In a bid to create a majoritarian state, one of the Hindu right’s key projects is recasting Indian history. I say recast, and not rewrite, for a reason. Professional historians who critically evaluate dominant versions of the past and produce rigorous revisionist accounts add to our knowledge. But the Hindu right-wing uses the past for political ends; scholarship is usually conspicuous by its absence. As part of a tactic to tap into the Islamophobia of a section of Hindus, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, relentlessly paint Muslim rulers in Indian history as a monolithic group of venal foreign invaders.
Last week, perhaps deciding that keeping up the invective against Muslim rulers was too labour-intensive, the central government’s National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) deleted, for a start, chapters devoted to the Mughal empire from its Standard 12 history textbooks. It will presumably extend this erasure to other Muslim dynasties.
I am not sure the regime will stop here. The imprint of Muslim rule, especially the Mughal empire, abounds in contemporary India, from tangible heritage, such as monuments, to culture, including clothes, food, language and music. The regime has long been attempting to stigmatise and marginalise Urdu.
Will it eventually make its way to khayal, the more widely practised of the two raga-bound genres with roots in north India, and the one that I have been learning for many years? The other genre is dhrupad, the older of the two. In the musical context, the word khayal, derived from Persian, means “imagination”. Today, the majority of khayal’s practitioners are Hindu, but in previous generations, a mix of Hindu and Muslim singers coexisted, while in its early phase, the genre emerged in a Sufi Islamic context.
The early form of khayal emerged in the late 16th century when Sufi musicians based in the region between Delhi and Jaunpur adapted the cutkula form, which used a Hindi dialect, to devotional forms such as the Persian qaul and tarana sung in Sufi communities from Amir Khusro’s (1253-1325) tradition, according to Katherine Butler Schofield, the foremost historian of khayal. Khusro, a musician, poet and scholar, lived during the rule of the Delhi Sultanate. The cutkula was a regional form that was in vogue during the reign of Sultan Hussain Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur, who ruled from 1458 to 1505 and was a great music lover.
The earliest version of khayal probably evolved into today’s drut bandish, the fast composition, also called the chhota khayal, which is meant to be sung in a spritely tempo, some experts say. The Sufi communities that were the crucible in which this emerged attracted both Hindus and Muslims, and its leading members had close relationships with Vaishnava sects, Butler Schofield says. In the early 17th century, khayal travelled from the Sufi communities to the qawwals of Hazrat Nizamuddin Dargah in Delhi, remaining within their lineage until the early 18th century, she further says.
In the next phase, many experts agree that Niyamat Khan “Sadarang” (1670-1748), a famous dhrupad singer and been player at the court of the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah “Rangila”, who ruled from 1714 to 1748, played a key role in further developing khayal. In particular, he began creating khayal compositions with some melodic movements from dhrupad, setting many of these compositions in a slow tempo. This version became the vilambit bandish, or slow composition, also called the bada khayal, which is now the centrepiece of a raga rendition in khayal. Sadarang was a kalawant, the term used for a singer from a hereditary lineage of musicians attached to a Mughal court. Both his slow and fast compositions are widely sung to this day.
“Khayal continued to be sung by both kalawants and qawwals all over north India and the Deccan until 1857, when many musicians were killed and scattered,” Butler Schofield said over email, in response to a query I sent her. “Important singers of khayal went to Gwalior [and other places], where they founded today’s khayal gharanas.”
By the end of the 19th century, hereditary khayal musicians, who were largely Muslim, likely because of khayal’s origin in Sufi communities, were teaching the genre to people outside their respective families, including Hindus. This eventually gave rise to celebrated Hindu musicians such as Bhimsen Joshi, Kishori Amonkar, Kumar Gandharva, Jasraj and Mallikarjun Mansur, from the era before the contemporary one.
A Muslim musician in my own pedagogical lineage, Khadim Hussain Khan (1907-1993), belonged to the same generation. He was a singer from the Agra gharana, a stylistic tradition of khayal. One of his leading students was Shrikrishna “Babanrao” Haldankar (1927-2016), who was one of the main gurus under whom my current teacher, the khayal vocalist and composer Arun Kashalkar (b. 1943), trained. Agra gharana musicians are particularly talented composers, and Khan was a master. One of my favourite compositions of his is set in a raga called Agre gharane ka Chandrakauns, invented by Mehboob Khan (1845-1922), a haunting variation of the more popular Chandrakauns. The lyrics are in a dialect of Hindi. The first verse goes as follows:
Teekhe nain tore bhaunhe hai kamaan/ Savari soorat mohani moorat (You, of intense eyes and bow-shaped brows/ Dark of face and enchanting of form).
The composition’s tune is stirring. Equally moving is the Muslim musician’s sensuous description of the Hindu god Krishna. Given its history, khayal abounds in such religious cross-fertilisation. It is like a beautiful tapestry, woven from the warp of Islam and the weft of Hinduism. One cannot pull out the threads of one culture without destroying the whole. In Pakistan, especially during Ziaul Haq’s rule, the state attempted to marginalise khayal because it was perceived as being too “Hindu”, as Yusuf Saeed shows in his wonderful film Khayal Darpan. But many musicians who either remained in Pakistan or moved there during Partition continued to keep the music alive, as the film also shows. One of them is Nasiruddin Sami. His rendition of the composition “Lanka charho Ram”, in raga Adana, at the Lahore Music Festival, which is available online, is a moving testament to khayal’s staying power and religious syncretism. But whether across the border or in this country, religious fundamentalism’s drive to “purify” culture ultimately threatens to stifle the voice and kill imagination itself.
The writer is an independent journalist and associate director of Literature Live
The early form of khayal emerged in the late 16th century when Sufi musicians based in the region between Delhi and Jaunpur adapted the cutkula form, which used a Hindi dialect, to devotional forms such as the Persian qaul and tarana sung in Sufi communities from Amir Khusro’s tradition. (Photo source: Wikimedia Commons) 
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