Person · Mughal court musician · India

Tansen

Date

1550–1589

Function

Arts & performance

Patron dynasty

Mughal

Condition

historical person + lineage memory

Confidence

Mixed / layered — established with later legendary accretions

Location

27.180, 78.020

Worth knowing

He was a pupil of the Sufi Muhammad Ghaus at Gwalior and is buried beside him there, which is the arrangement he asked for. The story that his Raga Deepak set lamps alight and Raga Malhar brought rain to cool him is later; what is documented is that Akbar's court paid him more than any other musician in it.

About the place

Placed at Agra, where he served Akbar as one of the navaratna and where he died. His earlier career belongs to Gwalior, which is a separate entry, and his tomb is beside Muhammad Ghaus's there.

Connections (10)

• Music biography routeAgra Fort

  Tansen came to Akbar's court from Gwalior, where the Tomar musical tradition had been developed under Man Singh, and spent his last years at Agra and Fatehpur Sikri as one of the navaratna. The Hindustani gharanas trace their descent from him through his children and the Seni line, though the chronology of his career is approximate and much of what is attributed to him is lineage claim rather than record.

• Music lineage traditionSwami Haridas tradition, Vrindavan

  Hindustani tradition makes Swami Haridas of Vrindavan the teacher of Tansen, and the dhrupad lineages trace themselves through that connection. The story that Akbar came in disguise to hear Haridas sing, because Haridas would not come to court, is the tradition's central anecdote about the relationship between devotion and patronage. Documentary evidence for the teaching link is thin, but the lineage claim has structured Hindustani music's account of itself for four centuries.

• Music lineage traditionBaiju Bawra tradition, Chanderi

  Baiju Bawra is attached to Chanderi and to Gwalior in various later accounts, and the story of his contest with Tansen at Akbar's court — in which the older, poorer, devotional singer defeats the salaried one — is one of the founding legends of Hindustani music. Biographical detail varies wildly between versions and the dates do not reliably work. What the story preserves is an argument about what music is for, not a chronology.

• PatronageAkbar

  Abu'l-Fazl lists Tansen first among the musicians of Akbar's court and records that the emperor sent for him from Rewa about 1562. The court's patronage is why his rāgas were written down and transmitted while Baiju's were not, and it is also the reason the tradition has spent four centuries arguing about whether a singer who performed for an emperor could be the equal of one who refused. Both positions are argued using stories about the same three men.

• Court associationIbrahim Rauza, Bijapur

  Ibrahim Adil Shah II and Tansen were contemporaries at two courts eight hundred kilometres apart, and the Deccan sultan is the one who left a book: the Kitab-i-Nauras, a collection of Dakhni songs set to ragas and dedicated to Ganesha and Saraswati, written by a Muslim ruler who played the tambur himself. Akbar's court produced the musician the Hindustani lineages descend from; Bijapur's produced the patron who wrote the songs down, which is the rarer thing.

• Court associationAbdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan

  Rahim's dohas and Tansen's dhrupads are both Braj-language work produced at a Persianate court by men at the top of it, one the commander-in-chief and the other the court musician. Mughal high culture was bilingual in practice long before Urdu existed as a literary language, and the Hindi canon has two Mughal grandees in it as a result.

• Teaching lineageGwalior Fort

  Dhrupad was codified at Gwalior under Man Singh Tomar in the late fifteenth century, a generation before Tansen, and the Gwalior gharana is the oldest surviving Hindustani vocal lineage. Tansen is the fort's most famous product rather than its origin, and the distinction matters: the tradition he is credited with founding was already being taught there when he was a boy.

• Samadhi atTansen Samadhi, Gwalior

  He asked to be buried in the enclosure of Muhammad Ghaus's dargah at Gwalior, beside the Sufi who had taught him, and the two tombs stand together. Singers chewed leaves from the tamarind in the compound for generations in the belief that it improved the voice; the tree has been stripped almost bare and is now fenced.

• Teaching lineageVrindāvan

  A strong tradition makes Swami Haridas of Vrindavan Tansen's teacher in the devotional line, and Muhammad Ghaus of Gwalior his teacher in the Sufi one. Whether both are historical or neither, the arrangement is the point: north Indian classical music was carried simultaneously by Vaishnava temple singing and by Chishti sama, and the same musicians moved between them.

• Teaching lineageMaihar gharana

  The Maihar-Senia gharana claims descent from Tansen through Wazir Khan of Rampur, who came to Maihar in the early twentieth century as Allauddin Khan's teacher. Every subsequent lineage — sitar through Ravi Shankar, sarod through Ali Akbar Khan — is treated in the tradition as an unbroken teaching line from Tansen. Whether the descent is literal is disputed; the transmission of style is not, and Maihar is where it was passed on.

On these journeys

• Akbar's court circle

Sources

Wikipedia, “Tansen”. Abu'l-Fazl, Āʾīn-i Akbarī, on the court musicians; Bonnie Wade, Imaging Sound (1998), on the Tansen lineages.

• Wikipedia — Tansen