Improvisation as devotion: nāgasvaram music and ritual communication in Hindu temple festival processions

Abstract

This article situates melodic improvisation in South Indian (Tamil) culture, asking why ālāpana, a melodic and unmetered genre that encourages creativity and favours time flexibility, has become the norm to accompany South Indian temple festival processions, one of the most imposing manifestations of Hindu devotion. With reference to music performance, religious praxis and history, I argue that improvisation is central to devotional, bhakti-oriented modes of worship, and part of a ritual system in which all senses are used to enhance participants’ religious experience and facilitate human–divine communication. Drawing from extensive fieldwork research in Tamil Nadu, I hope to shed new light on the production and reception of ālāpana in South Asian culture and help understand further the function and significance of sound, music, hearing and imagination in Hindu South India.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.