Gendering Musical Memories of 1947 in Tripartite “Punjab”

This paper will examine the musical memories of Partition through the perspective of women: as performers, patrons, and listeners. The history of Hindustani or classical music is typically dominated by the experience of male virtuosos, and is often narrated by male interlocutors, sidelining the voices, life stories and experiences of female performers. I will begin with a general background survey into the experience of prominent female musicians affected by 1947: Madam Noor Jehan, Farida Khanum, Roshanara Begum, Iqbal Bano and Malka Pukhraj, who became Pakistani citizens, and Surinder Kaur, Parkash Kaur, Shamshad Begum and Shanno Khurana, who became Indian citizens. Beyond performers, I will also focus on the narratives of Partition in the memories relayed by two women, both born in 1947, who patronised South Asian music both in the subcontinent and in Britain: Khurshid Aulia, daughter of the late Us. Alla Rakha, the famous tabla exponent of the Punjab gharana, and Dr Ghazala Irfan, daughter of Hayat Ahmed Khan, the founder of the All-Pakistan Musical Conference. Finally, to contrast the experiences of these urban and elite women, the paper will also reflect on the memories of Partition songs as narrated by rural Pakistani Punjabi women in an ongoing pilot ethnographic project on 'Punjabi Women's Partition Music' funded by the University of California at Davis. Using these three disparate groups of women, representing a diversity of musical genres (classical, film song and folk) as my entry point into musical memories of the Partition in tripartite 'Punjab'–broadly understood as existing in India, Pakistan and in the diaspora–I will explore how affect and aurality have shaped a distinctly gendered mode of remembering the cataclysm of 1947.