In the middle of the nineteenth century in cities and towns across North India a popular craze for the sitar drove untold numbers of amateur enthusiasts to seek instruction in Hindustani raga music from the only available source: the Muslim hereditary professional performers known as ustads. A long record of statements excoriating the ustads has generally been dismissed by contemporary scholars as colonially inspired propaganda that served a Hindu identitarian vision of music reform and institution-building for the incipient nation. This article accesses a collection of Urdu-language music instruction texts produced between 1863 and 1915 to offer a contrasting interpretation: the depiction of ustads as ignorant, ill-mannered, and addicted is propounded first and foremost by Muslim authors unconcerned with nationalism, but invested in opening the Hindustani music tradition to the uninitiated amateur. Close readings of narrative anecdotes from these texts alongside the 1910 and 1914 Marathi-language works of famed scholar and music reformer Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860–1936) reveal a continuity of concerns across language, region, and religious community. Bhatkhande and the earlier Urdu authors share not only their frustration with the half-trained and ill-behaved ‘fly-by-night’ ustad, but also their reverence for the masterful ustads whose reputations were threatened by the unchecked presence of charlatans in their midst.

This collection of papers explores the intellectual history of music in global context during the period between around 1870 and 1930. Following an introduction that discusses the state of the field, each of the three papers presents a case study that explores the intersection between music and global history from diverse perspectives. The first paper discusses a Hindi music treatise published in 1896. By situating this work within multiple ‘significant geographies’, the paper highlights the limitations of ‘global’ approaches that neglect the more immediate musical, social and intellectual environments of their subjects. The second paper analyses the intersection between music and Islamic modernism in the late Ottoman Empire. It argues that a Eurocentric understanding of music history propagated by earlier reformists was succeeded at the end of the nineteenth century by an oppositional narrative that drew on the geopolitical imaginary of pan-Islamism. The final paper discusses the work of the Argentine composer Alberto Williams, particularly in relation to his views on race and national music. The paper demonstrates how contemporary scientific theories such as positivism and Social Darwinism contributed to a narrative of national musical development that created hierarchies of musical genres and excluded Argentine composers of African descent.