The Multiplicities of Hindustani Music

Abstract

Abstract The Multiplicities of Hindustani Music: Re-envisioning a National Tradition explores the dynamic social and economic world of North Indian raga-based music over the twentieth century and into the present day. By looking beyond geographical and social centers, this book elucidates new dimensions of Hindustani music’s history, richness, strengths, contradictions, and challenges. Hindustani music was patronized by elites but existed also as a common culture of fairs and festivals in temples, shrines, and the estates of royalty and landowners. Khyal in particular flourished not only as court music but also in Sufi shrines as the repertoire of qawwals, and lineages of classical khyal singers encompassed a myriad of Hindustani music genres, including qawwali. The greatest mastered a multiplicity of such forms and were known as chaumukhi “all-round” artists. Certain styles of Hindustani music were modernized, sacralized, and canonized as a national “classical” art form, set above the ostentation of courtly patronage, and, after Independence, associated with government funding. Yet this classical music flourished due to commercial wealth both before Independence and in the Nehruvian era, with business sponsorship playing a pivotal role. A parallel history tells of its draining and thinning from smaller urban centers in North India and its limited scope beyond certain communities. Nevertheless, the reform and modernization of classical music was an ideal central to its reform, and many musicians and music lovers strive to fulfill it to this day through music schools and other projects. However, it is “lighter” forms of raga-based music that have national reach. Rather than seeing classical music as a bounded and exclusive arena opposed to other forms, this book sees it as interdependent with and strengthened by them.

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 — 2 citations exist upstream.

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