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A talk by Razak Khan, Research Fellow, Center for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen

The princely state of Rampur was an important gharana and center for learning & studying music. It attracted not just practitioners or listeners, but also scholars of music. This presentation will focus on Hindu scholars of music as well as Muslim musicians and Nawabs of Rampur—a center for learning & studying music—to argue for alternative histories of musical reform in colonial India. Muslim musicians extended their writings and commentaries from music to modernity and nation-building projects. Their voices were not servile to the whimsical demands of patronage but were active participants in the chorus of theorists, publishers, and cultural commentators on music and nation. These voices, texts and archives need to be brought back into the conversation about the larger question of Muslims, music and cultural reform in the history of colonial and post-colonial India.

Razak Khan is a Research Fellow in the History Research Group at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) Göttingen University. He has edited a special issue of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and is completing a book Minority Pasts: Locality, Histories, and Identities in Rampur for Oxford University Press.