Musicians’ ‘Significant Geographies’ in Colonial Punjab: From Patiala and Kapurthala to Lahore and Delhi

Presenter:

---

Abstract

The waning of Lahore (post-1849) and Delhi (post-1857) as courtly centres and the concomitant rise in prominence of Patiala and Kapurthala transformed the political economy and cultural organisation of Hindustani music in Punjab. In this paper I will demonstrate the broad impact of musical developments at the Punjab courts of Patiala and Kapurthala, on other princely states such as Jammu, Jaipur and Baroda, but also beyond princely India, in erstwhile royal centres such as Lahore and Delhi in ‘British’ India. Conversely, standards of bureaucracy in British India came to inform norms of musicians’ recruitment in Patiala, marking the transition from an older, more informal set of rules governing musical patronage, similar to those in Baroda (Bakhle 2005). Tracing the emergence of a new devotionally-oriented ‘classical’ music palatable to Anglicised middle classes, yet carrying within it older trajectories of sensuality, I will show how rulers like Bhupinder Singh at Patiala and Jagatjit Singh at Kaputhala, influenced the aesthetics and practice of musical patronage in middle-class settings in British India too (Jhala 2015). In the process I offer an answer as to why it was that, of the many princely states, it was Patiala alone that emerged as the singularly representative lineage of Punjab’s classical music. Focussed on a range of musicians¬–Behram Khan, Goki Bai, Tanras Khan, Ali Baksh-Fateh Ali, Kalu Khan, Bhai Booba, Rehmat Khan, Maula Baksh and VD Paluskar¬–I demonstrate how the multitudinous migrations of musicians within ‘significant geographies’ (Orsini 2015) helped create a distinctive Hindustani musical ‘space of performance’ in colonial India more generally.