This thesis studies the political life of Sultanate north and central India through an archive of musicological sources. The music history of this period has been underexplored and overshadowed by processes of canonisation and standardisation that took place at the seventeenth-century Mughal court. Engaging with recent scholarship that has emphasised the political horizons of the Sultanate period as intimately intertwined with its cultural production, this thesis re-examines Sultanate musicology and frames musicological developments of this period as shaped by the particular political and intellectual concerns of its time. By emphasising different social actors—from the governor of a regional sultanate and an unnoticed Gond raja to a network of merchants—whose role in the dissemination of musicological text and practice has been hitherto overlooked, this thesis directs attention to spaces beyond the gilded walls of the court where, too, musicological knowledge circulated and to actors who have so far remained invisible. The thesis makes three contributions: first, by focusing on the musical fashioning of hitherto neglected social actors in the political fabric of Sultanate India, the thesis develops a conceptual framework that goes beyond the restrictive discursive dyads of regional/imperial and vernacular/cosmopolitan. Second, it contributes to existing musicological scholarship by analysing the ways in which social, political and intellectual currents in the Sultanate period and musicological theory and practice were mutually constitutive. Third, this thesis reads Sanskrit, Persian, and vernacular sources alongside one another, demonstrating that the relationship between knowledge and power is better understood at the intersections between and at the interstices of these languages. The thesis moves between two kinds of narratives: a political narrative that examines the lives of kings, governors, and merchants as they made their place within the contested political fabric of the Sultanate period, and a musicological narrative that closely analyses the presence and development of specific musicological features as determined by the various modes and milieus of musicological composition and circulation. This thesis thus makes two interrelated interventions, one within the field of early-modern South Asian history and the other within the field of Indian musicology.