Since 2007, Coke Studio has rapidly become one of the most influential platforms in televisual, digital and musical media, and has assumed a significant role in generating new narratives about Pakistani modernity. The musical pieces in Coke Studio’s videos re-work a range of genres and performing arts, encompassing popular and familiar songs, as well as resuscitating classical poetry and the musical traditions of marginalised communities. This re-working of the creative arts of South Asia represents an innovative approach to sound, language, and form, but also poses larger questions about how cultural memory and national narratives can be reimagined through musical media, and then further reworked by media consumers and digital audiences. This article considers how Coke Studio’s music videos have been both celebrated and criticised, and explores the online conversations that compared new covers to the originals, be they much loved or long forgotten. The ways in which the videos are viewed, shared, and dissected online sheds light on new modes of media consumption and self-reflection. Following specific examples, we examine the larger implications of the hybrid text–video–audio object in the digital age, and how the consumers of Coke Studio actively participate in developing new narratives about South Asian history and Pakistani modernity.

In the aftermath of 1857, urban spaces and cultural practices were transformed and contested. Regional royal capitals became nodes in a new colonial geography, and the earlier regimes that had built them were recast as decadent and corrupt societies. Demolitions and new infrastructures aside, this transformation was also felt at the level of manners, sexual mores, language politics, and the performing arts. This article explores this transformation with a focus on women's language, female singers and dancers, and the men who continued to value their literary and musical skills. While dancing girls and courtesans were degraded by policy-makers and vernacular journalists alike, their Urdu compositions continued to be circulated, published, and discussed. Collections of women's biographies and lyrics gesture to the importance of embodied practices in cultivating emotional positions. This cultivation was valued in late Mughal elite society, and continued to resonate for emotional communities of connoisseurs, listeners, and readers, even as they navigated the expectations and sensibilities of colonial society.Over the nineteenth century, a variety of public women came under attack from both the colonial administration and Indian moralists and social reformers, who collapsed the distinctions between 'prostitutes', lower class singers, and elite courtesans. 1 There were several impulses behind the social marginalisation of female artists, which has come to be termed the 'anti-nautch (dance) movement'. 2 In the early nineteenth century, the British began to discourage relationships with Indian women, but also lost interest in indigenous entertainments and cultural practices, including the patronage of dancing girls. 3 Those sectors of the Indian middle class that fared well under the colonial economy also 1 S. Waheed, 'Women of "Ill Repute": Ethics and Urdu Literature in Colonial India', Modern Asian Studies 48:4 (2014), pp. 986-1023. 2 'Nautch', a corruption of the Hindustani nāc (dance), refers to the dancer and her/his ensemble of musicians.

Grateful thanks are extended to Katherine Butler Schofield, Richard Widdess, Francis Robinson, and the journal's anonymous peer reviewers for their comments and suggestions. 1 'Hindustani' here refers to the language (loosely, the predecessor of modern Hindi and Urdu) and culture of Hindustança region of central northern Indiaçassociated predominantly with Delhi and Lucknow. 2 Clearly music publishing continued after this period, but increasingly with a different set of priorities relating to the advance of gramophone recording, which are beyond the purview of the current discussion. 1818 and 1905 were the years of publication of the earliest and latest works discussed in this essay. 3 While the Mughal Empire (1526^1857) spread across the subcontinent, the cultural heartlands of the Empire were in the north, especially in Hindustan. The Empire continued until the suppression of the so-called 'Sepoy Mutiny' and Uprising (1857), but had been in a state of decline and collapse from the early 18th c. 4 While Anglophone scholarship conventionally employs 'musicology' as a translation of the 19th-c. concept Musikwissenschaft, in this article the term refers to the systematic and canonical epistemology of music that developed in the South Asian context. On the ethnocentrism and exclusionary consequences of Western music historiography, see

This article examines the literary strategies employed by a devotional poet who wrote about recent events in the eighteenth century, in order to shed light on contemporary notions of social responsibility. Taking the poetic treatment of Ahmad Shah Abdali's invasion of North India and the sacking of Vrindavan in 1757 as its primary focus, the article will discuss how political and theological understandings of lordship converged at a popular level, such that a deity could be called to account as a neglectful landlord as well as venerated in a bhakti context. It examines the redaction of tropes inherited from both vaisnava literature and late Mughal ethical thought, and considers the parallels between the Harikala Beli, a Braj Bhasha poem, and immediately contemporary developments in Urdu literature, particularly the shahr ashob genre. As such, it uses poetic responses to traumatic events as a guide to the interaction between multiple intellectual systems concerned with human and divine expectations and obligations.