Sonic Matters: Singing as Method and the Epistemology of Singing across Bengali Esoteric Lineages (original) (raw)

MIGRATING SONGS CONNECTING THE OCEAN: DISPLACEMENT, BENGALI IDENTITY, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF HOMELAND

Agriculturist families of low-caste refugees from East Bengal have resettled since 1949 in the Andaman Islands, bringing along rich repertoires of songs and oral narratives. Rooted in ethnographic material, this article is inserted in the scarcely-discussed interstice between cultural histories of postPartition displacement and the trajectories of verbal arts in Bengali language. Exploring the ways in which identity and community emerge from performance practices, the paper analyses congregational singing sessions in the Andamans as sites that connect traditional knowledge to contemporary experiences of displacement, providing a platform to learn, transmit and perform ‘homeland’, as a notion shaped by the realms of language, devotional music and religious knowledge.

Continuity and Change: A Restudy of Arnold Adriaan Bake’s Research on the Devotional and Folk Music and Dance of Bengal 1925-1956

SOAS Research Online, 2020

This thesis is a restudy of the research that the Dutch musicologist and indologist Arnold Adriaan Bake (1899-1963) conducted on the folk and devotional music and dance of the Bengal region between 1925 and 1956. My thesis pursues two central aims. On the one hand, I study Bake’s research and fieldwork methodology, by investigating his interactions with Bengali academics, artists, and recording participants and informants. I argue that Bengali scholars often significantly shaped Bake’s views on communities and their performing arts through idealised portrayals, and that he established personal connections to the Indian Civil Service and to missionary organisations to facilitate his fieldwork and recordings. On the other hand, I study the regional performance traditions rāybẽśe, jārigān, Bengali kīrtan, and Bāul music and dance, as they developed from the early 20th century until the present in West Bengal and Bangladesh, and the development of Santali music and dance in Jharkhand and West Bengal. I argue that Bengali scholars reframed the representation of regional folk music and dance in Bengali society between the 1900s-40s, through academic discourses with nationalist overtones, and that their efforts changed performance styles and contexts up until the present day. Furthermore, I argue that missionaries restricted the practice of traditional Santali music and dance among converts, and remodelled their songs into church hymns, to support proselytisation processes. For my research critique, I evaluated Bake’s sound recordings, silent films, and field notes held at the British Library Sound Archive, his correspondence at the British Library, the Berlin Phonogram Archive, Leiden University Library, at the Rabindra Bhavan Archive at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, and other published and unpublished resources. I circulated Bake’s recordings among performers and academics in West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Bangladesh, for support in the evaluation of the recordings, which provided insights into the relevance of the recordings to them. The recirculation resulted in the repatriation of copies to a museum and to an archive in West Bengal in 2018. For the study of stylistic continuity and change, I analysed Bake’s recordings, and compared these with my field recordings from 2017 and contemporary online resources. During my fieldwork, I conducted ethnographic observations, to study the current living circumstances of performers, and the wider socio-cultural context of genres.

How Does Music mean? Embodied Memories and the Politics of Affect in the Indian Sarangi

American Ethnologist, 2000

In this article, I bring the multidimensional sensory medium of music into the anthropological conversation on meaning and embodiment Based on a study of the sarangi that is frankly experiential as well as broadly referenced (India, Pakistan, North America), I explore how an instrument can become an icon of intense affect and performance contexts privileged sites for enacting and contesting cultural memories in the face of hegemonic resign ification across India's political transformation from feudal-colonial to urban-bourgeois dominance, [

FIND THE TRUE COUNTRY: DEVOTIONAL MUSIC AND THE SELF IN INDIA'S NATIONAL CULTURE

For centuries, the songs of devotional poet-saints have been an integral part of Indian religious life. Countless regional traditions of bhajans (devotional songs) have been able to maintain their existence by adapting to serve the contemporary social needs of their participants. This dissertation draws on fieldwork conducted over 2014-2015 with contemporary bhajan performers from many different genres and styles throughout India. It highlights a specific tradition in the Central Indian region of Malwa based on poetry by Kabir and other Sants (anti-establishment poet-saints) performed by lower-caste singers. This tradition was largely unheard-of half a century ago, but is now a major part of Malwa’s cultural life that has facilitated the creation of lower-caste spiritual networks and created a space for those networks to engage in discourse about social issues. Malwa’s bhajan singers have also become part of India’s popular religious and musical life as certain performers have attained celebrity status and been recognized at the national level as living bearers of the Sant tradition. This dissertation follows performers and songs from Malwa into new contexts and explores the processes by which performers and audiences in diverse styles and contexts use Sant bhajans to construct understandings of the self. It further addresses the role of Sant bhajans in the formation of new communities comprising members from previously disparate social groups. It interrogates why Sant bhajans might be relevant and appealing to Indians from so many backgrounds and how these bhajans and their performers are relevant to major cultural, religious, and social discourses in India today. It describes and analyzes the various processes by which Sant bhajans are creating new arenas for artistic, spiritual, and social dialogue, and allowing previously marginalized voices to contribute to the formation of Indian culture.

The endless search for SA: spiritual ideology in Hindustāni music. PhD Thesis, University College Cork.

2014

This dissertation centres on philosophical attitudes presented by North Indian classical musicians in relation to the concept and experience of rāga improvisation. In Hindustāni music, there is a dynamic tension between ideology and pragmatism, devotion and entertainment, fixity and improvisational freedom, and cognition and visceral experience. On one hand, rāga is an embodied methodological template for the creation of music. On the other hand, rāga improvisation is conceptualised as a path to metaphysical experience and as an evocation of an ineffable divine presence. A masterful rendition of rāga is both a re-enactment of a systematic prescribed formula and a spontaneous flow of consciousness. This study presents these apparent dichotomies to highlight ideological concerns, while simultaneously contextualising philosophical idealism in relation to pragmatic realities. A central paradigm is the manner in which pragmatic concerns are elevated in status and given spiritual significance. The dissertation begins with a view into historical and religious context. The discussion continues with a speculative investigation positing co-relations between Hindustāni music and central tenets of Indian philosophy, considering how rāga improvisation may manifest as a philosophy of sound. The study then explores the concept of rāga, a modal and conceptual construct that forms the heart of Indian classical music. The final three sections ground the subject of spiritual ideology within the life experience of Hindustāni musicians: ‘Transmission’ looks at the learning and enculturation process, which encapsulates values intrinsic to the ethos of Hindustāni music culture. ‘Practice’ explores the discipline, science and experience of musical practice, revealing core ideological concerns connecting spirituality to musical experience; and ‘Performance’ examines the live presentation of rāga improvisation, and the relationship between music as ‘entertainment’ and music as ‘devotion’. Both ethnographic and musicological, this research is the culmination of various fieldtrips to India, extensive interviews with Hindustāni musicians, fifteen year’s sitār training, and the study of relevant musicological and philosophical texts.

Ethnomusicology in Action -An Appeal of Musicology (My applied research on Ethnomusicology 365 at the University of Alberta, department of Ethnomusicology)

European Journal of Research , 2020

Ethnomusicology, formerly known as Comparative Musicology (Ethnomusicology Newsletter in 1953) is a theoretical subject which is the combination of archiving, research, teaching & learning, presentation, outreaching, interviewing, gathering data, observation, documenting musical tradition, for the development of human being, global development, community sustainability, peace and harmony, social integrity, justice, health and education. It is music like other music through singing, dancing, playing instruments, drama, poetry (Ramayana, a great Indian epic written by a great monk and poet Tulsi Das, it reflexes nationalism, music folklore, ethnology (Giving Voice to Hope for Liberia, a refugee camp in Ghana's village is the combination of nationalism, folklore and ethnology, international folk music council, a UNESCO affiliated organization created for international cooperation manifested in the creation of the United Nations). The paper aims to explore Ethnomusicology as an independent subject from the subject of Musicology and to know traditional music from around the world through its participatory research activities within the community and in the classroom. The outcome is to establish and understanding its glimpses to the society, its complexity through social, economic, cultural bonds in every ethnic and traditional community such as discover of Pigmy Community through the reading of Rain Forest. The question is how does Ethnomusicology work as a medication for the deprived community from the ancient world to the present world? The future activities are to expand its various roots by writing and researching especially to know about the music of lost communities from humanity such as Maya civilization.

The Marketplace of Devotional Song: Cultural Economies of Exchange in Bengali Padāvalī-Kīrtan

In the past two decades, professional performers of a genre of Hindu devotional song known as padāvalī-kīrtan have begun to introduce a variety of promotional techniques to further their careers. Advertising, media production, and transformations of musical style are but some examples of this trend. These recent changes have spurred journalists, kīrtan scholars, and kīrtan instructors in urban Kolkata to suggest that professional kīrtan musicians are guilty of transforming the musical style of this genre in order to attract new audiences, while further subverting the genre's association with themes of social prosperity. In this article, I study the social and musical values that surround this debate, as I argue that these negative critiques overlook the ways that money, music, and religious belief are intertwined in the lives of present-day musicians. Theories of musical commodification, neoliberal entrepreneurship, and the influence of capitalism on musical style are considered as I focus on a specific musical style of padāvalī-kīrtan that uses large meters and slow tempos in performance.

The Ethnographer as Apprentice: Embodying Sociomusical Knowledge in South India

Anthropology and Humanism, 2012

This article focuses on the social significance and the cultural politics of the body-sensorial knowledge acquired through learning music. It considers music as a means for producing particular kinds of embodied subjects, as a repetitive practice and a mode of discipline that inculcates and hones gendered and classed sensibilities. These ideas are elaborated in reflection on the author's experience of learning South Indian classical (Karnatic) music through apprenticeship, multiple pedagogical encounters, and learning to appreciate music in the company of others. [embodiment, sensorial knowledge, gender, apprenticeship, music] One of the more striking stories my music teacher told me, in the course of my long apprenticeship learning South Indian classical music with her, was of the strong ambivalence she had experienced about music when she was younger. She related this story, which I paraphrase here, during a lull one afternoon in 1998 as we sat on the floor in her house in Chennai with our violins in our laps and the notes I had been making to learn a particular composition scattered on the floor around us. As the daughter chosen to absorb and carry on her father's musical art, she had felt intensely jealous of her younger sister, who was sent off to boarding school and college. Why, she wondered, should only her younger sister get the opportunity to become educated and eventually work outside home? How could they have been born of the same parents yet be so unequally treated, one kept at home in the bonds of hereditary musicianship, and the other sent off to get a college education so that she could move beyond her family? My teacher, barely more than a teenager herself at the time, began to doubt if she were her father's child at all. She retreated to the upper verandah of the house and refused to eat, talk, or play the violin for two weeks. Her father, almost blind, a genius absorbed in his music and busy with students who came to him daily to learn, did not notice her absence. It was only after her mother said something to him that he came up the stairs to where she was sitting. She expected harsh words from him, so was surprised when he instead gently asked, "So, you are doubting whether you are really my child or not?" But rather than simply laying the doubt to rest, he said, "You play your violin. Listen to that sound. And you will know." At first she had resented the fact that he had avoided her question, but then she began to appreciate the genius of his reply, which had in effect already bs_bs_banner