Ayesha Sheth

I am a doctoral candidate at the Department of South Asia Studies. I am broadly interested in music and musical practices, across genres and regions, of South Asia. My dissertation, tentatively titled A Political History of Music: North India between 1428-1605, studies the relationship between knowledge and political power through an analysis of developments in musicological theory and practice against the rise of new aspirants to political life in North India between the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries. I draw on a wide archive - literature, music texts, histories, dictionaries, religious (Sufi and Bhakti) literature, and paintings - in both Sanskrit and Persian.