11:00
King's College London
May 28
King's Building Room: Great Hall Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS
Please join us to celebrate Professor Katherine Schofield in this Inaugural Professorial Lecture:
If there is a heaven on earth: life, death, and the spaces between in South Asian music
اگر فردوس بر روی زمین است
همین است و همین است و همین است
The ghazal is a short, lyrical genre of poetry that has been widely embraced from Syria to Sumatra as a privileged form of emotional, artistic, and devotional expression. It originated in Arabic but made its main home further east in the Persianate world — in Iran, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. With its lilting metres and musical rhymes, the ghazal lends itself irresistibly to being set to melody, and has long enjoyed a second life throughout India and Pakistan as a major song form set in the classical ragas.
Moving backwards and forwards between the Mughal empire (1526–1858) and contemporary examples from India and Pakistan, in this lecture I will address the live musical performance of Persian and Urdu ghazals in two different, but ultimately linked, spaces: the secular mehfil — the intimate gathering for listening to elite music and poetry — and the majlis-i samā' (“assembly for spiritual listening”) at the Sufi shrine. Building on work I published twenty years ago on the occupational liminality of professional musicians, I will argue that in both the mehfil and the majlis, music acts to create a liminal space-time, or barzakh, in which listeners believe the isthmus between heaven and earth, the dead and the living, momentarily becomes thin, creating a highly emotionally charged experience.
The quotation that forms my title is half of a Persian couplet attributed to the famous Indian poet Amir Khusrau (1253–1325): "If there is a heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here". It is said to refer to Kashmir, or to the city of Delhi, or any number of other beautiful places built upon the Islamic idea of paradise as a garden. In this lecture I will explore how the ghazal when sung in raga works upon the listening body to create a heightened, in-the-moment experience of dwelling with the beloved in the garden that never dies — and in so doing serves to underline the listener’s own sense of transience and mortality: of life in the face of death.
Katherine Schofield is Head of the Department of Music and Professor of South Asian Music and History, specialising in cultures of music and listening in early modern India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean. Her latest book Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (Cambridge, 2024) was described as a “masterpiece” by William Dalrymple, and bears the unique distinction of winning both the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award (2025) and the Association for Asian Studies’ Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize (2026) for the most distinguished book by a senior scholar in Musicology and South Asian Studes respectively.
Working largely with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite cultures in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, Katherine’s research interests lie in South Asian music, visual art, and cinema; the history of Mughal India (1526–1858); Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the natural and supernatural worlds. Katherine has been Principal Investigator of a European Research Council Starting Grant (2011–16) and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2018), and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic and Royal Historical Societies. She is the editor with Francesca Orsini of Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India (Open Book, 2015) and with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau, Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain (Niyogi, 2018). Her new edited volume, with Margaret E Walker, will be Hindustani Music Between Empires: Relational Histories, 1750–1900 (Primus, 2026 forthcoming).
Professor Schofield will be introduced by the Executive Dean for the Faculty of Arts & Humanities: Abigail Williams.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks and nibbles reception.