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From the beginning of the colonial period, western musical forms and practices have travelled to the subcontinent, interacted with domestic sound cultures, and played a significant role in the making of Indian modernity. As the contributions in the volume show, it would be popular western styles like ragtime, jazz and rock n' roll that had the greatest impact on Indian culture and social life. Thus, in the nineteen thirties and forties, American jazz served as a powerful catalyst for local musicians who would create Bollywood film music. After Independence, contemporary western music played a big role in the formation of urban youth culture, a process that consisted of regular pop programming on All India Radio, music festivals at the IITs and other colleges, the rise of clubs, discos and local rock bands, and widespread coverage in English-language magazines like The Junior Statesman and Youth Times. Today, western popular music forms like electronic music and rap continue to fertilize India's musical milieu, but do so within the larger context of globalization and digital culture.
This book will appeal to students, researchers and scholars of ethnomusicology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies, as well as anyone interested in the intersection of music, culture, and modernity.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of
South Asian History and Culture.
List of contents
Introduction: Western popular music and Indian modernity
1. The bi-musical subject: Dwarkanath Tagore and European music in early-nineteenth century Calcutta
2. Rhythm, noise and action: Decoding R.D. Burman's soundtracks of Bombay
3. The Beatles, the bands, and Bollywood: dialectical identities of India's popular music
4. Beatlemania in Bombay
5. Contextualizing the voice of a female pop artist: Western music and Indian modernity
6. 'All Divine': Mapping the intersections between spirituality and modernity in independent Indian music
7. Broadcasting the popular: All India Radio's western music programming in the postcolonial era
8. 'If Madonna can...': emergence of the female indipop star in the 1990s MTV cultural economy
9. Rocking in Kasba: "band" music, contemporary Bengali cinema, and Anjan Dutta's lost Kolkata
10. Sounding against culture? The tenors of western music in a colonial small town
11. 'A distant echo attracts me, fragrance of life beyond': growing up a metalhead in India
About the author
Biswarup Sen is Associate Professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon, where he has taught since 2004. His research focuses on mass communications, globalization, new media, and popular culture. He is the author of
Digital Culture and Politics in Contemporary India: The Making of an Info-Nation (2016) and
Channeling Cultures: Television Studies from India (co-editor, 2014) and is currently working on a manuscript titled
Cliff Richard and Anglo-India.
