Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India

A collection of essays that focus on the role of music in the formation of a public in India across the twentieth century, Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India looks at different regions, languages, and different genres and styles of music.

Modernity fundamentally changed the relationship between private and public realms. New social arrangements gave rise to new forms of music making, with the musicians 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 became an important feature of public life in modern times, it also influenced how modernity itself took shape. Music became a key site for the articulation of questions of the public and of politics, and the essays in this volume look at various such aspects, from the formation of modern spaces of performance, certain forms of music assuming the status of classic, creation of a national and nationalistic tradition, and circulation of music in popular politics to broadcast technology. Through exploring these diverse inter-disciplinary questions relating to music, musicians, and their audiences, the volume provides new entry-points for the discussion of music and modern-day cultural practice in India.

Tejaswini Niranjana, Professor, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingan University, Hong Kong

Tejaswini Niranjana is Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She was formerly at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, which she co-founded. Among her books are SITING TRANSLATION: HISTORY, POST-STRUCTURALISM AND THE COLONIAL CONTEXT (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), and MOBILIZING INDIA: WOMEN, MUSIC, AND MIGRATION BETWEEN INDIA AND TRINIDAD(Durham: Duke UP, 2006).

Foreword by Thomas Christensen
Introduction by Tejaswini Niranjana
Part I: Music and Modernity
1. Musical Publics in Twentieth-Century Madras: Competing Narratives of Sonic Sociability by Lakshmi Subramanian
2. The Ustads from the North, the Public Sphere, and the Classicization of Music in Late Nineteenth-Century Calcutta by Adrian McNeil
3. Hindustani Music and the Emergence of a Lingua Musica in Mumbai by Tejaswini Niranjana
Part II: New Musical Publics and the Formation of Taste
4. Govind Sadashiv Tembe and the Education of Taste in Maharashtra by Urmila Bhirdikar
5. Artists in the Open: Indian Classical Musicians in the Mid-Twentieth Century by 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 by Vebhuti Duggal
7. Rewind and Play: Nineties Romantic Music in the Cinematic Public Sphere by Abhija Ghosh
8. The Public Sphere of Marketed Sound: The Business of Early Recorded Music in India by Vibodh Parthasarathi
Part IV: Music and Popular Politics
9. Singing in the Fray: Radical Publics and Popular Entertainment in South India by Kaley Mason
10. Vernacular Music Traditions and Their Publics: The Political Dimensions of Sounds and Technologies by Aditi Deo
Bibliography
Index
About the Editor and Contributors