Sophia Elizabeth Plowden, an English amateur musician living in India, collected songs performed by North Indian musicians and had them translated, transcribed and arranged for Western instruments. The resulting pieces became known as Hindustani airs. They were collaborative adaptations—not Plowden’s compositions—and their surviving notation offers only part of the story of the original performances.
Who made the Hindustani airs?
Plowden encountered music at gatherings in Lucknow, where North Indian musicians, including courtesans, performed. Her work depended on local collaborators who helped collect and interpret the songs and render them in forms European musicians could read and play. Scholarship describes performers, musicians and linguists as involved in gathering, transcribing, arranging and performing the airs. The musical knowledge and source material belonged to Indian artists as well as the European collector.
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Khanum Jan, a prominent courtesan and singer associated with Kanpur and the Lucknow court in the 1780s, is central to the best-documented connections between Plowden and this repertoire. Katherine Butler Schofield’s work brings Indian-language materials into conversation with European papers and notation to investigate how the songs may have sounded.
What did the adaptations change?
Hindustani airs were short pieces reworked for European musical settings. The process involved collecting songs and, where the evidence supports it, translation, transcription, harmonisation and arrangement. Western notation made melodies legible within a different musical system, while arrangements recast them for European performance contexts.
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That process also had limits. A written melody or harmonised arrangement cannot by itself preserve the full sound of a performance, its improvisational practice or its social meaning. Indian-language lyrics and European notation each preserve different evidence; neither alone provides a complete account.
What survives in the Plowden songbook?
The Fitzwilliam Museum describes the Plowden songbook as a rare manuscript containing 77 songs in Persian, Urdu, Classical Hindi and Punjabi. Its illustrated leaves include lyrics, and a surviving example shows harpsichord notation for a Hindustani air. This combination of languages, images and musical notation makes the manuscript an unusually rich record of musical exchange in the Lucknow court milieu. The museum’s digital resource does not state a publication year for this description: Fitzwilliam Museum: Songs and Souvenirs—Sophia Plowden.
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The surviving evidence is not limited to music. The British Library catalogue records Plowden correspondence, including a letter dated 4 April 1783 in which she described her life in Calcutta and attending a masquerade dressed as a Kashmiri singer. It offers a glimpse of her own self-presentation, separate from the songbook: British Library catalogue: Sophia Plowden correspondence.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How should the story be understood?
Plowden’s musical encounters took place in a late Mughal and early colonial environment shaped by East India Company power. Courtesans such as Khanum Jan should be understood as skilled performers and cultural participants, not reduced to decorative figures or treated as interchangeable with sex workers. The record supports meaningful interaction and Indian artistic agency, but the wider setting was unequal. Neither a story of uncomplicated cultural harmony nor one that erases Indian performers’ contributions fits the evidence.
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The surviving materials also call for care when reconstructing sound. Schofield’s King’s College London record says: “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.” This is Schofield describing what her research makes possible, not a statement by a contemporary witness. Her chapter on Khanum Jan and Plowden is included in Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858: Cambridge University Press: Khanum Jan and Sophia Plowden. A related King’s College London record outlines the research: King’s College London: Katherine Butler Schofield.
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