The Illiterate Ustad and Other Myths: Writing on Music in the Late Mughal World. The Tenth Dr Ashok Da Ranade Memorial Lecture, November 2021

UNREFERENCED LECTURE TRANSCRIPT; DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION --- One of Dr Ashok Ranade's major contributions to the field of Indian musicology was his seminal book, On Music and Musicians of Hindoostan. While Dr Ranade was a champion of the intellectual depth and virtuosity of the sina-ba-sina mode of transmission of the guru-shishya-parampara, he also made the fundamentally important point that oral and literate traditions in Indian music have not historically been in opposition to each other, nor have they ever been mutually exclusive. As if to prove his point, shortly after the death of the protagonist of one of Dr Ranade’s chapters, the great Hindustani singer Ustad Faiyaz Hussain Khan-sahib, the late Professor R C Mehta received a Persian manuscript that had been in the Ustad's possession. It turned out to be one of several versions of a music treatise written in the first decade of the nineteenth century, in Persian and Brajbhasha, by a hereditary ustad, Khushhal Khan ‘Anup’, whose father Karim Khan had been the special disciple of Firoz Khan Adarang. What role did this manuscript play in Ustad Faiyaz Khan-sahib’s understanding of his tradition of Hindustani music and musicianship? Did reading it inform his performances? COULD he even read it? Didn’t Bhatkhande tell us the Muslim ustads of Hindustani music were illiterate—ignorant of authoritative theoretical writings on music and therefore susceptible to passively transmitting changes to the tradition they were entrusted with embodying? In her wonderful work on The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting, Molly Aitken has daringly slain some of the mythical beasts of the art-historical jungle: notably that Mewar paintings were mechanical and conventional, conservative and passive products of artists who were unconscious of what they were doing. Scholars’ understanding of the nature of tradition and its relationship with innovation in North Indian classical music has customarily been slightly different; it is recognised, for example, that “tradition” can often simply be a rhetorical device used to mask or to justify individual creativity and virtuosity. But when it comes to Hindustani music’s hereditary Muslim masters, or ustads, a very similar legend to the tale about Rajput traditional painters has long been in operation: that the ustads were illiterate; ignorant of authoritative theoretical writings on music and therefore susceptible to passively transmitting incremental changes to the tradition they were entrusted with embodying. In this paper I will demonstrate that far from being illiterate, several hereditary ustads in the families of Tansen and Sadarang right down to the twentieth century were literate in the written discourses of Indian music and highly conscious of the need to assert their authority over their traditions through writing. Even those family members who were not formally literate were steeped in literacy and deeply familiar with the written as well as embodied knowledges of their families. The literate ustad changes the way we understand the battle for Hindustani music’s modern soul in the early twentieth century.