89

Katherine Butler Brown

Evidence of Indo-Persian Musical Synthesis?
The tanbur and rudra vina in seventeenth-century Indo-
Persian treatises

It has long been accepted wisdom that North Indian classical music as we
know it today developed as a synthesis of Indian and Persian influences,
largely under Mughal patronage between the sixteenth and eighteenth
centuries
1
. Whether celebrated as a brilliant symbol of North Indias tolerant
composite culture (Ratanjankar in Bhatkhande 1990 [1930]: iii), or criticised
for its impurities in comparison with its supposedly undiluted Southern
counterpart (Tagore 1990 [1896]: 67), the hybrid nature of Hindustani music
is usually taken for granted. There can be no doubt that the Mughal emperors
(1526-1858) as well as their rivals, contemporaries and earlier Indo-Muslim
rulers were thoroughly ecumenical in their patronage of music, employing
performers of Hindustani, Karnatic, Persian, Central Asian, Ottoman, and
even European music at their courts. Evidence for this eclecticity is found in
a wide range of sources, from Persian historical chronicles to miniature
paintings to European travel accounts
2
. Musicians and theorists too, from
both sides of the Indian/Persianate divide, demonstrated an interest in each
others music. The Sanskrit theorist Pundarika Vitthala for instance noted the
names of the Persian maqams in his sixteenth-century treatise Ragamanjari
(Sarmadee 1996: xxv), but by far the greater interest came from the Indo-
Persian theorists, who created an enormous corpus of musicological texts in
Persian exploring both Sanskrit theory and contemporary Hindustani musical
practice
3
. The obvious descent of such quintessential modern Hindustani
instruments as the sitar and sarod from West and Central Asian forebears is
further living testament to the meeting of diverse musical cultures facilitated
by Mughal rule in North India
4
.

1
This research was generously funded by a Postgraduate Award from the UK Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and a Small Research Grant from the British
Academy.
2
For the Mughal court see Brown 2003: 35-42 and Brown 2000; see also Faqirullah
1996: 95; Wright 1996a: 457; Wright 1996b: 680; Ahmad 1975: 101; Kamilkhani f. 135;
Wade 1998: pl. 7; Mir 1999: 46,72; Sarmadee 1996: xxxv, lii; Lahawri 1867-8: vol ii 5-7;
Woodfield 1990: 52; Das 1959: 211.
3
See Delvoye 1994 and Brown 2003: 27-81 for details.
4
See Miner 1993 for details.
90

However, the idea that this eclecticity of patronage translated into a
synthesis of local and foreign musical systems or styles is very difficult
to demonstrate. The concept of synthesis as applied to North Indian
classical music is deeply problematic. It is very hard to pin down exactly
what is meant by this term in Indian musicological discourse. There seems to
be an unexamined and unstated assumption that the term synthesis
describes a historically verifiable process whereby two separate musical
styles, Indian and Persian, were combined together to produce a new,
intermediate musical style called Hindustani music. However, the term
synthesis is customarily used in a very vague manner, without ever
defining precisely what that synthesis entailed on a music-technical level, or
how this confluence differed from simple appropriation. The evidence often
presented for synthesis
5
may in fact demonstrate only the most superficial
levels of cross-cultural encounter. Paintings, for example, of Indian and West
or Central Asian instruments being played side by side may simply be
testament to the very eclecticity of patronage already noted, or at best suggest
that instruments were borrowed from one system into another. It is simply
not possible to make any conclusive statement about a merging of styles on
the basis of such visual evidence because it is not possible to tell just by
looking at a picture - or even at an instrument itself - what the music played
on it sounded like, or indeed whether that music was Indian, Persian,
something in between, or something entirely different. Similarly, a few hints
of foreign melodic graftings into the Hindustani modal system seem to be
betrayed by the names of a number of Hindustani ragas (such as Rags Kafi
and Hijaj), and mixed ragas that have supposedly been created from maqams
(e.g. Faqirullah 1996: 59-63). But in the general absence of musical examples
in the treatises to confirm tangible melodic relationships leaving aside the
possibility that these relationships might in any case be coincidental these
names and associations remain merely suggestive.

This leads us to the question of what was identifiably and specifically
Persian about the non-Indian musical elements of this supposed Indo-
Persian synthesis. Except when the source leaves no room for doubt, our
modern choice of Persian to signify any and every foreign grafting into
Hindustani music seems to have been made on the somewhat random basis
that the Mughal treatises are written in Persian and Mughal courtly culture
often identified itself with Persian norms (Richards 1993: 61; OHanlon
1999: 55, 84). But the ethnicity of a musical style is certainly not

5
For example in Wade 1998: 27-32, 136-159; cf. 161, Brown 2001: 168 and Brown
2003: 40-45.
91
synonymous with the language in which its musicological treatises were
written, or even the language of its song texts. The Mughals may have used
Persian for official purposes and deferred to Persian cultural etiquette, but
they were not Persians; they came from Central Asia, drew their pride and
claims of sovereign legitimacy from their Turkic and Mongol ancestry (Alam
and Subrahmanyam 1998: 17), and spoke a variant of Turkish, and later
Urdu, as their mother tongue. The foreign musical influences on Hindustani
music could just as often and as easily have been Central Asian as Persian.
We frequently cannot tell from the available evidence, and I would suggest
that Indo-Persian as a descriptive term for whatever style resulted from the
musical encounter between India and its neighbours may be as much of a
misnomer as synthesis.

More persuasive suggestions of foreign graftings however - and specifically
Persian and Arabic influences in this case - have been made with respect to
scale types and instrumental tuning systems. This is important, because if any
stylistic synthesis occurred in the interaction between Indian and other
musical cultures, solid evidence for it must be found in the material building
blocks of the music itself - the notes of the scale and the patterns they formed
in raga and maqam, and the rhythmic patterns of tala and usul. It has been
noted for example that ragas with augmented seconds only began to appear
in North India after the Muslim conquests in the late 12th century. Te
Nijenhuis has also noted the widespread popularity of Arabic treatises on
music in medieval North India, arguing that the scale temperaments used by
the Sanskrit theorists Pundarika Vitthala, Somanatha, and possibly
Ramamatya, were influenced by Pythagorean systems for fretting stringed
instruments in Arabic and Persian musical traditions (1976: 4, 7). However,
these well-educated guesses still do not provide evidence that Persian styles
were mixed with Indian ones to create a new hybrid musical system. At most
they demonstrate the propensity of Hindustani musicians to borrow novel
melodic material, temperaments and methods of tuning from Persian theory,
perhaps opening up the possibility of playing maqams on the rudra vina and
ragas on the tanbur.

Surely a true synthesis should be more than just appropriation? One would
never claim that Puccinis opera Madame Butterfly is a synthesis of
Western and Japanese music just because he borrowed a few Japanese folk
tunes to add an authentic flavour to his score. It is too early to present a
coherent and fully elaborated theory on this, but I am beginning to think that
synthesis is neither an accurate nor a helpful concept to use when analysing
the interaction of Indian and West and Central Asian musics in the
development of Hindustani music if only because such a radical mingling
92
cannot be proven on the available evidence. Nor do I think influence is a
particularly useful concept to invoke, because it suggests a lack of agency on
the part of the influenced - the music makers, both individual and
collective. To be influenced even smacks of a lack of choice in the matter,
a forcible yet strangely agent-less imposition of Persian styles on passive
musicians helpless to do anything about it. Instead, I want to discuss these
interactions in terms of appropriation, a deliberate borrowing of interesting
concepts, techniques and methods from another musical system to enhance
ones own craft and tradition.

I am therefore going to sidestep the issue of synthesis altogether, and
consider some concrete ways in which both ideational and music-technical
concepts taken originally from Persian music theory and instrumental
practice were applied by Mughal theorists and musicians to the Hindustani
musical system in the mid to late seventeenth century. By sidestepping I
mean that I am not going to make any claims that the Hindustani style
underwent any radical movements in the direction of a so-called Persian
style as a result of these appropriations. However, I am going to demonstrate
that certain discrete aspects of the Hindustani system did change as a result of
active decisions made by individual musicians and theorists in the encounter
between Indian and other cultures, and Persian musical culture in particular.
Talking about specific appropriations from Persian tradition, rather than a
vaguely generalised synthesis, makes it possible to avoid fruitless and
unanswerable questions about style, while at the same time making it
possible to talk in concrete terms about verifiable historical interactions
between two musical systems.

The area I wish to consider here is the convergence in mid seventeenth-
century Hindustani performance practice of fretting systems and scale
temperaments on the Indian rudra vina and West Asian tanbur. In fact, I am
going to argue that this was not so much a convergence as a deliberate
transferral of tanbur techniques and methods onto the rudra vina for
pragmatic and ideational reasons. This convergence is revealed in a
remarkable series of musical treatises, primarily in Persian but also
confirmed in Sanskrit texts, and embraced by both theorists and some of the
foremost performing musicians of the Mughal era. By the end of the
seventeenth century, not only were the bin and tanbur fretted the same way
using the same scale temperament and the same series of fretting patterns
called thaths, but this was done according to a technical and ideational
93
system of Perso-Arabic origin
6
. This convergence made it possible for
Hindustani ragas and Persian maqams to be played on both the bin and the
tanbur - often by the same musicians - and for experiments in combining the
two instrumental techniques to be undertaken. The thath systems and scale
temperament set in place by the late seventeenth century seem to have lasted
until at least the nineteenth century, and are still partly recognisable in V N
Bhatkhandes more theoretical elaboration of the system. More interestingly,
however, the appropriation of this Persianate system for setting up the frets
had a significant cultural impact on the way in which Hindustani performers
thought about the extra-musical properties of the ragas.

Contrary to conventional music historiography, thath systems using their
original definition - that is to say, discrete series of fretting patterns for
stringed instruments into which the majority of ragas can be fitted (Gangoly
1935: 3; Widdess 1995: 31) - have a surprising longevity and continuity in
the Indo-Persian and later Urdu theoretical traditions. The key texts in this
tradition, written over nearly three hundred years, are a series of practical
manuals, or smaller sections of more general texts, on instrumental
construction and playing technique. The earliest known text to describe the
thaths, the Chishtiyya-i Bihishtiyya (f. 261a), was written in 1655 by
Alauddin Barnawi, the son of the earliest known composer of khayal, Shaikh
Bahauddin Barnawi. (It is worth noting in passing that this text contains four
khayal bandishes, which to my knowledge are the oldest khayal texts so far
discovered
7
.) They extend via Mirza Raushan Zamirs 1666 translation of
Ahobalas famous Sangita Parijata (e.g. f.49b), and Kamilkhanis two
seminal 1668 treatises on thath systems, to two early eighteenth-century
musical treatises (the anonymous Risala dar Rag (f.144b) and Risala-i
Musiqi (f.23b)), late eighteenth and early nineteenth century works on tanbur
technique (e.g. Risala dar navakhtan-i rag dar tanbur (f. 3a) and Risala-i
Musiqi-i Ghulam Muhammad (n.f.)), Captain Willards 1834 Treatise on the
music of Hindoostan (1882: 64)), and several sitar handbooks of the late
nineteenth century (see Miner 1993: 45). These texts nature as practical and
not theoretical manuals is important to note, because it indicates that before
Bhatkhande, thath systems were not conceived as a new way of classifying
the ragas designed to replace the all important aesthetic raga classificatory
system, the raga-ragini system. Instead, thaths coexisted with and were
subsidiary to the raga-ragini system, acting simply as a practical shorthand

6
For details of the thath system in use at the seventeenth-century Mughal court as a
practical shorthand for use in performance practice, see Brown 2003/4.
7
For details see Brown forthcoming a.
94
indicating to instrumentalists how to set up their frets for particular ragas
(Brown 2003/4: 8).

Figure 1. Comparison of Ahobalas and Kamilkhanis scales by string
fractions

The first scale in both cases constitutes Ahobalas and Kamilkhanis suddha
scale; Kamilkhanis suddha scale, being produced on a moveable-fret vina,
consists of all swaras in their lowest fret positions.

There is no fret position for komal Dha in Kamilkhanis thath system; for an
explanation of this conundrum see Brown 2003: 217-24 and 2003/4: 9.

There are two principal areas in which tanbur techniques and methods seem
to have been deployed by Hindustani musicians and theorists in the
seventeenth century. The first is scale temperament. Three treatises,
Ahobalas Sangita Parijata and Kamilkhanis treatises, give us the precise
locations of the 12 notes of the Hindustani scale along a single string of the
rudra vina worked out lengthwise according to Pythagorean calculations (see
Figure 1).

Both treatises were clearly written independently of each other, but the
closeness of their final calculations and the correspondence of several of their
scales or thaths testifies strongly to the basis of their tuning systems in
contemporary performance practice (see Figure 2).

95
Figure 2. Comparison of kamilkhanis seventeen- thath system with thath-s
extrapolated from Ahobala/Mirza Rausham Zamir
Corresponding that-s are highlighted in bold.

The reason for the transferral of tanbur fretting systems and temperaments
onto the rudra vina seems to lie in a so far unexplained change in the tuning
of the rudra vina from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth
century, from Ramamatyas vina tuned mandra Sa, mandra Pa, madhya Sa,
madhya Ma, to Ahobala and Kamilkhanis vinas tuned mandra Pa, madhya
Sa, madhya Pa, tar Sa.
96

Because of the tuning system he used, Ramamatya was able to establish his
frets very easily and swiftly using Pythagorean relationships across the
strings of the vina (see Figure 3).

It appears from Mirza Raushan Zamirs translation of Ahobala that a
crosswise method of fretting the new vina had also been used originally (see
Figure 4)
8
. However, because of the new tuning, it was considerably more
laborious and unsystematic than Ramamatyas method. By the time Ahobala
was writing, however, a much simpler lengthwise method for fretting
instruments by Pythagorean ratios had been in existence in North India for
some time: the Persian system used to fret the tanbur. This system is
described, for example, in a Persian treatise widely available in sixteenth-
century India, the Kashf al-Autar by Qasim bin Dost Ali Bukhari
9
. The
notes of the lower tetrachord of its basic scale are fixed at identical ratios to
Ahobalas (Qasim f. 244a; cf. Mirza Raushan Zamir f. 43b-4a). Furthermore,
as Ahobalas description of the tanbur shows, the tanbur was extensively
used in the performance of Indian music at this time, employing identical
fretting patterns thaths in Mirza Raushan Zamirs translation as Indian
instruments (f. 93a). Mirza Raushan Zamir states explicitly in his
commentary on Ahobalas string ratios that the bin and tanbur were fretted
using the same method as does Alauddin Barnawi (f. 261a) and that both
were instruments of equal prestige played by the kalawants (Mirza Raushan
Zamir f. 49b). In his tazkira of musicians Faqirullah described at least one
kalawant, Tarachand, who specialised in tanbur and whose late ustad Shauqi

8
For details, see Brown 2003: 204-12.
9
In her study of Somanathas Ragavibodha, te Nijenhuis also notes the popularity in India
of Safiuddins thirteenth-century Arab treatise, the Kitab al-Adwar, and its possible
influence on Indian methods of fretting (1976: 4, 7). Two copies of this treatise in
Persian (both Shahjahanabad 1664) and one in Arabic (Shahjahanabad 1663) are in the
important connoisseur Diyanat Khans collection in the British Library.
97
had been equally an expert in Indian and Persian music (1996: 209). It
therefore seems probable that Ahobala appropriated the lengthwise Persian
system of establishing the frets from the tanbur for use on the rudra vina, for
the entirely practical reason that it simplified the fretting of an instrument
tuned Pa-Sa-Pa-Sa.

Kamilkhanis string ratio system is if anything more clearly derived from
tanbur techniques. This further extension of Persianate fretting systems onto
the rudra vina was made possible by the one significant difference between
Kamilkhanis and Ahobalas instruments: Kamilkhanis vina used moveable
frets, covering two octaves of a single string tuned to Sa, exactly like the
tanbur (Kamilkhani f.125a-7a)
10
. Because the frets were positioned only in
relationship with Sa, they were liberated from the need to be in samvadi
relationship with swaras in crosswise alignment with them, making it
possible for Kamilkhani to use the harmonic proportions in tempering his
scale
11
.

The use of moveable frets also required Kamilkhani to lay out a table of
fretting patterns to explain where to move the frets in order to play different
ragas. Kamilkhanis table is the first known Hindustani thath system,
comprising first seventeen, then eight different scales. The more radical
nature of Kamilkhanis system begs the question as to whether or not
Kamilkhani was describing a traditional rudra vina. The inclusion in his first
thath system of a scale clearly borrowed from Persian music with a three-
quarter-tone Re called ghazal thath is suggestive. Indeed, the way he
establishes his frets is strikingly similar to the two later treatises on the
fretting of the tanbur
12
. It is possible that Kamilkhanis moveable frets,
harmonic proportions, and thath system represent a more radical transferral
of tanbur techniques onto the rudra vina, which may not have any lasting
impact on the fixed-fret rudra vina, but which may have influenced
subsequent developments on tanbur and ultimately sitar. At any rate, this full
convergence of rudra vina and tanbur construction must have facilitated

10
For details see Brown 2003/4 and Brown 2003: 198-201, 212-6.
11
All the fractions Kamilkhani uses to temper his scale correspond almost exactly to the
Pythagorean harmonic proportions, except that because he uses geomancy divination
from the geometric configuration of 16 dots to establish his frets, all his denominators
are required to divide into the number 96, a multiple of 16 (f. 126a). Hence the strange
fraction, 19/48, for Kamilkhanis Dha fret, which is as close as he can get to 2/5, the
harmonic major 6th, under the geomantic circumstances. Note also that his smallest
interval is set at 1/16, and his extended thath system in fact has 16, not 17, thaths.
12
For comparison see Risala dar navakhtan-i rag dar tanbur, f. 1b-8b, and Risala-i Musiqi-i
Ghulam Muhammad, section three.
98
considerable possibilities of movement between different styles and musical
systems. It is quite clear from all the treatises that once the frets had been
established, on the bin or on the tanbur, either instrument could be used to
play Persian or Hindustani music. Indeed, Alauddin Barnawi states that when
the thath was set up, any style of music could be played in it Persian,
Hindustani, Afghani, Kashmiri, and startlingly even European (firangi) music
(f.261b). And in theory he was quite right; the European system still used
Pythagorean tunings in the seventeenth century.
It is with respect to the moveable frets used in the thath system that several
treatises reveal the second area in which tanbur terminology became
indispensable to rudra vina performance practice: in explaining how and why
the frets were moved. The moveable thath system is described in exactly the
same way by Alauddin Barnawi, Kamilkhani, and the treatises on tanbur, as
well as in an important 1698 treatise, the Shams al Aswat, by Ras Baras Khan
Kalawant, a direct descendant of Tansen, the chief musician of the Mughal
emperor Aurangzeb
13
, and the greatest performing musician of his
generation
14
. Each of the seven swaras on the rudra vina was allocated to
one of the seven celestial bodies. Because Sa and Pa are fixed swaras, they
were allocated to the two celestial bodies with fixed orbits, the moon and the
sun respectively, whereas the swaras that move were allocated to the five
planets with vacillating orbits visible to the naked eye (Kamilkhani f. 126a-
b). The fact that both Alauddin Barnawi (f. 261a) and Ras Baras Khan (f.
16b-7a) endorse this terminology strongly indicates that it had entered the
ideational repertoire of practicing musicians at the highest levels.
More importantly though, it is Ras Baras Khan who lets us in on the secret of
its cultural meaning, a meaning that is reiterated by Kamilkhani. It was the
celestial bodies that determined the times and seasons at which the ragas
should be sung. Each celestial body is dominated by one of the four elements
earth, air, fire and water which according to the Indo-Islamic psycho-
physiological theories of Unani medicine act directly upon the four humours
that animate the functions of the human body (Ullmann 1978: 56-8).

13
Contrary to popular belief, Aurangzeb did not ban music. Although he renounced it
privately for personal religious reasons, he knowingly acquiesced in its continuing
patronage under his sons and noblemen throughout his reign. See Brown forthcoming b
for a refutation of this myth.
14
Ras Baras Khan was certainly still under the emperors patronage in 1698 (f. 11a-12a);
his father, Khushhal Khan, had been Aurangzebs chief musician before him. Khushhal
Khan was the son of Lal Khan, Shah Jahans chief musician, the son-in-law and chief
disciple of the great Bilas Khan, Jahangirs chief musician, son of Tansen (for details see
Brown 2003: 75-6; 108-9).
99


The celestial bodies determine the elemental character of their associated
swara. Because the maintenance of humoral equilibrium is of paramount
importance in maintaining health in Unani physiology, ragas that included
fiery swaras should thus be sung in the cool of the morning or the evening to
balance out the cold with heat, and similarly ragas with watery swaras
100
should be sung in the heat of the day (Ras Baras Khan f. 16b-7a). Ras Baras
Khan is therefore arguing that the time at which each raga should be
performed was determined in the Mughal period by each swaras effect on
the bodily humours
15
.

It is clear from Ras Baras Khans writings, which are based on his own
hereditary performance practices and oral theories, that he had no idea where
Indian knowledge ended and Persian knowledge began; it was all one to
him
16
. But by wholly embracing these Persianate concepts derived from
tanbur technique, and applying them to his understanding of Hindustani raga
aesthetics, Ras Baras Khan has supplied us with a cogent physiological
reason fully in accordance with his own hybrid worldview why conformity to
the time theory of ragas was so necessary in Mughal musical culture. It is in
the person of Ras Baras Khan that we perhaps get closest to a true sense of
what Indo-Persian musical synthesis might have meant.

Bibliography

Primary Sources
Ahmad, Aziz, trans. (1975) The British Museum Mirzanama and the
seventeenth-century mirza in India, Iran: Journal of the British Institute of
Persian Studies 8: 99-110.
Ahobala Pandit (1971) Sangita Parijata. Hathras, U P: Sangit Karyalaya.
Allaudin Barnawi (1655) Chishtiyya-i Bihishtiyya. Asiatic Society of Bengal,
Kolkata, Curzon Collection no. 78.
Anonymous (1719-48) Risala dar Rag. Raza Library, Rampur, no. 1252,
f.140-50.
Anonymous (early 18C) Risala-i Musiqi. National Library, Kolkata, MS no.
236, ff. 17b-40a.
Anonymous (late 18C) Risala dar navakhtan-i rag dar tanbur. (Risala-i ilm-
i musiqi, chapter 4) National Library, Kolkata, no. 237.
Faqirullah, Saif Khan (1996/1666) Tarjuma-i-Manakutuhala & Risala-i-Rag
Darpan. Shahab Sarmadee, ed. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre
for the Performing Arts and Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

15
For details of the extensive connections Mughal theorists and musicians drew
between the ragas and swaras and Unani medical theories and therapies, see Brown 2003:
188-201, 222-4.
16
For more information on Ras Baras Khans treatise the Shams al-Aswat, and its unique
contribution to Indo-Persian musicology, see Brown 2003: 56-61, 76-8.
101
Ghulam Muhammad (early 19C) Risala-i Musiqi-i Ghulam Muhammad.
Raza Library, Rampur, no. 1262.
Kamilkhani, Iwaz Muhammad (1668) Risala-i Ivaz Muhammad Kamilkhani
dar amal-i bin va thatha-i ragha-i Hindi (c.1668). Bodleian Library, Oxford,
Ouseley 158, f.123a-132b.
_____ Risala-i Kamil Khan dar bayan-i thata yani navakhtan-i sazha.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ousely 158, f.133b-136a.
Lahawri, Abdul Hamid (1867-8) Padishahnama. Kabir al din Ahmad and
Abd al Rahim, eds. Bibliotheca Indica. Calcutta: College Press.
Mir. Muhammad Taqi (1999) Zikr-i Mir: the autobiography of the eighteenth
century Mughal poet Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir. C M Naim, ed. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Mirza Raushan Zamir (1666) Tarjoma-i Parijatak. British Library, London,
India Office no. 808.
Qasim bin Dost Ali Bukhari (16C) Kashf al-Autar. British Library, London,
Or. 2361.
Ras Baras Khan Kalawant (1698) Shams al-Aswat. Salar Jung Museum
Library, Hyderabad, Mus.9.
Willard, N. Augustus (1882) [1834] A Treatise on the music of
Hindoostan. In Sourindro Mohun Tagore, ed. Hindu music from various
authors, 2nd ed. Calcutta: I C Bose.

Secondary Sources
Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, eds. (1998) The Mughal state,
1526-1750. Oxford in India Readings: Themes in Indian History. Oxford
University Press.
Bhatkhande, V N (1990) [1930] A comparative study of some of the leading
music systems of the 15th, 16th, 17th & 18th centuries. Delhi: Low Price.
Brown, Katherine Butler (2000) Reading Indian music: the interpretation of
seventeenth-century European travel writing in the (re)construction of Indian
music history, British Journal of Ethnomusicology 9.2: 1-34.
_____ (2001) Bonnie C Wade Imaging Sound, review in Yearbook for
Traditional Music 33:167-8.
_____ (2003) Hindustani music in the time of Aurangzeb. Unpublished
PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of
London.
_____ (2003/4) The that system of seventeenth-century North Indian ragas:
a preliminary report on the treatises of Kamilkhani, Asian Music 35/1:1-13.
_____ (forthcoming a) The origins and early development of khayal. In J
Bor, F Delvoye and E te Nijenhuis, eds. The history of North Indian music.
_____ (forthcoming b) Did Aurangzeb ban music? Questions for the
historiography of his reign, Modern Asian Studies.
102
Das, Harihara (1959) The Norris Embassy to Aurangzeb. Calcutta: K. L.
Mukhopadhyay.
Delvoye, Franoise Nalini (1994) Indo-Persian literature on art-music:
some historical and technical aspects. In Franoise Delvoye, ed. Confluence
of cultures. New Delhi: Manohar.
Gangoly, O C (1989) [1935] Ragas and raginis: a pictorial and iconographic
study of Indian musical modes based on original sources. New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal.
Miner, Allyn (1993) Sitar and sarod in the 18th and 19th centuries. Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass.
O'Hanlon, Rosalind (1999) Manliness and imperial service in Mughal North
India, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 42.1: 47-94.
Powers, Harold S and Widdess, Richard (2001) India III: Theory and
practice of classical music. In Stanley Sadie, ed. The new Grove dictionary
of music and musicians, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan.
Richartds, John F (1993) The Mughal empire. The New Cambridge History
of India. Cambridge University Press.
Sarmadee, Shahab (1996). Introduction to Tarjuma-i-Manakutuhala &
Risala-i-Rag Darpan, by Saif Khan Faqirullah. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi
National Centre for the Performing Arts and Motilal Banarsidass.
Tagore, Sourindro Mohun (1990) [1896] Universal history of music compiled
from divers sources together with various original notes on Hindu music.
Delhi: Low Price.
te Nijenhuis, Emmie (1976) The ragas of Somanatha, vol.i. Leiden: E J Brill.
Ullmann, Manfred (1978) Islamic medicine. Islamic Surveys. Edinburgh
University Press.
Wade, Bonnie C (1998) Imaging sound: an ethnomusicological study of
music, art and culture in Mughal India. Chicago Studies in
Ethnomusicology. Chicago University Press.
Widdess, Richard (1995) The ragas of early Indian music: modes, melodies,
and musical notations from the Gupta period to c.1250. Oxford Monographs
on Music. Oxford: Clarendon.
Wright, Owen (1996a) Middle Eastern song-text collections, Early Music
August: 455-69.
_____ (1996b) On the concept of a Timurid music, Oriente Moderno
76.2: 665-81.

Discussion

JB - I would like to come to one of the statements made in this paper
questioning the credibility of the visual aspect. I think it can become an
103
extremely important source of evidence if used along with relevant texts.
This paper also raises a question whether there is any visual source
suggesting co-existence of bin and tambur. If theoretically they were so
close, were they close in practice as well? How much of the theoretical
system of tuning and fretting was reflected in the practice? I havent come
across any visual evidence pointing to the co-existence of these instruments.

There is a dramatic shift between the instruments from the time of Akbar to
Shahjahan. We see Iranian instruments like ghichak, tambur, duff and nai in
the Moghul painitings, primarily up to the time of Akbar. Even in the
descriptions of thirty-six musicians of this period, there isnt much about the
practitioners of these Iranian instruments. However, all this changed at the
time of Shahjahan. Therefore, I think that visual evidence combined with the
literary evidence is extremely useful.

NJ - There is always a problem with measurements on string, because it
needs to be pressed down on the fret, and as we go near the nut, on either
side, the pressure changes in proportion. As a result, it is not possible to
obtain Pythagorean or any other scale for that matter, from such
measurements. There would be deviations. Therefore, the whole idea seems
like a theoretic rationalization of the performance practice.