Review: Lineage of Loss:Counternarratives of North Indian Music by Max Katz

This review was published in South Asia Research Vol. 41 (3), 2021

Max Katz, Lineage of Loss: Counternarratives of North Indian Music (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), xii + 201 pp.

Professor Janaki Bakhle (2005) described a meeting between Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936) and Karamatullah Khan (1848-1933), a sarod player from Allahabad. During this meeting, which took place in 1908 or 1909, Khan argued that knowledge of Hindustani music did not come only from Sanskrit texts, but also from those in Arabic and Persian. To him, it did not matter if the ragas had come to India from Persia or Arabia or gone from India to those countries. Since Bhatkhande was obsessed with finding a Sanskrit origin for an Indian national music, he was deeply upset by these arguments. Bakhle (2005: 112) writes that Karamatullah Khan was voicing a prescient and progressive claim against national, ethnic and religious essentialism when it came to music, while Bhatkhande was looking for a ‘classical’ music ‘that existed in his time, not one that used to exist in ancient times’. For Bhatkhande, Khan was a member of the class of hereditary Muslim musicians who were responsible for what, in his view, was the degradation of ancient Hindu music.

Katz focuses on the Lucknow gharana, an hereditary musical lineage of sarod and sitar players, of whom Karamatullah Khan was a major representative. The son of Niamatullah Khan (d. 1903), a court musician of the last Nawab of Lucknow, Wajid Ali Shah, Karamatullah in turn served as ustad of his nephew, Sahkawat Husain Khan (1875-1955), one of the most renowned sarod players of the early twentieth century and a teacher at the Marris College in Lucknow, now Bhatkhande Music Institute Deemed University.

Katz attempts to understand how the Lucknow gharana, as one of the most renowned instrumental traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suffered enormous decline in prestige over the course of the twentieth century, such that even aficionados of Hindustani music have rarely heard of it today. He links this (hi)story to the loss of prestige suffered by hereditary, mostly Muslim musicians, ‘as their traditions were appropriated and rebranded by a reform movement led by English-educated, urban upper-class elites’ (p. 23). Pandit Bhatkhande himself was one of the main representatives of this reform movement.

Katz deals most directly with this reform movement and its impact on Muslim hereditary musicians in Chapter 4, ‘The College and the Ustad’, based on his 2012 article, ‘Institutional Communalism in North Indian Classical Music’, and in Chapter 5, titled ‘Voices and Visions from the Archive’. Chapter 4 focuses on Sakhawat Husain Khan’s experiences as a teacher at Marris College until his death in 1955. Drawing on the concept of institutional communalism, defined by the sociologists Patricia and Roger Jeffrey as the ‘grinding and routinized aspects of communalism that pervade people’s daily lives’ (p. 145), Katz observes that this institutional communalism differs from incidents of riots and pogroms, while at Marris College, which ‘depended on Muslim hereditary musicians as its earliest professors, the ideology shaped within the institution alienated and eventually dispossessed those very musicians’ (p. 138). The everyday operations of the college promoted a distinctly Hindu-centric nationalism invested in Muslim oral musical traditions, but not in Muslims themselves (p. 138). However, this communalism was not the result of biases or prejudices of any specific individual. Rather, it was ‘a nearly inevitable consequence of the ideological basis on which the college was founded’ (p. 170).

Chapter 5 discusses how the arguments by Karamatullah Khan and his brother Asadullah ‘Kaukab’ Khan (ca. 1850-1915) regarding Hindustani music, contained in their treatises, differed from those of Pandit Bhatkhande and the reform movement. Contrary to the music reform movement’s dismissive characterisation of Muslim hereditary musicians as ‘illiterates’, both Karamatullah and Kaukab Khan ‘also authored treatises of music theory that reveal their own self-consciously modern orientation and document their participation in vital debates about the modernity of Hindustani music raging in the early decades of the twentieth century, while simultaneously drawing on a six-hundred-year legacy of Islamicate texts on Indian music’ (p. 174). Karamatullah Khan’s book has been out of print for more than a century, while Kaukab Khan’s unpublished, unfinished manuscript had not been thoroughly investigated until Katz undertook the task.

According to Katz, ‘the principal contribution of Karamatullah and Kaukab Khan lay in their ability to draw on the Indo-Persian tradition to both participate in and critique the nationalist effort to shape musical modernity in their own time’ (p. 177). While Pandit Bhatkhande and others claimed that Hindustani music was essentially a Hindu tradition that had fallen into decline, partly due to the influence of illiterate Muslim musicians, Muslim musicians were rarely able to rebut these views. This makes the re-discovery of Karamatullah and Kaukab Khan’s treatises so important. Katz writes that these texts ‘present a contemporaneous critique of the reform movement that both envisions a robust musical modernity and explicitly emphasizes the rightful place of Muslims and streams of knowledge from the Islamicate world in the history of Hindustani music’ (p. 182). Additionally, by producing scholarly treatises, the brothers undermined the stereotype of Muslim musicians as uneducated, backward and pre-modern (p. 182).

Agreeing with Bhatkhande’s core propositions, yet asserting the preeminence of Islamicate contributions to music history, Kaukab Khan signals a ‘radical intervention in the debate over music and modernity’ (p. 198). Both brothers agreed with Bhatkhande that music needed to be systematised, so that it could be widely taught. Yet they disagreed with his over-privileging of the Sanskrit tradition and his belief that Muslims were responsible for Hindustani music’s decline. Katz concludes that Kaukab’s anticolonialism and simultaneous rejection of an incipient Hindu nationalism suggest a remarkably sophisticated plea for the value of long-standing cultural syncretism, ‘as the basis for a non-exclusionary modernity’ (p. 207).

In these days of increasing Hindu nationalism, Katz’s book is an extremely important work, illustrating larger trends while focused narrowly on attempts to answer the question of why the Lucknow gharana and other hereditary Muslim lineages were marginalised over the course of the twentieth century. He deserves great credit for introducing readers to a lineage that is almost forgotten today, while at the same time filling in a critical background story of institutional communalism. Scholars of both Hindustani music and resurgent nationalism will find this book insightful and of great value.

Reference

Bakhle, J. (2005) Two Men and Music: Nationalism and the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.