A Songbook From Lucknow: The Fitzwilliam Opens the Plowden Manuscript

Tomorrow morning, in a single free gallery in Cambridge, one of the most quietly extraordinary objects in a British collection goes on public display. A Mughal Songbook: Art, Music and Empire opens at the Fitzwilliam Museum on 8 September and runs until 7 March 2027. It is not a blockbuster. There is no ticket, no timed entry, no queue snaking down Trumpington Street. What it offers instead is a rare thing: a chance to look closely at how art, music and imperial power got tangled up together, using one manuscript as the knot.

What the object actually is

The centrepiece is MS 380, catalogued at the Fitzwilliam and known informally as the Plowden songbook. It was made in Lucknow in 1787–88 and contains seventy-seven songs in Persian, Urdu, classical Hindi and Punjabi, illustrated with paintings of the musicians, dancers, singers and courtesans who performed them. It belonged to Sophia Elizabeth Plowden (1751–1834), an Englishwoman living in India during the East India Company’s rapid consolidation of power in the north.

Plowden did something unusual. Rather than simply collecting Indian objects as curiosities, she attended performances, listened hard, and wrote down the melodies she heard using European staff notation. She then brought the loose-leaf Indian poetry home alongside her own transcriptions. The songs she noted became known in Britain as “Hindustani airs” and circulated in drawing rooms and printed collections for decades, usually stripped of any acknowledgement of where they came from or who had sung them.

That last detail is the reason this display matters more than its modest scale suggests. The manuscript is simultaneously a document of genuine artistic curiosity and a document of extraction. Both things are true of the same pages.

The performers, named

The exhibition, developed from a research project led by Dr Vivek Gupta with Dr Suzanne Reynolds, Senior Curator of Manuscripts and Printed Books, takes the illustrations seriously as portraits rather than decoration. Among the figures associated with Plowden’s circle is Khanum Jan, a celebrated courtesan-performer at Lucknow whose name survives partly because Plowden wrote it down.

This is the kind of curatorial choice that changes what a visitor sees. A gallery could present the songbook as an object made for a British woman. Presenting it as an object made with and about South Asian performers shifts the centre of gravity. The women in these paintings were professional artists at the top of a sophisticated musical culture, working in courts where poetry, dance and song were high-status disciplines. They were not anonymous local colour. Naming them, where naming is possible, is a small act with substantial consequences for how the room reads.

The display leans on sound as well as image. Paintings, manuscripts and textiles sit alongside music and sound installation, so that the songs are audible rather than merely described. Anyone who has stood in front of a music manuscript and felt slightly locked out by it will understand why that decision was made.

Why Lucknow, and why 1787

The dates do a lot of work here. The Mughal Empire nominally ran from 1526 to 1857, but by the 1780s effective power in much of Hindustan had fragmented. Lucknow, capital of Awadh, had become a magnet for musicians, poets and painters drawn away from a weakening Delhi, and its court was famously lavish in its patronage of performance. At exactly the same moment, the East India Company was tightening its grip through a mixture of treaty, debt and force.

So the songbook was made at a hinge point. The artistic culture it records was at a peak of refinement, and the political structure supporting that culture was being dismantled by the very network that produced this manuscript’s British owner. The Fitzwilliam frames the show around art and music crossing boundaries of language and empire, which is accurate and also slightly generous. Crossings of that sort were rarely symmetrical.

Worth the trip

Practically, this is one of the easiest recommendations we make. Entry is free, no booking is needed, it sits in Gallery 14, and the run is long enough that there is no need to rush. The Fitzwilliam is a ten-minute walk from Cambridge city centre, and the surrounding University of Cambridge Museums group means a day can easily absorb two or three collections. The display is supported by The Marlay Group.

For anyone building an eye for South Asian art, it is a useful corrective to the way Mughal painting is often shown in Britain: isolated miniatures behind glass, admired for finish and detached from function. Here the images have a job. They accompany words that were meant to be sung, by people who were paid to sing them, in a place and a moment that can be dated precisely.

Six months is a generous window. Go in the quiet middle of a weekday, take the audio seriously, and read the labels for names. The songbook survived because someone wrote things down. The interesting question the Fitzwilliam is asking is whose voices were being written.