Musicophilia in Mumbai

Musicophilia in Mumbai

Author: Tejaswini Niranjana

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-02-28

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 1478009195

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In Musicophilia in Mumbai Tejaswini Niranjana traces the place of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai throughout the long twentieth century as the city moved from being a seat of British colonial power to a vibrant postcolonial metropolis. Drawing on historical archives, newspapers, oral histories, and interviews with musicians, critics, students, and instrument makers as well as her own personal experiences as a student of Hindustani classical music, Niranjana shows how the widespread love of music throughout the city created a culture of collective listening that brought together people of diverse social and linguistic backgrounds. This culture produced modern subjects Niranjana calls musicophiliacs, whose subjectivity was grounded in a social rather than an individualistic context. By attending concerts, learning instruments, and performing at home and in various urban environments, musicophiliacs embodied forms of modernity that were distinct from those found in the West. In tracing the relationship between musical practices and the formation of the social subject, Niranjana opens up new ways to think about urbanity, subjectivity, culture, and multiple modernities.


Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India

Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India

Author: Katherine Butler Schofield

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-11-23

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1009058401

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Based on a vast, virtually unstudied archive of Indian writings alongside visual sources, this book presents the first history of music and musicians in late Mughal India c.1748–1858 and takes the lives of nine musicians as entry points into six prominent types of writing on music in Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu and English, moving from Delhi to Lucknow, Hyderabad, Jaipur and among the British. It shows how a key Mughal cultural field responded to the political, economic and social upheaval of the transition to British rule, while addressing a central philosophical question: can we ever recapture the ephemeral experience of music once the performance is over? These rich, diverse sources shine new light on the wider historical processes of this pivotal transitional period, and provide a new history of music, musicians and their audiences during the precise period in which North Indian classical music coalesced in its modern form.


Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia

Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia

Author: Harald Fischer-Tiné

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-01

Total Pages: 697

ISBN-13: 0429774699

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The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the historiographical specialisation and sophistication of the history of colonialism in South Asia. It explores the classic works of earlier generations of historians and offers an introduction to the rapid and multifaceted development of historical research on colonial South Asia since the 1990s. Covering economic history, political history, and social history and offering insights from other disciplines and ‘turns’ within the mainstream of history, the handbook is structured in six parts: Overarching Themes and Debates The World of Economy and Labour Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education Environment and Space Culture, Media, and the Everyday Colonial South Asia in the World The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars of South Asian history and related disciplines to introduce a broad readership into the respective subfields and research topics. Designed to serve as a comprehensive and nuanced yet readable introduction to the vast field of the history of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the handbook will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and global and world history.


Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India

Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India

Author: Tejaswi Niranjana

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-02-14

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0190990201

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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.


Music in Colonial Punjab

Music in Colonial Punjab

Author: Radha Kapuria

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-04-15

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0192692925

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This book offers the first social history of music in undivided Punjab (1800-1947), beginning at the Lahore court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and concluding at the Patiala royal darbar. It unearths new evidence for the centrality of female performers and classical music in a region primarily viewed as a folk music centre, featuring a range of musicians and dancers -from 'mirasis' (bards) and 'kalawants' (elite musicians), to 'kanjris' (subaltern female performers) and 'tawaifs' (courtesans). A central theme is the rise of new musical publics shaped by the anglicized Punjabi middle classes, and British colonialists' response to Punjab's performing communities. The book reveals a diverse connoisseurship for music with insights from history, ethnomusicology, and geography on an activity that still unites a region now divided between India and Pakistan.


Ways of Voice

Ways of Voice

Author: Matthew Rahaim

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2022-05-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0819579408

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Ways of Voice explores techniques of voice production in North India, from Bollywood to raga music to ghazal to devotional hymns and Sufi song. The voices in play here are not merely given, but achieved. Singers consciously train themselves to cultivate characteristic vocal gaits, sonorities, and poetic attunements; they adopt postures of the vocal apparatus; they build habits of listening, temporality, and social relations. The action in Ways of Voice revolves around several dozen North Indian popular, devotional, classical, and folk singers engaged in projects of vocal striving. Like most singers, they are strategically working on changing, refining, and making their own voices. The book thus highlights the ways in which singers not only "have" voice, but actively acquire, cultivate and contest particular vocal dispositions for particular kinds of listeners. In framing a "Hindustani vocal ecumene" that encompasses a diverse range of classical, popular, and spiritual-devotional musical styles and practices, it offers an expansive look at ways of voice that extend far beyond commonsense boundaries of genre and place. A rich archive of audio and video examples are provided on the online companion site, which can be found at https://www.weslpress.org/readers-companions/.


Lineage of Loss

Lineage of Loss

Author: Max Katz

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2017-11-07

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 081957760X

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In the middle of the nineteenth century a new family of hereditary musicians emerged in the royal court of Lucknow and subsequently rose to the heights of renown throughout North India. Today this musical lineage, or ghar n, lives on in the music and memories of only a small handful of descendants and players of the family instrument, the sarod. Drawing on six years of ethnographic and archival research, and fifteen years of musical apprenticeship, Max Katz explores the oral history and written record of the Lucknow ghar n ,tracing its displacement, loss of prestige, and erasure from the collective memory. In doing so he illuminates a hidden history of ideological and social struggle in North Indian music culture, intervenes in ongoing debates over the anti-Muslim agenda of Hindustani music's reform movement, and reanimates a lost vision in which Muslim scholar-artists defined the music of the nation. An interdisciplinary, postmodern counter-history, Lineage of Loss offers a new and unsettling narrative of Hindustani music's encounter with modernity.


Singing Gandhi's India - Music and Sonic Nationalism

Singing Gandhi's India - Music and Sonic Nationalism

Author: Lakshmi Subramanian

Publisher: Roli Books Private Limited

Published: 2020-01-10

Total Pages: 127

ISBN-13: 819429598X

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Here is the first ever and only detailed account of Gandhi and music in India. How politics and music interspersed with each other has been paid scanty, if not any, attention, let alone Gandhi’s role in it. Looking at prayer as politics, singing Gandhi’s India traces Gandhi’s relationship with music and nationalism. Uncovering his writings on music, ashram Bhajan practice, the Vande Mataram debate, Subramanian makes a case for a closer scrutiny of Gandhian oeuvre to map sonic politics in twentieth century India.


Tawaifnama

Tawaifnama

Author: Saba Dewan

Publisher: Context

Published:

Total Pages: 804

ISBN-13: 9395073594

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About the Book A NUANCED AND POWERFUL MICROHISTORY SET AGAINST THE SWEEP OF INDIAN HISTORY. Dharmman Bibi rode into battle during the revolt of 1857 shoulder to shoulder with her patron lover Babu Kunwar Singh. Sadabahar entranced even snakes and spirits with her music, but eventually gave her voice to Baba Court Shaheed. Her foster mothers Bullan and Kallan fought their malevolent brother and an unjust colonial law all the way to the Privy Council—and lost everything. Their great-granddaughter Teema paid for the family’s ruination with her childhood and her body. Bindo, Asghari, Phoolmani, Pyaari … there are so many stories in this family. And you—one of the best-known tawaifs of your times—remember the stories of your foremothers and your own. This is a history, a multi-generational chronicle of one family of well-known tawaifs with roots in Banaras and Bhabua. Through their stories and self-histories, Saba Dewan explores the nuances that conventional narratives have erased, papered over or wilfully rewritten. In a not-so-distant past, tawaifs played a crucial role in the social and cultural life of northern India. They were skilled singers and dancers, and also companions and lovers to men from the local elite. It is from the art practice of tawaifs that kathak evolved and the purab ang thumri singing of Banaras was born. At a time when women were denied access to the letters, tawaifs had a grounding in literature and politics, and their kothas were centres of cultural refinement. Yet, as affluent and powerful as they were, tawaifs were marked by the stigma of being women in the public gaze, accessible to all. In the colonial and nationalist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this stigma deepened into criminalisation and the violent dismantling of a community. Tawaifnama is the story of that process of change, a nuanced and powerful microhistory set against the sweep of Indian history.