In 1835, the East India Company sequestered the salt lake at Sambhar from the Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, until 1842. This historical footnote left behind a set of financial accounts in the Company records that are alive with musicians and dancers and the cycle of the ritual year in Rajasthan. One courtesan stands forth as exceptional: Mayalee “dancing girl”. Her insistence on being paid in salt reveals the extraordinary stories the fleeting appearance of performers in the official records of the East India Company can tell about relations between the British and the princely states in the 1830s and 40s, about the Rajput notions of prosperity and sovereignty invested in courtesans and in salt, and the existence of a salt commons at Sambhar before the ill-informed interference of the Company there.

Khanum Jan was a celebrity courtesan at the court of Lucknow in the 1780s. She became famous again in twentieth-century musicology because of her musical interactions with an Englishwoman, Sophia Plowden. Plowden’s involvement in the “Hindustani Airs” episode has been told before from the European side. In this chapter, I focus instead on Plowden’s collection of song lyrics in Persian and Indian languages, alongside writings by Indian musicians and patrons about their views of Europeans and their music. Reading Indian-language sources and European papers and notations together make it possible to get much closer to how songs from the Lucknow court may have sounded in the 1780s. But it also gives us a much richer understanding of Lucknow courtesan culture between late Mughal and early colonial patronage.

The fifth chapter examines how Ireland’s status as the bridgehead between Georgian Britain and Mughal India is also reflected in London performance venues dominated by women. I frame this transnational connection from the jaded viewpoint of Bengal ex-captain Thomas Williamson, who lambasts Abu Taleb Khan as an effeminate poser for bragging about his romantic intimacy with English noblewomen. Indeed, the Indo-Persian’s travelogue, Persian poems on London, the Diwan-i-Talib, and his essay “Vindication of the Liberties of the Asiatic Women” (printed in 1801 in European periodicals) was forged in two overlapping spaces of female sociability: the salon of the Duchess of Devonshire Georgiana Spencer, a politically outspoken socialite, and the London playhouses where star actresses ravished the Indian spectator with their professional artistry. Both spaces recall the skilled courtesans he would have known in Lucknow, mainly their perceived ability to debauch men. His subtle critique of elite British theatergoers who indulge in such impropriety aligns the feminized imperial capital with Persianate court rituals, panicking racist chauvinists like Williamson.