Eclipsed by the Moon: Mahlaqa Bai and Kushhal Khan Anup in Nizami Hyderabad

6 May 2022

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 Khushhal Khan’s work, and more about what we can learn of the lives of these two remarkable characters and the court of which they were a part.

View the video below.