Transported by Song: Music and Cultural Labour in Dharwad (original) (raw)

Music and Nationalism in India

Within South Asian studies, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have engaged in an extensive discussion of the role music plays in forging nationalism in India. Music can articulate both distinct regional identities and a broader pattern of national assimilation, as well as religious, class, and caste differences. In the past, the classicization of musical traditions has often been seen as a nationalist response to colonialism. Music in religious contexts can evoke nationalist sentiments and ideologies, as well as expressions of identity that have political meanings. Economic development and the media consumption of rising middle classes have also contributed to a more widespread dispersal of popular music, strengthening the possibilities of greater collective sharing in national identities as expressed through musical forms. Although their focuses and perspectives differ, all the authors discussed in this review frame music as a significant social force that can generate conflict, change, and meaning. The authors address the various facets of music in nationalist discourse through the lenses of regionalism, religion, and class conflict, utilizing a diverse range of methods including historiography, ethnography, and analysis of the music itself to discuss these themes.

Interpretation out of Contradiction: A World of Music in the West Indies

Canadian University Music Review, 1994

This paper addresses the researcher's double challenge: to acknowledge and situate contrasting experiences of the same phenomenon and yet to integrate them into a personal rendition of that phenomenon. An examination of the various strategies employed in ethnographic writing, from the copious use of quotations to dialogical or polyphonic writing, shows how contradictory viewpoints have been given more attention in ethnographic literature, as the politics of representation have developed into an important debate in the social sciences. While these various approaches have undeniably allowed more voices to be heard, they have nevertheless left unanswered the problem of interpretation in the case of contested appropriations or contradictory versions of the same phenomenon. The simple fact of integrating various voices in an ethnography does not indeed constitute in an by itself an explanation of what is being said and why. This paper examines possible uses and treatments of divergin...

Music for the Migrant’s Soul: Blending the Traditional with the Topical…

Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network

This paper explores how the Bhojpuri music industry is catering to the needs of north Indian migrants in Mumbai, India. Bhojpuri is the dialect spoken by large numbers in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The influx of Bhojpuri speaking migrants to different parts of India has led to a demand for music that helps them remain anchored to their region. This study examines the content of music videos, CDs and cassettes, to show how tropes from the collective memory of migrants are embossed in the lyrics, while their aspirations are interwoven with an idyllic image of the home states. Ribaldry, folk music and topical issues are melded to create a familiar world. The result is a distillate of the region’s socio-cultural values. Meanwhile, the industry is creating a global identity for the migrants, connecting them to Bhojpuri diaspora across the world.

The New Cultural Histories of Music/of India (2013)

2013. Unreferenced spoken-word draft of position paper given at the Cultural Musicology Conference, Amsterdam, 2014. "In my view, a truly ethnomusicological approach to the cultural history of music still has not yet emerged in the discipline. Firstly, I make a distinction here between the long established concerns of historical ethnomusicology, which are primarily musicological (admirably and crucially so), and the chrysalid cultural histories of those same art-music systems. The difference, as I see it, is that between a piece of carved jade and a clear glass prism – the study of music as a beautiful and important cultural object in and of itself, versus the study of music predominantly as a lens to illuminate the rest of the world. Both modes of historical study are critically important and frequently complementary, and there has not been anywhere near enough of the former in most cases to even start on the latter. But I do consider them to be substantively different kinds of enterprise. Secondly, the curious thing for me about the concerns of the new cultural histories of [Indian] music is how presentist they are. This is generally fair enough, I think, of history in ethnomusicology: a) because ethnomusicologists have rarely ventured earlier than the twentieth century in any case; and b) precisely because of the overwhelming concerns of the bulk of the discipline with the present and the impact on the present of the immediate past. With respect to India, much of the recent historical work I’ve noted has at its heart a valid and necessary desire to expose anti-colonial nationalists’ deliberate construction of North and South India’s contemporary classical traditions as “ancient, Hindu arts”, and to reposition them as colonial products to a lesser or greater degree. But historians of earlier soundworlds [and I include myself here] do not have such an excuse. Surely, as cultural historians seeking to illuminate the very different life-worlds of the past, we should at least recognise presentist concerns for what they are, and try to resist them where they are not relevant to our primary sources? Should we not approach the archives of the past as we do the living fields of the present: alive to difference, and its scholarly pleasures and dangers?"

SHARED RESEARCH PRACTICES ON AND ABOUT MUSIC: TOWARD DECOLONISING COLONIAL ETHNOMUSICOLOGY (2018)

Martí, Josep and Revilla Gútiez, Sara (eds) (2018) Making Music, Making Society. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. , 2018

The contemporary contexts relating to ethnomusicology and other disciplines interested in music research are changing radically. Two main reasons are at the crux of this change: (1) the presence of music in academia has grown substantially over the last 20 years; consequently, research has considerably increased; (2) the persons who until now have been crucial for our research, especially in the field of ethnomusicology, are now very conscious of their importance for research outcomes and sometimes refuse to accept their " objectification ". The latter can be seen across a large spectrum of contexts, such as those belonging to the field of subaltern studies focusing on depressive urban communities or socially marginalised groups, as well as in the context of " high culture " universes-research developed by art music performers about contemporary composers, for example. In both cases, the researcher represents an academically powered subject of authority. His/her work aims to promote the involved subjects but, mainly, to validate him/herself as the owner of a kind of knowledge which is socially more qualified. This situation generates deep asymmetries and has been discussed by different scholars, proposing methods and research actions based on " participative-action-research " practices.

Exploring Music in a Globalized World 01 / 2017

2017

This article examines the relationship between musical practices and discourses and island identities in the Caribbean context. I wish to challenge Caribbeanist musicological research that emphasises the structural features of Caribbean music and identity, by creating an isomorphism between musical genres and island musics (e.g. Cuba is to salsa as Jamaica is to reggae). A side effect of this relation is that it takes either musical genres or island identities for granted, resulting in a static picture of either category. In this article, I propose the notion of transinsularismas a methodology and language with which to discuss the mutually informing process of music and island identity as consistenly evolving and practice-based, rather than static and discursive. The article is based on long-term fieldwork on the Caribbean island of Culebra, in the north-eastern Caribbean. The ethnographic material that I present in this article will show how the musicianship of Culebran musicians ...

Indianness, Revolutionary Music and National Identity: Songs of a Nation

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2018

Though Indian courts at present are riddled with issues concerning music on the copyright front, significance of another aspect of music based on its essence is largely lost and unexplored. Though courts refer to popular songs in judgments, they are few and far in between. The understanding is that law today is neither poetic nor musical. Music, however, expresses mankind's faith, hope and aspiration. The use of popular music by Indian courts to write creatively, though not necessarily improve the judgment is restricted and largely unexplored. This paper proposes to explore the dimensions of labour movement through music and the role of law in the making of India as a nation. The association of political dissent through music and the determination of the nation state to procure a stake in the management of the popular music that is sought to belong to itself will be the key theme for understanding the songs that make a nation. Beginning from the struggle for India's independence to modern day labour movements using music for critique and promoting the vernacular culture are the essence of the paper. Historically, the role of music is central for workers in any labour movement worldwide and is now explored in the Indian context, beginning from the early years of struggle in the nineteenth century to the year of independence in 1947. Recent movements including the protests against profiteering and displacement of persons will also form part of the discussions in this paper. The roles of music and the law have periodically been addressed in the scholarly legal arena but the topic has seldom been explored in-depth from a labour perspective, as paper ventures to do.