Syracuse University SURFACE Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Social Science - Dissertations Affairs 12-2011 Tuning Modernity: Musical Knowledge and Subjectivities in Colonial India, c. 1780s - c. 1900 Sharmadip Basu Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/socsci_etd Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Basu, Sharmadip, "Tuning Modernity: Musical Knowledge and Subjectivities in Colonial India, c. 1780s - c. 1900" (2011). Social Science - Dissertations. 176. https://surface.syr.edu/socsci_etd/176 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Social Science - Dissertations by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract This dissertation studies two signal moments of intervention in the musical field in colonial India: (i) the late-eighteenth century moment of Orientalist scholarship, specifically, the appearance in 1792 of Sir William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” which fundamentally reconfigured the way musics of the Indian subcontinent would be studied thereafter; and (ii) the mid/late-nineteenth century moment that witnessed the first efforts among the colonized to self-consciously produce themselves as modern musical subjects. My enquiry into these two fertile passages in India’s music history is an attempt to disentangle the set of musico-historical processes that enliven a larger question: what is modern—colonial modern, to be precise—about a music and musical culture that claims a continuous tradition of cultivation over thousands of years? In approaching this question, this dissertation not only addresses the epistemological aspect of musical modernity in the Indian colony, it also looks at two new forms of musical subjectivity inaugurated therein over the course of colonialism’s unfolding—one short-lived and one enduring. The former, the Anglo-Indian musical subject, was enlivened in and through the sites of British leisure in late-eighteenth century India—a time when ‘nautch’ had already emerged as the colonizers’ favored form of entertainment. It ultimately perished once the contingencies of colonial rule changed, and avenues of European recreation became more easily available and accessible over the nineteenth century. The other form of musical subjectivity that this dissertation enquires into is that of the nineteenth century Bengali Bhadralok. In tracing the genesis of this subject, I look at three pivotal figures: Dwarkanath Tagore, Rammohan Roy, and Sourindramohan Tagore. I show that while early stirrings of musical modernity can be evidenced in the first two, as a systemic process it congealed only during the era of Sourindramohan in the last third on the nineteenth century. Tuning Modernity: Musical Knowledge and Subjectivities in Colonial India, c. 1780s – c. 1900 by Sharmadip Basu B.Sc., Calcutta University, 1997 M.A., Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1999 M.Phil. Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2001 Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Science. Syracuse University December 2011 Copyright © Sharmadip Basu 2011 All Rights Reserved Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………........................................vii Notes on Translation and Transliteration…………………………………………………………………...xi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………...1 Chapter 1 ‘A Subject So Delightfully Interesting’: Power/Knowledge in William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos”……………….27 Revisiting a ‘Historical Curiosity’: Untying William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos”………………......................................................29 The Limits of Musical Humanism: The Early Colonial Encounter in Contemporary Ethno/Musicological Discourse…………………………………...37 “Pure Fountain” and “Muddy Rivulets”: Framing the Textual Canon for “Hindoo” Music………………………………………………………….................55 “We Go On Slowly”: Historical Contingencies of Orientalist Knowledge Production…………………………………...............................65 Recasting the Orphic Myth: Towards a Critique of Power/Knowledge in Orientalist Music Discourse…………………………………………...73 An Impossible Disavowal: Mirza Khan’s Tuhfat-ul-Hind in Jones’ “Musical Modes”……………………………………… ………………….78 ‘Oriental Despotism’ and Colonial Enlightenment: Reading the “Musical Modes” as a Text of Power…………………………………………………………………...84 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………94 Chapter 2 Frames of Musical Knowledge: Towards an Archeology of the Late-Eighteenth Century European Musical Episteme………………………………………………………………………………...100 Music as a Universal Positivity……………………………………………………………………………………...102 Is Music an Art, Or Is It Science? ……………………………………………………………………......................113 Music in the European Inter-art Hierarchy……………………………………………………………….................124 Dignifying the Man in Nature and Melody: The Influence of Rousseau on Jones………………………………………………………………………………...147 iv Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..156 Chapter 3 When Sang the Hybrid Muse: The Anglo Indian Musical Subject and ‘Fusion’ Music in Late-Eighteenth Century India…………………………………………………………………………….160 Western Music in the Early Colonial Social Formation: Beyond Historicism…...…………………………………………………………………………………..................169 Framing Musical Hybridity: Anglo Indian Musicality in the Early Colonial Social Formation…………………………………………………..171 Musics of ‘Work,’ ‘Study,’ and ‘Play’: British Musical Labor and Leisure inEarly-Colonial India………………………………………………………….178 The ‘Nautch, Its Music, and Musical Fusion………………………………………………………………………..185 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..217 Chapter 4 Making of the Bhadralok Musical Subject: The ‘Pre-history’ of Musical Modernity in Colonial Bengal, 1815-c. 1850s………………………………………………………………......................222 “He Would Have Been a No Mean Amateur”: Dwarkanath Tagore, the West, and Western Music…………………………………................................................223 Dwarkanath and Musical Double Consciousness: The Thematics of a Musical Encounter in Paris………………………………………………………….................229 Bengali Bhadralok and Western Music in Early/Mid-Nineteenth Century Calcutta……………………..................246 New Sites of Bengali Music in Calcutta: Rammohan Roy, Raga Music, and the Beginnings of Bengali Musical Modernity………………………………...266 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..288 Chapter 5 Making of the Bhadralok Musical Subject: Producing Musical Identity in late-Nineteenth Century Colonial Bengal……………………………………………………………………………………..291 The Era of Sourindramohan Tagore in History and Historiography: Theorizing the Bhadralok Musical Apparatus………………………………………………………………………295 The Discursive Anatomy of Bhadralok Musical Anxiety: Europeans on Indian Music………………………………………………………………………………………….309 A Counter-Discourse of Musical Modernity: Sourindramohan Tagore’s Critique of C. B. Clarke………………………………………………………………...319 v The Bhadralok Musical Subject and Its Others: The Colonialist Roots of Bhadralok Musical Politics……………………………………………………………….327 Teaching to Play: Harmonium Manuals in late-Nineteenth Century Bengal…………………………………………………………...342 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..352 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………………………..355 Bibliography.........................................................................................................................................................358 vi Acknowledgements A confession: ever since I first read the opening sentences of Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousands Plateaus as an ingenuous graduate student, I have known how exactly I would begin the acknowledgements to my dissertation, even if I had no clue then what the dissertation itself would be about. Referring to the first volume of their seminal diptych, Deleuze and Guattari say: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.” I have always been struck by the beautiful directness with which these lines disclose the necessarily schizoid labor of writing, something that is dissembled by the authorial signatures conventionally attached to the outcome of this labor. In putting together these last lines of the dissertation, I now have the immensely gratifying opportunity to ‘begin’ at last, to acknowledge the crowd, and the debt to it, that has been accrued over the process of this work’s realization. My freight-train journey of dissertation-writing, with its wildly varying rhythms, schedules, and stations, would never have reached its destination had it not been for the unstinting guidance of my supervisory committee at Syracuse University. I thank Dr. Sudipta Sen for nourishing me intellectually throughout my graduate life, and for seeing this project through its many stages of unfolding, from its pre-conception to completion. I consider myself fortunate for the care and critique that went into his engagement with my often-desultory submissions, and for the space and time he generously made available for every inchoate idea to be voiced and vetted, not just within seminar-settings but also outside of it. Many of the overarching concerns addressed in this dissertation bear the direct imprint of a continuing conversation with him on history, modernity, and culture. Dr. Subho Basu has similarly been a keen and demanding interlocutor whose intricate