The Scholarly Ustad: Hindustani Music's Muslim Hereditary Professionals and Their Textual Traditions

Abstract

Hindustani music's Muslim hereditary professional performers—known as ustād-s—have long been depicted as essentially nonliterate. Colonial and nationalist texts condemned the ustads for their ignorance and illiteracy; latter-day ethnomusicological texts celebrate the same ustads for their orality and embodiment. Based on original translations of twentieth-century sources in Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali, this article highlights a contrasting dimension of the Muslim hereditary tradition in Hindustani music: a three-hundred-year commitment by the ustads themselves to the saṅgītaśāstra, a succession of technical musical treatises traceable to antiquity.