Chief musicians to the Mughal emperors: the Delhi kalawant biradari. Revised edition, 2015

This substantially revised article draws extensively from the SHAMSA database to trace the genealogy of the chief Hindustani musicians to the Mughal emperors from Akbar (r.1556-1605) down to Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837-58), for the first time from contemporaneous written sources. It includes a great deal of information about the written sources available for Hindustani music history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The original paper was published in a very limited print-only run in India. I have therefore uploaded a substantially revised version here for "open peer review". This paper is made available under a CC-BY-NC license