Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India

Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research spans modern and contemporary Hindi literature (The Hindi Public Sphere: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, 2002), cultural history (she edited Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, 2006), popular literature and the history of the book (Print and Pleasure: The Genres of Commercial Publishing in Nineteenth-century North India, 2009), and multilingual literary history (Hindi and Urdu Before the Divide, 2010; After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-century North India, co-edited with S. Sheikh, 2014).

Katherine Butler Schofield (née Brown) is a historian of music in  Mughal India and the colonial Indian Ocean. Working largely with Persian sources for Hindustani music c.1570-1860, she has established music as central to Mughal technologies of sovereignty and selfhood, identified classicisation processes at work in early modern Indian arts, examined the role of connoisseurship in nourishing male friendships, told tales about ill-fated courtesans and overweening ustads, and traced the lineage of the chief musicians to the Mughal emperors from Akbar to Bahadur Shah Zafar. Her current European Research Council project, "Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean" (2011-2015), investigates the ways in which the musical field was transformed in India and the Malay world c.1750-1900 as precolonial polities gave way to colonial regimes. As part of this project she is co-writing a book, Hindustani Music Between Empires: Alternative Histories.