Review: The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal by Richard David Williams

Kabir · April 19, 2026 · No comments

In an attempt to shift the focus from geopolitics, I am sharing this review of a book by Richard David Williams (my professor at SOAS). 

This piece was originally published in South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ) in January 2025. 

Richard David Williams’s The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal examines the Calcutta-based court-in-exile of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah (1822-1887), the last ruler of Awadh who was deposed by the British in 1856. The book is based on Williams’s doctoral thesis “Hindustani music between Awadh and Bengal, c. 1758-1905.” It develops a social history of how Hindustani classical music and dance responded to the transition from the Mughal Empire to British colonialism. Using previously unexplored sources in Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi, Williams aims to demonstrate the importance of Wajid Ali Shah’s exile in Calcutta in enabling the rise of that city as a celebrated center of Hindustani music. As he writes in the introduction:

Establishing the connections between Lucknow in Hindustan and Calcutta in Bengal challenges the notion of distant, regional performance cultures, and underlines the importance of aesthetics and the performing arts to mobile elite societies. Since Lucknow is associated with late Mughal or nawabi society, and Calcutta with colonial modernity, examining the relationship between the two cities sheds light on forms of continuity and transition over the nineteenth century, as artists and their patrons navigated political ruptures and social transformations (p. 3).

Most previous studies of Wajid Ali Shah treat his thirty years of exile as a footnote to the culture of Lucknow.1 In contrast, Williams focuses on the court-in-exile at Matiyaburj (located in southwestern Calcutta) in order to examine the impact of the nawab’s presence in Calcutta on the development of Hindustani music in Bengal. He examines the circulation of musicians between the transposed court and musical soirees in North Calcutta. Through his reconstruction of musical life at Matiyaburj, Williams demonstrates that the nawab’s musical innovations continued in Bengal and that he was engaged with his surrounding environment—for example, by composing lyrics in a mixed Bengali-Hindustani register. Continue reading Review: The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal by Richard David Williams

Moderation Notice

X.T.M · April 18, 2026 · 13 comments

A brief note to all commentators on standards going forward.

We prefer ten comments from ten commentators rather than a hundred comments from three commentators.

Capacity for unmoderated commenting has run out. Known authors will be held to a materially higher bar than anonymous readers, because name recognition carries responsibility.

Kabir has set the template. He has moved his argumentation out of comment threads and into original posts (India is Not a “Muslim Power” & Overzealous Pemra), which is exactly the trajectory we want to see from regular contributors.

Direct warning to BB: stop fanning thread fires. The metric this year is not comment density, it is commenter diversity. Low-quality threads drive high-quality voices off the platform, and we have watched it happen in real time. One dominant voice churning out heat costs us three or four signal contributors who quietly stop showing up.

If you have a substantive argument, write a post. If you have a reaction, keep it tight and keep it clean. Threads are not a venue for serial combat.

This applies to everyone, but authors especially. You set the tone whether you mean to or not.

– Moderation, Brown Pundits

India is Not a “Muslim Power”

Kabir · April 18, 2026 · 28 comments

In the comments on “Pakistanis=Indian Muslims With Sovereignty”, BB argued that India is a “Muslim Power”.   This is a patently ridiculous argument but it merits a full rebuttal.

The simple fact is that India is NOT a Muslim country.  India is 80% Hindu. Muslims are a minority (approximately 15%).   India is a constitutionally secular state. So under no reasonable definition is India a “Muslim Power”.

Pakistan is the world’s second-largest Muslim-majority country. It is projected that within five years it will overtake Indonesia to become the world’s most populous Muslim country.  Additionally, Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority nuclear power.  Finally, Pakistan is an “Islamic Republic”.

This argument is so blatantly ridiculous and disingenuous that I can’t believe this clarification is even necessary. But here we are.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to clarify my exchange with El Khawaja.  He argued that “Pakistanis are Pakistani and that’s it”.  I disagree with this position.  I am as patriotic as the next Pakistani but this quote expresses the belief of the State — a belief I argue is fundamentally wrong.

Post the loss of East Pakistan in 1971, the Pakistani State has doubled down on the belief that we are all “Pakistanis first”.  The argument goes that if people are allowed to identify as “Punjabi”, “Sindhi” etc this may lead to secession. This is obviously a red line for the State.  Thus, the introduction of “Pak Studies”, a course that all students must take from primary school through their undergraduate studies.

However, this indoctrination has not served to lessen people’s feelings of being “Punjabi”, “Sindhi” etc.

It would be much healthier if the Pakistani State accepted that Pakistan is a multi-ethnic–NOT multinational– country.

Seccession is not a realistic possibility since Pakistan is a nuclear power. So I think the State’s worries on this ground are overblown.

The efforts of BB (and to some extent RNJ) to undermine the Pakistani identity and classify us as “Indian” are patently obvious and not intellectually tenable.

However, I do believe that my compatriots also go too far and try to downplay the links that Pakistan has with the “Indian subcontinent”.

 

 

Overzealous Pemra

Kabir · April 18, 2026 · 6 comments

A few days ago RNJ had referred to Pakistani TV channels being issued show-cause notices for airing Indian content in connection with the passing of Asha Bhosle.

This is one of the rare occasions when RNJ and I actually agree on something.  Though there is a judgement of Pakistan’s Supreme Court that bans the airing of Indian content on TV–and this is what PEMRA relied upon in their arguments–I personally think that this law is counterproductive. Art should transcend borders.

Mirza Moeez Baig explains in DAWN:

The decision in Human Rights Case No 22753-S: In 2016, Pemra issued a circular banning all private TV channels from airing Indian content. The circular was assailed before the Lahore High Court, where Justice Mansoor Ali Shah declared that Pemra’s ban was unconstitutional. In 2018, however, the apex court suspended the LHC judgement. In keeping with the jurisprudence that characterised his tenure, then chief justice Saqib Nisar, while suspending Justice Shah’s well-reasoned judgement, thundered, “They are trying to obstruct the construction of our dam and we cannot even ban their channels.”

And:

The right to free speech includes the right to receive ideas, facts, knowledge, theories, creative and emotive impulses through theatre, da­­-nce, music and film. Critical to the foundation of an independent and free media is creating an environment co­­n­ducive to the widest possible dissemination of informa-tion from diverse and antagonistic sources.

Unsurprisingly, Pemra’s show-cause notice would only pass muster if the content celebrating Bhosle’s musical journey (i) offended Pakistan’s ideology, (ii) was immoral, (iii) or jeopardised Pakistan’s security and integrity. Needless to say, Bhosle’s music posed no such existential threat.

I will end this post with a clip of Asha ji and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s piece “Khayal in Gaud Sarang”

 

 

 

Pakistanis = Indian Muslims With Sovereignty?

X.T.M · April 18, 2026 · 96 comments

Part 1: Who Can Speak for the Muslims of India

Part 2

BB has made a comment calling Pakistanis “strayed Muslim Indians“; which does not quite make sense, because Pakistanis are both Indic & Islamic, uniquely so. One cannot deny the highly syncretic and distinct Muslim subculture that has come about from a very long and deep history in India. It cannot be subsumed into an Indian identity in any meaningful way without acknowledging that distinctiveness.

But the phrasing opens a useful equation.

Pakistanis = Indian Muslims with sovereignty.

Continue reading Pakistanis = Indian Muslims With Sovereignty?

Prominent lawyer Raza Kazim passes away at 96

Kabir · April 17, 2026 · 8 comments

More importantly (for me) Raza developed the “Sagar Veena”–a plucked string instrument.  His daughter, Noor Zehra Kazim, is the foremost exponent of this instrument.  His grandson, Rakae Jamil (a personal friend of mine) is a sitarist who trained at the Sangeet Research Academy in Calcutta.

From DAWN:

Continue reading Prominent lawyer Raza Kazim passes away at 96

India That Is Bharat: The Exceptional Uniqueness and the Dual Identity

X.T.M · April 16, 2026 · 67 comments

This is a Brown Pundits Precedent Post.

We have been asked, repeatedly and in good faith, why Brown Pundits appears to handle criticism of India with more care than it handles criticism of Pakistan. The charge is that we hold a double standard. It deserves a direct answer.

The answer is that we do hold a distinction, and we are not embarrassed by it, but it is not the distinction the charge assumes.

The Distinction

Pakistan is roughly seventy-nine years old as a sovereign state. India as a sovereign state is roughly seventy-nine years old as well. As nation-states under international law, as signatories to the United Nations, as entities with currencies and armies and foreign ministries, the two are pari passu. We treat them that way and we will continue to treat them that way. On every question that applies to nation-states as nation-states, the two sit at the same table and get the same scrutiny.

But India is not only a nation-state. India is also a civilisation, and the civilisation is not seventy-nine years old. The civilisation is, give or take the archaeological argument one prefers to have, somewhere around five thousand years old. It stretches from the Indus Valley through the Dravidian-Aryan synthesis, through the Vedic period, through the great classical flowering, through the medieval syntheses, through the colonial rupture, and into the present. One can argue the exact nature of the continuity. One cannot plausibly argue that the continuity is not there. It is there in the same way it is there for China. It is there in the same way it is there for Egypt. It is there.

This is not a claim about superiority. It is a claim about category. Pakistan is a sovereign state. India is a sovereign state and a civilisation. The two facts do not cancel. They coexist.

The Civilisational Peer Group Is Short

How short is short. At the level of a nation-state that is co-terminus with a multi-millennial civilisation, the peer group is essentially India and China. Two entries. Iran and Egypt have the civilisational depth but have been transformed by the Greco-Arab conquest, in an unalterable fashion. Greece has the civilisational depth but the modern Greek state is a nineteenth-century construction with limited political continuity to the ancient polis; the Ottoman interlude was equally determinative. Israel is a unique case and we will come to it.

That leaves India and China. Two countries on the planet where the nation-state is also the civilisation, where the sovereign political entity today is a recognisable continuation of the same cultural-linguistic-religious matrix that produced its earliest texts, and where the ordinary citizen, with some education, can read something written two or three thousand years ago in a language that is still a living vehicle of the culture.

That is not a small claim. It is also not a nationalist claim. It is simply a descriptive one.

The Indian Exception Continue reading India That Is Bharat: The Exceptional Uniqueness and the Dual Identity

Open Thread; the endless Argument of the Archives

X.T.M · April 16, 2026 · 147 comments

What We Did

Brown Pundits was founded as a diaspora project. A handful of Brown people thinking out loud about where they came from, what it meant, and whether the subcontinent could be understood in English without either romanticising it or apologising for it.

What happened instead was stranger and more valuable. The site became a place where the subcontinent argues with itself in public, without editorial supervision, without a line to hold, and without the particular kind of cowardice that afflicts publications which need to keep everybody happy.

Over the past week, we forced the archive into coherence. All 3,987 published posts; every Open thread, Genetics argument, Civilisational essay, Partition debate, BrownCast episode, Film review, Obituary, every Moderation notice, are now part of a single navigable structure. For the first time, the site can be read not as a sequence of posts, but as a narration.

What the Archive Revealed

The Partition of India is not a historical event on this site. It is a living emergency. Every argument we have had about Pakistan’s identity, India’s secularism, the Muslim League, Jinnah that is QeA, the two-nation theory, Bangladesh’s founding, the treatment of minorities across all three successor states; all of it is 1947 refusing to close. The wound keeps producing arguments because it was never properly treated. The British left. The questions they left behind did not. Brown Pundits has been, among other things, one of the few places in the English-speaking world where those questions are fought over by people who have actual stakes in the answers, not just professional opinions about them.

Pax Persica

Continue reading Open Thread; the endless Argument of the Archives

The Ukrainian Interlude is over

X.T.M · April 16, 2026 · 7 comments

The Iranian One has just started

Nobody seems to be interested in Pakistan’s diplomatic resurrection. What does it mean that a country written off as failed just a year ago is now the hinge of a regional peace settlement and averting World War Three on the double. This is the actual story of 2026 and it is not on our comment boards.

Pakistan: From Failed State to Diplomatic Champion

A year ago, before Operation Sindor, Pakistan was being written off in every serious strategic publication in the English language. The IMF was reluctant. Every mainstream Indian and Western analyst agreed. Pakistan was finished as a regional actor of any significance.

Today Pakistan is mediating, leading, the Iran crisis. The Hormuz situation, which could have escalated into a catastrophic closure of the world’s most important oil chokepoint, is moving toward resolution largely because Pakistan has positioned itself as the only party credible with Tehran, Riyadh, and Washington simultaneously.

The war that looked civilisational is now looking more like a pivot point. Pakistan is not a failed state. India is not uniquely ascendant under PM Modi. The question of whether the BJP holds power post-Modi is now a live one, not a theoretical one. Iran is not isolated. Israel is not unbreakable. The realignment is happening now, in real time, and almost nobody seems to be writing about it.

Iran Stood Up Continue reading The Ukrainian Interlude is over

The Inward Turn: Muslim Politics in the Indian Subcontinent from the Fall of the Mughals to the Present

Omar Ali · April 15, 2026 · 24 comments

A friend from Twitter (@kartheeque) has written a nice detailed post about the inward turn in Muslim politics in India and its various consequences. It is well worth a read. The original is available at Substack as “The Inward turn..” (he goes by Viduracounsel) He has kindly consented to posting the whole thing here as well:

Continue reading The Inward Turn: Muslim Politics in the Indian Subcontinent from the Fall of the Mughals to the Present

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