Indo-Islamic music in Little Awadh

This paper draws on my doctoral research on Indo-Islamic music in South Asia to discuss how the hyperlocal travelling cultures of Indo-Islamic music becomes a tool to map the rhizomatic networks of inter-city migration of North Indian Muslims to Bengal in the mid 19th century. The varied consequences of the movement and displacement of Bihari Muslims and its associated socio-political vulnerabilities forms the core of this chapter. Deriving from ethnography conducted in Little Awadh in Calcutta I argue how the Shia liturgies of Hussaini poet Saleha Begum Maqhfi encode the “hijrat” or migration of Bihari Muslim families to Calcutta. Based on literary and textual analysis of exemplary marsiya and nauha composed by Maqhfi, I wish to argue how her Indo-Islamic liturgies honouring Imam Hussain’s valour and benefaction may also add to our understating of the many socio-political and emotional anxieties faced by Bihari “mutwassit” (middle class) Muslims of Little Awadh in Calcutta.