An open access repository for the SHAMSA database of sources for the history and analysis of music and dance in Mughal and British-colonial South Asia c. 1700–1900, housed at King's College London and funded by the European Research Council as part of the Musical Transitions project (MUSTECIO grant no. 263643, PI Katherine Butler Schofield, 2011–15/16).

Our logo is a shamsa, or sunburst, from the opening of a 17C imperial Mughal manuscript in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number 55.121.10.39. More information about this beautiful illumination can be found at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/451286. Public Domain.

The Musical Transitions project was a five-year research programme funded by the European Research Council and based in the Music Department at King’s College London 2011–2015/16.

Headed by Principal Investigator, Katherine Butler Schofield, the aim of the Musical Transitions team has been to produce histories of how the musical fields—the soundworlds—of the eastern Indian Ocean changed during their transitions to and through European colonialism c.1750–1900. Our focus has been on North India and the Malay world, largely under British colonialism, and combined the methodologies of history and ethnomusicology to analyse visual, material, and literary sources on music, sound, and listening, in key regional and European languages. The programme consisted of three Case Studies – focussing on South Asia, the Malay world, and India–Malay connections – whose findings were increasingly pooled in order to make larger-scale sense of how local musical systems and networks were transformed across the region in their encounter with European colonial power.

This deeply collaborative and cross-disciplinary project has had exciting and field-changing results, which are summarised on our archived website. One of the most important is that we have established for the first time that vast and rich historical sources exist for North Indian and Malay music history before 1900. These archives are in many languages, extremely diverse, and represent multiple lineages of knowledge.

For North India, we have developed a source database—SHAMSA: Sources for the History and Analysis of Music/Dance in South Asia—of more than 300 key primary musical texts produced c. 1700–1900 in Sanskrit, Persian, Hindavi, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English; for more than 100 of these a digital copy is also included.

This Zenodo community is dedicated to placing resources from the SHAMSA database in the open access domain as and when they become available to do so. The full SHAMSA database may be consulted at King’s by appointment with Dr Katherine Schofield.