Musical publics in twentieth-century Madras: competing narratives of sonic sociability / Lakshmi Subramanian -- The ustads from the North, the public sphere, and the classicization of music in late nineteeenth-century Calcutta / Adrian McNeil -- Hindustani music and the emergence of a lingua musica in Mumbai / Tejaswini Niranjana -- Govind Sadashiv Tembe and the education of taste in Maharashtra / Urmila Bhirdikar -- Artists in the open: Indian classical musicians in the mid-twentieth century / Amlan das Gupta -- Seeing print, hearing song: tracking the film song through the Hindi popular print sphere, c. 1955-75 / Vebhuti Duggal -- Rewind and play: romantic music of the 1990s in the cinematic public sphere / Abhija Ghosh -- The public sphere of marketed sound: the business of early recorded music in India / Vibodh Parthasarathi -- Singing in the fray: radical publics and popular entertainment in South India / Kaley Mason -- Vernacular music traditions and their publics: the political dimensions of sounds and technologies / Aditi Deo.
Summary:
A collection of essays that focus on the role of music in the formation of a public in India across the twentieth century, Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India looks at different regions, languages, and different genres and styles of music. 0Modernity fundamentally changed the relationship between private and public realms. New social arrangements gave rise to new forms of music making, with the musicians 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 became an important feature of public life in modern times, it also influenced how modernity itself took shape. Music became a key site for the articulation of questions of the public and of politics, and the essays in this volume look at various such aspects, from the formation of modern spaces of performance, certain forms of music assuming the status of classic, creation of a national and nationalistic tradition, and circulation of music in popular politics to broadcast technology. Through exploring these diverse inter-disciplinary questions relating to music, musicians, and their audiences, the volume provides new entry-points for the discussion of music and modern-day cultural practice in India.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.