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

Abstract

This essay is an exercise in thinking through the issues involved in putting together a new project. It will aim to set out some of the problems I am encountering as I try to formulate my research questions-the dilemmas over directions to take or avoid; the anxiety about how to interpret diverse sorts of materials; about what methods to adopt; about how to constitute my archive. My last project took me deep into the analysis of Caribbean popular music in terms of the social grids that sustain it. The book, Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (2006), was followed by a documentary film called Jahaji Music (dir. Surabhi Sharma, 2007). The film engaged with the musical culture of the Caribbean through the journey and collaborations of an Indian musician, Remo Fernandes. The Remo project-which tried to pursue the possibility of connection in another sphere, that of actual musical practice-seemed to be a logical if somewhat unexpected outcome of the earlier scholarly endeavour. Perhaps the most predictable direction I could have taken next would have been to pursue the story of the Indian diaspora and its musical negotiations in the United Kingdom for example, where once again the Indian and the African come together to form different sorts of cultural equations. However, the insights I gained from thinking about music, nationalism and race in Trinidad took me in another direction altogether. The point of the comparative frame I proposed in my book was not simply to look at two different contexts, but to see how the questions I was asking could be brought back 'home' to India. What did I gain from thinking about popular music in Trinidad? That consolidation and displacement occur together and form part of a continuing process. [Here the consolidation and displacement had to do with notions of racial identity and citizenship.] That this complicated process is often manifested most visibly as cultural practice, and as music production in particular. That in our modernity-fashioned as it is through and in the wake of colonialism-thinking about the music might help us see one of the important ways by which ideas of who we are/who we want to be are put together, circulated, and gain purchase. That music is related to the structure of social aspiration and issues of social mobility. That female sexuality is central to processes of nation-making and the production of modern subjects, and that music is one such process. Thinking about these issues has brought me to my own cultural context, which is that of southern India.

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References (11)

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