Music, history, and the sacred in South Asia

Abstract

This chapter uses the notion of techno cultures to suggest some broad perspectives on the historical development of popular music, especially outside the mainstream West, and to look at a set of distinctive music subcultures based around specific uses of extant technologies. New forms of bourgeois song and social dance emerge, together with commercialized versions of traditional musics, all representing forms of bourgeois synthesis. Film culture that centered around Bollywood constitutes a quintessential culture of mechanical reproduction. Indian film culture and film-music culture, which continue to flourish vigorously today, reflect the persistence of the mass-culture mode of production in specific regional centers even in the new millennium. Digital technology had a dramatically democratizing effect on standards and forms of musicianship. The effects of digital technology on modes of dissemination and exchange have been equally dramatic, although similarly concentrated in wealthier and modernized societies or pockets of societies.

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