Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India

Description

With the onset of modernity in twentieth-century India, new social arrangements gave rise to new forms of music-making. The musicians were no longer performing exclusively in the princely courts or in the private homes of the wealthy. Not only did the act of listening to and appreciating music change, it became an important feature of public life, thus influencing how modernity shaped itself. This volume attempts to study the connections between music and the creation of new ideas of publicness during the early twentieth century. How was music labelled as folk or classical? How did music come to play such a catalytic role in forming identities of nationhood, politics, or ethnicity? And how did twentieth-century technologies of sound reproduction and commercial marketing contribute to changing notions of cultural distinction? Exploring these interdisciplinary questions across multiple languages, regions, and musical genres, the essays provide fresh perspectives on the history of musicians and migration in colonial India, the formation of modern spaces of performance, and the articulation of national as well as nationalist traditions.

About the Editor

Tejaswini Niranjana is professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.

Contributors

Urmila Bhirdikar

Amlan Das Gupta

Aditi Deo 

Lakshmi Subramanian

Vebhuti Duggal

Abhija Ghosh

Kaley Mason

Vibodh Parthasarathi

Adrian McNeil

Tejaswini Niranjana

Table of contents

Foreword by Thomas Christensen

Introduction

Tejaswini Niranjana

Part I Music and Modernity

1. Musical Publics in Twentieth-Century Madras: Competing Narratives of Sonic Sociability

Lakshmi Subramanian

2. The Ustads from the North, the Public Sphere, and the Classicization of Music in Late Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

Adrian McNeil

3. Hindustani Music and the Emergence of a Lingua Musica in Mumbai

Tejaswini Niranjana

Part II New Musical Publics and the Formation of Taste

4. Govind Sadashiv Tembe and the Education of Taste in Maharashtra

Urmila Bhirdikar

5. Artists in the Open: Indian Classical Musicians in the Mid-twentieth Century

Amlan Das Gupta

Part III Inter-medial Publics

6. Seeing Print, Hearing Song: Tracking the Film Song Through the Hindi Popular Print Sphere, c. 1955-75

Vebhuti Duggal

7. Rewind and Play: Romantic Music of the 1990s in the Cinematic Public Sphere

Abhija Ghosh

8. The Public Sphere of Marketed Sound: The Business of Early Recorded Music in India

Vibodh Parthasarathi

Part IV Music and Popular Politics

9. Singing in the Fray: Radical Publics and Popular Entertainment in South India

Kaley Mason

10. Vernacular Music Traditions and Their Publics: The Political Dimensions of Sounds and Technologies

Aditi Deo

Bibliography

About the Editor and Contributors

Index