Young Scholars' Talk

The World of ‘Rāgamālā’: Jain Musicologists on the Indo-Persian Stage

Ayesha Sheth

(Historian & Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University)

This talk examines the role played by Jain scholastic and mercantile networks in the development and circulation of the rāgamālā form in music and painting. The rāgamālā (garland of rāga) tradition, initially a form of musicological verse that subsequently inspired a genre of painting, flourished during the fifteenth—seventeenth centuries across courts in north and central India. While the artistic and poetic beauty of the rāgamālā form has received much attention in scholarship, not much has been written on its initial development and circulation, both of which took place within a specifically Jain milieu.

This presentation focuses on two texts —Sudhakalasa’s Saṅgītopaniṣatsāroddhāra (1350), composed during the reign of Muhammad bin Tughluq (r. 1325-51) in Gujarat, and Mandana’s Saṅgītamaṇḍaṇa, composed for the Malwa Sultan Hoshang Shah (r. 1405-32)—as well as a series of Jain Kalpasūtra manuscripts that contain the earliest known rāgamālā images. In doing so, this talk widens the ambit of ‘Indo-Persian’ musicology to include the contributions of a Jain mercantile and scholastic network.

About Ayesha Sheth

Ayesha Sheth is a historian of early modern South Asia. She specialises in courtly culture and polity formation with a particular focus on music, literature, and comparative knowledge traditions in South Asia and the broader Persianate cosmopolis. She earned her PhD from the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University.

Date: 9 January, 2026 (Friday)

Time: 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM

For ages: 18 and above

Venue: Lecture Hall, L D Museum

For registration, please contact:

Call: +91-9408536883 | WhatsApp: +91-7863040584

Image: Folio from the “Devasano Pado”, Patan, 1500. LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), M.87.275.3

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