May 06 2022 to May 06 2022 5:30 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

From Konkan to Coromandel – Deccan Heritage, Art and Culture (Summer 2022)

From Konkan to Coromandel – Deccan Heritage, Art and Culture (Summer 2022). The fourth season of seminars and lectures co-organized by the Deccan Heritage Foundation, the Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, and the Bangalore International Centre, presenting the pioneering work of scholars in various cultural fields from both the Northern and Southern Deccan regions of India.

Mahlaqa Bai ‘Chanda’, ‘The Moon’, sang and danced her way into the historical firmament when in 1799 she presented a book of her songs to the Resident of Hyderabad, John Malcolm, in the middle of a nautch party. Renowned as the first Indian courtesan to write a divan of Urdu poetry, Mahlaqa Bai was equally famous for her affairs with powerful men at the Nizam of Hyderabad’s court. Obscured by her luminescence today, however, is the man behind The Moon, her master-teacher Khushhal Khan ‘Anup’, ‘The Incomparable’. As celebrated and as central to Hyderabad’s courtly culture as his illustrious pupil was at the time, Khushhal Khan left behind an enormous corpus of songs, several musical treatises, and an illustrated ragamala that tell us a great deal about musical life and lives in Nizami Hyderabad c.1780–1830. Join music historian Katherine Schofield as she discusses what we can learn about the lives of these two remarkable characters and the court of which they were apart from Khushhal Khan’s collected works.

In collaboration with the Deccan Heritage Foundation, the Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, and the Bangalore International Centre.