by Siddhesh Gooptu

When cellist Yo-Yo Ma co-founded the Silk Road Project in 1998, it was in the context of a particular conjuncture between political and personal factors. On the one hand, Ma’s personal story of transnational migration and mixed cultural heritages prompted him to reflect on the Silk Roads as a metaphor for the kind of inter-cultural music he wished to play at the helm of a diverse ensemble of cultural voices and traditions. On the other hand, the project was also partially funded and politically supported by the US State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs in a post-Cold War revival of cultural diplomacy towards the Islamic World (Central and West Asia, and North Africa, frequently lumped together as the New/Greater Middle East).

Implicit within this project is the so-called “Intersection of Cultures,” a commonsensical idea of the meeting of traditional national cultures that are in themselves distinct, homogenous, and (frequently) immutable. Individuals may traverse national borders, families may be of mixed cultural heritage, and national state institutions may even promote international cultural exchange, but “Indian Culture,” “Middle-Eastern Culture,” or for that matter “Western Culture” is something essential that must be either preserved wholesale or risk degradation. The lay assumption is that “traditional” music, as an abstract apolitical art-form that is merely an expression of cultural heritage or social entertainment, stands outside historical processes; ironically, this assumption makes it particularly useful for explicitly socio-political projects like nation-building.  The review of new and old scholarship offered here will seek to unsettle this commonsensical notion by looking at musical circulations within and out of India.

Silk Roads and Indian Oceanways

Theodore Levin asks a deceptively simple question – how does a historian account for the curious cultural divergences and convergences along the Silk Roads, rather than a continuum from one distinct culture to another? The answer lies in the fact that musicians, instruments, and musical practices have clearly been footloose since time immemorial. Through a symbiotic process of assimilation and transformation, musicians have moved across realms, picking up or spreading musical influences and techniques, and carried on moving. This accounts for the certain remarkable similarities in instrument-building and musical techniques on the one hand, and the profusion of diverse musical meanings and cultural connotations of individual musical traditions on the other. In this footloose world, there are no “traditional” musicians, but simply musicians who transmit their craft from one audience to the next as they travel.

Within this context of movement and circulation, musical instruments accumulate new contextual meaning and animate social relations – while clearly originating from a particular place and time, they may be transformed and assimilated within a new context to contribute something new and unique. Circulating musical instruments embody evidence of cross-cultural connections, and examining the physical and aural details of an instrument can help illuminate its place within material and cultural networks. These processes formed such quintessentially “Indian” instruments as the sitar and the tanpura. Comparing them in relation to other lute-type instruments along the Silk Roads shows how they grew out of “multiple Central Asian and Indian lineages, combining in themselves Hindu, Muslim, Persian, and Turko-Mongol Central Asian cultural elements and historical traditions.” Similarly, the Indian term “vina” (a generic Sanskrit term for Indian chordophones) had a Sumerian origin, and came to designate a family of instruments ranging from Mesopotamia to South-East Asia. Through this lens, all historical instruments appear as hybrid nodes in wider cultural networks: simultaneously traditional and modern, local and trans-geographic.

In a recent volume, Jim Sykes and Julia Byl bring together scholarship that similarly seeks to analyze such moments of movement, assimilation, and transformation across another fertile geography of political and social exchange, the Indian Ocean. By foregrounding certain communities associated with the Indian Ocean, the volume seeks to highlight music’s key historical role in establishing networks of circulation like Sufism, colonialism, slavery, and indentured labor. Whether it is Bengali-speaking populations “re-sounding” musical genres in colonial Burma or musically expressing the restrictive confinement of the Andaman Islands, or the Sikh diaspora’s transformation of traditional devotional music in Kenya, or the Afro-Asian Siddi community organizing music festivals to challenge the historical “othering” they face in Western India – music and musicians can both reinforce and traverse boundaries, fortifying communal distinctions while producing new syncretisms. They frequently combine multiple musical inheritances, even as they seek to newly establish themselves in particular places and times.

Colonial Encounters and Postcolonial Confusions

The traumatic experience of British colonialism transformed musical tastes and habits of musical consumption within India. Scholars have explored the fascinating and often difficult histories behind the entry of European classical music into the Indian subcontinent, particularly with the help of prominent European and Anglo-Indian families. Similarly, there was a burgeoning popularity of jazz and popular music during the late colonial period. The 1930s saw several successful tours and stays by talented African-American jazz performers in major Indian cities like Calcutta and Bombay, and their presence played a huge role in the public consumption and appreciation of “western” music amongst Indians. At the same time, it has been argued that India’s popular and classical musics were continuously being “discovered” and re-discovered within the West over a span of two centuries, each time being represented in differing ways to reflect the shifting relationship between India and Britain. This would go on to produce such historical oddities as The Oriental Miscellany (1789) of William Hamilton Bird and the hybrid music genre of “Hindoostanee Airs” frequently performed on harpsichords or pianofortes. Music from India (alongside the music of other British colonies) was a key source of musical inspiration for the emerging English Musical Renaissance of the late 19^th–early 20^th century. By critically exploring this process of acculturation and musical transmission between India and Britain through composers like Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Kaikhosru Sorabji, John Foulds, and Amy Woodforde-Finden, we see how the new forms of national musical identity (“Englishness,” “Indianness”) began to slowly coalesce into recognition. When looking at this musical exchange within the context of imperialism, postcolonial musicological scholarship has helped to further complicate the relationship between culture and social history. Virinder S. Kalra has taken some contemporary musicologists and historians to task for tacitly relying upon European musical categories (Absolute vs. Programmatic music, Sacred vs. Secular music), leaving unexplored the epistemological violence of colonial knowledge-production. In this account, the troubled dyad of the native informant and the European colonist should underpin our understanding of the colonial past.

At any rate, the imperial encounter mutually transformed the British metropole and Indian colony, and there is no reason to suppose that the music of these two nations would not undergo the same process. By looking at shared musical influences and complicities between key Indian and European figures, music becomes a lens of examining societal and intellectual change within the context of emerging Indian national(ist) consciousness. The colonial encounter inspired elite Indian music reformers to modernize and institutionalize the great “Indian classical” traditions to gain imperial respectability: standardized notation and pedagogy, distinct musical schools and traditions with canonical composers/founders and repertoire, the establishment of national music conferences, and new forms of public performance. Simultaneously, the domain of “folk music” gained a new significance due to growing ethnomusicological interest in the cultures of the diverse racially-defined communities within the British Empire. One can see the emergence of the neo-Romantic notion of a supposedly pre-modern “residue” still existent within the folk traditions of Indian villages, a musical source that could serve as a cultural corrective to both stricter “classical” traditions and modern nationalist politics.

This process of mutual acculturation and musical exchange was helped by that other great modernist innovation in music – the commodification of sound-recording technology. The emerging phonograph industry in India was fiercely competitive (chiefly characterized by the rivalry between the Anglo-American Gramophone Company and German companies Beka and Odeon), and its rapid expansion was marked by attempts to capture an ever-increasing share of the “native” market by recording and marketing “native” artists and singers. At the same time, the relative ignorance of Western recording professionals meant that they were less able to (or indeed interested in) differentiating between individual musical styles, at most deigning to promote some amount of linguistic variety within their company catalogues. This may have resulted in homogenising “Indian” contra “Western” music within early catalogues, popularizing “non-Western” recorded music within the market at the expense of flattening stylistic differences between individual Indian musical traditions. A similar perceived gulf between Indian music and Western music clearly informed the decision of the All India Radio’s musical director John Foulds to ban the harmonium or portable reed-organ in 1940, on the grounds that the “un-Indian” instrument was fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of accompanying “authentic” Indian classical music, despite its overwhelming popularity with many musicians and its distinctly hybrid origins. The ban would stay in force well into the postcolonial nation, reflecting a deep-seated cultural nationalism that survived the twin events of Independence and Partition.

Fusion Music? Global Hybrids? Or Something Simpler?

Against nationalist attempts in postcolonial India to preserve and promote an “authentic” Indian culture free of Western corruption, the turn of the new century has seen a growing global interest in transcultural connections and musical co-mingling. The products of these musical conjunctures are often given the dismissive title of “fusion music” within India, a sacrilegious contrast to the alleged purity of “classical” and “folk” traditions. When exported outside India, they are often categorized as “exotica” or the more euphemistic “world music” – prominent examples include the band Shakti co-founded by John McLaughlin, Zakir Hussain and others; the annual music programmes Coke Studio Pakistan/India/Bangla, funded by the Coca-Cola company; or the multiple award-winning oeuvre of composer, musician, and producer A. R. Rahman. While clearly wildly popular and beloved by many diverse audiences, these cultural phenomena are perhaps not as revolutionary or path-breaking as they may first appear. Rather, one may see them as simply a natural extension of a longer trajectory of musical collaboration and cultural interplay.

Looking at the life of Baba Allauddin Khan, the famous founder of the Maihar gharana and one of India’s most influential pedagogues, is particularly instructive. As a young man in Calcutta in the early 20^th century, he learned multiple instruments in both Western and Indian styles, and worked as a musician in a Bengali theatre company. This early influence shaped his musical trajectory enormously, and when in 1918 he entered the service of the Maharaja of Maihar he formed the eclectic Maihar Band, which included a xylophone, cello, and harmonium alongside esraj and sitar, with Allauddin leading on the violin. Allaudin’s musical journey is just one example of a common trend across modern India. The integration of the European violin within Karnatak classical music, as an expressive melodic instrument that can both accompany and occasionally outshine the human voice, is another notable case. Introduced during the 19^th century in the Thanjavur court of Madras, the evolving techniques of modern Karnatak violin-playing reflect the changing aesthetics and priorities of the Karnatak tradition, and an opportunity for musicians to expand its boundaries. Similarly, one can look to the enthusiastic Indian adoption of the guitar in its many avatars (acoustic, electric, lap-steel) in disparate musical genres – from the heyday of rock and jazz music in the 1960s, to western classical music, to Indian classical and popular traditions. Indeed, one of India’s greatest modern cultural exports “Bollywood” has historically relied upon (and profited greatly from) the contractual labour of working musicians, composers, and arrangers performing in an eclectic mixture of Indian and Western musical styles. Many of these individuals were talented multi-instrumentalists, and a film soundtrack might include everything from “standard” Indian instruments like sitars and tablas, to full-scale Western symphonic orchestras, to electric guitars and saxophones and synthesizers.

In contrast to the aforementioned “fusion” label, I would argue that these are all simply forms of Indian music, precisely because they intertwine local and global influences. Mixing cultural sources necessarily makes the task of cleanly separating “ours” from “others” more difficult. By looking at cultural exchange and musical circulation, the plurality of musical heritage helps unsettle nationalist attempts at fixing musical practices to a particular time and place. The cultural “traditions” of today, whether in India or elsewhere, are ultimately the contingent products of historical processes – politically and socially constructed on the one hand, while carrying real historical weight on the other. Music-making, while being potentially the most abstract and historically intangible of human activities, bears this imprint as well.  It may be argued that whenever peoples meet and interact, there is both exchange and transformation, a (re)making of social life and relations. By looking at musical circulation and the impact of cultural and political encounters, one can see (and hear) that musical traditions are almost always embedded with the histories of mobility, assimilation, and transformation. In some instances, musicians reflect the political and cultural norms and values of their times; in others, they fight and resist them, and seek to imagine something new. The varied and occasionally competing scholarship examined here leaves one with a renewed appreciation of Indian musical traditions as co-evolving, contingent, and a far more dynamic field than national imaginations may allow. Certainly, the space for further research, and future musical experiments, seems to be ever-expanding.

Siddhesh Gooptu is currently studying at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. He completed his MA (Sociology) at the Delhi School of Economics, and worked at Zubaan Books, New Delhi. He is an enthusiastic musician, with an amateur interest in ethnomusicology and music history.

Edited by Dibyokamal Mitra

Featured image: George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library, “England-India-Malaysia-Australia Route: Map A.,” New York Public Library Digital Collections.