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4 - The Courtesan and the Memsahib: Khanum Jan and Sophia Plowden at the Court of Lucknow

European Private Papers and Musical Notations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Katherine Butler Schofield
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

Khanum Jan was a celebrity courtesan at the court of Lucknow in the 1780s. She became famous again in twentieth-century musicology because of her musical interactions with an Englishwoman, Sophia Plowden. Plowden’s involvement in the “Hindustani Airs” episode has been told before from the European side. In this chapter, I focus instead on Plowden’s collection of song lyrics in Persian and Indian languages, alongside writings by Indian musicians and patrons about their views of Europeans and their music. Reading Indian-language sources and European papers and notations together make it possible to get much closer to how songs from the Lucknow court may have sounded in the 1780s. But it also gives us a much richer understanding of Lucknow courtesan culture between late Mughal and early colonial patronage.

Type
Chapter
Information
Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India
Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858
, pp. 79 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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