story of medieval North Indian music is not one of replacement, of one sacred order displacing another, but of overlapping sacred worlds. Hindu devotees visited, and continue to visit, the Sufi shrines in numbers the shrines themselves have always welcomed: Ajmer and Nizamuddin draw pilgrims of every faith, and the dargah calendar absorbed Indic festivals. The most beautiful instance is Basant, the spring festival of mustard flowers, which tradition says Khusrau brought into the khanqah to console his grieving master by joining a procession of Hindu women singing to the season, and which the Nizamuddin qawwals still celebrate every year in yellow garments and with Basant ragas. In the opposite direction, Muslim musicians learned from Hindu gurus in every generation, Tansen (Ramtanu Mishra/Ramtanu Pandey son of poet Mukund Mishra)  under Swami Haridas according to tradition, a pattern documented repeatedly in later centuries; they sang Brajbhasha Krishna poetry at Sufi assemblies and perceived no contradiction, because the theology of the text within sama held that any words, rightly heard, could carry the listener to the Divine. The ethnomusicology of Regula Qureshi completes the picture from the musical side: qawwali’s melodic and rhythmic substance is the Indian raga and tala system in its entirety, so that the Chishti liturgy is itself a Hindu and Muslim artefact, uniting Persian and Hindavi poetry, Indic music and Sufi purpose. The khanqah and the temple were not rival worlds but adjacent rooms with a connecting door, and the musicians held the key.

The Legacy: From Sufi Shrine to Court to Concert Stage

The consequences of this sanctification radiate through every subsequent chapter of the art’s history. Because the sultans and the Mughal emperors were devotees of the Chishti shrines (Akbar walked on pilgrimage to Ajmer, built his capital around the dargah of Salim Chishti, and named his heir for the saint), Sufi legitimation flowed directly into court patronage: the ruler who bowed before a music-sanctifying saint could scarcely ban the art at his own darbar. The khanqahs and dargahs functioned as a permanent, decentralized patronage network that outlasted every dynasty. The Qawwal Bachche carried shrine music into the court and thence into khayal. And the Sufi voice persists within the classical art itself: in the Persian couplets of the tarana, revived with explicit Sufi intent by Amir Khan of Indore; in the Khusrau texts of the khayal and thumri repertoire; in the kafi genre of the Punjab and Sindh; and in the world-conquering qawwali of the twentieth century, all of them the Chishti sanction still audible. The practical result, central to the theme of this study, bears restating: in India, Muslim religious authority did not suppress music. A Muslim devotional counter-tradition sanctified it, staffed it, defended it in court and carried it for eight hundred years, and Muslim rulers patronized it on a scale the temples could never match.

A saying attributed to Nizamuddin Auliya holds that music can reveal truths inaccessible to ordinary speech: that what the discourse of the schools cannot carry, the melody delivers to the prepared heart. Whether or not the sentence is authentic in this precise form (the malfuzat record his defense of sama in more juridical language), the saying faithfully reflects the Chishti understanding of listening: sama as a mode of knowledge rather than entertainment, the conviction for which the saint stood before hostile jurists, for which Kaki died in ecstasy, and upon which eight centuries of qawwali at his shrine have rested. It is, translated into Sufi idiom, the very conviction that the temple stream expresses as nada-upasana: that sound reaches where words end.

Court Patronage of Indian Classical Music: A Plural Ecology

From the thirteenth to the nineteenth century the royal court progressively displaced the temple as the primary economic base of art music, without ever severing the music’s devotional self-understanding, and the map of patronage was religiously plural at every stage. Among Muslim courts stood the Delhi sultans; the regional sultanates, including Jaunpur under Hussain Shah Sharqi, himself remembered as a composer and a claimant in the debate over the origins of khayal, together with Malwa, Gujarat, Bengal and the Deccan sultanates, most notably Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur, author of the Kitab-i-Nauras, a book of songs in praise of Hindu deities and Sufi saints alike; and, above all, the Mughals. Among Hindu courts stood Gwalior, Mewar, Amber and Jaipur, and Rewa, whose Raja Ramchandra employed Tansen before Akbar did, followed in later centuries by the Maratha courts and zamindaris such as Bishnupur, Banaras and Darbhanga. Jain patronage was likewise significant: wealthy Jain merchant-bankers and monastic libraries sponsored and preserved musicological manuscripts and ragamala painting, particularly in Gujarat and Rajasthan. Sikh patronage was perhaps the most remarkable of all, for the Gurus made raga the organizing principle of scripture itself; the Guru Granth Sahib is arranged according to the thirty-one ragas of its hymns, and the community maintained the hereditary Muslim rababi lineage descending from Bhai Mardana, Guru Nanak’s lifelong Muslim companion and rabab player, to perform kirtan in the gurdwaras: perhaps the most remarkable standing institution of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh musical symbiosis in the subcontinent’s history.

Alongside the courts stood the Sufi khanqahs and dargahs, permanent, decentralized and popular patrons whose sama assemblies kept musician families employed independently of dynastic fortune, and the aristocratic households, the umara, whose competitive connoisseurship, rendered musical knowledge a form of elite capital. When one patron fell, another absorbed the musicians; this redundancy of patronage explains the tradition’s extraordinary survival through political catastrophe.

The Temple Stream: Haveli Sangeet, Nathdwara and Vrindavan

The rise of the court did not end the temple’s musical history; it merely drove it from the centre of the written record. Through the entire Sultanate and Mughal era, and down to the present day, a parallel temple stream carried the oldest strata of the art in continuous liturgical use, and the continued importance of this stream has been chronically understated in court-centred histories. Three of its institutions matter most.

Haveli Sangeet and the Vallabh Sampradaya

The first is haveli sangeet and the Vallabh Sampradaya. The Pushtimarg of Vallabhacharya (1479 to 1531), consolidated by his son Vitthalnath, built its entire liturgy around sung kirtan. The ashtachhap, the celebrated eight seals, comprising the poet-singers Surdas, Kumbhandas, Paramananddas and Krishnadas under Vallabha, and Chaturbhujdas, Nandadas, Chhitswami and Govindswami under Vitthalnath, composed the Brajbhasha corpus that the sect’s havelis, temple-mansions in which the deity is treated as the living lord of a great house, have performed daily ever since, in dhrupad and dhamar style with pakhawaj accompaniment. Because this repertoire was fixed in liturgy in the sixteenth century and transmitted by hereditary temple singers rather than by concert fashion, haveli sangeet preserves some of the oldest dhrupad-derived music in continuous performance anywhere: a sung archive of the pre-khayal art, maintained through the very centuries in which the courts moved on to khayal and thumri. Its debt to the classical mainstream runs in both directions. The ashtachhap poets were contemporaries and, according to tradition, interlocutors of the Gwalior dhrupad world; Akbar is said to have sought out Surdas and Kumbhandas, and Kumbhandas’s famous rebuff of the imperial summons, his declaration that a saint has no business in Sikri, stands as the temple stream’s declaration of independence from patronage itself. In the twentieth century the haveli repertoire re-entered the concert tradition, most audibly in the Mewati gharana of Pandit Jasraj and in the researches of Kumar Gandharva.

Nathdwara: Raga as Living Liturgy

The second institution, and the tradition’s citadel, is Nathdwara in Mewar, where the image of Shrinathji, carried out of Braj during the insecurity of Aurangzeb’s reign, was installed in 1672. There the daily seva proceeds through eight darshans: mangala, shringar, gwal, rajbhog, utthapan, bhog, sandhya-arati and shayan, each requiring specific ragas according to the time of day, the season, and the deity’s bhava, the mood in which Krishna is being served at that hour. There are morning ragas for the waking of the lord, Malhar songs through the monsoon, Basant and Bahar with the spring, Hori and dhamar at Holi, and the swing songs of Hindola in the rains. This is the raga, time and season theory of the treatises rendered not as classroom doctrine but as living liturgy, arguably its oldest continuous application anywhere, older in unbroken practice than the concert stage’s observance of the same rules. It makes Nathdwara a functioning museum of the medieval performing system, preserving raga discipline, dhrupad and dhamar forms, pakhawaj accompaniment and seasonal repertoire, all sustained because worship, unlike patronage, does not change with fashion.

Vrindavan: The Devotional Source

The third is Vrindavan, together with the wider Braj country, which held the other great temple lineages: the Haridasi or Sakhi sampradaya of Swami Haridas at Nidhivan, whose singing tradition serves Banke Bihari; the Radhavallabh sampradaya of Hit Harivansh, whose samaj-gayan preserves its own dhrupad-descended congregational art; and the Gaudiya, or Chaitanyaite, kirtan lineages. From this world the influence ran outward and upward: the traditions of Swami Haridas shaped not only devotional music but, through Tansen, his reputed disciple, and through the Gwalior dhrupadiyas formed in the same Braj devotional culture, the Mughal court music of the succeeding age. The temple was thus not merely the tradition’s origin but its permanent counterweight and refreshing source: the courts drew from the devotional stream their greatest musicians, their repertoire language in Brajbhasha, their forms of dhrupad and dhamar, and their aesthetic ideals, and returned to it, in every generation, for renewal.

Two anecdotes crystallize this relationship. Haridas, the tradition insists, sang not for audiences but for Krishna himself, alone in Nidhivan, for the deity his music was believed to make present. Later generations fixed the contrast into an aphorism repeated wherever the purpose of the art was debated: the court singer performs for a patron; the saint sings because the Divine is present. This saying became one of the deepest philosophical influences upon Hindustani aesthetics, embodying the conviction, held by court musicians themselves, that performance is at best the shadow of offering, that the true audience of a raga is not the one seated before the singer, and that the art’s highest state, still invoked in the language of sur-sadhana and nada-upasana, is reached when the patron is forgotten. Every ustad who closes his eyes upon the concert stage is, in this tradition’s self-understanding, turning from the first audience to the second.

The second story dramatizes the first. Court memory preserves the tale of Akbar visiting the aged Swami Haridas of Vrindavan, Tansen’s reputed guru, disguised as Tansen’s servant, since the saint would sing for no king. Overwhelmed by what he heard, Akbar asked Tansen why his own singing never attained such heights, and Tansen’s reply became proverbial: I sing for the emperor of Hindustan; my master sings for the Emperor of the Universe. The tale is legend rather than document, but it is the tradition’s own theory of itself: court music forever measuring itself against its devotional source.

Conclusion

The medieval synthesis of North Indian music thus resists every simple narrative of conquest and displacement. An Indic melodic system, ancient in its grammar of raga, shruti, svara and tala, absorbed a Persianate performance culture and emerged enriched rather than effaced. A Muslim devotional order, in a century-long labour stretching from Muinuddin Chishti to Amir Khusrau, transformed music from an object of juridical suspicion into a sanctified path to God, defended that transformation before tribunals, and institutionalized it in shrines where hereditary musicians sing to this day. Courts of every faith, Muslim, Hindu, Jain and Sikh, together with the khanqahs, the dargahs and the aristocratic households, wove a redundant web of patronage that carried the art unbroken through dynastic collapse and political catastrophe. And beneath it all, the temple stream, in the havelis of the Pushtimarg, in the liturgical citadel of Nathdwara and in the devotional lineages of Vrindavan, preserved the oldest strata of the music and returned the courts, generation after generation, to their source. The khanqah and the temple, in the image with which this history must close, were never rival worlds but adjacent rooms with a connecting door; and it was the musicians, Hindu and Muslim alike, who held the key. In their keeping, sound reached where words end, and it reaches there still.

August 10, 2026

Mufaddal Idris Khumri