ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers the import of a significant corpus of collections of courtly Hindustani songs that emerged in unprecedented number between about 1770 and 1830. She presents those collections that are all unambiguously anthologies of the songs performed by elite musicians in the Hindustani tradition in Delhi and the post-Mughal soirees of Lucknow, Hyderabad, Kathmandu, the Marathas and even of the British. Richard Johnson's collection of music-related manuscripts indicates that he intended to participate in this late Mughal culture of connoisseurship on a fully informed basis and even to influence it from within. The set of materials reveals his strong desire to obtain an insider's understanding of how the Hindustani rag system of melodic modes worked. Musicologists and literature scholars have also examined the literary implications of anthologies of courtly dhrupad songs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cheap mass-produced songbooks in colonial-era Hindi and Urdu, and collections of their art-music counterparts from nineteenth-century Bengal.
