Of Music and the Maharaja: Gender, affect, and power in Ranjit Singh's Lahore

Abstract

ReuseThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. This licence only allows you to download this work and share it with others as long as you credit the authors, but you can't change the article in any way or use it commercially. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ TakedownIf you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. AbstractThis essay focuses on performing artists at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (r. 1801-1839), the last fully sovereign ruler of the Punjab and leader of what is termed the Sikh Empire. After Ranjit's death, his successors ruled for a mere decade before British annexation in 1849. Ranjit Singh's kingdom has been studied for the extraordinary authority it exercised over warring Sikh factions and for the strong challenge it posed to political rivals like the the British. Scholarly exploration of cultural efflorescence at the Lahore court has ignored the role of performing artistes, despite a preponderance of references to them in both Persian chronicles of the Lahore court and in European travelogues of the time. I demonstrate how Ranjit Singh was partial to musicians and dancers as a class, even marrying two Muslim courtesans in the face of stiff Sikh orthodoxy. A particular focus is on Ranjit's corps of 'Amazons'-female dancers performing martial feats dressed as men-the cynosure of all eyes, especially male European, and their significance in representing the martial glory of the Sikh state. Finally, I evaluate the curious cultural misunderstandings that arose when English 'dancing' encountered Indian 'nautching', revealing how gender was the primary axis around which Indian and European male statesmen alike expressed their power. Ubiquitous in the daily routine of Ranjit and the lavish entertainments set up for visitors, musicians and female performers lay at the interstices of the Indo-European encounter, and Anglo-Sikh interactions in particular.* For their valuable guidance on this research, I wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers of the article, and especially

Music and Religion: Trends in Recent English-Language Literature (2015–2021)

“…The above analysis highlights this privileging of diversity through four recurrent trends. In RM literature on gender and sexuality there are many publications that articulate marginalized perspectives, such as those of LGTBQIA+ communities (e.g., Jones 2017;Kohfeld 2018;Lorea 2018;Moore 2018a;Taylor 2018;Kapuria 2020;Andrews 2020;Thorne 2020). Other authors focus on themes of race and ethnicity, with topics and peoples situated throughout the globe (e.g., Khabeer 2016-Muslim hiphop in the U.S.; Harris 2019-Uyghurs in China; Karkabi 2021-Israeli pop), including a large sub-set of the literature dealing specifically with music of Africa and the African diaspora (e.g., Booker 2015;Sterling 2015;Gidal 2016;Snyder 2016;McCormack 2017;Dempsey 2017;Bridgeman 2019).…”

“…A few themes emerged in my review of these texts. First, several authors explore relationships between music and transgendered identities, including androgyny in Little Richard's stage shows (Andrews 2020), female cross-dressers in nineteenth-century Sikh courts (Kapuria 2020), and drag in Santeria rituals (Thorne 2020;Kohfeld 2018).…”

Socio-Cultural Aspects of Identity Formation of Lahore City

“…Traditional food is improved with butter ingredients, vegetables, and meat flavors (Bhatti & Kharl 2018). The city's identity is interwoven with the remnants and monuments of diverse civilizations, rendering it a veritable repository of cultural legacy (Kapuria, 2020). The walled city of Lahore, the very heart of the city, originally conceived as a defensive stronghold during the Mughal era, traces its origins to the very birth of Lahore itself Talbot, 2007)then Lahore around the ages has been a Jain city, a Buddhist city, a Hindu city, and then a Hindu-Muslim-Sikh city (Murphy, 2010), and a blend of faiths that made this an extremely tolerant place.…”