Stories of Musical Life in Nizami Hyderabad c.1780-1830 (1)

In 1799, Mahlaqa Bai “Chanda”, “The Moon”, presented a book of her songs to the Deputy British Resident of Hyderabad, John Malcolm, in the middle of a music and dance party. Renowned as the first Indian courtesan to write a collection of Urdu poetry, she was equally famous for her affairs with powerful men at the Nizam’s court. Obscured by Mahlaqa Bai’s luminescence today is the man behind the Moon: her ustad Khushhal Khan “Anup”.

A hereditary musician in exile from Mughal Delhi, Anup left behind an enormous corpus of songs, several music-technical treatises, and an illustrated ragamala. In this lecture, I will use the illustrated writings of this single hereditary musician to unravel the stories of musical life, and the lives of these two extraordinary figures and their patrons, in Nizami Hyderabad c. 1780–1830. And in focusing on Khushhal Khan’s musicological writings, I also aim to dispel the myth…