This dissertation explores how attention to the role of sound and music in the lives of North Indian Muslims can give us new insights about social, cultural, political, intellectual, technological, religious, and urban shifts and transformations taking place in colonial India during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on a broad range of primary materials with an emphasis on Urdu textual sources that have not yet been studied conjointly, this dissertation adds complexity to our understanding of the ways in which North Indian culture and society changed following the British Annexation of Avadh in 1856 and the final dismantlement of the Mughal throne in Delhi after the Uprising of 1857. By focusing on “Hindustan” or the region of the Gangetic plains between Lahore and Lucknow, and by using the semi-independent princely state of Rampur as a case study of Muslim courtly culture during the time of the British Raj, this dissertation aims to show that listening to music was an integral (if contested) aspect of everyday life for most Muslims in colonial North India. It demonstrates how Muslim patrons and performers of rāga-based music, and especially women, were affected by colonial rule, ethnoreligious nationalism, majoritarian politics, and the modern re-invention of “classical” Hindustani music. It brings to the fore a dynamic discourse on music in the “Urdu public sphere,” shows how poetry and music became an important part of both Hindu and Muslim nationalism, and it qualifies the social marginalization of Muslims in late colonial India. Moreover, this dissertation probes how music was used to promote individual and collective identities, and how performers had to re-negotiate community boundaries, ideas of belonging, as well as the policing of gender and sexuality. By introducing “auditory culture” as a serious field of inquiry into the study of modern South Asia, this dissertation contributes to and expands current scholarly debates on colonial modernity, cultural nationalism, musical classicization processes, and Islamic reform.