Music as History in Tamil Nadu, T.K. Venkatasubramanian, Studies in History 28, 1, (2012): 129-149 (original) (raw)

working conditions of these social actors were regulated by such spaces. Thus in the case of the child, traditional value systems of 'caste', 'class' and 'gender' were imparted by the child's family, neighbourhood and school; in the case of the dhobīs their local caste-based governing bodies defined and protected their politicoadministrative interests and socio-economic relations in the urban centre. In the case of Nepali residents, appropriation of public spaces (temples, ghats, streets, and so on) was achieved by superimposing their Buddhist and tantric customary practices (rites, rituals, Buddha sculptures, and so on); financing the building of the Nepali mandir at a crucial site that was within the holy field encompassed by the sacred pilgrimage routes and by controlling the built environment and sociocultural activities (poetry, literature and musical recitations, marriage celebrations, festivals) in semi-public spaces around areas such as Ram Ghat, Dudh Vinayak and Mangala Gauri. Nepali residents also acquired residential plots and flats, and helped to finance and maintain dharamshalas or hostels for Nepali pilgrims, as well as streets, market squares, tea stalls and entire neighbourhoods. The different contributors explore almost all tropes of visual representation including historical maps, photographs, paintings, reconstructing scaled diagrams depicting pilgrimage routes and city layouts, apart from tabulating data gained from literary texts. Moreover, the thematic arrangement of the articles in the volume systematically deal with a wide range of issues such as power sharing, class and caste conflict, cultural co-existence, acculturation and the formation of minispaces. However some lacunae include under-researched processes such as the effects of urban markets, industries and production on city evolution and visual representation. Nevertheless this does not take away from the overall significance of this collection, making it a must read for scholars researching on urban history in general and the historical city of Banaras in particular.