I am very pleased to share with you my new podcast, “The Courtesan and the Memsahib: Khanum Jan meets Sophia Plowden at the 18C Court of Lucknow”. Professionally produced by Chris Elcombe with harpsichordist Jane Chapman, the podcast is part of my current project “Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India, 1748–1858,” sponsored by the British Academy in association with the British Library. For those of you who don’t already know:

Khanum Jan was a celebrity courtesan in the cantonment of Kanpur and the court of Asafuddaula of Lucknow in 1780s North India. Famed then for her virtuosic singing, dancing, and speaking eyes, Khanum became famous again in twentieth-century musicology because of her close musical interactions with a remarkable Englishwoman, Sophia Plowden. Through Plowden’s papers and extraordinary collection of Khanum’s repertoire, it is possible to reconstruct songs from the Lucknow court as they may have been performed 200 years ago, in both Indian and European versions. In this podcast, Katherine Butler Schofield tells the story of these two women, and harpsichordist Jane Chapman joins her to perform some of Khanum’s “Hindustani Airs”. The intertwined stories of Khanum and Sophia show that using Indian sources of the time to read between the lines of European papers and collections gives us a much richer view of this sadly short-lived moment of intercultural accord in late Mughal India.

I hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it!

With best wishes,

Katherine