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The Music Box and its

Reverberations:

Technology and Music in India

14 – 17 January 2015

School of Arts and Aesthetics Auditorium,

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Musical Performances at

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2 CONTENTS

Conference Concept Note…….3 Musical Performances Programme…….6

Programme…….7 Abstracts…….15 Biographical notes…….38

Emails…….53 Acknowledgements…….57

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CONFERENCE CONCEPT NOTE

The explosion of digital technologies for sound in the past two decades has thrown into sharp relief the tangled mediations of the musical, the technological, and the social-institutional. As a medium for aesthetic creation, the digital facilitates processes such as sampling and remixing that confuse popular notions of authorship and originality in music. The particular materialities of digital circulation, reproduction and storage of audio have simultaneously impacted established music industry norms and subjective engagements of listeners with music. Indeed, the digital’s blurring of existing practices of creativity, circulation and listening draws our attention to music as a sonic-social-technological-legal assemblage (Born 2005, 2011). Debates about what the digital signifies in contemporary musical experiences also encompass reflections on previous technologies; especially, the digital’s prolific remediation of previous technological formats that gives rise to a provocative binary between it and the analogue. From this perspective, the digital allows us a unique opportunity to open anew conversations on the analogue, ranging from continuities and parallels between the two, to a radical split in the digital context. A way to historicize the digital, then, might be to peek at analogue sound technologies as mediums for aesthetic creation as well as circulation of/for different musical sounds and genres.

This conference enters these discussions from the vantage point of India, taking the opportunity to rethink claims about the digital and its precursors through India’s particular combination of several musical forms and technologies in modernity. We begin from the coordinates of ‘popular’ music (film, vernacular) and ‘classical’ music, aiming to open up routes that probe technologies as they intersect with questions about definitions of categories, re/configurations of genres, musicians’ livelihoods and music industries (especially popular music industries), and affective engagements of musicians and audiences. For instance, for music

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that continues to be associated with oral circulation — specifically, the regional/vernacular and the classical/art — technologization has been perceived as a singular mode of recording for posterity while simultaneously inciting anxieties about the loss of the ‘liveness’ central to their performance and transmission. The digital, in these contexts, is emphasized through its seemingly infinite possibilities for archiving and dissemination, and an ever-increasing attention to the ‘live’ aesthetic. In contradistinction, with digital production tools, music genres that are ontologically technological — for instance, Hindi and Bhojpuri film songs, remixes, Indipop — have explicitly embraced new generic formations, and sonic and musical textures. Further, if it accentuates certain kinds of differentiation, the digital also flattens production hierarchies and differences by promoting new kinds of industry and engendering new modes of listening.

Organized collaboratively by the Music Digitisation Mediation project based in the University of Oxford, UK and the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, the conference uses these lenses to trace musical experiences in the Indian context as they are mediated by technologies of music production, circulation and consumption. Choosing to concentrate on the aural as against the audiovisual (following Ochoa Gautier 2006), we draw upon scholarship from several disciplinary orientations to focus on selected domains of the interfaces between sound socialities and musical technologies. We aim to bring together perspectives from academics and practitioners through papers, roundtable discussions and performances. We propose the following themes, without being limited to them:

§ Sonic technologies, aesthetic regimes and the crafting of genres/categories

§ Technologies, digitization and film music industries

§ Individuals, institutes and processes of collecting, storing and archiving music

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§ Amplification, circulation and the creation of musical/sonic publics

§ Enmeshed technologies of the object and listening subject/s and practices

§ Musical livelihoods, economies and sonic technologies

Each conference evening will culminate in a concert that will speak to the several musical practices that are being used as organizing schema.

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CONFERENCE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Prof Georgina Born (University of Oxford)

Prof Ira Bhaskar | Prof Bishnupriya Dutt | Dr Kaushik Bhaumik (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Dr Aditi Deo

(Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune) Vebhuti Duggal | Anubhuti Sharma | Anugyan Nag

(Jawaharlal Nehru University) SUPPORTED BY Jawaharlal Nehru University Ministry of Culture, Government of India University of Oxford | European Research Council

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MUSICAL PERFORMANCES PROGRAMME All performances to be held at the School of Social Sciences Auditorium

7:00 to 8:30 pm

Thursday, 15 January Bombay Jayashri Ramnath

accompanied by Anirudh Athreya Delhi Sairam K.J. Dileep Pavithra Ramesh Vijayshri Vittal Friday, 16 January Moushumi Bhowmik accompanied by Satyaki Banerjee Saturday, 17 January Arijit Datta accompanied by Vinay Lobo

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PROGRAMME

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP WITH JONATHAN STERNE & GEORGINA BORN

Wednesday, 14 January

SESSION I

10:00 am-12:30 pm Jonathan Sterne Introduction to Sound Studies 12:30-1:30 pm Lunch

SESSION II

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INAUGURAL SESSION

Wednesday, 14 January

4.30-5.30 pm Registration 5:00-5:30 pm Tea/Coffee

5:30-6:00 pm Welcome: Prof Ira Bhaskar, Dean, School of Arts and Aesthetics

Introductory Remarks: Prof S. K. Sopory, Vice Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru

University

Introduction to the Music Digitisation Mediation Project: Prof Georgina Born, University of Oxford

KEYNOTE

6:00-8:00 pm Music, Technology, Aesthetics: A Conversation across Disciplines Chair: Amlan Dasgupta

Jonathan Sterne

Stretching Time: Quantum Legacies in Analogue and Digital Audio

Georgina Born

Directions in Digital Musics: On the Entanglement of Technological, Social and Aesthetic Change

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CONFERENCE

Thursday, 15 January

9:00-9:30 am Registration PANEL I

9:30-11:30 am Hindustani Classical Music: Histories, Sounds, Technology Chair/discussant: Vidya Rao

Amlan Dasgupta

Notes Towards a Possible History of Musical Sound: Interpreting Archival Evidence

Justin Scarimbolo

Commercial Recordings and the Construction of Gharana Identity

Anubhuti Sharma

Neutral Operator or Aesthetic Tool? Kumar Gandharva and the Question of Technology

11:30 am-12 noon Tea/Coffee

PANEL II

12 noon-1:30 pm Music in South India: Shifting Aesthetic Paradigms in the Early Twentieth Century Chair/discussant: Bombay Jayashri Ramnath

Vikram Sampath

The Creation of a Carnatic Music ‘Aesthetic’ in the Early Twentieth Century

Stephen Hughes

Sound Unbound: Visualizing Technological Change in South Indian Musical Practice

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10 1:30-2:30 pm Lunch

PANEL III

2:30-4:00 pm Vernacular Music Practices: Culture, Media, Politics Chair/discussant: Lakshmi Subramanian

Aditi Deo

Technologically Crafting Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Vernacular Music Documentation in India

Stefan Fiol

Khud Lagni Cha: A Social History of Music, Media and Folk Culture in the Garhwal Himalayas

4:00-4:30 pm Tea/Coffee

ROUNDTABLE I

4:30-6:30 pm Archiving Music: Theory and Practice Moderator: Shubha Chaudhuri

Participants: Suresh Chandvankar, Gopal Singh Chauhan, Amlan Dasgupta, Bhaskar Kowshik, Sukanta Majumdar, Yatindra Mishra, Vikram Sampath

Musical Performance I

7:00-8:30 pm, the School of Social Sciences Auditorium

Bombay Jayashri Ramnath

accompanied by

Anirudh Athreya | Delhi Sairam | K.J. Dileep Pavithra Ramesh | Vijayshri Vittal

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Friday, 16 January

PANEL IV

9:30-11:30 am ‘Meri Awaaz Suno [Listen to my Voice]’: Cinematic and Aural Stardoms Chair/discussant: Ranjani Mazumdar

Neepa Majumdar

Music, Mediation and Cinematic Self-Reflexivity

Yatindra Mishra

The Structure and Melody of Hindi Film Songs

Amanda Weidman

Constructing the ‘Husky’ Female Voice in Analogue and Digital

11:30 am-12 noon Tea/Coffee

ROUNDTABLE II

12 noon-2:00 pm Technologically Yours: Film Music and Sound Practices Moderator: Ira Bhaskar

Participants: Bombay Jayashri Ramnath, Biswadeep Chatterjee, Sneha Khanwalkar, Arjit Datta, Ravindhar Randhawa,

Kunal Sharma

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12 PANEL V

3.00-4.30 pm Seeing Print, Hearing Film: Reception Histories of Music and Sound Chair/discussant: Ravi Vasudevan

Madhuja Mukherjee

To Speak or Not to Speak: An Enquiry into Technology, Mediations and Early Bengali films

Vebhuti Duggal

The Swarlipi in Madhuri and Other Stories: Tales of Listening to the Hindi Film Song

4.30-5.00 pm Tea/Coffee

PANEL VI

5.00-6.30 pm After the Great Divide: Digitization and the Vernacular Music Industries Chair/discussant: Ravi Sundaram

Ratnakar Tripathy

Enabling Music: A Comparative Perspective for Bihar and Haryana

Gregory Booth

The ‘Long Tail’ in the Digital World: Musical Diversity and the Survival of India’s ‘Minor’ Labels

Musical Performance II

7:00-8:30 pm, the School of Social Sciences Auditorium

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Saturday, 17 January

PANEL VII

9:30-11:30 am The Business of Sounds: Music Industries, Retailing, Piracy Chair/ discussant: Lawrence Liang

Vibodh Parthasarthy

The Business of Making Sound: Entrepreneurial Practices at the Dawn of the Analogue Era, 1900-1908

Jayson Beaster-Jones

‘Copy Bhi Milega [Copies are also available]’: Reproduction and Distribution in India’s Family Run Music Stores

Bhagwati Prasad

Kai Choti Kahaniya Banati Hai Badi Kahani [Many small stories constitute the big one]

11:30 am-12 noon Tea/Coffee

PANEL VIII

12 noon-1:30 pm Fiddling with the Dials: Radio, Performance and Listening Cultures Chair/Discussant: Partho Dutta

Shrinkhla Sahai

Alaap on the Airwaves: Indian Classical Music on Web Radio and Digital Technologies

Ravikant

Cinema on Radio: Voice, Music, Words

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2:30-4:00 pm Noise, Technology and Music Chair/discussant: Jonathan Sterne

Shikha Jhingan

Music as Noise: Sonic Disorders, Mobility and Devotional Music

Samhita Sunya

High-Fidelity Ecologies: India v. Noise Pollution in the Contemporary Public Sphere

4:00-4:30pm Tea/Coffee

PANEL X

4:30-6:00 pm Electronic Music Cultures Chair/discussant: Georgina Born

Natalie Sarrazin

The Rise of the Gigabyte Guru: Technology’s Impact on Indian Music Education

Ankush Gupta

Electric Dreams: Questions of Gender and Technology

VOTE OF THANKS

6:00-6:30 pm Georgina Born and Kaushik Bhaumik

Musical Performance III

7:00 – 8:30pm, the School of Social Sciences Auditorium

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ABSTRACTS

Thursday, 15 January

PANEL I

9:30-11:30 am Hindustani Classical Music: Histories, Sounds, Technology

Notes Towards a Possible History of Musical Sound: Interpreting Archival Evidence

Amlan Dasgupta

The paper attempts to make some preliminary comments about the possibility of speaking about the history of musical sound. Inasmuch as musical sound has often been thought as being specific, if not unique and unrepeatable, it may be interesting to consider a particular musical utterance as being historically sited. This would potentially involve understanding the changes in technology of instrument-making (for example, wood, metal, varnish, etcetera) and also those in vocalization. Questions of style, taste and decorum could also be posed meaningfully. Archival examples will be used as evidence.

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Commercial Recordings and the Construction of Gharana Identity

Justin Scarimbolo

Scholars of Indian music have long argued that the traditional schools or gharānā-s of contemporary North Indian classical music, though largely understood as age-old institutions, instead arose in the late nineteenth century as a protective response to the expansion of social and musical encounters engendered by modernity. Specific modern developments thought to have induced these encounters include: the dispersion of musicians from the principal centres of patronage following the War of 1857; the regrouping of classical musicians together with vernacular musicians under the new administrative practices of indirectly ruled princely states; the increased travel (and therefore contact) of musicians following the growth of the Indian railways; and later, the burgeoning of non-hereditary professional musicians. However, the factor most responsible for exposing musicians (both hereditary and non-hereditary) to new audiences, contexts, and styles at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century—sound recording technology—has received almost no attention in theories relating to the growth or even the later-day consolidation of gharana identity. This paper considers some of the problems and possibilities that the history of recording technology in India offers for theorizing the

gharanas. Scholarship on recording in India has tended to assume that increased access to a greater variety of musical styles via recordings has led to greater stylistic homogenization, thus making their connection with the gharanas appear unlikely or even harmful. However, if the distinct socio-musical identities known as the gharanas

arose as a response to increased contact between musicians and not in isolation, then commercial recordings, as catalysts for contact par excellence, rather than flattening distinctions, may have heightened them, thereby contributing to an on-going process of the construction of gharana identity. One case this paper considers is that of the Imdad Khan gharana, which takes its name from the first star sitar player of the recording industry and the great-grandfather of the twentieth century sitar maestro, Vilayat Khan.

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Neutral Operator or Aesthetic Tool?

Kumar Gandharva and the Question of Technology

Anubhuti Sharma

Pt. Kumar Gandharva (1924-1992) is one of the many musicians born in the twentieth century whose lives and careers coincided with a significant period in North Indian Classical music—from the time technological production of music took roots in India till it progressed via different formats to cassette. He started his career by copying records of master musicians at the age of nine and recorded a range of genres from khayal, abhang, thumri, tappa and bhajan right up to 1986. This paper seeks to investigate the repertoire that he recorded and his own musical career within the larger discourse of modernity. What are the choices that Pt. Kumar Gandharva made in order to grapple with or even alter popular taste? How does he posit his own style, his own raga-s and compositions? How did an audience fed on notions of authentic gharana lineage also appreciate Pt. Kumar? What kind of an audience was this? How does he become an icon of an individuated musicianship? These are some of the questions that this paper tries to look into. More precisely in the context of modernity, this paper seeks to investigate two broad problems: First, in the presence of a certain scientific and technologizing spirit, which is always seeking something new but at the same time whose logic is determined by a sort of self-referentiality of knowledge, what happens to the legitimizing discourse of tradition? Second, if there is a certain response to tradition from the point of view of technology, how does it differ from the kind of response that a figure like Kumar Gandharva embodies with respect to North Indian Classical Music? From this perspective, the paper would go on to argue that while there is a certain use of technology by Kumar Gandharva, this use finally reveals the creation of an artistic subject rather than an objective pursuit of knowledge which is what technology in a sense embodies.

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18 PANEL II

12 noon-1:30 pm Music in South India: Shifting Aesthetic Paradigms in the Early Twentieth Century

The Creation of a Carnatic Music ‘Aesthetic’ in the Early Twentieth Century

Vikram Sampath

The earliest recordings of Carnatic music date back to 1904 when the London-based Gramophone Company sent its experts to Madras to record ‘native’ voices. An analysis of the recording catalogues of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the profusion of women artists (largely of the Devadasi community) who recorded, the stylistics of the recordings themselves and the manner in which the

raga and the kriti-s were presented, indicate the possibility of the ‘construction’ of a ‘tradition’ in the musical system as being of later vintage, influenced by numerous socio-cultural factors. This paper analyses these earliest gramophone recordings of Carnatic music and contextualizes them to the present performance aesthetics. Brief descriptions of the differences in raga delineation or kriti presentation to the present context; the repertoire of Padam-s and Javali-s and their gradual disappearance in the wake of the anti-nautch campaign; and the use of deep gamaka-s as a predominant and defining feature of Carnatic music today would be touched upon. It therefore bolsters the argument often put across that the standardization and systematization of Carnatic music, and the creation of a new, ‘acceptable’ aesthetic for the art-form, was a phenomenon of the 1930s and thereafter.

Sound Unbound: Visualizing Technological Change in South Indian Musical Practice

Stephen Hughes

There is now ample scholarship about how, from the late nineteenth century, the introduction of recording technology and mass production of recordings ‘liberated’ music from earlier temporal, spatial and social limitations. However, it has been more

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difficult to go beyond a technological determinist formula. We know far less about the historically contingent and shifting practices of this liberation. Drawing from historical sources in south India during the 1930s, I argue that visual materials such as photographs and illustrations of musical performers, technology and audiences can ground an analysis of how music was simultaneously being unsettled and reassembled into a new set of relationships. During a period before south Indian musical performance had been normalized as a material commodity of industrial production, visual representations of recording technologies helped imagine a new, but still familiar, set of temporal, spatial and social coordinates for older musical practices. During a period of intense commercial activity when south Indian businesses took over the local market, images in promotional literature and the popular press brokered a new set of relationships between performers and audiences; between the occasions of performance and those of listening.

PANEL III

2:30-4:00 pm Vernacular Music Practices: Culture, Media, Politics

Technologically Crafting Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Vernacular Music Documentation in India

Aditi Deo

Oral vernacular music in India has been called upon in the crafting of the colony, the nation, and in more recent periods, the collapsing of boundaries—regional, national and religious. Technological mediation, specifically audio-visual documentation of vernacular forms, has been central to such deployment. Integral to both colonial projects of salvage anthropology and postcolonial self-representations of national cultural diversity, during the past few decades, documentation activities have increasingly drawn upon transnational discourses about intangible heritage, identity and development. Intersecting with these discourses is the valorization of potentialities of digital technologies—a seeming expansion in modes of documenting and dissemination, as well as the kinds of voices that can participate in both.

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The paper traces a brief history of documentation practices in India, to then inquire into the renewed attention in the present day to oral vernacular music as valuable resources. Examining ethnographic instances of digital documentation, archiving and dissemination in the present day, it attempts to unpack the imbrication of the musical-discursive and the material-technological. In particular, it is concerned with tracing the participation of such activities in the constitution of what in the Indian context is increasingly an ‘aural public sphere’ (Ochoa-Gautier 2006). It is also interested in the manners in which digital technologies are deployed—in practice and rhetorically—to carve out and regulate spaces in which these musical forms may partake.

Khud Lagni Cha: A Social History of Music, Media and Folk Culture in the Garhwal Himalayas

Stefan Fiol

A tenet of popular music studies is that the technological medium of dissemination is neither incidental nor neutral (Manuel 1993: 15; Porcello 1996); each medium “brings with it a particular logic...that reflects its particular social history” (Porcello and Greene 2005: 5). Each medium, moreover, conditions the way that producers and consumers make meaning of cultural content. This presentation traces the evolution of Garhwali popular music through successive media—gramophone, radio, film, cassette, video compact disc, and digital download—asking how the social history and technological possibilities and constraints of each medium have shaped representations of lok sanskriti (‘folk culture’). For instance, gramophone discs and vernacular films circulated almost exclusively among migrant classes in the urban plains; as a result, these recordings privileged themes of nostalgia and the emotional longing (khud) for return. All India Radio was the first truly mass-medium that brought rural mountain-dwelling and urban migrant populations into a shared listening community and the preservationist goals of the state guaranteed a concern for folk authenticity in broadcasts of regional music. Cassettes ushered in a period of privatized expansion

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and diversification, with ‘lokgeet’ serving as a crucial marketing brand. Cassettes also introduced multi-track recording, restructuring social and musical relations in the studio. Finally, under the regime of mp3s, VCDs, and digital downloads, every element of lok sanskriti has been mass-produced to the point that the market is oversaturated and new vernacular productions have come to a standstill.

ROUNDTABLE I

4:30-6:30 pm Archiving Music: Theory and Practice Moderator: Shubha Chaudhuri

Participants: Suresh Chandvankar, Gopal Singh Chauhan, Amlan Dasgupta, Bhaskar Kowshik, Sukanta Majumdar, Yatindra Mishra, Vikram Sampath

This roundtable brings together archiving practitioners of diverse kinds: collectors, scholars, sound engineers, archiving technologists and music patrons. It seeks to explore how shifting technologies have constructed varied forms of music—including but not limited to commercial popular forms, concert music and oral vernacular music—as objects of archiving in India. Discussions will include theoretical approaches as well as technologies/methods that have shaped music archiving:

v Archiving as valorisation

• Relationships between archivists/collectors and the music they

archive

• Processes through which archivists decide what becomes part

of the archive

v Archiving as site of memory/heritage

• Audio-visual music archives and the question of intangible

heritage

• Music archives and popular music heritage (including Hindi

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v Technologies/materiality

• Archiving of commercial recordings versus documentation as

archiving

• Technologies of music documentation—questions of

authenticity

v Technologies/archival organization

• Technological shifts, most crucially from analogue to digital • The circulation of archival content

• New notions of the archive—community archives, making

archives accessible, crowd-sourced archiving, etcetera ____________

Friday, 16 January

PANEL IV

9:30-11:30 am ‘Meri Awaaz Suno [Listen to my voice]’: Cinematic and Aural Stardoms

Music, Mediation, and Cinematic Self-Reflexivity

Neepa Majumdar

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Hindi films tended to displace their obsessive self-representations on to the world of theatre, avoiding any actual references to the cinema. More specifically, the displacement was from narrative performance on screen to musical and dance performance on stage. This points to the specific terms in which a displaced self-reflexivity was played out in these films: theatre provided a space for representations of stars and fans in the world of musical performance though this was a thinly disguised reference to the cinema. The common explanation for these displacements in Hindi films of this period is their urge to distance themselves from cinema’s lowbrow and morally suspect status and their desire to align

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themselves to more legitimate cultural forms such as music and theatre. But a desire for higher cultural status is hardly adequate as an explanation for the recurrent scenarios of musical stage performances, fans, and the moral price of stardom, especially when these scenarios were the very ground on which the performative attractions of the cinema were based. Through an analysis of specific films, this paper will argue that anxieties over technological mediation and liveness are at the heart of the displacement from cinema to music and from narrative modes to performative modes.

The Structure and Melody of Hindi Film Songs

Yatindra Mishra

Tracing the prominent tendencies that have developed in the history of Hindi film music, it is remarkable to see how musicians work hard with the lyrics of the songs to fill them with melodies. It is relevant to note how a song is decorated with fine tunes during its formation. The making of a tune is extremely subtle, technical and larded with many types of sounds and effects. For instance, while listening to a song one should try to note how various components such as the ragas of classical music add to the effect of its tune, how the application of beat patterns (taals), the counting of metres (matras), the influence of folk elements, the dialects of the region, the provincial traits on the musician himself and the shadow of Western music have left their impact on it. It is very easy to experience the impressions of Western music or a pure Indian classical tone while listening to a song. But if we patiently note we can find many more effects in the making of the music that have been used to create a perfect tune.

I wish to emphasize through the popular tunes of evergreen film songs, how the maestro musicians of Hindi films have provided a delicate shape to the tunes with the use of classicism, aspects of the folk, western effects and many other relevant sounds to make a fine blend of tradition and modernity. It is obvious that this study is not only necessary for the scholars of music but also for comprehending the process of forming an enchanting and melodious tune.

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Constructing the ‘Husky’ Female Voice in Analogue and Digital

Amanda Weidman

Playback singing is a technological process and cultural phenomenon that emerged with analogue sound recording technologies. With the transition to digital sound technologies, many aspects of playback singing have changed, including the process of recording and manipulating vocal tracks, social relations among singers, music directors, and others involved in the process, the kinds of vocal sounds that are produced and circulated, and conceptions of musical creativity and value.

This paper will explore the implications of the analogue-digital transition for the female playback voice in the context of the Tamil cinema industry. It will do so by focusing on the career of the singer L.R. Eswari, who entered the field of playback singing in the late 1950s. A typology of female voices emerged in the 1960s, based on voices that were heard as clean and licit, and voices that were considered ‘husky’ or immodest. Although she began as a singer for second heroines and comic characters, by the mid-1960s, L.R. Eswari was consistently cast as the voice for sexualized female performances in ‘club’ and ‘cabaret’ songs. In the 1970s and 80s, she retreated from playback singing and made a name for herself as a devotional singer. Since 2010, she has re-emerged as a playback singer for several hit ‘item’ songs in Tamil films. Her voice is now recorded and produced using the full range of digital sound technologies available. This paper will examine how analogue and digital sound technologies have differently played into the construction of the ‘husky’ female voice.

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25 ROUNDTABLE II

12 noon-2:00 pm Technologically Yours: Film Music and Sound Practices Moderator: Ira Bhaskar

Participants: Bombay Jayashri Ramnath, Biswadeep Chatterjee, Sneha Khanwalkar, Arjit Datta, Ravindhar Randhawa,

Kunal Sharma

This roundtable brings together practitioners of film music and sound—composers, lyricists, singers, and sound designers—in a dialogue that takes as its starting point the technologically mediated nature of the film song and film sound. This discussion will be focalized around some of the nodal questions related to sound, technology and music, but will not be limited to the issues listed below which are meant to open up the discussion.

v The materialities of production and audio-processing

• Differences between recording and processing of on-location

and studio sounds, and between dialogue and song; the use of sync-sound

• The creation of sonic effects through reverb, generation of

distance and tonal quality differences to produce varied emotional intensities on-screen through music and song

• The production of music for film

• The influence of music from across the world and the use of

non-film musical styles for film music at different historical points

v Technological shifts

• The move from dual tracks to multi-track recording. • The shift from analogue to digital

• Practices of sampling and the use of electronic music in the production of film music and sound

v The film song

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• Lyrics, music composition and the creation of emotional

effects

• The place of the processes of voice-casting with respect to

singers: have there been moments of standardization of the playback voice (male or female) within music and sound industries?

• The singer and the changes in the performance of the song • What have been the alterations in vocal practices and the place

of the voice with shifts in music production?

v The digital world of music production and consumption

• Debates about the emergence of a dispersed and fragmented

film music and sound production and consumption context

• How have ideas about creativity, virtuosity and ownership of

music/songs altered, if at all?

• Questions of labour/livelihood: What have been the kinds of

labour practices, jobs created and lost in the music and sound industry? For instance, with the coming of digital technology or through ‘cover versions’, remix songs and the ‘jhankaar

beats’ additions? PANEL V

3.00-4.30 pm Seeing Print, Hearing Film: Reception Histories of Music and Sound

To Speak or Not to Speak: An Enquiry into Technology, Mediations and early Bengali films

Madhuja Mukherjee

This paper studies a large repertoire of writings from the early 1930s, published both in English and Bengali, which deal with issues of film language and the advent of sound. By using the articles, reviews and advertisements of and on films (and equipment) it shows how the rapid growth of sound films became a topic of fervent discussions in Bengal. While subjects of the chastity of spoken language, music and taste were repeatedly brought up in other vernacular journals (including those in Hindi and Gujarati), in case of

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Bengal, where many of the influential studios (like the Madans Theatres and New Theatres) were located, questions of a ‘sound’ technology, industry, production of vernacular films and the economy of the Bhadralok culture became pertinent.

Within this framework, this paper first focuses on the ways in which authors like Naren Deb argued for a distinct visual idiom, as well as the manner in which inspiring innovations were forged even when the sound-film was perceived as a limiting form. Secondly, while Deming Jr.’s articles were designed as a guide for the production of high-quality films, this paper examines the soundtrack of the early talkies, for instance, of Chandidas (1932) and Kalanka Bhanjan (1933), in order to consider how background music was devised and deployed, as well, the processes through which specific applications of film music became acceptable. Briefly, by reflecting upon the available literature and film texts this paper revisits the contexts within which the problem of technology and technique became imperative.

The Swarlipi in Madhuri and Other Stories: Tales of Listening to the Hindi Film Song

Vebhuti Duggal

This paper focuses on the textualisation of Hindi film songs in the popular Hindi print sphere during the 1950s and 60s. In so doing, the paper attempts to construct some possible practices of listening to popular film music. The sites of textualisation of the film song – visual motifs of music (such as staff notation on advertisements), lyrics that circulate in film magazines such as Film Sangeet (Film Music), Madhuri and song booklets, swarlipi (musical notation) of film songs – form a point of convergence between film, radio, and print during that period. For instance, the notation pages in Madhuri would often carry the phrase “aapki pharmaish par (at your request)” as a sub-title and the names and addresses of readers who had ‘requested’ for the song, much like the request-based shows on radio.

In probing this textualisation, the intent is also to examine the manner in which radio and print become different modes of

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circulation of the film song. Attention to this circulation allows us to think through the aural, affective, performative and sensuous dimensions that seep through the act of reading this literature in the form of memories of listening and popular idioms. In this manner, reading and listening are seen as being intertwined and an inter-sensory experience foregrounded.

PANEL VI

5.00-6.30 pm After the Great Divide: Digitization and the Vernacular Music Industries

Enabling Music: A Comparative Perspective for Bihar and Haryana

Ratnakar Tripathy

This paper will focus on how digital technologies have lent a new force to traditional and popular musical forms in Bihar and Haryana. In the new scenario there is the possibility of talking of both aesthetic decline and refinement. While the new technologies offer unique opportunities for growth of regional languages and taste, they also threaten to transform the traditional forms both positively and negatively - in creative as well as vulgarizing ways. The paper will focus on a process that unfolds even as it is tempting to form judgments in the interim. Briefly, regional music is culturally enabling even as the new technologies are further enabling its growth.

The ‘Long Tail’ in the Digital World: Musical Diversity and the Survival of India’s ‘Minor’ Labels

Gregory Booth

Prior to the cassette revolution of the late 1970s, India’s music industry was driven by a logic based on (1) the popularity of film song to the exclusion of almost all other genres, (2) severely limited means of mass production and (3) an economy of scarcity perpetuated by the Gramophone Company of India. Cassette tape altered music industry logic to a significant extent, radically increasing the diversity

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of genres and languages available and bringing down costs of both production and consumption. The on-going reliance on physical format music commodities, however, continued to constrain distribution and production, especially in context of rampant piracy, and especially for some of India’s older, smaller music companies. The computer and mobile-phone revolutions that swept India in the twenty-first century have resulted in a more complete re-orientation amounting to a truly global ‘revolution’ of industrial logic, structure and market dynamics. This paper offers a case study in which I examine the impact of the new industrial logic on one of India’s oldest surviving music enterprises, Hindusthan Musical Products/Indian Record Manufacturing (Hindusthan), as well as a number of other still smaller music labels all located in Kolkata.

____________

Saturday, 17 January

PANEL VII

9:30-11:30 am The Business of Sounds: Music Industries, Retailing, Piracy

The Business of Making Sound: Entrepreneurial Practices at the Dawn of the Analogue Era, 1900-1908

Vibodh Parthasarthy

At the dawn of the twentieth century, we observe a highly competitive and rapidly internationalising business in recorded music throughout the Northern Hemisphere. This business was orchestrated by private capital germinating in countries on both sides of the Atlantic, some of which had never managed a territorial foothold in the Indian subcontinent. The nascent exports in records to British India, part of this process of internationalisation, rested on an emergent but categorical division of labour: broadly between, investor and managers of records firms from Europe and America;

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secondly, recording engineers, who often switched their loyalties to rival firms; thirdly, indigenous financial and cultural interlocutors in colonial and sovereign countries; and lastly, the commercially intuitive local musicians and singers.

This paper excavates how the strategy of ‘Recording Expeditions’ between 1902 and 1908, shaped the founding contours of the nascent business in and around ‘music on record’. It will weigh the evolving nature of colonial imprints on these configurations by scrutinising three sites: the production of music, including the kinds of business practices shaping it; the propulsion of commodities and ideas through advertising; and the meanings accorded to this ‘new media’ in the everyday life of early twentieth century India.

We proceed from a sense of recognising the interplay between entrepreneurship and entertainment, between the dynamics of commerce and culture spawned by the early records industry. The core issues concerning entrepreneurship and entertainment are multiple, simply because recorded music touched upon a plethora of human activity. In grasping the instances that articulated the changing relationship between entrepreneurship and entertainment, three principal sets of sources will be engaged with: travelogues of European engineers sent on ‘recording expeditions’ to colonial India; advertisements of gramophones and records in Indian English-language newspapers; and, popular commentaries resplendent with euphoric and sceptical observations on the implications of recorded music. Importantly, it is the interplay of these sources that form the bedrock of an account of the colonial mediation of business practices and cultural commodities during the formative years of this media industry.

‘Copy bhi milega’ [Copies are also available]: Reproduction and Distribution in India’s Family Run Music Stores

Jayson Beaster-Jones

While pirate modes of distribution have long been present in India after the introduction of the audio cassette (Manuel 1993) Indian music stores have adapted to the plummeting prices of digital hardware and media to provide various services for customers that

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seamlessly blend legitimate and illegitimate modes of distribution. For example Siddharth’s Music House a store of modest size in the central Indian city of Bhopal displays a large selection of original media in a variety of formats and genres. Yet most of the store’s collection of cassettes CDs and DVDs also reside in the hard drives of a computer hidden from view. With the help of both his legitimate and illegitimate collections the store owner provides a number of services for his customers that often do not align with music industry packaging practices including transferring of music from cassette to CD and mp3 reproducing songs on audio CD and mp3-CD collections and creating direct copies of his original media for a discounted price. This paper examines the disruption and disintegration of Western models of music distribution and copyright in India. Based upon ethnographic data collected in 2003, 2005, 2010, and 2013, I describe how many family-run stores in India exploit the inherent contradictions of media distribution and music capitalism. This mutual dependence, and juxtaposition, of formal/informal economies indicate the ways in which traditional top-down models of physical media circulation have become infeasible in ways that are forcing the Indian music industry to reconsider very idea of legitimate circulation.

Kai Choti Kahaniya Banati Hai Badi Kahani [Many Small Stories Constitute the Big One]

Bhagwati Prasad

We live in a tumultuous media environment. There is widespread confusion, uncertainty and awe at the inventiveness of the thousands of people in media networks. I attempted to map the interweaving histories of Delhi and its media technologies to understand how this interweaving provides new conditions for consumption practices and links to global economies in the stratified circumstances of urban life. I specifically researched technologies of reproduction and the significant shift they have undergone since the 1990s from the mechanical (cassette and VHS in the 1980s) to the recent low cost digital forms. Here, I sought to examine issues of circulation, conflict

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over property forms and non-legal reproduction. In short, the diversity and complexity of what has been referred to as the ‘continent of piracy’. In this paper, I will focus on the cassette and the transformations it produced.

PANEL VIII

12 noon-1:30 pm Fiddling with the Dials: Radio, Performance and Listening Cultures

Alaap on the Airwaves: Indian Classical Music on Web Radio and Digital Technologies

Srinkhala Sahai

Radio as a concept, radio as technology, and radio as an object of study has been constantly shifting and re-configuring over the years. The very nature of radio, the reach and conceptual framework of what radio constitutes, have undergone paradigmatic shifts through history along with marked shifts in programming, presentation and formats. In India, at All India Radio from the 1950s to the 70s, classical music was a major part of the music programming, and in turn also inspired music presentation and repertoire that suited the medium. The time allotted for the classical music broadcasts decreased over time, hardly finding substantial space. The advent of FM radio in the 1990s completely sidestepped classical music programming. In the past ten years, there has been a resurgence of classical music on the internet platform. The idea of radio has also transfigured, and offered new challenges in terms of technology and presentation. The ‘local-ness’, liveness and one-way format of radio was challenged on a global platform where users could tune in at various time zones, participate in the act of radio-making, create their own playlists and download tracks and shows. In this context, what are the challenges in programming and presentation of classical music? What are the opportunities for music makers and connoisseurs? What are the technological possibilities? The paper seeks to explore this negotiation between Indian classical music and new media formats and the implications.

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Cinema on Radio: Voice, Music, Words

Ravikant

Film music-makers (composers, singers, lyricists) indeed spawned a ‘parallel stardom’ in South Asian film history (Neepa Majumdar). Let us add to the list those who relayed this music in packages re-designed for listening. Arguably a predominant genre of radio programming, it involved distinctive and continuous stylistic innovation in curatorial packaging, giving each programme and its presenter a creative opportunity and challenge to connect with their listeners cutting across several countries. Building on the emergent intermedia histories, this paper will focus on the figure of the radio presenter as it has been historically constructed in auto/biographies, advertisements, cartoons, listeners’ reactions, and Hindi films. More specifically, it will touch upon the following questions: How did the RJs win the loyalty of their linguistically diverse audiences? How was a presenter like Ameen Sayani able to craft a lasting intimacy with an everlasting fandom, or why do we still associate Vividh Bharti’s

Chhaya Geet with Kanta Gupta? How important was the figure of the film music listener in the historically changing programme design? In the pre-television days what did it mean to create, play and listen to a song as a standalone artifact? What role did audio-visual commercial and artistic networks play in the creation of this long journey signposted by K.L. Saigal’s expansive invocation awaz ki duniya ke dosto in Dushman (1939) to Himesh Reshamiya’s inward-looking entreaty: man ka radio, bajne de zara (Radio, 2012)?

PANEL IX

2:30-4:00 pm Noise, Technology and Music

Music as Noise: Sonic Disorders, Mobility and Devotional

Music

Shikha Jhingan

This presentation will focus on the heavy amplification of music through mobile caravans of devotees such as the Kanwariya-s, which has become a familiar site in Northern India. Travelling on highways

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across towns and cities of Northern India, these itinerant ‘Hindu devotees’ deploy digital media practices and sound dispersal to reconfigure geographical spaces, bypassing in the process state and city laws of aural governmentality. The booming musical tracks mounted atop trucks, tempos and tractors carve out unstable acoustic territories modulated by noise and repetition. Marked by mobility, excess and evanescence, these sonic practices seem to contest conventional ideas about the spatiality of a ‘live’ event and consumption of recorded music. The latter part of the presentation will attempt to explore the different nodes and circuits involved in the setting up of these sensate events, and to offer some insights on the music industry, in contemporary media ecology.

High-Fidelity Ecologies: India v. Noise Pollution in the Contemporary Public Sphere

Samhita Sunya

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music (2002), Jacques Attali asserts that music is not only “a repository of... the social score... [and our] collective memory of the social order,” but also that music is prophetic “because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities of a given code” (9-11). Over the last decade, several contemporary artist- composers who are engaged with both national and diasporic Indian contexts have produced compelling pieces that blur lines between music and noise, the natural and technological – working to invoke and imagine contemporary spaces through the ephemeral and fleeting experiences of sound. Recent directions in sound studies, too, have called for attending to music, noise, and ambient sounds as a whole, within analyses of aural and audio-visual media, as well as soundscapes and sonic environments (Rick Altman, Anahid Kassabian, 2008).

This paper explores the terrain of policy surrounding noise pollution in India, initially drafted as the ‘Noise Pollution (Control and Regulation) Rules’ in 1999, under the auspices of the Ministry of Environments and Forests. This paper is premised upon an insistence that perceptions, classifications, and public debates over noise have

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long operated far more along classificatory binaries of noise versus music and other highly subjective criteria (for example, that of ‘public disturbance’), rather than along expressly quantifiable measurements of decibel levels. Popular/film music, for example, has been described in countless anecdotal, journalistic, and literary accounts not only as ubiquitously blaring from loudspeakers, but also as intrinsic to the deafening textures of modernity in Indian city-spaces. This paper argues that the modes of hearing associated with digital technologies have ushered in the very discourse of noise pollution. Techno-ideals of noise reduction and aspirations towards lifestyles of private consumption via ‘high-fidelity’ (or ‘hi-fi’) systems have extended themselves into a public discourse of environmental protection and individual health. ‘Noise pollution’ becomes a conveniently floating target that is paradoxically produced by the very neoliberal space with which such sonic assaults are purportedly extraneous, inappropriate, and out of sync: “industrial activity, construction activity, generator sets, loud speakers, public address systems, music systems, vehicular horns and other mechanical devices [that] have deleterious effects on human health and the psychological well being of the people.”

PANEL X

4:30-6:00 pm Electronic Music Cultures

The Rise of the Gigabyte Guru: Technology’s Impact on Indian Music Education

Natalie Sarrazin

Like many teenagers in India, when 15-year-old Aashish wanted to learn guitar, he took a familiar path… he found a private teacher and took lessons to learn the basics. The proliferation of technology, however, allows him significantly different alternatives and after a few months, he quit the private lessons altogether and looked to a second, less expensive, demanding and more accessible teacher – YouTube.

In his book The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into India’s Technicolour Youth (2011), writer Palash Mehrotra recounts the

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difficulty musicians had in obtaining electronic instruments in India only a few short years ago. In what seems like light years away, today’s musicians are able to harness and negotiate the power of technology from basic education to dissemination and circulation with astonishing simplicity. Western music education in India is booming, benefitting from these technological advances. After school programs in music production and technology and home recording cater to college-aged students with access to laptops, allowing them to bypass the recording studio altogether and create high quality sound recordings of their own works right at home.

In this paper, I discuss the current condition of technology in Delhi in particular, as it relates to music learning and education, presenting case studies in which technology has significantly changed the traditional system of music teaching and learning. Part of my research examines the prevalence of Western music and lessons, including the demand for music teaching in the public school. Ultimately, I conclude that technology’s impact on a fledgling Western music educational process has allowed Indians to free themselves from traditional learning, realizing music not only as a means of personal expression, but as a means to reinvent the pedagogical process itself.

Electric Dreams: Questions of Gender and Technology

Ankush Gupta

Music itself—especially as it intersects with the body and destabilizes accepted norms of subjectivity, gender and sexuality—is precisely where the politics of music often reside. With regard to disco, Gilbert says, “Dyer’s ‘all-body-eroticism’ would seem to be precisely the objective of a Queer musicology’s erotic politics, informed at once by a rigorous anti-essentialism and by Cusick’s rather beautiful suggestion that ‘music is sex’.”

This paper seeks to interrogate the complex relationship between gender and technology in the space of a Queer (Male) Discotheque with the music that is played there at its center. There seems to be little space for irony in the discotheque, where emotion (feelings) and

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affect (bodily sensation) are far more prominent. After the introduction of reinforced sound (tweeter arrays and bass reinforcements), the dance floor functions as a space in which distance—and therefore irony—is impossible. The force of the sound system, as Kodwo Eshun and Julian Henriques point out, envelops the dancer to the extent that s/he cannot exist outside of or be removed from the experience and when the music selected by the DJ includes a female diva, which it so often does, her powerful, amplified voice permeates the body of the gay male dancer, who in turn has been charged by the vocalist’s refusal to assume the role of the downtrodden underdog within the conventional heterosexual relationship. It is this moment of identification (?) that the author picks up to ask multiple questions: What happens to the voice when it is mediated by technology? The auto-tuning devices, the mixing, the layerings and different digital interventions have blurred the lines between identity and voice; then whose voice is it that we actually hear? And how does the subject receive this voice? The author opens up this discussion through the concept of an ‘Auracle’ where capital is accumulated to a point, where it becomes a sound. Is there a possibility of subjectivity in this sound where ironies are already being negotiated against? This paper picks up examples from some of the mixed compositions played in the Queer (male) discotheque parties from Delhi to study the carefully woven matrix of the ‘self’ that this music aims at invoking. The question is—does it?

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Aditi Deo is an ethnomusicologist with research interests in the music of the Indian subcontinent. She is currently a faculty at the Indian Institute for Science Education and Research Pune. Between 2011 and 2013, she was affiliated with the ERC Music, Digitisation and Mediation project as Postdoctoral Research Associate for the India study. During this period, she conducted research on practices of digital documentation of oral vernacular music, and on circulation and consumption of music on portable devices. Her research interests also include the north Indian classical vocal genre of khayal, specifically, non-hereditary musicianship and related practices.

Amanda Weidman is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr PA. She is a cultural anthropologist with interests in music, performance, technological mediation and gender. She has conducted research in Tamil-speaking South India since the mid-1990s. She is currently working on a project on playback singing in relation to the cultural politics of gender in South India from Independence to the post-liberalization period. Her publications include Singing The Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (2006), several articles on performance, embodiment, and technological mediation in relation to South Indian classical music, film songs, and historic South Indian sound recordings, and a review article on voice for the Annual Review of Anthropology. She is also a Carnatic violinist.

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Amlan Das Gupta is Professor, Department of English and former Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. He was educated at Calcutta and Oxford, and his areas of specialization are classical Greek and Latin literature, Christian thought, John Milton, Renaissance literature, digital humanities, textual studies and music history. He has held visiting positions at Pune University, University of Malaya at Kuala Lumpur, Delhi University and Macquarie University, Sydney. Professor Das Gupta is the founder of the Archive of North Indian Classical Music, a large digital resource held at the School of Cultural Texts and Records. He has directed a number of major archiving projects and pioneered the course in digital humanities offered by the School.

Kanjira player Anirudh Athreya is the great-grandson of violin maestro Late Sri. Papa K.S.Venkatramiah. He learnt Kanjira from his grand uncle, the Kanjira maestro Kalaimamani Late Sri V.Nagarajan. Following the passing away of Sri V. Nagarajan, Anirudh took up his tutelage under Sangeetha Kalanidhi Dr. T. K. Murthy. Anirudh has received many awards for his music and has accompanined several renowned musicians.

Ankush Gupta is a research scholar from Theatre and Performance Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University with a specialization in musicology. His research interests include gender, performance and performativity.

Anubhuti Sharma is currently pursuing PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. She completed her M Phil in 2013. The title of her dissertation was Thinking and Singing: The fashioning of Kumar Gandharva as a kalakar. Her work focussed on the musical practice of Kumar Gandharva while attempting to place his reception and artistic choices within the context of modernity in India. She is trained in north Indian vocal music and her research interests include cultural studies, performance studies, gender and sexuality, politics of aesthetics and protest music.

Anugyan Nag is currently a Senior Research Doctoral Fellow in cinema studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has an M.Phil in cinema studies (2012), dissertation title: The Contemporary Bengali Film Industry: From Tollygunge to Tollywood. He has previously completed a Master’s degree in Film

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Production and Film History from Salford University United Kingdom. Anugyan has also taught film studies at various colleges and institutes and has published articles in academic journals and books.

Arijit Dattais a songwriter, composer, performer and producer. He has worked on a large number of advertisements for brands like Nikon, Kissan and British Petroleum. 2014 saw the release of his first ever feature film Filmistaan. Arijit and Vinay came together in 2009 to form their own band Airport.

Bhagwati Prasad is an author and performance artist based in New Delhi. He started researching popular culture and media life and histories in Delhi, which resulted in him co-authoring Tinker Solder Tap

(2009), a graphic novel on the history of media piracy in Delhi. He shifted attention to the impending global water crisis as part of the STEPS programme, producing his second graphic book, The Water Cookbook (2012). He has subsequently been part of various experimental art contexts and spaces, and has performed in Seen At Secundrabagh in Vienna, Austria (2012), Shanghai, China (2013), Delhi, India (2014). Bhaskar Kowshik is Programme Manager with the Google Cultural Institute, overseeing multi-disciplinary projects with art and cultural organizations (public and private) across India. He coordinates operations for various technology deployments, enables and steers partnerships, and supports the Cultural Institute’s global activity and priorities. Prior to this, he has consulted for five years on IT in the social sector, with higher academia and government, notably the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment, Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of the Swiss Confederation, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Ambedkar University Delhi. He holds an MPhil in Philosophy and Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Bishnupriya Dutt is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her area of research includes colonial and post-colonial theatre histories in India, feminist readings of Indian Theatre and popular and cultural performance practices. Her publications include Engendering Performance, Indian Women Performers in Search of an Identity (co-authored), and “Theatre and Subaltern Histories, Chekov Adaptations in Post-Colonial India” (in Clayton and Meerson, eds. (2012)). She and her colleagues are working on an on-going collaborative project with the School of

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Theatre and Performance Studies, Warwick on ‘Gendered citizenship: Manifestations and Performance.’

Bishwadeep Chatterjee graduated in Sound Recording and Sound Engineering from the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, Maharashtra. He has worked as sound designer and recording/mixing engineer for feature films short films, commercials and music albums. With a career spanning over two decades, he has worked on songs/music and sound tracks for films such as Chachi 420 (1997) and Devdas (2002), and music albums such as Silk Route and Ab Ke

Sawan. His award accolades include a National award, two IIAFA

awards, Filmfare awards for the films Devdas and Parineeta and a Screen award for Best Sound Design for the Eklavya. He has done the entire sound designing, mixing and music engineering for films such as Chokher Bali (2003), Raincoat (2004), Parineeta (2005), Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006), Eklavya (2007), 3 Idiots (2009), Lafangey Parindey (2010) and Madras Café (2013).

Born into a family of musicians with a rich lineage in pedigree music, Bombay Jayashri Ramnath represents the fourth generation of music practitioners in her family. Strengthening this with rigorous grooming under the music legend Vidwan Shri Lalgudi G Jayaraman and Smt T R Balamani, she scaled heights over three decades, to become the most sought after Carnatic musicians today. Jayashri has trained consistently also in Hindustani music. She learnt Bharatanatyam and was associated with theatre in her early years. She has worked with great maestros in the field of music, dance, fusion, films and theatre giving her work a place of pride. She has received numerous awards, nominations and titles including nomination for the best original song at the Academy Awards (2013), Sangeetha Choodamani, Shanmukha Sangeetha Shiromani, and

Naadabhooshanam.

Delhi Sairam, born Sairam Sundaram, has studied Mridangam under the expert tutelage of Maestro, Shri Tiruvaarur Bhakthavatsalam in Chennai. During the past twelve years, he has given more than one thousand performances, accompanying the doyens and prodigies in the field. In 2008, Sairam was the only Mridangam instrumentalist to be selected among twenty-eight young and promising musicians by a leading Tamil magazine.

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Georgina Born is Professor of Music and Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her work combines ethnographic and theoretical writings on music, media and cultural production. Her books are

Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (1995), Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (edited with D. Hesmondhalgh, 2000), and

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (2005). She recently edited two books: Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (2013), and Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences (edited with A. Barry (2013)). In 2014, she was elected Fellow of the British Academy. From 2010 to 2015 she is directing the research programme ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies’, funded by the European Research Council, which ethnographically examines the transformation of music and musical practices by digitization in the developing and developed world.

Gopal Singh Chauhan is a music-lover, researcher, event organiser and cultural activist from the Northern Rajasthan city of Bikaner. Through the cultural heritage NGO Lokayan, and his newsletter,

Yuvayan, Gopal campaigns for several cultural ventures, chief among them, the restoration and preservation of Bikaner’s beautiful carved havelis. He works closely with The Kabir Project, has led a community archiving project in collaboration with them, and organized a number of related events and projects including The Rajasthan Kabir Yatra—a beautifully envisaged roving village festival. He is currently associated with Soundtravels (Musical Expeditions) as adviser and interpreter. Gregory D. Booth is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and has been engaged in the study of Indian music and culture for more than thirty years. He is the author of two books, Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios (2008) and Brass Baja: Stories from the World of Indian Wedding Bands (2005), and numerous articles on music, film, industry and culture in South Asia. He recently edited More than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular Music (Booth and Shope, eds. 2013) and is currently studying aspects of India’s music and film culture-industries, focusing on a wide range of factors including intellectual property, technology, industrial structures, and the music-film relationship.

References

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