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In Musicophilia in Mumbai Tejaswini Niranjana traces the place of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai throughout the long twentieth century as the city moved from being a seat of British colonial power to a vibrant postcolonial metropolis. Drawing on historical archives, newspapers, oral histories, and interviews with musicians, critics, students, and instrument makers as well as her own personal experiences as a student of Hindustani classical music, Niranjana shows how the widespread love of music throughout the city created a culture of collective listening that brought together people of diverse social and linguistic backgrounds. This culture produced modern subjects Niranjana calls musicophiliacs, whose subjectivity was grounded in a social rather than an individualistic context. By attending concerts, learning instruments, and performing at home and in various urban environments, musicophiliacs embodied forms of modernity that were distinct from those found in the West. In tracing the relationship between musical practices and the formation of the social subject, Niranjana opens up new ways to think about urbanity, subjectivity, culture, and multiple modernities.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. On Not Being Able to Learn Music 1
1. "Yaa Nagari Mein Lakh Darwaza": Musicophilia and the Lingua Musica in Mumbai 19
2. Mehfil (Performance): The Spaces of Music 46
3. Deewaana (The Mad One): The Lover of Music 86
4. Taleem: Pedagogy and the Performing Subject 128
5. Nearness as Distance, or Distance as Nearness 162
Afterword 181
Glossary 199
Notes 205
Selected Bibliography 227
Index 235
About the author
Tejaswini Niranjana is Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University and author of
Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad, also published by Duke University Press, and
Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context.
Summary
Tejaswini Niranjana traces the place of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai throughout the long twentieth century, showing how the widespread love of music throughout the city created a culture of collective listening and social subjects who embodied new forms of modernity.
