Musical Culture under Mughal Patronage: The Place of Pleasure

Abstract This chapter theorizes the place of Hindustani music in Mughal thought and social life, from the last decades of Akbar’s reign until the death of Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir I (1707). Mughal understandings of the human being, and thus of the social and political worlds, were dominated by two parallel binaries deriving from Persianate discourse on ethics and proper governance: the inner struggle between reason and the emotions anger and desire; and the outer struggle between duty and pleasure. For virtue to prevail, reason and duty must ultimately master desire and pleasure. This mastery had to be displayed to the world if it were to be deemed a virtue at all. Hindustani music was understood in Mughal writings as the sonic vehicle of the emotions joy, love, and longing, which belonged to the domain of desire. Musical patronage and connoisseurship therefore became a major social and political arena in which the inner struggle to place desire under rational control could be outwardly manifested. Patronage and connoisseurship of music, recited poetry, dance, youthful beauty, and other ephemeral phenomena were the core practices of the domain of pleasure in the Mughal world, conducted largely within the intimate social institution of the majlis or mehfil (assembly). Listening to music in the majlis could be dangerous for Mughal men because of its exploration of desire, but music was simultaneously indispensable to Mughal courtiers because of its use value in fortifying the primary Mughal virtue of male-to-male affection and as a cure for physical and mental disease.