Race in the Raga? Musical Reflections on Tribal Peoples in Early Modern India

How was race discussed in the multilingual, culturally mixed courts of Mughal India? Beyond their sense of foreigners, invaders, and alien others, early modern writers were also conscious of tribal communities—the forebears of the peoples now known as ‘Adivasis’—whom they considered essentially different from mainstream society, by virtue of physical difference, color, and their problematic status in the caste system. This paper will consider early modern conceptions of tribal peoples by analyzing literary texts, which explored the body, the emotions, nature, and beauty through musical categories. Writing in a variety of elite settings, courtly poets mapped the known universe through their visualizations of sound embedded in the rāgas, the building blocks of composition in Hindustani music. Each rāga was assigned a vignette—a prince meeting his beloved, or an ascetic in a storm—that tied together different connotations associated with the musical performance. Poetic digests of these rāgas included representations of tribal people, especially Bhils and Gonds, integrating them into the courtly imaginary of beauty, while simultaneously marking their difference from ‘civilized’ bodies. What did this difference mean to early modern thinkers, and how did Mughal epistemologies of sound and nature influence contemporary understandings of race?