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12-2011
Tuning Modernity: Musical Knowledge and Subjectivities in Colonial India, c. 1780s - c. 1900
Sharmadip Basu Syracuse University
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 knowledge of political life in modern Bengal I
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have had the good opportunity to mine extensively for the benefit of my own understanding. He
also went out of his way to smoothen for me many institutional kinks that arose over the course
of my dissertation’s meandering progress. There is no possible way to adequately express here my debt to Dr. Susan Wadley. What I can unequivocally say is that had it not been for her unconditional help and encouragement during the darkest hours of feeling personally, intellectually, and institutionally lost-in-process as a graduate student, this work would never
even have approached completion. To her, I owe my deepest gratitude.
Thanks are also due to Drs. Carol Babiracki and Romita Ray for agreeing to serve on my
dissertation examination committee, and for engaging with my work in such critical detail. To
Dr. Manan Desai, my gratitude for not only chairing the dissertation defense but also for
providing, prior to this, social and intellectual camaraderie in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
This dissertation is a significant but, really, a small chapter in the on-going process of
intellectual becoming, much of which is practiced, enacted, and processed outside of the formal
confines of institutional spaces, responsibilities, and affiliations. It is in this larger domain of
intellectual sociality, solidarity, and friendships where my debt is at its most marked. In Calcutta
and New Delhi, I have been lucky over the years to learn from the lambent brilliance of Rajarshi
Dasgupta, Prasanta Chakravarty, Mohinder Singh, Paromita Brahmachari, and Bodhisattva Kar.
In New York, I have glimpsed in Nauman Naqvi, Rajan Krishnan, and Ravindran
Sriramachandran the same incandescence of fearless thought.
Living in Syracuse as a graduate student has been perhaps the most exciting intellectual
passage in my life thus far. The endless hours spent in animated discussions and equally
animated digressions with Ishan Ashutosh, Shrimoy Roychaudhury, Santosh Shankar, Karen
McNamara, Sanjukta Mukherjee, Anirban Acharya, Joe Driscoll, Kafui Attoh, and Shreyas Roy
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will remain for me an exemplary instantiation of the collective labors implicated not only in
one’s intellectual enrichment, but also in the conduct of everyday life. My involvement with
South Asia Solidarity Initiative in New York City engendered the same feeling of community,
and served as a telling reminder that academic thinking and political activism must nurture each
other without holding either captive. Biju Mathew, Jinee Lokaneeta, Saadia Toor, Sangay
Mishra, Murli Nataraj, and Humayun Kabir best exemplify this dialectic for me.
I would be remiss not to mention the names of Navaneetha Mokkil-Maruthur, Mollica
Dastider, Monikha, Cyril Ghose, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, Mandira Banerjee, Aswin
Punathambekar, Pavitra Sundar, Ananya Dasgupta, Anuradha Chakravarty, Jaideep Mallik,
Shiladitya Banerjee, Haimanti Roy, Rahul Nair, Siva Arumugam, Poornima Paidipaty, and Anne
Murphy, who, even when not by their own consent, comprise the crowd that I am. And it would
be equally remiss if the role that structural and actual homosociality plays in subjectifying South
Asian males is not acknowledged here. To the following people, all of whom I have now known
for some two decades, goes the credit for not making this space de facto oppressive, for being constant sources of creative energy and life-relief—simply, for being friends: Subhashis Ray,
Subhayu Saha, Suranjan Chakraborty, Santanu Pal, Aryak Guha, Debraj Bhattacharya,
Anandaroop Ghosh, Prithviraj Guha, Zaheer Abbas, Rohan Sinha, Rajesh Kumar, Bravin Rayan,
P. A. Mathew, Nabarun Majumdar, Abhik Samanta, Arijit Sen, Bhaskar Narayan, Shamya
Dasgupta, Bibek Basu, Sumit Bhattacharya, and Rahul Guha Roy.
Nourishment comes from different sources, fulfilling different hungers. My two sets of
parents, Krishnakshi and Dyuti Kumar Basu in Calcutta, and Anjali and Vinod Bhatia in
Jodhpur, even without any direct clue into my work, have often felt the associated frustrations,
fears, and elations perhaps even more intensely than I have. For putting up with all the demands
ix and vicissitudes I have forced upon them, all I have to give in return is my love, humble respects and thanks. But parentage is more than just kinship logic. The ever-available affection of Drs.
Kumar and Sabita Ashutosh in cold Syracuse proved this over and over again. My uncle, Swasti
Kumar Basu was instrumental in first instilling in me a sense of curiosity in the world. I now miss his presence therein. My sister, Enika, came into adulthood, finished her under-and post- graduate degrees, took up employment, and got married to the wonderful Diego Giacani, while I all I did in the meanwhile was to try to finish my doctoral studies. To her, my thanks for easing more encumbrances for me than she will ever know. My siblings-in-law, Nikhil and Tania
Bhatia, and their little one, Ananya, have been a source of constant support even when they have been bemused by what I do, or don’t do. I thank them for keeping the sense of bemusement alive.
At certain pauses, the limits of language stand fully revealed. Adequately acknowledging the presence of Varuni Bhatia in my life (and work) offers such a pause. Indeed, it is difficult to organize in words that simultaneously rational and irrational relationship which encompasses love, hate, gratitude, egotism, self-diffusion, music, noise, silence, and everything in between.
All I can say is the experiment-in-comradeship we began fifteen years ago remains my fount of life in all its shades. And as with many things else, I hope she will not mind bearing the burden of this dissertation’s dedication.
Lastly, or perhaps even firstly, though the author is nothing more than the crowd s/he channels, for all the errors in this dissertation, needless to say, it is only the former who is culpable.
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Note on Translation and Transliteration
I have devised and followed my own code of transliteration in this dissertation, keeping in mind that many of the non-English terms mentioned here appear in at least three, if not more, South Asian languages: Bengali, Hindi and Sanskrit. To mark their specificities in words, texts, and names of people and places, I have abided by the following general rules:
1. Diacritics have not been used.
2. Non-English terms are italicized only when they appear for the first time. If a term is italicized, and appears more than once in the dissertation, its meaning is explained in a footnote. If a term only appears once in the dissertation, a translation is provided in parentheses following its usage in the main text.
3. The final “a” is done away with while transliterating Bengali terms, unless it is pronounced; hence, Bhadralok and kobigaan are spelt the way they are.
4. In transliterating the names of books that are written in Sanskrit, I follow the standard rules of Sanskrit transliteration. Hence, Sangitadarpana.
5. All names of places have been transliterated according to the official spellings followed by the governments of India and Bangladesh respectively. The only exception is my usage of the name Calcutta, instead of the now-official Kolkata, in part to denote a larger than colonial association with this name.
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Introduction
This dissertation, in terms of its broadest coordinates, is a study of musical modernity and
colonialism, in this case, British colonialism in India. The account of this elaboration is plotted
in the present work along two complementary thematic axes: discourse formation, and subject
formation. The first implicates the discursive processes through which Indian music was made
amenable to and rendered comparable within the framework of (post-)Enlightenment musical
knowledge—first by English Orientalists and later by Indian music scholars themselves.
Informed by this, the second axis addresses the production of modern musical subjectivities in
the colony by looking at the social life of musical practice, and its institutional and discursive
mediations.
The narratives and analyses presented here do not pretend to be exhaustive of the
aforementioned processes. Instead, they operate within a rather well-defined temporal and
spatio-cultural scope. Specifically, then, this dissertation looks at two signal musico-historical
conjunctures in India through the overarching lens of a colonially-mediated musical modernity:
(i) the late-eighteenth century moment of Orientalist (music) discourse and the production of the
Anglo-Indian musical subject in the early colonial social formation; and (ii) the latter-nineteenth
century moment of the formation of a Bengali Bhadralok musico-discursive apparatus,1 and the
1 The Bhadralok animates an entropic demographic whose constitution as such is organic to the unfolding of colonial rule in India, and its particular inflection in Bengal. As a socio-economic class with categorical presence in discourse, it solidifies over the nineteenth century, agglomerating a constituency that favorably exploited the new economic, political, and educational arrangements ushered in by the British. As is well known in the annals of mainstream Indian nationalist history, members of this class played a vanguardist role in the articulation of a national-colonial modernity in India and in programs of native self-improvement, leading, by the end of the nineteenth century, towards the framing of a certain kind of anticolonial politics. In more formal terms, the cultural content of the Bhadralok—literally, the ‘civilized’ and ‘respectable’ folk, and necessarily educated—acts over and under the more economistic demarcation, madhyabitta, literally, the middle-class. Hence, economic locus of a subject in the middle-class, however discursively defined, is not always co-extensive with the socio-cultural locus that the Bhadralok discriminates. If the madhyabitta straddles the ‘in-between’ of the Bengali class-duality, barolok/goreeb—rich person/poor person, in economic terms—then ‘Bhadralok’ wills into being as its dichotomous Other, the chhotolok, or the uncivilized—a value of cultural politics than of political economy. Thus, theoretically, it is possible for a person hailing from the lower-middle economic class to be a Bhadralok, just as it is possible for an
1
musical subject that the designers of this apparatus sought to will into being. Accordingly, the
dissertation is divided into two parts.
Part I, comprising Chapters 1-3, focuses exclusively on the colonizers and their musical
concerns in the early colonial social formation. Comprising Chapters 4-5, Part II, on the other
hand, concentrates exclusively on the colonized and their musical world at a time British rule in
India had congealed—to put it in terms of Francis Hutchins’ evocative phrase—into an “illusion
of permanence.”2 What connects these two parts is the fact that the main protagonists therein,
both the colonizer and the colonized, all operated out of colonial Bengal—specifically, out of the capital of British India, Calcutta, which colored their approach to and understanding of (Indian) music in determinate ways.
But another connection between the two parts is more pertinent for our purposes here, one that is secured by the fact that the epistemological legacy of late-eighteenth century
Orientalist knowledge was enthusiastically claimed in India by the nineteenth century Bengali
Bhadralok. Orientalism’s driving thematic (textually reconstructing a ‘classical’ age of ancient,
Vedic Hindu glory) and problematic (how to reckon with the ‘corruptive’ accretions therein, consequent of Muslim rule in India?) was brought to bear on a range of issues that this social
economic elite to be a chhotolok. That said, in social reality, be that of the postcolonial present or the colonial past, there is/was a significant overlap between the economic upper/middle classes and the Bhadralok. Importantly, as Partha Chatterjee has argued, in a somewhat functionalist manner that he otherwise repudiates in his oeuvre, that the colonial Bhadralok occupied a certain “middle” between the colonial state and its colonized subjects, performing a crucial mediating role between the European ruling class and the natives. This location positioned the Bhadralok advantageously in terms of its will to hegemonic power, particularly after the retreat of colonialism. Thus, in Chatterjee’s formulation, the Bhadralok is also a “middle-class,” and it is as such he refers to them in his seminal text, The Nation and its Fragments. However, I have chosen to stick with ‘Bhadralok’ in this dissertation to specifically highlight the field of cultural politics and ideology in which it was largely invested as a class-formation. Thus, though not explicitly mobilized here, it needs to be kept in mind that my usage of Bhadralok also implicates its constituencies’ ‘middle-ness.’ [Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 35-40 My usage of the term ‘Bhadralok’ in this dissertation should be understood throughout as signifying all the senses outlined above.
2 Francis Hutchins, Illusion of Permanence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
2 class deemed important for its “unnati, an equivalent of the nineteenth-century European concept of ‘improvement’ or ‘progress.’”3
The field of music4 provides a fecund register to chart both Orientalist knowledge production and the aforementioned act of discursive inheritance. Thus, one point that is pushed consistently throughout this dissertation is that the colonizer and the colonized were both ineluctably enmeshed in the production of musical modernity in India. If it was the discursive dint of the former that constituted the necessary condition for this process then the condition of sufficiency to render it specifically colonial in form and content rested on the colonized (we will return to this later).
In this introduction to the dissertation, I will not follow the conventional schema of locating this work in a survey of relevant scholarship and historiography. These are discussed in detail in the chapters, in context of their particular thematic and problematic. Instead, I will use the space of this introduction to address the dissertation as a whole, and briefly clarify the historical, narrative, and analytical sense that the central concept, ‘musical modernity,’ seeks to animate in this dissertation.
3 Partha Chatterjee, “Our Modernity,” in Empire and Nation: Selected Essays, ed., Nivedita Menon, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 140.
4 I should clarify here my use of the word ‘field’ in this dissertation. For the most part, besides obviously conventional uses, ‘field’ should be taken to also imply the analytic charge that Pierre Bourdieu has imputed it with. Bourdieu defines ‘field’ “as a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and potential situation…in the structure of the distribution of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relation to other positions…” [Loic Wacquant, “Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre Bourdieu,” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1(1989): 39.] What we need to take away from this from this expansively rigorous, if dour, definition is the idea of the ‘field’ as a delimited site of contestation and power, encompassing individuals, discourse, institutions, within a social group or between them.
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Musical Modernity and the Colony, Colonial Modernity and Music
Needless to say, the conditional abstract noun, ‘modernity,’ and its various cognates—adjectival
(modern), verbal (modernize), processual (modernization), and ideological (modernism)—defy
easy definitions. Each is a contested issue, and it will not be possible to adequately address either
the breadth or the depth of the debates surrounding them within the scope of the present
undertaking. Nevertheless, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, in his article, “Hearing Voices: Vignettes of
Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400-1750,” proposes a useful formulation of the concept as a process that we can use as a point of departure for our discussion here.
Arguing against both the existing frame of Marxist as well as liberal historiography that ultimately regard (western) Europe as the privileged producer of a universal modernity,
Subrahmanyam calls for an understanding that views modernity as
a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a set of diverse phenomena the Mongol dream of world conquest, European voyages of exploration, activities of Indian textile traders in the diaspora, the “globalization of microbes” that historians of the 1960s were fond of discussing, and so on.5
It is evident from Subrahmanyam’s proposition above that his ideological investment lies in decentering the spatio-temporal and political-cultural vortex towards which dominant narratives of modernity’s historical unfolding gravitate—post-Renaissance Western Europe. Indeed, if, as
Fredric Jameson says, “‘Modernity’ always means setting a date and position a beginning,”6 then the scatter-map of dates and positions marking its origin in this dominant discourse mostly
converge around Western Europe emerging out of its medieval, ‘dark’ period. It is to displace the
solipsistic hegemony of modernity’s Eurocentric narratives, then, that Subhrahmanyam proposes
interrogations of pre-colonial ‘early modernities’—scattered around the globe (including, of
5 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “ Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400-1750,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 99-100.
6 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 31.
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course, in the West) but connected through trade, information, and intelligence-flows that precede the eighteenth century take-off of modern European colonialisms—as an alternative historiography of the origins and formations of modernities, precisely in its plural sense.
If we, then, for the moment, generalize the idea of (East-West) ‘encounter’ here to nominally mean ‘meeting of radical difference,’ and not necessarily in its specific colonial economic-political-cultural sense, then Europe’s encounter with Indian music (discourse) and vice-versa, of course, preceded its colonial intervention in the subcontinent in the mid-eighteenth century. Indeed, as contemporary musico-historical research has shown “[m]usic played a prominent part in…early [European] missions to the [Mughal court], with consorts of musicians acting as diplomatic ‘extras’ to ambassadors, and lavish keyboard instruments being transported to India as presentation gifts to Mughal rulers.”7 Curiosity of encounter certainly also prevailed
on the other side of the exchange. Thus, at Emperor Akbar’s behest, an arghanun, or an organ
procured in Goa from some European traders was brought over to Fatehpur-Sikri, and put on display as a public exhibit.8
Since the fifteenth century, with Vasco da Gama opening up the sea-route from Europe to the south-western coast of India in 1498, there had been a constant presence of Europeans in the subcontinent—travellers buffeted by the so-called ‘age of exploration,’ Christian missionaries spurred by the possibility of propagation and conversion, and traders and factors servicing a global (mercantilist) economic engine yet to mature into its industrial-colonial capitalist form. It
7 Ian Woodfield, Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in the Late-Eighteenth Century Anglo- Indian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1. Also see, Woodfield, “The Keyboard Recital in Oriental Diplomacy, 1520-1620,” Journal of Royal Musical Association 115, no. 1 (1990): 33-62.
8 Bonnie Wade, Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in South Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 152-154. Wade’s sources are the fascinating accounts of the arghanun by the great rival scholar-chroniclers that adorned emperor Akbar’s court: Abul Fazl and Abdul Qadir Badauni, and Mughal paintings show the organ.
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is through their writings and reportage of their travels that Europe got its early (modern)
intimations of Indian music.
Travellers’ accounts of India, however, mostly treat music in passing, usually providing only fleeting descriptions of their musical experience in the subcontinent. And fleeting it had to be. Narratives, after all, thrive on events; the scope the travellers’ narrative had to encompass events accumulated over, often, many years of travel. This being the primary imperative for travel-narration, music, even if it sensorially animated the experience of events, never made much space in the descriptive content of traveller-accounts. In any event, only after Charles
Burney’s music travelogues in the second-half of the eighteenth century did music even become a consideration-worthy axis on which travel would be narrated in Europe (Chapter 1).9 Thus, in accordance with contemporary formal conventions, and owing to the intractability of the musical medium itself to expression in verbal language, European travelogues are rather parsimonious in describing the South Asian soundscapes and musicscapes they lived and journeyed through. This is true of most of the best-known works in the concerned genre pertaining to pre-colonial India, for example, the seventeenth century accounts by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Francois
Bernier—both Frenchmen, who travelled in India during the reigns of the Mughal Emperors
Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, respectively—and of Niccolao Manucci, an Italian who lived much of his adult life in India during Aurangzeb’s rule.10 No doubt, these accounts provide fascinating
9 For details, see, Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 11-72. Further, it would not be unreasonable to generalize that it remains to this day a relatively under-used register for this genre of writing.
10 For details, see, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, trans., V. Ball, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Company, 1889); Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mughal Empire, trans., Irving Brook, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1826); Niccolao Manucci, Storia do Mogor, Or Mughal India, 1653-1708, trans., William Irvine, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1907).
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glimpses into music in Mughal India, and their authors’ experiences of it. But these are mostly
incidental, and purely that—‘glimpses’ (Chapters 1 and 3 refer to them).
Of the travellers’ fellow Europeans in pre-colonial, ‘early modern’ India, the Christian
missionaries were a social group of a different order. The integral incumbency of their office to
broaden the fold of the Church necessitated an investment in the people of the subcontinent that
was structurally different from that of other Europeans. Thus, as is well-known, records kept by
the missionaries—Jesuits, Franciscans, Baptists, Lutherans, et al—constitute some of the best
source material for studying early modern(ities) in the Indian subcontinent. It ought not to be
surprising, therefore, that Bartholomeaus Ziegenbalg, the author of what can considered among
the first methodical forays into music in/of India and its re-presentation in discourse, was a
European of this class.11
Though his primary intellectual investment was in understanding the Tamil language and de/recoding it for the Europeans’ understanding, Ziegenbalg’s chapter on the region’s music in his 1711 Malabarisches Heidenthum, is one of the earliest recorded expenditure of musico- discursive labor by a European into India’s music.12 Importantly in this context, Ziegenbalg was also, as Joep Bor points out, the first European to “make the significant observation that in India poetry, music and dance are closely related.”13 It is this pivotal aesthetic-complex in Indian
(musical) thought, first put forth discursively in the Sangitratnakara—a fourteenth century
11 Ziegenbalg, in fact, was also the first Pietist missionary in India. He, along with his fellow-missionary, Heinrich Plütschau, arrived at the Danish colony, Tranquebar, in the present-day Tamil Nadu in 1706, to set up a mission under the sponsorship of the Danish King. He died there thirteen years later. For details, of Ziegenbalg’s life and work, specifically his engagements with the Tamil language, see the translator’s introduction to Batholomeaus Ziegenbalg, Tamil Language for Europeans: Ziegenbalg's Grammatica Damulica (1716), trans. and ed., Daniel Jeyaraj (Gottingen: Harassowitz Verlag, 2010), 1-26.
12 Joep Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music c.1780-c.1890,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988): 53-54.
13 Ibid., 54.
7
Sanskrit treatise, called by some the ‘Bible of Indian music’14—that would present itself to
William Jones as a vexing epistemological problematic in his watershed tract on “Hindoo” music
in 1792 (Chapter 2).
Ziegenbalg also contributed substantively—including on music in (southern) India—to the Berlin-based French librarian, Maturin Veyssière La Croze’s 1724 Histoire du Christianisme
aux Indes Orientales (History of Christianity in the East Indies). It was through correspondence
with Ziegenbalg that La Croze, a Benedictine-tuned-Protestant, and a pivotal figure in early
French Orientalist discourse, found and vetted much of the information regarding (southern)
India that found their way to his History.15 It is, however, the following concatenation in this
intertextuality which this set of early modern writings on music of India enliven that is the most
interesting and relevant for our purpose.
In 1763, an English priest, Rev. John Brown, published A Dissertation on Poetry and
Music.16 Written in a febrile atmosphere for publications in the field of European aesthetic
theory in both the Continent and the Isles, with intra-aesthetic comparisons in and between
poetry, painting, and music as its regnant thematic, what is particularly remarkable about “Dr.”
Brown’s Dissertation is not his theoretico-philosophic engagement in the discursive field of his
interest. The work, in epistemic terms, can be seen to belong in a series and a network of such
writings from around the mid- to late-eighteenth century—articulating the British iterations in a
14 Shahab Sarmadee, Nur-Ratnakar: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey, and Techno-Historical Study of All Available Important Writings in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and Other Allied Languages on the Subject of Song, Dance and Drama, eds., Prem Lata Sharma and Nalini Francoise Delvoye, vol. 1 (New Delhi: ITC Sangeet Research Academy, 2003), 259.
15 See, for example, the translator’s post-face chapter in Ziegenbalg, Tamil Language, 161-162.
16 Dr. John Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progression, Separations and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music, To Which is Prefixed a Cure of Saul [sic], a Sacred Ode (London: L. Davies, and C. Reymers, 1763).
8
larger European current—by James Harris, Daniel Webb, Lord Henry Kames, James Beattie, et al.17 What sets John Brown’s Dissertation apart is quite plainly a historicist excitement on the part of this dissertation.
Presaging the ‘general histories’ of music that will soon begin to appear, Brown’s 1763 work is the earliest reference I have been able to trace in English musico-aesthetic letters that
devote an entire (sub-)section to “the natural union and the progression of the melody and song”
in India, alongside China, and Peru. And what secures the intertextuality suggested earlier is that
this sub-section is almost entirely a translated reprint of the music-relevant sections from La
Croze’s History in French, who in turn had depended on his private communications with a
German Pietist leading a Danish mission in India: Ziegenbalg. In this light, we will perhaps even
ironically appreciate William Jones’ euphoric declaration of rupture when we discuss it in
Chapter 1: that colonialization and the ‘presence’ it afforded on the ground had radically changed
the way music(s) of India could and would be studied (by the West, of course).
While my understanding of modernity-as-a-process and its origins accords, in general,
with Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s critical vision of modernity as a historical process, this dissertation
is not a positive engagement with it. In that, this is not an inquiry into ‘early musical
modernities’ in South Asia. It is, rather, a negative critique of the extant dominant discourse, of
modernity’s Eurocentric version—its purported universalism (Chapter 2), and will to power
(Chapter 1)—articulated on the discursive register of music, and viewed from the perspective of
17 For reference, see: James Harris, Three Treatises: The First Concerning Art, The Second Concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry, The Third Concerning Happiness, 4th ed. (London: C. Nourse, 1783); Daniel Webb, An Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting; and into the Merits of the Most Celebrated Painters, Ancient and Modern, 3rd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1769); Lord Henry Kames, Elements of Criticism (1761), 2 vols. (Edinburgh: John Bell and William Creech, 1783); and James Beattie, Essays on the Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind, 3rd ed. (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1779).
9
colonial-capitalist-modernity’s violent unfolding in the region.18 Hence, my point of beginning
in this dissertation is not really Ziegenbalg but William Jones; if this work makes frequent forays
into the early modernity or beyond that is only for purposes of contextualization on a longer
temporal scale.
In other words, the history of modern European musico-aesthetic thought, onwards from
around the mid-eighteenth century conjuncture of the formal onset of British colonialism in
India, based on a “right of conquest,”19 is a major site of engagement in this work (Chapter 2).
Thus, one of my main critical investments here is to bring to light the strong genealogical
connection between (early-)colonial European writings on music in India—specifically that of
the great Orientalist, William Jones—and contemporary professional scholarship’s reading of
music in/and the early colonial encounter—specifically that produced from the influential
disciplinary locus of ethnomusicology in European and American academies (Chapter 1). This,
despite the near-institutionalization in contemporary human sciences of a proclaimed cultural
and, more importantly, epistemological self-reflexivity in engagements with modern
Europe/West’s Other(s).20
18 In that its primary concern will to bring to light on the discursive canvas of music what Gayatri Spivak has called “epistemic violence” of colonialism and its paradoxical enabling of hegemonic aspirations in a (privileged) class of colonized subjects who often reproduced this structure of violence on its socio-economic subordinates. The concept of epistemic violence will be addressed in detail in Chapter 1 of this dissertation.
19 Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), iii. 20 This was, of course, a self-conscious gesture brought about in Western academic sites to ensure that the historical complicity of (human) scientific knowledges—otherwise hailed as an exemplary achievement of European modernity and ‘civilization’—with colonialist violence on multiple levels, is not reproduced. What I argue (in Chapter 1) vis-à-vis this is that the structures of epistemic violence associated with the colonialist, Western supremacist phase of the modern human sciences, including ethnomusicology, stand the risk of being discursive reproduced precisely at the moment it is assumed that self-reflexivity of the present modes of engagement with the Other(s) has automatically seen to it that the previous violence is not revisited. Rather, I argue that this self- reflexivity has to enacted in the very process of engagement with other knowledges, cultures, and peoples. It simply cannot be taken to be structurally wired into the discursive frame used for study. Otherwise, I show, using examples from contemporary historical ethnomusicological scholarship, such efforts precisely end up reenacting the epistemic violence they would like to obviate.
10
This critique, however, ought not to convey the idea that apportioning accountability for
the violence of modernity’s elaboration in the non-West can proceed in any simple ethno- identitarian fashion, especially in the present conjuncture. Indeed, the historical processes of colonialism and postcolonial globalization have complicated any self-evident, hermetic, and
‘authentic’ understanding of East/West, Orient/Occident, North/South, and such binaries— particularly so, on the grounds of ‘culture,’ be that of social life, governance, or knowledge.
Hence, it is the mode of co-imbrication of modern colonial power and modern musical knowledge—the discursive framework—that I am interested in critiquing, not the individual scholar-author at the intersection of multiple strands of identity.
I do believe, however, that the fuzziness of identities, be that ascriptive or voluntary, is a historical outcome, not a general theory.21 For, it is a fact that modernity in South Asia has been mediated through and through by the particular form of it that European colonial rule ushered in, a form that was grafted on to the subcontinent under conditions of unambiguously asymmetric power relations between the colonizer and the colonized, and foundational violence. Hence, it
might be worthwhile to speculate what character the pre-colonial ‘early modernities’ that
Subrahmanyam talks about would have assumed over time, had it not been for the history-
21 It is for this reason that I have capitalized ‘West’ throughout. For I believe that in the time-frame of this dissertation, it is indeed possible to demarcate a ‘West’ in terms of geography, knowledges, cultures, and race. This, of course, flattens out the multitude of internal variegations within the West, cultural and linguistic differences that have been historically important for the formation of nation-states in Europe. Had this been a work whose remit had necessitated it to take into effective consideration this heterogeneity then it would not have, perhaps, been prudent to use West in the sense I have. However, this work imagines the past that it addresses from the point of view of the colony, and how it became one. In this sense then, what was epochal in the first instance was Western colonization and the coerced diffusion of its knowledge systems, not so much the internal variances between, say, the English, French, and the Dutch. Ergo, the consistent capitalization of ‘West’ in this dissertation. What this implies is that my understanding of the category ‘West’ is temporal, that it stops being a stable signifier over time. Had this dissertation been addressing the present then it would have been difficult to sustain this conception, given the de/re- territorialization of culture in the current historical conjuncture.
11
altering and History-bestowing22 intervention of European colonialism. But it is difficult to look beyond the onset of British colonialism in India to historically account for the modernities that ultimately came to unfold in the subcontinent—the moment of modernity’s violent iteration, particularly in reshaping Bengal in every sense of the word, with the rise of Calcutta as the center of culture and power, and the eventual emergence of the Bhadralok as the social class elaborated by the conjuncture. And as Ranajit Guha has put it, colonialism, in the first instance, depended
“simply and exclusively on the power of the sword.”23 Even music was not outside its ambit. If
not the musical phenomenon per se, its technological, institutional, and discursive mediation as a
socially significant cultural act was fundamentally re-arranged in and through European colonialism (Chapter 1). Thus, in order to have a clear understanding of how music was imbricated in the unfolding of European modernity in the South Asian theatre, of the character that musical modernity came to assume in latter-nineteenth century India, it is necessary to reacquaint ourselves with how a Eurocentric modernity is usually historicized and narrated.
The characteristic features that signal the epoch of modernity in Europe, and therefore, signal Europe as paradigmatically modern, are most commonly narrativized on the following registers: the Protestant reformation in the field of religion; the Cartesian break in epistemology; the French Revolution in the field of politics and political belonging; the “emergence of capitalism” as the regnant economic system imbricating social relations amenable to its
reproduction; and the inception of a historical self-consciousness reconfiguring man’s
22 This is a good instance to exemplify my use of capitalization in this dissertation. Whenever a term is in smaller- case, it ought to be interpreted in its general, conventional sense. On the other hand, whenever the same term or any other term is capitalized, it ought to convey its categorical, technical, and disciplinary sense. Thus, ‘history’ with a small ‘h’ in the text should be read in its conventional sense as the sequential passage of events over time demarcating a ‘past.’ But ‘History’—in upper-case—should be understood as a particular relation with time and its recording/retelling that structure the discourse produced or ratified by its bona fide practitioners—historians— usually, from within an institutional location in the modern academia called, the discipline of History.
23 Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony, xiii-xiv
12
relationship to the temporalities of ‘present,’ ‘past,’ and the ‘future,’ of the ‘new’ and the ‘old.’24
To this short “inventory” of “narrative options” drawn up by Fredric Jameson in his A Singular
Modernity, one can add further interrelated layers, charting European modernity’s constitutive
nuances. These can be, say, the emergence of a ‘public’—materially enlivened through print
capitalism and new associational spaces, implicating a ‘private’ sphere also no less mediated by
print capital; emergence of secularism based on the separation of the church and the state, and
the concomitant privatization of religion; congealment of a bureaucratic rationality in the
administration of law, governance, even social life, and so on.
Constitutive as each of these narrative strands are in entifying and expressing Europe’s
modernity—and, by extension, modernity in general—in this dissertation I will be concerned
primarily with only one of them. And the figure that this narrative animates is widely viewed as one of the foundational fictions of modern, (post-)Enlightenment Europe, arguably its most enduring philosophical legacy: the (idea of a) sovereign, self-reflexive, rational individual, or, the Subject. As it is often put, modernity is the era of the Subject thus conceived.
The particular frame through which I make sense of this narrative of modernity in the dissertation owes its formulation to the philosopher, Michel Foucault. I find persuasive
Foucault’s argument, associated with the archaeological phase of his oeuvre, that human being as a discursively bound, empirically studied “Man” (or, Subject) appears on the West’s epistemic horizon only in the latter-eighteenth century, through fundamental changes in prior modes of knowing the world and the human being emplaced therein.25 What this move does is that it
radically historicizes the birth of a universal humanism qua philosophical anthropology, and
concomitant ideas of human ‘nature.’ Similarly compelling, I find, is his theorization of the
24 For details, see, Jameson, Singular Modernity, 31-33 25 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; English repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1994)
13
dispositif, or apparatus, to map and understand the ensemble of processes, often contradictory, though which subjects are produced in different domains of social life. We will have opportunity in the chapters to develop Foucault’s illuminating counter-intuitive arguments in greater detail.
What needs mention here is that his critiques of modern epistemology, philosophical anthropology, human sciences, and subjectivity have rendered deeply problematic any universalist transhistorical assumption regarding human essence or nature.26
In the present work, I attempt to bring this critical viewpoint into conversation with the narrative of musical modernity in Europe. For, as we will see in Chapters 1 and 2, paralleling the emergence in Europe of Foucault’s ‘Man,’ was also the appearance of Music as a universal category of humanist knowledge and experience, as a vertical index of civilizational advancement with the European man and his music at the head, and as a domain of human social activity that was now significant enough to be discursively dealt with in/as a ‘general history.’ It is not happenstance that scholarly treatises on music bearing this remit in their titles began to appear precisely around the mid/late-eighteenth century.27 Thus, it is under the sign of Foucault’s
‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ studies that I, respectively, undertake a critique in this
26 By drawing on the insights of a thinker whose oeuvre is projected—very limitedly, in my view—as only a critique of modernity’s discursive scaffolding, I do not at all suggest that the material conditions of colonialism were any the less important, or that the concerns and the problematics of a Marxist cultural and political economic critique are any the less persuasive or revealing of its processes. Indeed, the class/caste location, ownership of musical means of (re-)production, concentration of musical capital in the hands of the few, etc., are all concerns that fundamentally inform this study. Indeed, there are many instances in this work where issues of Bhadralok musical modernity that relate to the ‘deep structures’ of colonialism and colonial society are clearly vocalized. For example, the development of Calcutta as a center of musical power in the latter-half of the nineteenth century was critical to the decline of the Bishnupur royal family, and therefore, of the patronage structure that sustained the cultivation of music in its court (Chapter 5). Nevertheless, given that the primary ‘sectors’ of inquiry here are knowledge formation, self-fashioning, subjectification, etc., I find a Foucauldian conceptual vocabulary to be particularly illuminating—more so than available Marxian concept-categories—in critically approaching the aforementioned processes.
27 For more the appearance of ‘general histories’ of music in Europe, see, Warren Dwight Allen, Philosophies of Music History: A Study of the General Histories of Music, 1600-1960 (New York: Dover Publication, Inc., 1962), 70-85.
14
dissertation of (i) the Western musical episteme at the above historical conjuncture, which
constituted the epistemological condition of possibility for the study of non-Western music
(Chapter 2); and (ii) of the ‘musical humanism’ that, I argue, grounds the Western discourses on
its musical others, not just in the moment of its latter-eighteenth century inception but down to
the present day (Chapter 1).28
In any event, nobody frames the complex of music, universalism, civilizational value,
historical self-consciousness better than a thinker with whom Foucault, despite conscious
differences, also shares significant affinities—Max Weber.29 Writes Weber in the very opening lines and pages of his seminal Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:
A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.30
Glossing two pivotal domains in which he sees this to be the case—Science and History—Weber
then turns to music to further generalize his theory:
The musical ear of other peoples has probably been even more sensitively developed than our own, certainly not less so. Polyphonic music of various kinds has been widely distributed over the earth. The co-operation of a number of instruments and also the singing of parts have existed elsewhere. All our rational tone intervals have been known and calculated. But rational harmonious music, both counterpoint and harmony, formation of the tone material on the basis of three triads with the harmonic third; our chromatics and enharmonics, not interpreted in terms of space, but, since the Renaissance, of harmony; our orchestra, with its string quartet as a nucleus, and the organization of ensembles of wind instruments; our bass accompaniment; our system of
28 By ‘musical humanism’ I mean a certain ideological disposition that follows from the philosophical theorization of the human being qua Subject in the latter-eighteenth century in Europe, which posited ‘humanism’ as a universal ideal that could ostensibly transcend the social, historical, political,, and cultural particularities of individual human location basis of certain universal properties, ‘music’ being one such. The concept, ‘musical humanism,’ will be developed in detail in Chapter 1. What we need know of it here is that music scholarship based in this ideological location tends to flatten the political cultural field in which music as a social activity is necessarily situated, whereby, for example, even the stark inequities of power that characterize colonialism can be held in suspension while discussing musical exchange between the colonizer and the colonized.
29 For a pithy outlining of the similarities and differences between Weber’ and Foucault’s projects, see the following text by the well-known sociologist, Barry Smart, Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 2002), 135-138.
30 Max Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930), trans., Talcott Parsons, intro., Anthony Giddens (New York: Routledge, 2001), xxviii.; emphasis in original.
15
notation, which has made possible the composition and production of modern musical works, and thus their very survival; our sonatas, symphonies, operas; and finally, as means to all these, our fundamental instruments, the organ, piano, violin, etc.; all these things are known only in the Occident, although programme music, tone poetry, alteration of tones and chromatics, have existed in various musical traditions as means of expression.31
Weber’s list of unique properties that characterize and essentially set apart the European
“civilization” musically from its non-European Other(s) was nothing new when it appeared in
1904. The exceptionality of European music and musical culture on these grounds had been stated long before him, and has been pointed out long after as well. What is specifically useful about Weber’s consideration of this, however, is his clear statement of European (musical) modernity’s universalism. In the encounter of Indians with European knowledge systems and cultural production over the course of colonial rule, this authoritative claim to universalism would be both a subjectifying frame as well as a site of contestation. Thus, as we will see, some of the musical attributes that Weber lists as uniquely European would also be the ones that the
Bengali Bhadralok either aspired to, or claimed to already possess, when they embarked on their hegemonic project of modernizing musical practice, discourse, and pedagogy in Bengal around
1870 (Chapter 5). On the other hand, we will also come across in the nineteenth century
Bhadralok musical field vocal rejections of the universalist claims of European knowledge formations, including that of music (Chapters 4 and 5).
This simultaneous acceptance and rejection of the universalist truth-claims of (post-
)Enlightenment knowledge systems, including Orientalism, would constitute a generative paradox in Indian nationalist thought down the road. As Partha Chatterjee has famously noted in the context of his seminal analysis of the thematic and problematic of this thought-field: “There is…an inherent contradictoriness in nationalist thinking, because it reasons within a framework
31 Ibid., xxix-xxx.
16
of knowledge whose representational structure corresponds to the very structure of power
nationalist thought seeks to repudiate.”32 In other words, the object of nationalist critique— colonialism—was the very historical-epistemic condition of possibility for the nationalists to be constituted as critiquing subjects. It is this paradox that is at the root of the ‘double consciousness’ that characterizes the psycho-social constitution of the Bhadralok (Chapter 4).
Further, I would like to extrapolate this argument on a higher order of generality and propose that this paradox is a foundational symptom of the persistence of colonial modernity in the post- colonial.
In this dissertation, then, I understand colonial modernity congealing precisely at the moment when the colonized Indians become active participants in the production of modernity in India, not just consumers of the European meta-narrative, from the nineteenth century onwards. The modernity that then takes shape in India is specifically colonial in character, a progeny of the master-narrative, no doubt, but different in its objectives as well, a difference which, in the political domain, articulates itself as anti-colonial nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Again, Partha Chatterjee, helps us theoretically conceive of colonial modernity in determinate ways. If in the Orientalist problematic, the Oriental is “…stamped with otherness[,]” and is “…above all, non-active, non-autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself[,]”33 Chatterjee argues that in nationalist thought the problematic is constituted quite in the
“reverse.” That is to say, “…the object of nationalist thought is still the Oriental….Only he is
32 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986), 38.
33 Anouar Abdel-Malik, quoted in Ibid., 36.
17
not passive, non-participating. He is seen to possess a ‘subjectivity’ which he can himself
‘make’. His subjectivity, he thinks, is active, autonomous and sovereign.”34
Though none of the figures that populate the dramatis personae of this dissertation,
particularly in Part II that deals with the musical concerns of the colonized, can be called
‘nationalists’ in its proper political sense, the general theory that Chatterjee provides above
underpins my understanding of colonial modernity. However contingent, determined, and
ideologically limited the assumption of agency by the colonized might have been under colonial
conditions, it is only at the moment of the colonized’s provisional consciousness as an agent, and the agonistic subjection to colonial rule this produced, can we designate the history of modernity in India as specifically colonial and different—Bengali (musical) modernity, in this case—not just a modular transplantation of European modernity.
Few proper names imprecate this dialectic better in a narrative of/on music than
‘Sourindramohan Tagore’—embodied by the younger son of Harakumar, at the Pathurighata branch of the illustrious Tagore family in Calcutta. Unyieldingly loyal to the British Crown as an
‘enlightened’ subject of its Indian empire, sometimes even to the point of shrill sycophancy, he was, however, a veritable insurrectionary when it came to the discursive domain of ‘Hindu music’ and its cultural-civilizational ‘history.’ Indeed, Souridramohan was the central node activating the apparatus of modern musical subjectification when it took shape during the latter- third of the nineteenth century in Bengal. And his systematic dismantling in 1874 of C. B.
Clarke’s essay, “Bengali Music,” standing on the very same epistemic ground that Clarke occupied—the ground of colonialism’s epistemic violence that had conditioned Tagore—marks, in my mind, an intensified instantiation of a specifically colonial musical modernity. For here we
34 Ibid., 38.
18
witness with the colonized as an active producer of it, but within an overarching structural
contradiction forged by his utter political complicity with the British, on the one hand, and
declaration of ‘national’ sovereignty in the domain of (musical) culture, on the other (Chapter
5).35
To reiterate, then: modernity in India becomes specifically colonial only when the
colonizer and the colonized become animated as co-producers of the modern, but not the same
modernity of the European kind (notwithstanding the ‘national’ differences within the latter).
Concepts in postcolonial criticism like ‘alternative modernities,’ ‘multiple modernities,’ ‘our
modernity,’ etc., are results of critical interrogations into this condition over the last few
decades.36 Again, this ought not to imply, therefore, an uncritical valorization of the ‘different.’
In fact, one of the primary concerns in Part II of the dissertation is to show how the process of
musical modernity’s congealment in Bengal as Bhadralok musical modernity in the 1870s was
foundationally based on their willing inheritance of a body of knowledge whose categories of
musical knowledge, frames of musical discourse, and assumed (musico-)civilizational hierarchy,
was infused with the blood and power of British colonialism.
This is, however, not to suggest that a specifically colonial musical modernity appeared,
fully formed as an apparatus, suddenly out of nowhere in Bengal. It is precisely to understand
how it came to be constituted the way it did that I look at the ‘pre-historical’ moments in the
35 This reading, as the discerning reader should be able to identify, of course owes its logic to Partha Chatterjee’s famous argument in The Nation and Its Fragments that much before declaring their demand for political independence from the British anti-colonial nationalists had “creat[ed] its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society[.]” [Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6]. This was done in the “inner,” “spiritual” domain—the site of identity formation, of culture—actively kept separate from the “outside,” “material” domain, where one had to engage with the political condition of colonial subjection and, in the anto-colonial phase, oppose it. For details, see, Ibid., 6-13.
36 See for example, Dilip Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modenrities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Shmuel Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002); and, Partha Chatterjee, “Our Modernity.”
19
making of the Bhadralok subject in the early/mid-nineteenth century. The musical constitution
and concerns of two individuals that occupy a place of eminence in this inquiry: Rammohan
Roy, and his unflinching supporter, Dwarkanath Tagore (Chapter 4). In the latter’s manifest bimusicality and the former’s efforts to reform and reframe Bengali musical practice, I see the stirrings of a musical modernity. The reason why I call this phase ‘pre-historical’ is because the elements of a modern musical consciousness, though present in Roy and Tagore, were yet to imprecate any discernible relationality between themselves. They existed discretely for the most part, brought into being by the labor of exemplary individuals like Rammohan and Dwarkanath.
In other words, these elements were yet to be placed on a solid discursive footing, i.e., in a framework of knowledge that was scientific, self-consciously historical, and institutionally- mediated. It is only in Sourindramohan Tagore’s time that we see this ‘pre-historical’ beginning assume its ideologically coherent form—realized in a musical apparatus of (modern) subject formation, backed up by a body of music discourse produced specifically for the disciplinary purpose, and openly critical of Western misrepresentations of music in India (Chapter 5).37
***
Though I have not used the space of this introduction for historiographical purposes, it would be remiss of me not to briefly situate this work in the scholarly space defined by a set of recent interventions in the past five years, addressing music, modernity, and colonialism in India socio- historically. I view this scholarship, best represented by Janaki Bakhle, Lakshmi Subramanian, and Amanda Weidman,38 as critically responding to the gradual reification of the (musico-
37 This is, however, not to suggest that this ‘agency’ of the colonized was objectively self-generated. Indeed, colonialism itself was the very condition of possibility for such an ‘agency’ to congeal in the colonized. I address this in greater detail in the relevant chapters (4 and 5).
38 Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Lakshmi Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Amanda Weidman, Singing the
20
)cultural nationalist idea which, despite many significant interventions by the disciplinary
practitioners of ethnomusicology studying music in/of India,39 has proceeded apace: the idea that
“the one (and perhaps only) art form said to have successfully resisted colonial influence…was
Indian classical music, both North Indian (Hindustani) and South Indian.”40
This notion is clearly a legacy of Orientalist and Orientalizing discourses on Indian music
that lends itself to cultural nationalist framings of the present day nation-state of India based, in
the present political conjuncture, on the body politic’s Hindutva, literally ‘Hinduness.’ However,
this is not a simple narrative of claiming musico-civilizational continuity from ‘ancient’ India to
the modern Indian nation-state that marks its origins in sacred Sanskritic Vedic texts and
knowledge. The cultural nationalist discourse of music today has no qualms in accepting—
unlike, say, Sourindramohan Tagore in the 1870s—the organicity of Arabo-Persian contributions
towards the enrichment and diversity of India’s art-musical traditions, particularly in the north.
Indeed, the field of Indian ‘classical’ music is today seen in a liberal consensus to be exemplary
of the Indian nation and the state’s modernity. For it fulfills, by its dominant discourse, three
normative attributes of the modern nation-state: civilization, history, and secularism. If India’s
Sanskritic Vedic heritage testifies to its origins in an ‘ancient,’ advanced ‘civilization’ that can
be telescopically mapped on to the country then the changes and adaptations owing to Muslim
rule testifies to its ‘history.’ And an evidently ‘secular’ ‘classical’ musical field in the post-
colonial present—characterized by inter-religious community marriages, gray devotional
Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
39 Some prominent ethnomusiclogists who have been interested in the social historical aspect of music in India are: Joep Bor, Harold Powers, Charles Capwell, Ian Woodfield, Gerry Farrell, Bonnie Wade, Gregory Booth, Daniel Neumann, Allyn Miner, and James Kippen, to name a few. For reference, see bibliography to this dissertation.
40 Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music, 3
21
practices straddling Islam and Hinduism, etc., by its marquee practitioners—fulfills the condition
of sufficiency for liberal political modernity. Thus, politics and historcity can be evacuated out of
the classical musical field, and the latter can presented as purely an aesthetic domain that was always-already modern. Indeed, for contemporary cultural nationalism in India, the historical responsibility is as much to find, paraphrasing Gyan Prakash, the “modern nation…in the archaic” as it is to find—in the usual vein—the ‘ancient’ in the ‘modern.’41
What interventions by Bakhle, with regard to Hindustani music, and Subramanian and
Weidman, with regard to South Indian music, have done is to shift the problematic of the extant
musico-historical discourse, and look at eminently modern ways through which this fiction of an
unchanging, ‘traditional’ Indian ‘classical’ music came to be constructed and sustained. Such
studies, then, have called into question the silent assumptions behind normalized categories of
music discourse, like ‘Indian,’ ‘Hindu,’ and ‘classical.’ Consequently, their push has been to
shift the focus from music as such—its aesthetics, theory, and performative ethics—to the
cultural politics of its social life, its discursive constitution and framework, its social production,
and its technological mediations. But Bakhle, Subramanian, and Weidman’s most signal
contribution has been, in my view, to habilitate the scholarship on Indian music in a critical
historiography of South Asia.
Moving away from both nationalist-liberal-bourgeois conceptions of nation(alism) and its
dangerous flirtations with right-wing nationalist discourse, as well as from orthodox Marxist
critiques of this that conceptually delimit critique along a determining economic base and a
determined cultural superstructure, the aforementioned historiography has paid central attention
to power, knowledge and cultures in/of modernity, its attendant technologies of rule, and the
formation of different subject- positions along different axes of subjection in colonial India. In
41 Gyan Prakash, “The Modern Nation’s Return in the Archaic,” Critical Enquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 536-556
22
other words, it has attempted to study ‘music’ along the tracks of critical analysis opened up by
the (post-)Saidian, critical Marxist (via Antonio Gramsci) engagements with discursive
technologies of both colonial rule and nationalist thought (via Foucault).42
My dissertation is a self-conscious attempt to position my work within this critical
historical current. While I certainly draw upon the wealth of ethnomusicological scholarship on
India, particularly the essays contained in two new edited collections published in England,43 the
methods and problematics of this work are divergent from that which animates this disciplinary
métier. The critical affinity that my work suggests—its reigning concerns being
power/knowledge, subjectivity, and modernity in the musical field of colonial Bengal—instead is
with the critical-historical scholarly trend identified above, specifically, with the three recent
contributions on music. That said, the particular enquiry that this dissertation participates in is
not, of course, perfectly congruent with the latter scholarship.
At the most obvious level, one difference is its regional focus. Curiously, despite being
somewhat an ‘overworked’ region on multiple thematic registers for various historiographic
persuasions studying modernity and colonialism, music in colonial Bengal remains a rather
neglected domain of critical enquiry. In that, this work studies a specific regional articulation of
musical modernity and augments the existing studies by Bakhle and Subramanian with western
and southern India as their respective focus. Further, in temporal terms, this dissertation covers a
42 . I am aware of the fact that a Foucauldian and a Marxist framework—narrowly conceived—do not sit well next to each other theoretically. The identifiable location and centrality of power in Marxist analysis, and the diffused circulation and contingent articulations of the heterogeneous ensemble named ‘power’ in Foucault seem to tug at different ends in any critique. While a resolution to this apparent incommensurability is to commit oneself to either critical disposition, I would like the keep the tension between the bodies of thought that bear these proper names alive in this particular work, while dealing with thematics and problematics that are articulated with greater critical felicity through a Foucauldian conceptual vocabulary.
43 These are: Claire Mabilat, ed., Orientalism and Representations of Music in the Nineteenth-century British Popular Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Bennett Zon and Martin Clayton, eds. Music and Orientalism in the British Empire: Portrayal of the East, 1780s-1940s, (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007)
23
period that has a mostly contextual presence in the aforementioned works. My narrative tapers
off more or less at the point where the latters’ inquiries pick up speed—the turn of the twentieth century. Taken in this sense, this dissertation also augments the concerned scholarship by providing it with its necessary backstory, i.e., the developments up until the moment that Partha
Chatterjee idiosyncratically calls the “moment of departure” of nationalist thought.44
In discursive terms, certain differences are more substantive. This dissertation is not
entirely a work of social history (unlike Bakhle or Subramanian), or of historically-informed
anthropology (Weidman). A narrative committed in either disciplinary way would have looked
very different, even if it addressed concerns similar to the ones articulated here. On the other
hand, my investment is both theoretical—specifically, in terms of clarifying the methodological
application of a Foucauldian critical vocabulary to South Asian music history—as well as social
historical. The latter strand finds a stronger narrative expression in Part II of the dissertation, in
part because of richer pool of sources that become available to social history from around the
mid-nineteenth onwards owing to the contemporaneous efflorescence of the Bengali print-world.
Exactly for the opposite reason, the investment in Part I of the dissertation is, relatively, more
theoretical.
To now put this dissertation in terms the broad themes running through its chapters: the
first and the last chapters are written as critiques of technologies of knowledge and subject
production, of the discursive violence involved in the West’s re-presentation of “Hindoo” music
(Chapters 1) and the Bhadralok’s fashioning of the modern Bengali musical subject (Chapter 5).
This is not at all to say that the power to represent/subjectify is vectoral. Indeed, there is a large
body of literature across different fields, including music, that show the contrary. It is only that
the critical focus of these chapters is different, based on the rationale that it is as important to
44
24
investigate what a particular configuration of power formally aspires to, as it is to find spaces of
strategic negotiations or outright resistance thereof. Chapter 2, on the other hand, is more a
schematic history of European, specifically English, musical thought, read ‘archaeologically’ to
reveal certain constitutive epistemological layers that were either extended or dispensed with in
the Orientalist incarnation of the metropolitan discourse. Chapters 3 and 4 stand somewhat at an askance in relation to the above chapter, in these chapters the focus is as much on musical practice as it is on the field of power in which it was embedded. Hence, the social aspects of musical life of colonial subjects—the colonizer in Chapter 3 and the colonized in Chapter 4—
appear more prominently in these chapters. And provisionally suspending the Foucauldian
schema, these chapters look at their subjects through the concepts of ‘hybridity’ (Chapter 3) and
‘double consciousness’ (Chapter 4).
The specific thematic and theoretical remit of this work will become clear in the
summary plan of chapters that follows.
Plan of Chapters
In Part I of this work, I explore the ideological and philosophical foundations of late-eighteenth
century Orientalist music discourse through a close reading of its foundational text, William
Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos”—the first sustained scholarly work on Indian
music by a European. This effort is spread over Chapters 1 and 2. The former concentrates on
unraveling the relationship between colonial power and musical knowledge in Jones’ text. The
second maps the late-eighteenth century European musical episteme of which Jones was a
subject. It is his situation within this knowledge-framework that constituted, I argue, the
epistemic condition of possibility for his work on Indian music. The concluding essay of this
25
part, Chapter 3, theorizes the production of an eminently hybrid ‘Anglo-Indian’ musical
subjectivity through an analysis of British ‘leisure’ in the colony and the presence of music
therein. The generative source here is the scattered reportage on failed experiments—conducted
under the colonizers’ aegis—at attempts to play English airs with Indian accompanists.
In Part II, I shift the discursive gaze from the colonizer to the colonized, and historically
analyze the production of the Bhadralok musical subject in the nineteenth century. The first of
the two chapters that comprise this part, Chapter 4, addresses the musico-historical processes were chronologically distributed over the period c.1800 to c.1850. Focusing on Rammohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore, I isolate here some constitutive elements in their musical subjectivity that were outcomes of Indians’ encounter with Europe and European musical mores through colonialism. Chapter 5, the final chapter of the dissertation, addresses the moment of musical modernity in the colony proper. At the center of the narrative here is Sourindramohan Tagore—a
scion of the Pathuriaghata branch of the family, and the first Indian musicologist in its proper
disciplinary sense. Through him, I trace the congealment of a governmental apparatus for
musical subjectification, comprising an array of publications on the topic of Indian music, the
formulation of a notation system, the establishment of a music journal, the rapid socialization of
a new musical instrument, and most importantly, a historically self-conscious idea of national
music.
26
Chapter 1 ‘A Subject So Delightfully Interesting’: Power/Knowledge in William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos”
I should like to know whether the subjects responsible for scientific discourse are not determined in their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity, and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them. 1
On the 24th of April, 1784, William Jones, then a judge at the Supreme Court of Judicature in
Calcutta, wrote a typically enthusiastic letter to fellow-traveler Charles Wilkins. Together, they had co-founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal just four months prior. In the letter, as is generally true of the correspondence between these two founding figures of Orientalism as a discursive field, the sheer excitement of encountering ‘ancient’ Sanskrit and Persian manuscripts in the colony, of making breakthroughs in interpreting them, is perspicuous. But this fourth missive in a series of thirteen emanating from Jones’ pen, collated and published nearly a century later in the Journal of American Oriental Society, stands apart for one particular reason.2 It presents a
rare and fleeting aperture into the pioneering Orientalist’s earliest preoccupations with (north)
Indian musical arts and music discourse. Writes Jones to Wilkins from Calcutta on April 24,
1784:
My present pursuit is the Indian system of music, which is comprised, I am told, in a book called Sengheit Derpen [Sangitadarpana], or the Mirror of Melody; and that book, they say, is not ill translated into Persian…I find also that the Indians have not only semitones, but even an enharmonic kind, or thirds and quarter of notes. Any hint on this subject will be particularly acceptable to me.”3
1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; English repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xiv.
2 This letter is the fourth in a series of thirteen from Jones’ pen, collated and published nearly a century later in the Journal of American Oriental Society. William Jones, “‘Thirteen Inedited Letters’” from Sir William Jones to Mr. (Afterwards Sir) Charles Wilkins,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 10, (1872 – 1880): 110-117. For the fourth letter by Jones, see, Ibid., 111-112.
3 Ibid., 112.
27
Whether Wilkins, who at that point in time was in Benares, conducting his own
researches into the Bhagawat Gita, was able to help Jones in the latter’s musical pursuits is not
known conclusively. But what is clear is that the domain of enquiry, “Music of the Eastern
Nations”—penciled in at the eleventh slot on the checklist that Jones had drawn up for himself
during his passage to India aboard the frigate Crocodile, itemizing areas of research that he
desired to devote his scholarly attention to—had risen rapidly in priority since he set foot in
Calcutta in September 1783. Within just a few months of the afore-quoted correspondence with
Wilkins, Jones surely thought he had enough knowledge of Indian music and its extant discourse
to be able to isolate from it “Hindoo” music as a self-sufficient category—its essence, in fact—
and write out a draft essay on the topic. Soon after, on February 24, 1785, during the second of
his eleven anniversary-lectures at the Asiatic Society, he declared that “the Hindu system of
music” was founded on “truer principles” than its European counterpart.4 Further immersion in the subject then found poetic expression in his famous hymn to Saraswati—the Puranic deity presiding over knowledge and the fine arts, including music.5 In all, there is ample evidence that
Indian music, which Jones understood categorically as “Hindoo,” was an abiding intellectual interest for him since his arrival in the colony, until his death in Calcutta in 1794.
This chapter is a close, historically contextualized reading of the only robust material evidence that remains today of Jones’ interest—a medium-length essay in the Asiatick
4 William Jones, Discourses Delivered Before the Asiatic Society: And Miscellaneous Papers on the Religion, Poetry, and Literature, Etc. of the Nations of India, vol. 1 (London: Charles S. Arnold, 1824), 14.
5 Jones devotes a significant portion of his “Hymn to Sereswaty” to versifying the mythological narrative of the creation and classification of the ragas—the self-contained melodic units of subcontinental art music that Jones translates—wrongly as subsequent scholarship was soon to point out—throughout as “musical modes.” For details, see, William Jones, The Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols., edited by Lord Teignmouth (London: John Stockdale, 1807), 13: 311-320. For the historical context in which the hymn was penned, see, Garland Cannon, The Life and Mind of Oriental Jones: Sir William Jones, the Father of Modern Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 234-235.
28
Researches titled, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” (referred to hereafter as “Musical
Modes”), published two years before his passing. The critical hermeneutic within which I seek to
place Jones’ essay is framed over the rest of this chapter in the following ways: (i) enquire into
its “curious” historiographic status in present scholarship, and map the ideological parameters of
the discursive formation within which the essay circulates; (ii) bring to fore the ideological frame
and historical contingencies impinging on Jones’ music scholarship and its materialization as an
article in the Asiatick Reseaches, embedded as this process was in the early colonial social
formation and its knowledge networks; and (iii) trace the genealogy of power and knowledge in
what is perhaps is the only substantive document of late-eighteenth century Orientalist music
discourse and its craft left to posterity.
Revisiting a “Historical Curiosity”: Untying William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos”
Today, William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” is generally recognized as the
first sustained, scholarly engagement with Indian music by a European.6 The essay—thirty-three
pages long as per its original quarto print in the third volume of Asiatick Researches, the house journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal—is widely cited as such in scholarship. As Captain C.
R. Day put it in his own 1891 landmark work on the musical cultures of southern India, the
“Musical Modes” “has formed the basis of almost all Indian musical research.”7 Indeed, it marks an originary point in the modern discourse on the musics of the Indian subcontinent, indeed, on
6 William Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” Asiatick Researches: Or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal For Inquiring Into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature of Asia 3 (1792): 55-87.
7 C. R. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern Indian and the Deccan (New York: Novello, Ewer, and Co., 1891), xvi.
29
the music of the West’s Other. One could even say that this seminal article lends itself
conveniently to such a historicist exercise. For, as it appears from the frankly self-historicizing
subtitle that this seminal essay carried when published in 1792, Jones himself did not want the
pioneering value of his effort to be lost on his readers. “Written in 1784, and Since Much
Enlarged” the subtitle matter-of-factly reads. By explicitly marking the chronological
coordinates for the conception and publication of his tract, Jones was not simply pointing out that
the work had had a long gestation, indicating his long intellectual commitment to his object of
enquiry. He was, I argue, also perhaps subtly staking a historical claim.
If published order of appearance is taken as the yardstick then Jones’ essay is not the first
English work on Indian music to see the light of day. That credit has to be assigned to one of
Jones’ close collaborators, Sir Francis Fowke, the British Resident at Benaras at the time.8 In
fact, Jones had been instrumental in publishing Fowke’s tract. Fowke had written a long letter to
Jones detailing his research on the instrument, Veena, with the admitted hope of contributing to
the latter’s ongoing researches into Indian music. In 1788, the merit of Fowke’s research found
his letter extracted by Jones and published as an essay in the inaugural issue of the Asiatick
Researches, under the title, “On the Vina, or Indian Lyre.”9 Meanwhile, Jones’ own essay, “On
the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” had remained a work-in-progress now for almost four years.
8 Francis Fowke and his sister Margaret, who was in India seeking a suitable hand in marriage, were among the nodal figures in musical activities among European residents (in northern and eastern India) that included other patrons and participants such as Lady Clive, Sophia Plowden, and so. This will be addressed in greater detail in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, where, too, Ian Woodfield’s groundbreaking work in this regard will be the guiding light. For details, see, Ian Woodfield, Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late-Eighteenth Century Anglo-Indian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 12-14.
9 Francis Fowke, “On the Vina, or the Indian Lyre,” Asiatick Researches; Or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literatures of Asia 1 (1788; repr. 1801): 295-299. Fowke’s tract is titled thus only in the content. The chapter title is, simply, “An Extract of a Letter from Francis Fowke, Esq., to the President”.
30
True to the rigor of his method, Jones had yet to be sated in his search for the Ur-text on the subject that would allow him to write authoritatively on Hindoo music as it once truly existed, in
India’s putatively glorious, ‘classical’ Sanskritic past of high Vedic learning. In 1787, the time around which Fowke must have related his research to Jones, the latter was still encountering new texts and reappraising the value of the previous ones that he had scrutinized.10
Nevertheless, Jones must have felt a need to wrap up his study and have it published soon
thereafter. There is evidence that “Musical Modes” was a finished article, ready for publication
in the second volume of Asiatic Researches in 1789. It, however, had to be excised from the list
of essays that Vol. II took to print for the want of space. Instead, the following promissory post-
script was appended to the content-page of the published issue: “There was not room in this
volume for the Dissertation on the music of the Hindus and the Laws of Siam; but they will
appear in the third volume for which ample materials have been collected.”11 But there must have bearing on him some persuasion—self-generated or otherwise—to make his research public. In November 1790, Jones presented the “Musical Modes” as a lecture before members of the Asiatic Society in attendance for the fifth meeting of the year.12 Finally, after a two-year gap
in the publication of the journal itself, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” appeared as
promised, in the third volume of the Asiatick Researches. And, as mentioned earlier, Jones did
not forget to remind the reader at the outset that even though the piece was seeing the light of
day in 1792, it was already eight years old, that though it had been “much revised and enlarged”
10 This will be discussed in detail later in the chapter.
11 Asiatick Researches 2 (1789; repr. 1799): 499.
12 Cannon, The Life and Mind, 319.
31 over this time, the article be considered “written in 1784,” rather than its year of publication in print.
The “Musical Modes” thus occupies an interesting place in Jones’ published corpus. It is both an early work and a late work in his career as an Orientalist in India: sounded out as a research interest in 1783, en route Calcutta, and appearing as a published article two years before his death in the same city. Indeed, the essay can be read both as an early statement of Orientalist ambitions, and as decennial report of the accomplishments and further possibilities of Orientalist project. Perhaps not unjustifiably, given the different registers on which this essay assumes significance, subsequent scholars, even while disputing Jones’ methodology and the conclusions of his essay, defer to the hidden imperative in its subtitle, and credit him as the pioneer of modern scholarship of Indian music. Yet, this deference has come at a cost for Jones’ essay.
In an ironic play on Jones’ wish to precisely historicize his own musico-analytic labor that yielded a draft of “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” as early as 1784, ‘historical’ is the only value that subsequent scholarship has ultimately come to accord to it. With the movement towards institutionally-supported, musikwissenschaft starting to formalize in the laboratorial spaces of the European academia around the late-nineteenth century—spawning, in due course, the (sub-)disciplines of comparative musicology and ethnomusicology—Jones’ essay had already begun to lose its epistemological relevance. Dormant thereafter in the disciplines and debates of modern musical knowledge formations, the “Musical Modes” has become more a chronological referent in temporally signifying the modern discourse on Indian music, rather than constitutive of it in substantive ways. Bennett Zon, identifying this most insightfully, has noted:
[W]hilst Jones was still respected as the first in a long line of influential ethnomusicologists, he had with Fox Strangways’s remarks been effectively superseded. Indeed, by the first decades of
32
the twentieth century, with advances in the methodological import and philosophical framework of ethnomusicology, Jones had become translated into history[.]13
It is, indeed, quite striking that despite being generally recognized for two centuries as the
first significant European scholarly treatise on Indian music, despite being reprinted in entirety a
number of times, in more than one language, well into the twentieth century,14 the essay itself
has been given the short shrift in terms of detailed critical consideration.15 While it is inevitably drafted into service for chronologically marking off the originary-end of modern discourse on non-Western (specifically, Indian) music, there is also a general consensus that the “Musical
Modes” is epistemologically obsolete: it has nothing more to contribute in terms of furthering either the knowledge of Indian music, or how this knowledge might be possible.
Harold Powers put this evaluation of Jones’ essay forth quite matter-of-factly in his 1965
review of writings on Indian music in English, published in the wake of yet another Indian
reprint of the “Musical Modes,” alongside N. Augustus Willard’s A Treatise on the Music of
Hindostan (1834), three years earlier.16 “The Jones essay,” Powers deemed,
could only be of interest as a scholarly curiosity; there is nothing in it which is not either wrong or superseded…
13 Bennett Zon, “From ‘Very Acute and Plausible’ to ‘Curiously Misinterpreted:’ Sir William Jones’s ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindus’ (1792) and Its Reception in Later Musical Treatises,” in Romantic Representations of British India, ed. Michael J. Franklin, 197-219 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 213; emphasis added.
14 According to Joep Bor, the “Musical Modes” has been reprinted no less than eight times; and this is discounting its translations in other European languages. See, Joep Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music c.1780-c.1890,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988): 57-58.
15 Janaki Bakhle too makes a similar observation with respect to the “Musical Modes.” See, Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 10.
16 Harold S. Powers, “Indian Music and the English Language: A Review Essay,” Ethnomusicology 9, no. 1(1965), 1. The volume reviewed by Powers is: William Jones and N. Augustus Willard, Music of India ( Calcutta: Sushil Gupta, 1962).
33
Though one could make some sort of an argument for reprinting the Willard Treatise,…it is difficult to see why Sir William Jones' essay should be brought out again, except as a historical
curiosity. 17
Quoting the first line from Powers twenty years later, Joep Bor, did not seem to differ from the
former’s estimation of the scholarship in “Musical Modes.”18 Though Bor’s rich historiographic
essay points towards “...[the] clear correspondence between the founders of ‘modern’ ethnomusicology and the 17th, 18th and 19th century travellers, Oriental scholars and music historians,”19 when it came to assaying Jones’ essay this “correspondence” is suspended, and the tract is deemed, again, a curiosity. Another thirteen years down the line, Gerry Farrell, in his brief exposition of “the relevance of [Jones’ essay] to any consideration of the West’s discovery of Indian music[,]” still found it necessary to preface his analysis by saying exactly the same thing as Powers and Bor: “There is no need to analyze or repeat here in detail the contents of the
[“Musical Modes”]; In the light of later studies, much of what Jones writes is redundant[.]”20 In
terms of extractable music(ologic)al knowledge one, thus, sees a definite closure drawn on the
“Musical Modes.” It has been rendered largely inert and artifactual in contemporary
scholarship—cited aplenty, but with little scholarly consequence.
My interest in revisiting Jones’ tract on music in the present chapter (and in the one after)
is quite different from that of the authors cited above. It is not to reiterate its musicological
17 Ibid. The whole quote reads: “There is nothing in it which is not either wrong or superseded. Jones' relationship to scholarship in Indian music is similar to his relationship to Indo-European philology: while he did not exactly discover the field, he brought it first to the attention of scholars, and left it to later generations to explore in depth.” Here again, Powers acknowledges Jones’ historical worth as the first among equals in pioneering the field, but clearly suggests that besides this there is hardly anything worthwhile in Jones’ essay in terms of its continued relevance to the knowledge and scholarship of Indian music. [Ibid.]
18 Bor, “Rise of Ethnomusicology,” 55.
19 Ibid., 64.
20 Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 25.
34
redundancy all over again—a point already well-made. In fact, one can argue that by repeatedly
evaluating the tract primarily in terms of its musicological merit (or the lack of it), contemporary
readings of the “Musical Modes” have, ironically, remained circumscribed within Jones’
authorial compass. For prior to anyone else, it was Jones himself—true to the Enlightenment
spirit of self-conscious knowledge production—who sounded out the limited scope of his own
treatise and the possibility of inaccuracies therein. “I have the leisure,”21 wrote Jones, “only to
present you with an essay [instead of a larger treatise], and even that, I am conscious, must be
very superficial; it may be sometimes, but, I trust, not often, erroneous.”22 Further, if the potential existence of errors in the “Musical Modes” was preemptively interpolated into the text by Jones himself, then every major work of European authorship on Indian music to appear thereafter over the colonial epoch—from Willard’s Treatise, via C. R. Day’s The Music and
Musical Instruments of Southern India and Deccan (1893), to A. Fox-Strangways’ Music of
Hindostan (1914)—have taken care to point out the actual instances of such inaccuracies.
Therefore, to judge the “Musical Modes” on the very same grounds and pronounce its general redundancy (except as a “curiosity” and a chronological token) on that basis has, ironically, been to travel a direction suggested by the author of the text himself—a direction that has, I believe,
outlived its initial critical import and subsequently been ‘normalized’ in discourse.23
21 This concern with “leisure” in the quote is not a perfunctory word-play in particular to the context of the given sentence. As we will see in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, ‘leisure’ was crucial to the late-eighteenth century Orientalist enterprise and its social life in the colony.
22 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 67.
23 Mention also needs to be made in this context of another ‘direction’—this time a historiographic one—in contemporary scholarship on colonialism and music in South Asia that is not traveled in this chapter. Alluded to above, this is the intertextually-bound genealogy of colonial music discourse on Indian ‘art’ musics, stretching from Jones to Herbert Popley, by the way of Willard, Day, and Fox-Strangways. This lineage of colonial music scholarship has been studied in recent times, in different ways, for different critical-historical ends, by scholars like Joep Bor, Bennett Zon, Lakshmi Subramanian, and Janaki Bakhle. While the first two have looked at this genealogy as it pertains to (the history of) Euro-American scholarship of non-western musics, in general, and subcontinental
35
Instead, I propose that if one suspends the reigning concern with the musicological limitations of Jones’ study that renders it an inert “historical curiosity” for today’s properly human scientific study of non-western musics then the “Musical Modes” charges back to life on at least two registers. First, it presents itself as a still relatively underexplored, even if well
known, canvas to view the production of Orientalist (musical) knowledge in the late-eighteenth
century colony, and its ideological and tropological moorings. Second, it shifts the attention of
critique away from ascertaining musicological validity, or the lack thereof, to the epistemic
location of Jones’ work vis-à-vis Enlightenment aesthetic and music discourse, to the epistemic
condition of possibility of its emergence, rather than a repeat roll-call of errors therein. This
latter aspect will be addressed in detail in the second chapter of this dissertation. In the present
chapter, I will be primarily concerned with the first register.
Specifically, my intention here is to explore the historically determined conditions of
power that informs the discursive appropriation of the musical Other into the body of (post-
)Enlightenment (musical) knowledge—Jones’ essay being the first articulate gesture of this
process. This overarching concern is distributed along two lines of enquiry. First, I read off the
“Musical Modes,” alongside other corroborative evidence, the historical conditions of its
material production in late-eighteenth century India. Second, I analyze how Jones textualizes and
musics, in particular, Subramanian and Bakhle have engaged the same in order to unravel its relations with a modern, nationalist musical consciousness congealing over the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century in south and north India, respectively. As mentioned in the Introduction to this dissertation, while necessarily informed by both these historiographies, and invested particularly in the latter, in this chapter I isolate only Jones and his essay from the larger historical field of colonial music discourse and place it at the center of my narrative. I restrict my analysis only to the inaugural movement in the formation and vicissitudes of a colonial music discourse. And in that, marking a difference with the scholarship alluded to above, the discursive gaze here is more conscious of the pre- colonial past of the moment that the “Musical Modes” defines in terms of a music discourse, rather than to what follows after it. See for details: Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology”; Zon, “From ‘Very Acute and Plausible’”; ------, Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth Century Britain (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007); Bakhle, Two Men and Music; Lakshmi Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006).
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narrativizes his musicological concerns with Indian music within the essay. What tropes and
allegories, discursive and cultural politics, come together, I ask, to constitute the body of the
written/printed text? Such an approach, I believe, will enable a critical understanding of the
production of musical knowledge under (early) colonial conditions, authorially mediated by a
figure who was at once a pioneering Orientalist scholar and a state-agent embedded in the
colonizing process. This is something that extant scholarship has not really examined in depth.
Hence, taking seriously what Harold Powers calls “only…a scholarly curiosity[,]” I attempt to
slake this ‘curiosity’ through an extended critical reading of the “Musical Modes,” with particular attention to its historical production in the colony, and to the convergences of musical knowledge and colonial power in its textual elaboration.
But before delving into this, it might be useful—indeed, necessary—to pose what has been said above as a generative question: why is it that despite the long history of scholarly engagement with Jones and his essay on “Hindoo” music those instances in Jones’ tract where musical knowledge is explicitly indexed to the colonizers’ agency and the enactment of colonial power have generally eluded sustained critical consideration? Amplifying this further will require a detailed discussion of the theoretical locus from which I attempt a ‘genealogical’ critique of power and knowledge, as this pivotal complex inheres in both the “Musical Modes,” as well as in the contemporary scholarship on it. Hence, before properly addressing Jones essay, it is this critical exercise that I now turn to.
The Limits of Musical Humanism: The Early Colonial Encounter in Contemporary Ethno/Musicological Discourse
‘Music’ as an object of academic enquiry has, over time, widened its departmental portfolio in
the modern academia—now pursued in a range of social scientific and humanistic disciplines—
37
much of the contemporary scholarly literature on music in India, and on the category ‘Indian’
music (which, without any added qualifiers, usually signifies ‘art’ musics of the subcontinent)
still largely emanates from within the (sub)discipline of ethnomusicology, housed in music
departments of universities in the global north. Filially bound to anthropology and (comparative)
musicology, ethnomusicology too, like other modern academic disciplines with their roots in the
nineteenth century human sciences, has had to reckon with its colonial antecedence and the
general Eurocentric derision of non-western musics running through its early proto-disciplinary prefigurations. In fact, the very formalization of ethnomusicology as a specialized academic subfield in Euro-American universities during the mid-1950s—the structuring of its discursive
edifice through the constitution of a professional association, the launching of a flagship journal,
etc.—was articulated as a need to establish a clear distinction with the Eurocentrism endemic to
dominant musicological discourse, both ideationally as well as spatially. The idea was as much
to challenge the undisputed primacy bestowed on post-Renaissance European art music as the
implicit or explicit standard of comparison in comparative musicology, and highlight the imprint
of Western imperialism in the disciplinary production of musical knowledge. It was to direct the
site of research away from the laboratorial comfort of the academy in the West in which
comparative musicological research was hitherto conducted to the ethnographic ‘field’ in the
‘non-West.’24
24 Today, of course, the ideas prevalent in the fifties, the ones that ethnomusicology inherited in its incipience as a disciplinary formation, have themselves transmogrified. As with other disciplines and methods capitalist globalization has forced a loosening and complication of earlier conceptual securities of ethnomusicological discourse, like, the categories west and the non-west, urban/rural, the home and the field; indeed, at a broader level, it has loosened up ideas of the western (musical) self and the other. But despite all this, as Bruno Nettl has observed, the popular perception of an ethnomusicologist being a scholar of largely non-western, often so-called ‘primitive’ musics—the music of the Other (in uppercase)—while not completely accurate today, is still descriptively not too far away from its professional truth. [Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One issues and Concepts (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 4-9]
38
Since this initial ‘de-centering’ of the European Subject at the heart of comparative musicological discourse, and the relativizing of its truth-claims, there have been successive disciplinary debates regarding the direction of ethnomusicological research, and its relation with other disciplines and methodologies in the social sciences and the humanities.25 The details of these debates have been recorded and discussed elsewhere; in any case, they are not immediately pressing on the task at hand. Rather, what is of importance here is that this disciplinary self- reflection in ethnomusicology and allied subfields in music departments has generated a renewed interest in the discipline’s own historical constitution. And it is under this light that scholars in the past three/four decades, like Powers, Bor, Farrell, Woodfield, and Zon—all operating primarily out of departments of music in the Euro-American west—have gone back to the moment of the early colonial encounter in South Asia in order to reexamine the founding movements of the discourse that they argue today has distilled into ethnomusicology as an academic discipline. Williams Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” expectedly, has come up as a nodal text for such exercises in (re-)writing the ‘history’ of ethnomusicology, particularly with regard to the west’s discursive investments in subcontinental musics. With the same thirty three-page essay published two-hundred odd years ago at its heart, the present chapter too actively participates in and extends this line of prior musico-historical (or, historico- musicological) scholarship. However, despite the obvious debt accrued to it, my location apropos of this scholarship is an admittedly critical, perhaps even a marginal one.
25 For a short chronological and descriptive summary of the vicissitudes in the disciplinary life of ethnomusicology and of the professional community of practitioners that it signifies, see, the first chapter of Nettl’s The Study of Ethnomusicology—a well-respected and much-circulating primer on the topic used in ethnomusicology survey courses.
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Such a location, on the one hand, is determined by a fundamental limitation in my
research, one that stems from being unschooled in the western sign-system for musical
transcription and reproduction—the staff notation—or music theory of any kind. Basic
competence in both is a precondition to plying one’s métier as a professional musicologist, with
or without the “ethno” component. Accordingly then, my engagement with the “Musical Modes”
here cannot, and does not, participate in the ‘language game’ of musicology as such. But, if this
structurally situates my work on the margins of the latter discourse, I also claim from it a self-
conscious distance—the basis of which I clarify over the rest of this section through a discussion
of two more or less recent monographs, Gerry Farrell’s influential Indian Music and the West,
and Bennett Zon’s Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth Century England.26 Using these two significant contributions towards understanding music, musical knowledge, and the colonial encounter, my aim will be to demonstrate that despite the disciplinary sensitivity acquired in recognizing musical difference and the musical Other, contemporary historical ethnomusicology and music history’s understanding of practical and intellectual investments into subcontinental musics made by Europeans in the early colonial context still turns on an uncritical
humanistic conception of music. In other words, an enduring substrate of what I call ‘musical humanism’ grounds this scholarship.
26 In fact, the first two chapters of this dissertation owe a significant intellectual debt to the work of Bennett Zon. With his specific interest in music discourse in imperial Britain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Zon has had, over the last five years or so, a sustained engagement with Jones’ music(ological) labors in late-eighteenth century India, contextualizing it in the many intersecting histories that marked the late-eighteenth century colonial conjuncture, and the subsequent incorporation of ‘Indian music’ as a category of modern disciplinary knowledge. See the following by Zon: “From ‘Very Acute and Plausible’,” 2006; “From ‘Incomprehensibity’ to ‘Meaning’: Transcription and Representation of Non-Western Music in Nineteenth Century British Musicology and Ethnomusicology,” in Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth Century British Music, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton, 185-202 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006); Representing Non-Western Music, 2007.
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As is well known, ‘humanism’ is a semantically, philosophically, and politically fraught
term that has acquired different and competing articulations over and across time. While it is not
possible within the scope of this chapter to engage the high polysemy of this concept and the
many humanisms it has historically yielded in any depth, the meaning that I attach to it in this chapter can nevertheless be clarified. In a generalized sense, I understand humanism here to imprecate that ideology, which, solidifying as such in late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century
Europe, posits Man as the transcendental locus of consciousness, reason, and rationality, endowed with a universal essence, and, guided by this, aspiring to the same ends in knowledge, ethics, and judgment. The particular articulation of humanism that I am concerned with here is
‘musical humanism.’ And I use this term in a different slant from the one that it usually bears in
Euro-American music philosophy and musicology since coming into significant circulation around the 1940s. No doubt, it is again internally differentiated within its field of discourse.
According to D. T. Mace, for example, musical humanism is simply “the study of musical theory of [Greco-Roman] antiquity,” particularly the renewed emphasis on it in post-Renaissance
Europe.27 On the other hand, Edward Lippman’s more sophisticated conception of it strives to
bring together historical and anthropological insights along with that of biological and
psychoacoustic enquiries to holistically apprehend the music of Man in society. As he puts it,
“the biological and the cultural sciences are two sides of the [same] humanist coin.”28 But two things are common to the spectrum of musical humanism: (i) it is staged in the discourse as a normative category—the fullness in/of which humanity as a whole ought to aspire to, an ideal
27 D.T. Mace, “Musical Humanism, the Doctrine of Rhythmus, and the Saint Cecilia Odes of Dryden,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 251.
28 Edward Lippman, A Humanistic Philosophy of Music (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2006), 7.
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that it worth fighting for discursively, and protecting; (ii) the explicit or implicit assumption that
in its more vulgar form posits the modern European (musical) Man as the ideal realization of a
(musical) humanism and a template for the rest to emulate. But, as Tony Davies, in his critical
historical survey of the idea notes: “All humanisms, until now, have been imperial. They speak
of the human in the accents and the interests of a class, a sex, a ‘race’…. It is almost impossible
to think of a crime that has not been committed in the name of humanity.”29 Musical humanism,
however nobly conceived, too runs the risk of contributing to and extending this history if it
remains blind to its own historicity in its drive to attain a normative status.
It is the critique of this humanism and its ideological operations that animates the present
chapter on a theoretical level. Such operations, I argue, lead the related scholarship dangerously close to unwittingly reenacting the ‘epistemic violence’30 of an earlier colonialist (music) discourse, which, as postcolonial criticism has consistently argued since its inception, was similarly predicated on the humanist ideal of the universal man.31 But, to be sure, epistemic
violence in/of contemporary ethno/musicological scholarship is not effected simplistically. It
does not follow from a straight-forward ethnocentric prejudice reminiscent of nineteenth century
29 Tony Davies, Humanism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 131.
30 The term ‘epistemic violence’ has been used a critical concept most famously by Gayatri Spivak to bring to view and subject to scrutiny those registers of violence that escape the more apparent enactments of it in the imposition of colonial rule and dominance. Spivak in her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” uses the concept to understand specifically that aspect of colonial/imperial violence that was imprecated in the European Self’s “…project to constitute the colonial subject as Other[,]” and the simultaneous erasure of the Other’s “trace” in Self-constitution. [Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Lawrence Grossberg and Carl Nelson, 217-313 (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1988), 280] Spivak’s usage of the concept will be further clarified below in Fn. 35 of the present chapter.
31 Indeed, as Robert Young has shown, it is precisely the consciousness in a “broad range of post-[second world] war thinkers” that humanism is a “highly politicized category,” that it is historically impossible to separate humanism and the European Self from (the violence of) colonialism and the (violated) colonized Other, which contributed to the early articulations of a postcolonial critical theory. [Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (New York: Routledge, 2004), 160]
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comparative musicology. Nor does it issue from a denial of the violence of colonial modes of
knowledge; this latter, indeed, is now generally accepted. How is it, then, activated in the texts by Farrell and Zon? It is this question I address next, beginning with the former.
Introducing his aims and objectives to the reader in its most generalized terms at the beginning of his text, Farrell makes an impassioned case for rescuing music (discourse) from the instrumentality of both: the “deterministic or polemical analyses of cultural theorists and the
narrow ethnographical concerns of the ethnomusicologists.” In his view, “the history of Indian
music and the west” appears as “an example of a unique cultural interplay which does not lend
itself easily” to the “[o]verarching theories about the cultural meanings of colonialism[.]”32 And
this intractability of music to critical analysis, according to Farrell, owes not to any socio-
historical condition but to the “[ephemeral] nature of music and the central place it holds in
human activity[.]” This point of Farrell’s is justified: it is indeed necessary to be attentive to the
formal, sensory, and social particularities of music and its experience in the lifeworld, without in
the first instance reducing it to its socio-political determinations. But he does not rest his case
here. And this is where a humanist ideology in contemporary music scholarship, despite all its
proclaimed sensitivities in dealing with the Other, becomes complicit in the very relations of
power that it seeks to overcome in and through music.
Desiccating the music-complex down to its formal essence and its singular
sensory/sensual status in human society, Farrell proceeds to declare that in the late-eighteenth
century early colonial context there are significant instances where music “functioned as a bridge
between cultures [and constituted] an aesthetic realm that operated outside the wider political
32 Farrell, Indian Music, 5.
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and economic structures [of colonialism].”33 This is precisely the kind of claim that I would like to avoid and critique in this chapter. For it turns, I think, on an ultimately specious attempt to dissociate the realm of human creativity and productive socialization, or culture, broadly understood, from the historico-material grounds of its possibility and existence, requiring a suspension of the question of power extant not only in the particular social formation in which a cultural text/artifact is produced and circulated, but also in acts of interpretation and analysis.
And herein lies the epistemic violence of a position such as Farrell’s. Such an ‘outside’ of the
political and economic, I therefore argue, can be maintained only through a humanist fiction that
views music as a universal quality of Man, a property of ‘his’ cultural communication that
transcends the material relations of power in which it is socially cultivated, including as
knowledge. Or else, it inevitably leads to a manifest contradiction. In the specific case of Farrell,
it is the latter. For, if early in his text Farrell clearly betrays the need to reserve for music a
redemptive space outside the structural violence of colonialism, then his reading of the late-
eighteenth century English fashion/fascination with collecting “Hindostannie airs” just later in
his book adumbrates a position that, as Nicholas Cook also notes, actually runs contrary to such a
project.34
There, Farrell opines that the European social-musicological investments in transcribing into staff notation and then re-performing the “Hindostannie” melodies of the day that they were exposed to ultimately acquits itself as “the logic of [how] one musical system is drawn into, and
33 Ibid.; emphasis added. The particular example that Farrell cites as a case in point is the practice of collecting and performing “Hindostannie Airs” by European denizens, specifically Englishwomen, in the late eighteenth century colony. This will be dealt with in some detail in the next chapter of this dissertation.
34 Nicholas Cook, “Encountering the Other, Redefining the Self: Hindostannie Airs, Haydn’s Folksong Settings, and the ‘Common Practice Style” in Music and Orientalism in the British Empire: Portrayal of the East, 1780s-1940s, ed. Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon, 13-38 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), 14.
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finally submerged by, the paradigms and demands of another.”35 And though certainly not the first one to be so, he too is critical of William Jones’ “Musical Modes” for its Orientalist overreliance on a textual canon of ‘Indian’ music, at the expense of music on the late-eighteenth century Indian ground. Such an argument, clearly, does not imprecate a position wherefrom one can infer a place for music outside the structural inequities of colonialism, or validate an earlier proposition made to the same effect. Rather, it is a position that is alert to the entwinement of power and European musico-discursive practices in the late-eighteenth century, attentive to the relations of domination and subordination undergirding projects of translating musics of the subcontinent into European idioms—an orientation that the present work is closely aligned to.
And it is precisely this unintended critical temper in Farrell that generates an unresolved contradiction in his own text: while the discursive intent, stated at the very beginning of Indian
Music and the West, is to safeguard a humanist bastion for music that both quotidian and structural hierarchies—however exploitative and oppressive—cannot encroach upon, his narrative actually undermines his own stated goal, rendering the humanist ideal of music so emphatically iterated at the start only a desire at the end, a desire, which, nonetheless, needs to
be anxiously upheld on the surface of the text.36
If, as I tried to show above, the desiderata of Farrell’s musical humanism manifests itself
in a move to abstract European musical engagements in the late-eighteenth century colonial
35 Farrell, Indian Music, 37.
36 This contradiction is not one-off in Farrell, specific only to his reading of the late-eighteenth century colonial social-musical formation. It gets repeated, and further entrenched, as his narrative unfolds. He goes on to interrogate precisely those historical conjunctures in which music and capitalist modernity are cast in the clearest dialectic on the colonial ground—again, an awareness of which firmly grounds my dissertation as well. These critical conjunctures include, for example, bringing music in India within the ambit of the western notation system; the moment of arrival of mechanical modes of music reproduction and dissemination in the colony—the gramophone, the radio; the moment of emergence of World Music as a recording industry category and the attendant categorical violence of the manner in which Indian music, among other units of the category, came to be configured in it, and so on.
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context from the economic and the political of colonization, leading to a manifest contradiction in his analysis, then Bennett Zon, in his otherwise important contributions towards historically disaggregating the colonial genealogy of modern musical knowledge formations and its comparative bases, presents a celebratory chronicle of a process that he calls “humanizing the musical savage.”37 This process is plotted by Zon on the progressive march of the European
(musical) Subject in objectively and sensitively apprehending its Other, through the constantly
evolving discipline of ethnomusicology. My skepticism with this narrative is a substantive
difference that I claim for grounding my essay vis-à-vis Zon’s work, whose sustained historical
and musicological analyses of Jones’ “Musical Modes” is one of the very few efforts of its kind,
one that the first part of this dissertation is otherwise indebted to in more ways than one.
Unlike in the narrative that Farrell constructs, there is no symptomatic contradiction that
results from Zon’s faith in a musical humanism. The latter presupposes an enlightened musical
humanism as already realized in and through the discipline of ethnomusicology, of which, he
undertakes to provide a history. For Zon, Jones, at the evanescence of the eighteenth century, is
already a vanguard “ethnomusicologist,” regardless of the fact that the (sub-)discipline itself
comes into being only around a hundred and fifty years later in the music departments of select
European and American universities. The great Orientalist, according to Zon, then, defines a
space—a discursive as well as an ethico-moral one—that lies not just outside the field of colonial
power, but outside the western musico-aesthetic discourse of his own time, presaging, thereby,
the arrival of a de-ideologized, value-free ethnomusicological “science” in the twentieth century.
If Farrell’s musical humanism led him to assert a distinction between his effort and that of both
critical theories of colonialism and culture as well as ethnomusicological scholarship, in Zon it
37 Zon, Representing Non-Western Music, 1.
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finds expression in almost a triumphalist narrative for the discipline of ethnomusicology as it
finally emerged as a proper science. In his words:
[B]y the beginning of the twentieth century ethnomusicology had effectively disentangled musicologically institutionalized Orientalism and racism, and had reduced Orientalist racism within its own prevailing theoretical praxis. Indeed, by disorientalizing early in its history, and deracializing later in its history, ethnomusicology was finally able to “disorient race,” and ultimately fulfilled its self-imposed obligation to humanize the musical savage.38
It is precisely in the finality of this declaration in which lies the fallibility of its claim.
The ‘history’ of ethnomusicology that comes into relief through Zon’s scholarship is a strictly linear, stagist movement through time, over which, the discourse acquires scientific consciousness, fine-tunes its methodology, and progressively rids itself of the previously accumulated dross of Orientalism and racism to arrive at its perfectly “self-reflexive” state today, exorcised of its earlier imperialist/colonialist hauntings. The historiographic operation in Zon, particularly in Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth Century Britain, is then two-fold: the underlying fold posits that the music discourse produced by the academic discipline of ethnomusicology as it exists in the present has successfully negotiated its chequered historical past, and, today, stands entirely proof to ideological lapses along racist and Orientalist lines. The more apparent fold—the actual narrative that Zon constructs—then casts this concept of ethnomusicology back in time and measures the ‘history’ of the discipline against this template: how proximate or removed earlier musicological labors were from ethnomusicology in the present. William Jones’ “Musical Modes” marks a point of origin for the ‘history’ of ethnomusicology imprecated by this method as it is seen to resonate, transhistorically, with the contemporary manifestation of the discipline.
38 Zon, Representing Non-Western Music, 4; emphasis added.
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Zon reads Jones’ efforts through two overarching, indeed, two overstated process-
metaphors. The “Musical Modes” in his account becomes a text responsible for not only
“disorienting the Orient”—an absolute contrary to what Edward Said thinks of Jones’ overall
project,39 it is also responsible for beginning “deracializing racism” in western musicology.40
These moves, according to Zon, apparently result in the “remov[al] of Orientalism from the
Orient,”41 and for the first time “set[s] western and non-western music on a level playing field.”42
39 It is perhaps an ironic coincidence that the chapter in White Mythologies, where Robert Young discusses the imbrications of colonialism and humanism, and the emergence of a postcolonial critique based on this, is similarly titled “Disorienting Orientalism” to imply a radically different discursive operation. [Young, White Mythologies, 158-180].
40 Zon, Representing Non-Western Music, 4-8; emphases added. Zon claims that Jones’ efforts turned “the anthropological presumption [of his day] on its head.” One need not argue against Zon from a position Saidian orthodoxy. Following Thomas Trautmann’s work on Jones—also quite critical of Said’s failure to distinguish between various kinds of Orientalisms, among other things—it can be shown Jones’ avoidance of the prevalent Enlightenment anthropological ordering of societies into savage, barbaric, and civilized (and, strictly speaking, this schema that Zon identifies with the Enlightenment was actually introduced in anthropological literature by E. B. Tylor about a century later, the same figure that Zon credits with helping musicology to move away from an evolutionary narrative) was not because he was any the less racist, and, therefore, of an innately superior moral character who had nothing but respect for the Other, but because he was invested in squaring a different ‘history’ of Man and ethnicity, one that Trautmann, reviving a nineteenth-century term, calls a ‘Mosaic Ethnology’—the meta-narrative of ethnic groupings and their dispersals laid out in the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, that would, ultimately give way to a more empiricist colonial ethnography further into the nineteenth century. For details, see, Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 42-57
41 Zon, Representing Non-Western Music, 4; emphasis added. Here Jones is contrasted to his late-eighteenth century contemporaries, Charles Burney—who we will have the opportunity to encounter later—and John Hawkins. Burney’s A General History of Music, and Hawkins’ A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, both published in 1776, and credited with being the pioneers of modern music historiography in England, Zon argues, were explicitly racist in their conception of non-western music. For the status of Hawkins and Burney in modern music scholarship, see, Warren Dwight Allen, Philosophies of Music History: A Study of the General Histories of Music, 1600-1960 (New York: Dover Publication, Inc., 1962), 70-85.
42 Ibid., 5; emphasis added. Zon identifies this in Jones in the latter’s privileging of music as “expression” rather than “imitation,” and in Jones’ supposed resistance to portraying Indians, or generally, non-western peoples, as per prevalent norms; i.e., “imitative of, or steeped in, nature than more developed people.” [Ibid., p.6] The issue of expression and imitation will be discussed in detail in the second chapter of this dissertation, albeit in a manner different from Zon’s. But Zon is quite off the mark in his estimation that Jones considered Indians any the less “steeped in nature.” In the “Musical Modes” Jones is quite clear that Indians, specifically the Hindus, are to particularly close to nature, and how entirely the art of their music is guided by it, even if as “expression.” In fact for Jones, that the “Hindoo” music treatises mostly elaborate thirty-six “modes” when, mathematically, there eighty-four possible (permutating the twelve semitones in the chromatic scale with the seven distinct notes with fixed ratios that comprise an octave)—is a sign
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He then goes on to say that because of the “disorienting” effected by “early writers in the history of ethnomusicology,” like Jones, the nineteenth century musicologists in the west found themselves in a situation “deprived of an openly Orientalist bias,” and therefore, “struggled in a precipitate of racial incomprehension.” Hence, the reason why “musicological racism,” despite gradually ebbing, thanks to the likes of Jones, still persisted in western music discourse throughout much of the nineteenth century. But come the fin de siècle, and this discursive contagion would be finally dealt with. It was at this moment when, according to Zon, the
German musicologist Carl Engel, under the influence of Tylorian cultural anthropology,
“effectively deracialize[d] music,” by supposedly eschewing “developmentalist conceptions of anthropological progress” in his work on national musics.43 Engel’s direction was further fine- tuned and formalized subsequently in the work of “psychologist and ethnomusicologist” Charles
Samuel Myers, during the first decade of the twentieth century.44 Myers’ theory of “cultural adaptationism” applied to music, Zon argues, enabled turn-of-the-century musicological discourse in the west to overcome any residual racist Orientalism—or Orientalist racism—in its dealing with the musics of the non-western peoples. Zon’s assessment of Myers is worth quoting for the teleological finality in its tenor: that for the Hindus “nature seems to have indicated” the number of modes that ought be retained for practice and contemplation in study. Proximity to nature is also one of the reasons that Jones indirectly suggests why the principle of harmony dominates “Hindoo” music theory and practice. See, Jones, “Musical Modes,” 60.
43 Ibid.,12. Zon’s uncritical celebration of Tylor is also problematic. For, as has been pointed out, E.B. Tylor’s notion of culture—his single most important contribution to the discipline of anthropology—was not after all bereft of a vertiginous notion of civilization. Since “Tylor equates culture with civilization…[C]ulture thus, at least implicitly, becomes a matter of degrees: everyone has it, but not in equal amount.” [T.H. Eriksen and F.S. Nielsen, A History of Anthropology (London:Pluto Press, 2001), 23]. Also, as Robert Young has argued, Tylor, despite being a “liberal, progressive thinker” for his times, nevertheless participated in the categorical reification of race through his ideas of racial permanence and racial types. [Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 140-141.
44 Ibid., 12-13.
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[Cultural adaptationism] effectively removed race as a conceptual underlay in the anthropological methodology of its day, and introduced into ethnomusicology—and ultimately musicology—a scientific template untarnished by questions of race…Myers was [thus] able to banish racism and humanize the musical savage.45
And thus was born the immaculate subject of modern ethnomusicological discourse, or the self- reflexive, “unitary ‘I’” of music, as Zon puts it quoting Myers. Zon’s rhetoric here is not ironical; neither is it a mere ‘reporting’ of Myers’ claims that is meant to be critiqued later in his text. It is actually grounded in the supposedly ‘justified’ belief that progressively cleansed of its earlier discursive sins through time and stages, modern western scholarship of non-western musics, and the subject that it interpellates, blazes an unblemished new trail from the early decades of the twentieth century onwards. According to Zon, A.H. Fox-Strangways appears as a pioneer of an
‘enlightened’ musicology with regard to Indian music, with the latter’s 1914 classic, The Music of Hindostan, cited as amongst the first works to properly “harmoniz[e] individualism and universalism in a linguistic framework by treating transcription as translation.”46 For Zon, Fox-
Strangways’ marks a new stage of music discourse in the west, and by westerners, where the newly humanized non-western musical savage finally took his rightful place in the universal
(musical) history of mankind—all in a dignified and even-handed manner, without the discursive violence of the past.
A couple of things ought to be noted by way of a critique of this teleological history of a discipline produced by Zon. Each nodal figure in the above-narrative is explicitly identified by our author as an ‘ethnomusicologist,’ regardless of the fact that all of them operated long before ethnomusicology came into being as a concept-category of disciplinary (musical) knowledge in the 1950s. This is precisely the kind of historical anomaly that a teleological humanist narrative
45 Ibid., 13.
46 Ibid.
50
produces. In Zon’s case it results in an uncritical ‘presentism.’ Reading the future in the past
from the vantage of the present, he talks of an ‘ethnomusicologist’ for a time when
‘ethnomusicology’ itself was non-existent. In the process, he ends up abstracting forms of knowledge and knowledge-producing subjects from their determinate historical-epistemic location.47
Second, if Zon is to be believed, then issues of Orientalism and racism are, it appears,
open and shut cases for contemporary ethnomusicological discourse, because the discipline itself
has putatively sublated its mottled past, and emerged as secure from any possibility of Orientalist
or racialist contamination. This, though, can hardly be the case, not just for ethnomusicology, but
for any discourse where the question of representation and knowledge of self and the other is in
any way involved. There are simply no a priori guarantees against epistemic violence, be that of the racist, Orientalist, or any other kind.48 In any case, as Robert Young has perceptively noted,
the issue is not one of
47 This argument follows, of course, after Foucault’s critique in his Order of Things, which will be addressed in detail in the next chapter.
48 In fact, in the seminal deployment of epistemic violence as a critical concept, Spivak uses it not only to critique the violence of Enlightenment modes of knowledge and a network of knowledge-producing institutions in the process of the establishing and securing colonial rule and governance (her particular example are “codification of Hindu Law” and colonial education policy) in the nineteenth century; more startlingly, the concept is also made to fold back as a critique of Foucault and Deleuze—two preeminent practitioners of French poststructuralism, closely associated with a critical theory alert to epistemic violence in the above sense. As will be seen most evidently in the second chapter of the dissertation, Foucault’s work, in particular, provides the theoretical bases for apprehending and critiquing epistemic break—specifically the modern rupture and the violence involved therein—effected by colonial musical knowledge. But according to Spivak, from this alertness to epistemic violence in their theoretical practice, Foucault (and Deleuze) move unproblematically to the claim that the violated, therefore, “can know and speak their conditions”; i.e., to cast the oppressed in the image of the enlightened European Subject. [Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 283] This move, argues Spivak, rather than proving to be an enabling gesture restoring agency to the oppressed, ends up being a paternalistic one, one that reinstates the latter’s representative supremacy. Thus, Spivak argues, let alone the eighteenth/nineteenth texts of knowledge of colonized world authored by colonizing Europeans—rather obvious candidates for exemplifying instances of epistemic violence—even Foucault and Deleuze are not entirely above and beyond slippage into such violence. [Ibid., 280-291]
51
…removing colonial thinking from European thought, of purging it, like today’s dream of ‘stamping out’ racism. It is rather a question of repositioning European systems of knowledge so as to demonstrate the long history of their operation as the effect of their colonial other…49
This “effect” cannot be simply recast as an expurgated humanism. As we will see, the neutral,
“untarnished” “scientific template” of (musical) knowledge and transparent representation
claimed by Zon—not just for Jones, Engel, Myers, and Fox-Strangways, but, by genealogical extension, for himself as well—is more an article of humanist faith than a product of actual historical experience and its critical interpretation. Thus, though Farrell and Zon cast their narratives on different registers, the analytical frame for both remains united by their uncritical conviction in a musical humanism, a slippage that I am keen to obviate in this dissertation. Both seek to define a space for music beyond politics, contestation, and power that animates any historically constituted discursive context. Ergo, if for Zon, William Jones’ “Musical Modes”
“eliminates Orientalism from the Orient” in the sphere of music and initiates ‘deracialization’ of its discourse, then in my reading, the same work (and figure) appears deeply embedded in the very field of colonial power and knowledge that Zon seeks to abstract it from.
In the light of the above discussion of the ideological moorings of Farrell and Zon’s works—two important studies that enrich the data and detail in this particular field of research— it should not come as a surprise that much of the scholarly engagement with Jones’ essay has glossed over the often explicit convergences of musical knowledge and power in the text.
Instead, it has largely opted to read the “Musical Modes” as an instance of how music and music discourse function as a metaphysical “bridge” over incommensurable (cultural) differences thrown up by the colonial encounter, validating in the process the essential unity of man. Based on what it sees as immediate connections that music innately effects between peoples (Farrell),
49 Young, White Mythologies, 158.
52 as well as the “equalizing” power of a “disorienting” and “deracialized” musicological discourse
(Zon)—both putatively lying “outside” the ambit of power described by the colonizing sword— such discourse posits a ‘level’ bridge, bracketing out the fact that this bridge was built across a very uneven historical situation. It is precisely the desire to contrive such an “untainted,” aestheticized space for music in the late-eighteenth century colony that brings a humanist historiography of music under colonial conditions close to reenacting the epistemic violence of colonial forms of (musical) knowledge, despite best intentions—often, actions—otherwise.
Indeed, as with culture in general, it was not structurally possible for music to inhabit an
“outside” of colonial power where the constitutive asymmetry of alien rule and its attendant violence could somehow be held in abeyance. As we shall see later in the chapter, the realm of late-eighteenth century colonial musical knowledge, which at the first glance appears removed from the overt violence of military conquest and economic extraction, was nevertheless eminently permeated by the calculus of power, with Orientalist musical knowledge production firmly indexed to colonial conquest, if Jones’ article on music is anything to go by.
In contrast to the historiographic investments delineated above, it will be evident in my engagement with William Jones’ musical research that my critical position draws its inspiration quite explicitly from how the colonial past of ex-colonized nations has been interrogated in so- called postcolonial scholarship. As is well known, inspired by the signal interventions of Edward
Said, and, in the specific case of early colonial South Asia, of Bernard Cohn, there has been a sustained scrutiny in the past three decades into both the epistemic violence as well as the productive power attending “colonialism and its forms of knowledge,” particularly as this came to be expressed in and through the so-called ‘cultural’ investments of the agents and institutions
53
of the colonial state.50 Taking a more anthropological approach to culture, this body of critical scholarship has made clear that the domain described by this much fraught notion was neither an abstract essence sequestered from, nor merely epiphenomenal to, the economic political of
colonialism. It was both an active instrument and product of colonial rule and control, intimately
connected in its discursive forms to the mode(s) of knowledge through which the colonized(’s)
nature and culture was apprehended and ‘fixed’—a process that generated in its wake an
astounding congeries of empiricities for classification and ordering. Not only was a “complexly
related variety of cultural technologies” necessary for the reproduction of the colonial state and
the colonizer’s habitus, such technologies were pivotal to the production and disciplining of a
subject population as well, inaugurating forms of subjectivity organic to the colonizing process
for both the colonizer and the colonized.51 Culture then, according to this scholarship, describes a heterogeneous site of power and knowledge, a site where the ‘rupture’ effected by colonialism often stands out in sharpest relief.52
The present work aspires to extend this critical impulse by bringing it to bear specifically
on a singular element in the culture-complex, music, and the discursive field that the latter
animated in the late-eighteenth/early nineteenth century. When held to scrutiny under this light,
50 For reference, see, among others: Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, intro. Nicholas Dirks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002); Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
51 Of course, the unity that the forms of colonial knowledge wanted to impose on the process of subject production could not, of course, always be maintained. With lesser or greater consequence, there were always excesses and subtractions to the economy of colonial control, unintended outcomes that skewed the intentionality of discourses and institutions; the class of English Nabobs, for example, that in the larger scheme of things did not fundamentally destabilize colonial rule, or the Bhadralok middle-class which did.
52 For succinct discussion on colonialism as a “cultural project of control[,]” i.e., the sense in which its is used here, see Nicholas Dirks, “Introduction: Colonialism and Culture,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 1-26.
54
Jones’ “Musical Modes” reveals itself as both a marker of rupture in the way musics of the
subcontinent had been studied in the past and the way it would be in the future.53 This, however,
ought not to suggest, as orthodox (mis)interpretations of Said’s seminal work tend to do, that the
‘regime of truth’54 enlivened by colonial modes of knowledge was installed on the colonial ground as if a prefabricated system—clear in its vision, and self-assured in its conduct by
European agents.
Indeed, as Ann Laura Stoler has pointed out, the “‘rule of reason’ appears far less stable when epistemology is rendered not as a fixed architecture of knowledge production but as achieved labor and worldly practice.”55 It is this “lived epistemic space,” in which Jones’ “On
the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” was historically produced, that I enquire first into in the
following two sections of this chapter, before moving on to a focused discussion of the
convergence of knowledge and power in the same tract in the last section.
“Pure Fountain” and “Muddy Rivulets”: Framing the Textual Canon for “Hindoo” Music
Though by the end of 1784 William Jones had a draft-treatise on “Hindoo” music prepared, he,
admittedly, had not been too comfortable with his own grasp over the subject matter just some
53 This is addressed in Chapter 2 of the dissertation.
54 This phrase, of course, owes its traction in critical discourse to Michel Foucault. It is deployed by him in many of his published texts to mean that moment which “…is marked by the articulation of a particular type of discourse and a set of practices, a discourse that, on the one hand, constitutes these practices as a set bound together by an intelligible connection and, on the other hand, legislates and can legislate on these practices in terms of true and false.” [Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-79, trans., Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 18]
55 Ann Laura Stoler, “Epistemic Politics: Ontologies of a Colonial Common Sense,” The Philosophical Forum 39, no. 3 (2008): 350. Here, Stoler advocated a looser interpretation of the term “regime” in Foucault’s ‘regime of knowledge’ for enabling sensitivity towards the “indecisive and muddled processes” intrinsic to knowledge formation. [Ibid., 350-351]
55
months earlier. In the affective realm of the letters he wrote to Charles Wilkins, Jones freely
aired his vexation over a fundamental issue in the music he wanted to decode:
The meaning of the word Sengeit [also spelt out in Persian] has been the subject of much debate between us. A Pundit here tells me that [sung] means [khoob] and [geet] means [nagma], so that it may be translated, melody or a sweet succession of notes. Sir Robert [Chambers] thinks that it means any music expressed by written notes. How do you decide?56
It becomes apparent from such travails over translation that in April 1784 Jones’
understanding of “Hindoo” music was rather rudimentary. The discursive parameters of his
project had yet to be identified and organized. He was still early in the process of establishing a hierarchical canon of Persian and Sanskrit texts—a central methodological prerequisite of the
Orientalist craft, to be arranged on the musical axis in this case. The conceptual vocabulary of his comparative method was still inchoate; musical terms had yet to achieve assured mutual translatability between languages. Indeed, as evidenced in the quote above, confusion prevails over the proper interpretation and translation of the central meta-signifier of the musical tradition that Jones sought to decode and re-present, ‘sangit.’57 It is, therefore, striking that Jones would claim in the subtitle of the “Musical Modes” that he had a draft of the essay ready at hand in
1784. For not only was he, by his own account, unsure of what sangit really meant in April that
year, he was also unsure of which text to privilege for defining the canon.
Recall that in the letter to Wilkins, dated April 24, Jones had discussed the Persian
translation of the originally Sanskrit Sangitadarpana [1625] by Damodara as if it were
potentially a definitive source-text. But by the time his essay was published in 1792, Jones had
moved on to a firmer textual terrain. In the intervening eight years, his discursive authority over
the subject of his research—by now categorically narrowed down to “Hindoo”—had expanded
56 William Jones, “‘Thirteen Inedited Letters,’” 112.
57 Ibid.
56
manifold. The textual spread now included no less than five other treatises on music ‘originally’ written in Sanskrit, besides the Sangitadarpana, namely, Subhankara’s Sangitadamodara,
Sarangdeva’s Sangitaratnakara, Gajapati Narayana Deva’s Sangitanarayana, the anonymously
authored Ragarnava, and Somnatha’s Ragavibodha.58 Now there was clearly a proper canon in
place, secured by commentarial intertexuality. There is, however, something more to be said
about the politics of inclusion and exclusion that impinged upon the framing of this canon.
It is clear that in the time that separated the first-draft of this essay in 1784 and its
ultimate appearance in print, during which Jones was deeply invested in improving his
competence in Sanskrit, his incipient bias against Arabo-Persian scholarship on themes that he
deemed Hindu in provenance had become articulately entrenched. In 1786, only two years into his Sanskrit studies, Jones asserted that a ‘true’ understanding of India and its civilization could be arrived at only if the corruptive accretions of Persian language and Islamic culture were methodically purged from its history. “India,” he declared in the third of his famous annual discourses at the Asiatic Society, was essentially
that whole extent of country, in which the primitive religion and languages of the Hindus prevail at this day with more or less of their ancient purity, and in which the Nagari letters are still used with more or less deviation from their original form. 59
Access to new Sanskrit texts over time seems to have led Jones, in the printed version of
“On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” to radically revise his opinion of the Persian copy of
Sangitadarpana that he possessed. If in his April 1784 letter to Wilkins Jones had noted that this text was perhaps key to unlocking the mysteries of Hindu music and “not ill translated into
58 For an excellent historical survey of Sanskrit and Persian documents pertaining to music in the subcontinent, including the ones mentioned above, see, Emmie te Nijenhuis, Indian Music: History and Structure (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 1-12.
59 Jones, The Works, 3: 29.
57
Persian,”60 he proposed something quite different in the published version of the “Musical
Modes” in 1792. And significantly, this new estimation is expressed by Jones at an important juncture in the text: during his introduction of Mirza Khan’s Tuhfat-ul-Hind (A Present from
India) [1675], perhaps the outstanding Persian text on the high-arts of India at the time.61 Writes
Jones with unqualified certitude in a passage that is perhaps the best-known excerpt from the
“Musical Modes,” except for its immediate context:
The Sangitadarpana, which [Mirza Khan] also names among his authorities, has been translated into Persian; but my experience justifies me in pronouncing that Moghols have no idea of accurate translation and give that name a mixture of gloss and text with a flimsy paraphrase of them both…[A] man who knows the Hindoos only from Persian books, does not know the Hindoos.62
This adverse opinion of Persian scholarship for Jones is total and expressed with manifest self-
consciousness, confidence, and reason: “From the just severity of the censure I except neither
AbulFazl, nor his brother Faizi, nor Mohsani Fani, nor Mirza Khan himself; and I speak of all
four after an attentive perusal of their works[‘]”63 he writes, in a tone that belongs as much to
Jones the Supreme Court judge as it does to Jones the Orientalist.
Such observations and homilies in the “Musical Modes” are symptomatic of an unresolved contradiction in Orientalist discourse of the era in general, and in Jones’, in particular. If it was his prior knowledge of Arabic and Persian—proficiency in which he had
acquired while still in England—that allowed Jones to understand the subcontinent in more
determinate ways than, say, the general class of Europeans in the colony, then the idioms emanating from these language-worlds, as they had become socialized in subcontinental cultures
60 Jones, “Thirteen Inedited Letters,” 112.
61 For more on the historical context of Tuhfat-ul-Hind, see, Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, India 1200-1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 178.
62 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 65.
63 Ibid.
58
and knowledge-systems over centuries, were also a source of constitutive anxiety. In fact, Jones
rings a pointed note of caution to members of his own tribe as well: “[A] European,” he writes,
“who follows the muddy rivulets of Mussalman writers on India, instead of drinking from the
pure fountain of Hindoo learning, will be in perpetual dangers of misleading himself and
others.”64
Whatever might be said of his Orientalist kinfolk, Jones himself seems to have tried to
adhere staunchly to his own advice. Only two treatises on music authored originally in Persian
find mention in his essay: the Risala-i-Ragadarpana written by Faqirullah in 1666, and the
Tuhfat ul-Hind. Faqirullah’s text is mentioned once, as simply Ragadarpana, alongside the texts
of Sanskrit origin listed earlier, and then dropped. On the other hand, the Tuhfat—which, in fact,
addresses music as but one of the seven arts within the ambit of its discussion—hovers in the
essay like a haunting that Jones constantly attempts to emerge out of but cannot. This
relationship of agonistic complementarity between the “Musical Modes” and the Tuhfat will be
discussed at length in the last section of this chapter. What is relevant here is that this referential asymmetry between Sanksrit and Persian texts, with Jones overwhelmingly citing the former in the “Musical Modes,” is a discursive act that was not historically, materially, or ‘scientifically’ determined, but was deeply prejudicial. However, the source of Jones’ prejudice was not simply
an irrational anti-Islamic bias expressed on a religious register. Rather, it was based on, as
Thomas Trautmann has pointed out, a pre-scientific paradigm of ethnological understanding of
the world and its peoples.65
64 Ibid.
65 In a seminal argument, Trautmann contends that though William Jones is enshrined in biographical and scholarly literature as a pioneering linguist who identified and formalized the homology of the classical languages of India and Europe, bringing into conceptual being the idea of the Indo-European (though the term was first used by Arthur
59
Indeed, had Jones’ endeavor been reflectively faithful to the historical ground out of
which he was writing, then the “Musical Modes,” one can justifiably speculate, would have been
composed differently on at least two counts: first, it would not have been so easy for Jones to
cull out the category “Hindoo” music—coterminous in his work with Indian music—with the
same certainty that he does in the essay; second, there would have been a much deeper and
positive engagement with Persian treatises on music in India. For Jones was writing under the
long shadow of the reign of Aurangzeb, which, contrary to the enduring myth the last great
Mughal emperor was anti-music,66 had witnessed an unprecedented flourish of music scholarship, in both Sanskrit and Persian, particularly so in the latter. Indeed, as Shahab
Sarmadee argues in his magisterial introduction to the English translation (and Devanagri transcription) of Faqirullah’s Tarjuma-i-Manakutuhala and Risala-i-Ragadarpana:
[A]n extraordinary feature of [Aurangzeb’s] age is there to be explained out in case his ‘total ban’ on music is taken in its fuller implications: it is that in none of the phases of Muslim rule in India but this has there been a such a sustained effort on the part of the intellectuals—predominantly Muslims—to study and write on the music of India, and its art, as contemporarily practised.67
Far from any “burial of music”—the supposed cultural outcome of Aurangzeb’s Oriental
despotism—musical scholarship in Persian, Sarmadee shows, reached an apogee, while at the
same time some outstanding treatises on music in Sanskrit were composed during his rule.68 This is the field of pre-colonial musical knowledge that Jones would have inherited in late-eighteenth
Young), “Jones's proposal of the Indo-European language family is better understood when we recognize that the character of Jones's project was primarily ethnological, not linguistic.” [Trautmann, Aryans, 40-41]
66 The myth of the “burial of music” during Aurangzeb’s reign, set in motion by the Italian traveler, Niccolao Mannuci, will be dealt with in greater detail later in the chapter.
67 Shahab Sarmadee, “Introduction,” in Nawab Saif Khan Faqirullah, Tarjuma-i-Manakutuhala & Risala-i- Ragadarpana (c. 1660), trans. and ed., Shahab Sarmadee (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, 1996), xlii.
68 For a list of Persian and Sanskrit works on music and musical aesthetics, see, Ibid.
60
century India when he began his researches into its music in 1784. Against this historical
context, Jones’ studied decision to keep Persian music scholarship out of the “Musical Modes”
only highlights the ideological investments of Orientalist (music) scholarship, indicating the
discursive politics of inclusion/exclusion on which their efforts at suturing a textual canon was
predicated.
It is tempting to read this politics immediately as reflecting an anti-Islamic bias in the
‘new’ Orientalists like Jones.69 However, such a conclusion, as Janaki Bakhle has pointed out in her reading of the “Musical Modes,” would be, if not entirely incorrect, somewhat hasty. An innate suspicion of Islam would definitely have been present in the new Orientalists as a historically constituted substrate, given the long history of Christian Europe’s encounters with
Islam on various registers. But more significantly than this, in the particular case of Jones, his conception of India as essentially Hindu and the consequent privileging of Sanskrit over Persian, was grounded in a ‘Mosaic’ ethnology, “that is, an ethnology whose frame is supplied by the story of the descent of Noah in the book of Genesis, attributed to Moses, in the Bible[.]”70
69 Networked by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, this breed of European scholars who appeared on the scene during the late-eighteenth century claimed their discursive authority from their knowledge of Indian languages, specifically, of the two outstanding languages of power and knowledge in pre-colonial India, Persian and Sanskrit. As I have mentioned earlier, the new Orientalists aggressively privileged the latter in their understanding of the subcontinent and its past. It also needs to be mentioned here that their Orientalism was ‘new’ insofar as they claimed a radical difference for the knowledge of India that they produced from that which circulated in Europe prior to their interventions, owing to the efforts and accounts of European travelers, who more often than not did not know the languages of the lands they visited. For the latter, everything was mediated through the witnessing ‘I/eye’ and its accounts. But, enabled by colonialism, for Orientalists like Wilkins, Jones, Colebrook, Halhed, et al, knowledge of the East, was to be, and could be gleaned through a language-enabled, hierarchized interaction with the ‘traditional’ keepers of knowledge—both scriptural and oral—in India: the pundit, kabiraj, munshi, qazi, maulvi, and the likes. Bernard Cohn’s seminal article “The Command of Language and the Language of Command” and Thomas Trautmann’s equally revealing Aryans and British India, read together, make clear the ideological practices and predicates that characterized this particular stage of Orientalist knowledge production. [Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 16-56; Trautmann, Aryans, 30-37]
70 Trautmann, Aryans, 41
61
As Trautmann has detailed, Jones’ Orientalist scholarship was fundamentally mediated
by a particular reading of this ethnological template, amongst other similar efforts in contemporaneous Europe, to plot the biblical narrative on a ‘secular’ historical compass, inspired by an ideological belief in the monogenesis of the peoples of the world.71 Importantly for us, in
Jones’ tallying of the story of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, filtered through “the materials
collected by Orientalist scholarship,”72 Persian revealed itself as derived orthogenetically from
Sanskrit—a language of even greater antiquity, cultivated by the ancient Hindus of India.73 For
Jones, therefore, reconstructions of a past that was authentically Indian necessitated careful isolation of Sanskrit and Hindu from Persian and Muslim, as the latter could appear in India in such profusion only through an unanticipated turn in history that disturbed the original Mosaic scheme of things—the advent of Islam.
Held against this narrative, it is possible to argue that Jones’ exclusive reliance on
Sanskrit texts for the textual recovery of the original and authentic India, occluding centuries of
Persian, Arabic, and Turkic musico-scholarly influence in the subcontinent through Muslim rule, was sieved, in the first instance, not through a blatant anti-Islamic bias, but through his desire to map the results of his systematic, and supposedly objective, researches into languages, law, and the arts and letters of the Orient on the Mosaic narrative. In other words, if his dismissal of
Persian scholarship, as pointed out earlier, was total, it was so only with regard to that which was produced in India, and on matters that he conceived to be essentially Indian, ergo Hindu and
71 Chief among those with whom Jones dialogs on this issue are Isaac Newton and Charles Bryant. Ibid., 43
72 Ibid., 42.
73 Asia appeared as comprising five distinct ethno-linguistic ‘nations’: the Hindus, Arabs, Tartars, Chinese, and the Persians. The first three, Jones identified as the three “original stocks” of humanity, corresponding, respectively, to Noah’s three sons—Ham, Shem, and Japheth. The last two nations, he came to believe through his language studies to be descents from the Hammite Hindus of India. For details, see, Ibid.
62
Sanskritic, in origin. In fact, as is well known, Persian (and Arabic) was Jones’ first love among
‘Oriental’ languages, which he had cultivated intensely for at least twenty years, prior to becoming seriously interested in Sanskrit upon his arrival in India. The epistemic violence of
Jones’ will to (Orientalist) knowledge, can then be said to have been directed more towards positing and defining India as an essentially Hindu/Sanskritic ‘civilization,’ rather than in a rejection of Perso-Arabic scholarship, universally and in toto.
Specifically apropos of music discourse, Jones considered authentic Persian and
Sanskritic music scholarship—and the musical cultures of which each was a product—to be essentially different from each other, embedded in different trajectories of historical development: the former belying greater epistemological and methodological affinities with music scholarship in the Hellenistic world. Authentic Hindu music discourse, according to
Jones, fell outside this ambit, and therefore, evolved differently. It is worthwhile to quote at length the following passage on this issue from the “Musical Modes,” though its substance will be developed in detail in the next chapter:
On Persian Music, which is not the subject of this paper, it would be improper to enlarge: the whole system of it is explained in a celebrated collection of tracts on pure and mixed mathematics, entitled Durratu’ltaj, and composed by a very learned man, so generally called Allami Shirazi, or the great philosopher of Shiraz, that his proper name is almost forgotten; but, as the modern Persians had access, I believe to Ptolemy’s harmonics, their mathematical writers on music treat it rather as a science than as an art, and seem, like the Greeks, to be more intent on splitting tones into quarters and eighth parts, of which they compute the ratios to show their arithmetic, than on displaying the principles of modulation, as it may affect the passions [like the Hindus]. I apply the same observation to a short, masterly tract of the famed Abusina [Avicenna], and suspect that it is applicable to an elegant essay in Persian, called Shamsu'laswat, of which I have not had courage to read more than the preface.74
Though the above quote clarifies that Jones’ decision to keep Persian and Hindu music/discourse mutually separate was based not on an anti-Muslim prejudice per se, it does
74 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 62-63.
63
little to dignify the politics of canon formation on which the Orientalist project of isolating the pure Sanskritic grain from the Persianized chaff was based. Indeed, confronted with a socio- cultural reality in India that was organically suffused with Perso-Arabic and Turko-Mongol
knowledge and culture for centuries, the only way that the Orientalists could apprehend their
present and justify their exclusion of Persian was through the trope of degeneration and
corruption, perpetrated on the once-glorious fabric of Sanskritic high culture by ‘foreign’ accretions that accompanied the advent and consolidation of Islamic rule in India. The great task that the Orientalist in India set for himself was to write this corruptive influence out in their own project of recovery of genuine Hindu knowledge, by putatively bypassing Persian scholarship altogether. In Jones’ own words, quoted from the third anniversary discourse to the Asiatic
Society, delivered on February 2, 1786:
Let me here premise, that, in all these inquiries concerning the history of India, I shall confine my researches downwards to the Mohammedan conquests at the beginning of the eleventh century, but extend them upwards; as high as possible, to the earliest authentick records of the human species.75
As mentioned earlier, Jones’s attempt to bypass the history of Islam in India and the
Perso-Arabic scholarship it generated for his reconstruction of the pre-Islamic “history of India” was, however, practically impossible. This is due to two interrelated reasons: first, for the likes of Jones, it was their knowledge of Persian that in the first instance enabled their scholarship; howsoever much was the Orientalist desire to recover classical Sanskritic knowledge, being located in late-eighteenth century India, Persian had to be the necessary gateway to any such
75 Jones, The Works, 3: 28. Summarizing Jones’ observations such as in this quote and elsewhere, Thomas Trautmann has noted that Orientalist “Indomania…was directed toward the Hindus and not the Muslims of India, even though the Persian language played a large role in the recovery of this object. It was concerned more especially with Indian civilization in most ancient times, prior to the coming of the Muslims.” [Trautmann, Aryans, 63]
64 project of recovery. Second, given the composite culture of this late-eighteenth century reality, efforts to neatly separate out its constituents and isolate the Sanskritic was doomed to fail.
It is then a telling statement of Jones’ confidence in the epistemological framework of his own scholarly practice that he could organize and posit as systematic knowledge that which otherwise passed through a rather contingent economy of production in the early colonial social formation.76 But despite this confidence, the authority with which the Orientalists pronounced their truth-claims in the permanence of print dissimulates the many impediments that often impinged on their production, impediments that were organic to the early colonial social formation and the scope of Orientalist scholarship therein. Indeed, these hurdles were often the source of foundational anxieties. Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” is a classic case in point. When read alongside para-discursive texts, such as personal correspondences from the period, biographies authored by contemporaries, etc., this famous article presents a particularly fecund illustration where such constitutive uncertainties can be evidentially traced. In what now follows, I first outline the contingencies of Orientalist knowledge production in general terms before examining their specific articulation in the aforementioned essay.
“We Go On Slowly”: Historical Contingencies of Orientalist Knowledge Production To begin with, Orientalists in late-eighteenth century India were crucially dependent for their fundamental source-texts on an exchange network of European manuscript and treatise collectors, diffused all over the subcontinent, mostly as functionaries of a still gelatinous colonial
76 And the issue was of not one of Jones’ confidence alone; it was also that of his colleagues’ in him. Just a week prior to Jones arrival in Calcutta on September 23, 1783, John Shore, who would be one of Jones’ closest associates in India, and later, as Lord Teignmouth, his first biographer—had written to a Professor Ford: “If Mr. Jones should, as we are taught to expect, arrive in Bengal, I may venture to pronounce that, notwithstanding the disadvantages he will labor under for the want of pronunciation, he will have more real knowledge of the Persian and Arabic languages than any person here, either Native or European.” [John Shore (Lord Teignmouth), Memoir of the Life and Correspondence of John Lord Teignmouth. By His Son Lord Teignmouth, 2 vols. ( London: Hatchard and Son, 1843), 1: 103].
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bureaucracy and army. Benares—the traditional center of Sanskrit scholarship with an equally
vibrant Nawabi culture, where the British had set up a Residency—and Calcutta, already
emergent as the seat of colonial power in India, marked an arterial conduit in this network. It is a
testament to the directedness of Jones’ labors that within a year of his arrival in the colony he
was an important node in this circuit. Instances abound, as we shall also see in the case of Jones’
essay on music, where texts procured in Benares were sourced to Calcutta for the purposes of
Orientalist research. Indeed, as Jones himself put it in the course of his second anniversary
discourse at the Asiatic Society:
My…journeys to Benares has enabled me to assure you, that many of your members, who reside at a distance, employ a part of their leisure in preparing additions to your archives; and, unless I am too sanguine, you will soon receive light from them on several topicks entirely new in the republick of letters.77
Surfacing on this network would be new Persian texts, or better, new Sanskrit ones of
potentially greater antiquity and authority, procured by a European collector, often working in
conjunction with native scholars and informants.78 Such texts would frequently be received with excitement that exceeded the instrumental call of knowledge production and spilled over onto the realm of desire, the desire to possess the text as a thing.79 This acquisitive mentality is evident,
77 William Jones, The Works of Sir William Jones, Vol. III, Lord Teignmouth, (intro. and ed.), London: John Stockdale, 1807, p. 11. Indeed, the importance of Benares to Orientalist research cannot be overemphasized. Much of the Sanskrit texts that ended up with British Orientalists in Calcutta were procured in Benares. Recall from the beginning of this chapter, Charles Wilkins based himself in the ancient city while researching the Bhagawat Gita. The copy of the Ragavibodha Jones worked with was sourced in Benares. Then, Samuel Davis’ essay on Indian astronomy in the Asiatick Researches was also based a text—the Surya Siddhanta—that was obtained in the same city by Robert Chambers. [Samuel Davis, “On the Astronomical Computations of the Hindus,” Asiatick Researches; Or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literatures of Asia 2 (1789; repr. 1799), 226] Indeed, the list is practically endless.
78 As we will see, Jones’ essay on “Hindoo” music is a good instance of seeing this circuit at work.
79 What I mean by this is that ‘ancient’ texts acquired in the hands of Orientalists in India a fetishistic value— imbued with qualities that was over and beyond its knowledge-content and the objective social relation with the inquiring subject. Importantly, this is not entirely congruent with the idea of ‘commodity fetishism’ in Marx’s sense. In the latter, the market, where an article with ‘use value’ becomes imbued with abstract ‘exchange value,’ masking
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for example, in John Shore when he excitedly writes in 1783: “I have in my possession Persian
translations of many valuable Sanskrit books on Religion and Morality; and these were acquired
within these six months only.”80 As we shall see below with Jones, as in Shore, the Orientalist desire to possess texts autochthonous to the Orient sublimated itself into a rhetoric of salvaging
such texts from extinction, of properly appreciating their ‘pricelessness.’
Then there was the pertinacious anxiety in the Orientalist over the ‘native’ mediation that
the texts they encountered necessitated. Orientalist knowledge, though aspiring sovereignty, was,
by the force of circumstances, inextricably dependent on the Pandit and the Munshi. Entailing
transcription, translation, and interpretation of Persian and Sanskrit texts, sometimes straddling
three or more languages, mediation of native scholars was indispensible to Orientalist knowledge
production.81 Indeed, at a time when the certitudes of colonial domination had not effectively
solidified, when, to borrow Bernard Cohn’s phrase, “command of language” was still deemed
determinate social relations, is central for any understanding of ‘fetishism,’ which flags the mystification of social relations between the labor-investing producer and the things produced for specific (set of) uses as it enters the capitalist market as commodities with abstract, exchange value. Thus what is actually an outcome of concrete social relations assumes the relations between commodities. [For details, see the sub-section ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secrets” in Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1982), 163-176] Indian texts in Sanskrit and Persian acquired fetishistic attributes in the hand of the Orientalists precisely by the opposite mechanism—taking the thing out of the market, making it ‘priceless’ in the process. Thus, the source of both value and fetishism for such articles is symbolic capital, not economic capital of the market and its mediation of commodity circulation. This, however, ought not to suggest that the market is absent or negated in this act of fetishism. The very idea of ‘price’ depends on the market; only then can something be ‘priceless.’ Rather than negating the market, in Orientalist fetishism with Indian treatises, the market is held in suspension. [For more on ‘symbolic capital’ and ‘economic capital,’ see, Pierre Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital,” in ed., J Richardson, Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Westport: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58].
80 Shore, Memoirs, 1: 107.
81 This is not just for their intellectual purposes. Matters of office, especially for Jones, also necessitated this dependence, particularly as India was ruled under traditional juridical modes in his time.
67 essential to the reproduction of the colonial state and its fledgling apparatuses of rule,82 bypassing the native scholar, even if desirable, was nigh impossible.
It can also be argued that the Orientalist desire to possess the text-as-a-thing, as the fetishized matter of congealed knowledge, was linked to this anxiety. For, if there existed doubts in the European mind over the hermeneutic veracity of native mediations, ownership of the text held the promise of arriving at ‘true’ knowledge of it in the future, once the contingencies of
Orientalist engagements in the early colonial situation had been disciplined into an order. And, collection of manuscripts was a prerequisite for achieving this order. Over the years Orientalists like Jones, Halhed, Wilkins, Shore, et al, had amassed a massive collection of manuscripts in eastern languages between them. The sheer number of manuscripts in William Jones’ possession alone at the time of his death in 1794 is perhaps a clue to the mutually reinforcing pulls of the text as an object of desire, and of the lingering discomfort that native mediation could compromise the scientific objectivity of knowledge. Catalogued by Charles Wilkins in 1798, a hundred and sixty manuscripts in Sanskrit, Chinese, Persian, Arabic, and “Hindostani,” was donated to the Royal Society of London by Lady Jones; and it is not known if this comprised her husband’s entire collection.83
With roots in doubt over his own aptitude in Sanskrit, Jones’ anxiety over native mediation in Orientalist knowledge production is well known.84 This often finds articulation in
82 For Cohn’s elaboration, see the eponymous chapter in his Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 16-56.
83 For details, see, Charles Wilkins, “A Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts Presented to the Royal Society by Sir William and Lady Jones,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 89 (1799), 335-344.
84 For details on Jones’ interactions and collaborations with Indian scholars, see, Rosanne Rocher, “Weaving Knowledge: Sir William Jones and Indian Pandits,” in Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), eds. Garland Cannon and Kevin R. Brine, 51-82 (New York: New York University Press, 1995).
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his search for the most reliable native informant. For example, when Govardhan Kaul applied for
the post of his “Personal Pandit”—as native mediators were often referred to—Kaul had to
procure a recommendation from Kashinath, Wilkin’s Pandit, to ensure a favorable consideration
by Jones. Since Jones held Wilkins’ knowledge of Sanskrit in the highest esteem, Kashinath too,
by implication, enjoyed his unmitigated respect to the extent that Jones frankly desired to inherit
the services of Kashinath upon Wilkins’ departure from India.85 The same anxiety permeates
contexts of much graver consequences, tied to the very operations of the Company-State in India,
as well. In another of his letters to Wilkins in 1785, written upon receiving a copy of the Manu’s
Smriti and the Dharmashastra from Benares—texts, which Jones almost instinctively sensed to
be of vital importance for British juridico-legal purposes in India—one finds him saying
emphatically in a well-known passage: “It is of utmost importance that the stream of Hindu law
should be pure; for we are entirely at the devotion of the native lawyers through our ignorance of
Shanskrit [sic].”86
As suggested earlier, the anxieties and contingencies of Orientalist knowledge production outlined above come together in a perspicacious manner in Jones’ essay on “Hindoo” music. I have also dwelt upon the fact that by the time this essay appeared in print Jones’ had reappraised his previous faith in the Persian translation of Damodara’s Sangitadarpana, and deemed it to be of dubious merit. When “On the Musical Mode of the Hindoos” ultimately appeared in print, the pride of place for being the Ur-text of Indian music was bestowed on
Somanatha’s Ragavibodha. The reasons ascribed for this by Jones, we will see, are reflective of
85 William Jones, “Thirteen Inedited Letters,” 110-111, 114.
86 Ibid., 110.
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how Orientalists, generally united in their first-instance suspicion of Persian texts, evaluated the
Sanskrit ones they encountered.
Colonel Antoine Polier, a Swiss-German in the service of the Company’s military at the time, who intermittently collaborated with Jones in manuscript collection and scholarship, procured a volume in Benares, which contained, “besides tracts in Arabic, Hindi and Persian,”87
the Ragavibodha.88 Polier subsequently brought his acquisition to Jones’ notice in Calcutta and
loaned it to him for temporary use. This transaction between Jones and Polier is most likely to
have occurred in mid-1787. The time of Jones’ acquaintance with the text can be gauged with
relative accuracy from the letter he wrote to a gentleman named Cowper Walker in Ireland from
Krishnanagar, dated September 11, of the same year. In this letter, he alludes to the priorities of
printing and publishing in the late-eighteenth century colony that often dragged back the desired
progress of Orientalist knowledge production:
You touched upon an important string when you mentioned the subject of Indian Music, of which I am particularly fond. I have just read a very old book on that art in Sanscrit. I hope to present the world with the substance of it, as soon as the Transactions of [the Asiatic] Society can be printed: but we go on slowly, since the press is often engaged by the government…89
There can be little doubt that this newly-encountered “very old book…in Sanscrit,” three years
since Jones had consecrated Damodara’s Sangitadarpana as potentially a primary source for his
87 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 66.
88 Colonel Polier’s fame in the Orientalist pantheon also owes to the fact that he was the first European to procure a complete copy of the Vedas. For details and biographical information on Colonel Polier, see: Anon, “Biographic notice of Colonel Polier” in The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany 7, nos. 41-42 (1817): 465-471, 569-172.
89 William Jones, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, 2 vols., ed. Lord Teignmouth (London: John W. Parker, 1835), 2: 7.
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own exertions, was the Ragavibodha.90 It is the only one music treatise regarding for which he evinced such excitement.
From Jones’ own account in the “Musical Modes,” we come to know that immediately upon receiving the volume that contained the Ragavibodha from Col. Polier, he had set his
“Nagri writer” to transcribe it. With the assistance of his pandit, he then collated the transcribed version with the original himself, before returning the collection to its proprietor.91 The rhetoric of salvage and pricelessness, which I earlier suggested was a reflection of the Orientalists’ desire to possess the text-as-a-thing, is unmistakably present in Jones’ commendation of Col. Poliers’
efforts. With belief that he now held the skeleton-key to Indian musical knowledge in his hands,
Jones wrote:
[Ragavibodha] may be considered a treasure in the history of the art, which the zeal of Colonel Polier has brought to light, and perhaps has preserved from destruction…He had purchased, among other curiosities, a volume containing a number of separate essays on music in prose and verse…but the brightest gem in the string was the was the Ragavibodha…92
Unlike the Sangitadarpana, or at least its Persian copy, whose value dissipated rather
rapidly in Jones’ eyes, the primacy of Somanatha’s treatise in acquiring knowledge of Indian
music is unambiguously staged by him in the “Musical Modes.” It is illuminating to consider
what led Jones to ascribe this primacy to the latter text. In the essay, where he discusses the
relative merits of the various Persian and Sanskrit musical tracts that had passed his scrutiny,
Jones declares:
90 After five years of familiarity, when promised “substance” really did appear in the Asiatick Researches in 1792, its author furnished a surprisingly nebulous chronology for the text: “a very ancient composition, but…less old unquestionably than the [fourteenth century Sangita] Ratnacara,” which left the Ragavibodha that was actually written 1609, at the beginning of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s era, wandering over four centuries. [Jones, “Musical Modes,” 66]
91 Ibid., 137.
92 Ibid., emphases added.
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The most valuable work that I have seen, and perhaps the most valuable work that exists, on the subject of Indian music, is named Ragavibodha, or the Doctrine of Musical Modes; and it ought here to be mentioned very particularly, because none of the pandits, in our provinces, nor any of those from Casi or Cashmir, to whom I have shown it, appear to have known that it was extant[.]93
It is clear in the quote above that, for Jones, the exceptionality of the Ragavibodha owed more to the fact that the many pandits that he had consulted appeared to be ignorant of this text, than its intrinsic merit. In other words, here was a Sanskrit treatise on music that despite being “a very ancient composition,” was, for all practical purposes, ‘new,’ a text, for which Jones believed no previous reference, interpretation, and intertexuality “was extant,” either in Persian or in
Sanskrit. The Ragavibodha, thus, presented itself as a text that had putatively escaped the all- encompassing decay set in motion by Muslim rule in India—a well-worn Orientalist trope. It was now left to the dint of the Orientalist to restore its centrality in the reconstruction of authentic
Indian music. Moreover, decoding such a text would minimize the subjective intervention of native informants—a major source of Orientalist anxiety—as the pandits were as ignorant about it as Jones had been, until Col. Polier discovered it and brought it to the latter’s attention. Hence, in Jones’ eyes, if there was any text where ‘true’ musical knowledge of the “Hindoos” was possibly preserved intact, it was the Ragavibodha. Such was his regard for this Sanskrit treatise that he says in the “Musical Modes”: “This book alone would enable me, were I the master of my time, to compose a treatise on the music of India…”94
The master of his time—a motif that surfaces in his written corpus with prescient frequency—Jones was not. He succumbed to liver inflammation in 1794: two years after the
“Musical Modes” had appeared in the Asiatic Researches, and twenty-two years before the life expectancy of seventy that bracketed off his Andrometer—“a scale of human attainments and
93 Ibid.
94 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 67.
72 enjoyment” which he had devised in 1774.95 A classic Utilitarianist apparatus for measuring individual intellectual progress that would have made his contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, proud, the Andrometer listed on a temporal scale—from the time of birth to age seventy, divided into annual units—a set of a scholarly-professional activities that a particular year in life ought to be devoted to. Upon tallying Jones’ own life-work against the Andrometer, it is astonishing to observe how much he was a subject of his own (self-)regulation and discipline. The Andrometric scale demanded that the forty-sixth of life year be devoted to patronizing the fine-arts. It is then perhaps not entirely a coincidence that Jones was in his forty-sixth year when “On the Musical
Modes of the Hindoos” appeared in print.
Recasting the Orphic Myth: Towards a Critique of Power/Knowledge in Orientalist Music Discourse In her recent thought-provoking work on a particular strand of Anglo-German music discourse and the cultural politics surrounding it during the European Enlightenment, Vanessa Agnew has very innovatively and productively read the musical episteme of late-eighteenth century western
Europe through the overarching trope of Orpheus—a seminal Greek mythological figure, best known for the power of his music.96 Historically recurrent, on various registers, in poetry, music, and the plastic arts throughout the entire span over which Europe charts its cultural/civilizational genealogy, the Orphic myth, argues Agnew, can be viewed as a totalizing allegory that is both constitutive and reflective of the various actional, ethico-moral, and symbolic concerns that enlivened the Enlightement musical subject. It “constituted a foundational, self-reflexive gesture
95 William Jones, Memoirs of the Life, 1: 237-241.
96 Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of music in Other Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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for music scholarship in the late eighteenth century.”97 According to Agnew, this gesture
crystallized in its epistemic fullness as a particular genre of music discourse organic to this
historical moment—“the specialized musical travelogue.” Such works, unlike European travel- narratives prior, were inspired, above everything else, by music as the driving stimulus for journeying to ‘other’ lands.98 Agnew’s deep yet diversely detailed examination of and around this literature brings into fresh focus the famous English scholar of music—twenty years William
Jones’ senior, but outliving the latter by exactly the same span—Charles Burney (1726-1814), whose mode of travel and scholarship famously inspired that doyen of eighteenth century
English letters, Samuel Johnson’s own travel writings on Scotland.99 It should also come as no surprise that both Burney and Jones were a part of the London intellectual network with Johnson at its center.
Refracted through Agnew’s tropological lens, Burney and his travels in continental
Europe in the 1770s activates certain constitutive narratives of the Orphic myth;100 to be precise, that part of the myth, first recorded in detail in ancient Greece by Apollonius Rhodius, where
Orpheus sets sail under Jason’s command, as a member of the heroic league in the quest of the
97 Ibid., 9.
98 Ibid., 4.
99 Ibid., 62-63.
100 Orpheus is a semi-divine figure of Western mythology with mythic narratives concerning him having their origins in pre-Socratic classical Greece of sixth century B. C. There are innumerable glosses of the legends of Orpheus. Regarding his origins, scholars usually converge around the account provided by the fifth century B.C. Greek poet, Pindar: Orpheus was born to the King of Thrace, Oeargus and the Muse, Calliope. He was taught to play the seven-stringed lyre by Apollo himself. He is considered to be the first poet and musician with divine inspiration. As George Mead puts it: “Lord of the seven-stringed lyre, all men flocked to hear him, and wild beasts lay peacefully at his feet; tree and stones were not unmoved at the music of his heavenly instrument. The denizens of the unseen world and the princes of Hades rejoiced at the tones of his harp.” [George Robert Stow Mead, Orpheus (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896), 14-15]
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Golden Fleece, aboard the legendary ship, Argo.101 It is through the allegory of the ‘Argonaut
Orpheus’ that Burney is brought to life by Agnew, and it is this that will detain our interest here.
For writing and publishing his own essay on Hindu music not too far apart from Charles
Burney’s pathbreaking scholarship in the previous decade, the latter’s enabling impact on music
scholarship in England could not have escaped William Jones. In fact, as I have mentioned
earlier in the chapter, “Music of the Eastern Nations” is first mentioned by Jones as a field of
interest aboard the ship that carried him to India from England.102 Not unexpectedly then, we
find recorded in the “Musical Modes” its author’s explicit gesture to situate his own labors in the
footsteps of Burney, in a brief but glowing tribute, as one: “…who [passes] slightly over all that
is obscure, explains with perspicuity whatever is explicable, and gives dignity to the character of
a modern musician by uniting it with that of a scholar and philosopher.”103
Despite this, however, there lies a fundamental difference between Jones and Burney’s practical-intellectual labors, the clue to which is deftly left behind in the way Jones’ frames his tribute. If Burney, himself a reputed musician, through his work dignifies his métier by bringing its medium within the fold of scholarly intellection, then Jones—a scholar-philosopher first— arrives at the union of musical practice and music philosophy from the opposite end: by extending the dignity always-already commanded by serious scholarship to the study of the largely practical art of music.104 Or, to gloss it in an allegorically appropriate fashion: if Burney
is the Argonaut Orpheus, then Jones resonates symbolically more with Argonaut Jason, the
101 Apollonius Rhodius, The Argonautica, trans. R. C. Seaton (London: William Heinemann, 1921).
102 Jones, The Works, 2: 4.
103 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 62.
104 Indeed, music as an object of enquiry detained Jones scholarly attention only in one essay, thirty-odd pages long, while Burney’s entire scholarly lifework is woven around music.
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commander of the Argo and the chief prosecutor of its mission, whose exceptional power lay
precisely in harnessing the exceptional powers that his fellow Argonauts possessed—like
Orpheus, his music—towards a common goal. The epistemological implications of this
difference will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapter of the dissertation; here, I
draw attention only to certain historico-ideological ones.
Constitutive subjects of the same Enlightenment episteme, particularly as it solidified in latter-eighteenth century England, like Burney, Jones too was an Argonaut; but for each, his
Argo, while embarking from the same port, took him to very different lands. Burney went
circumambulating Western Europe, in two phases, between 1770 and 1773. He passed through
France, Italy, Netherlands, and most importantly, as Agnew argues, Germany, always returning
to London, and finally settling there for the rest of his life.105
Exactly ten years later, in 1783, Jones sailed to reach India, the site of his scholarly fulfillment, of juridico-bureaucratic power, and economic improvement. Jones’ eastward traversal of seas was, of course, not quite just travel; it, in some ways, signals the very limits of this enterprise so central to the Enlightenment worldview. First, contrary to the ontology of movement that the sense of travel adumbrates, Jones remained quite rooted once he reached
India. Calcutta was his station, and despite some minor peregrinations further inland for research or convalescence, the city remained his fixed residential address. Also unlike the usual traveler,
Jones’ stay in India was professionally and institutionally encumbered, often impinging on the very reason why he traveled—his Oriental studies. Importantly, there was no return for Jones to his original port of departure, no completion of a circuit that travel definitionally implies. His travel to India was terminal; he was to die there. Lastly, Jones’ vision of his role in India was
105 Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, 3-10.
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grand and grandiose; his imaginary far exceeded the scope of activity usually offered by travel.
“I have additional motive for wishing to obtain an office in India[,]” he wrote in a letter to Lord
Althorpe, some nine months before setting sail, “where I might have some prospect of
contributing to the happiness of millions, or at least of alleviating their misery, and serving my
country essentially, whilst I benefit my fellow creatures.”106 On all these counts, Jones’ travel
was different from Burney’s. Thus, in Jones and Burney we see two quite different narratives
unfolding, two different Argonaut narratives that complement each other: one colonial/imperial,
and the other metropolitan/nationalist; one concerned with the external Other, justifying
Europe’s civilized Self and its civilizing missions in distant lands, and the other concerned with
demarcating national-cultural differences and selfhood internal to Europe.
The musical episteme that Jones inaugurated in the colony was an extension of the
Enlightenment musical rationality, of which Burney too was a subject. But its production in the
Indian colony by an active agent of the Company state, its infusion with other myths—
‘scientific,’ and cosmological—marks a relationship of power and musical knowledge quite distinct from that Burney’s efforts—be that the latter’s music travelogs or his ‘general history’ of music. And it is with an enquiry into this that I seek to supplement Agnew’s account of the
“Enlightenment Orpheus.” For any such account is bound to remain partial—or, its constitutive
parts, unexplained—if the colonial enactment of the European Orphic myth is left unattended.
In what follows, I first pick up a thread from our discussion in the previous section and
look at the ideological function of Mirza Khan’s Tuhfat-ul-Hind [c. 1675] in Jones’ “Musical
Modes.” Here we will see that despite Jones’ announced position in his study of “Hindoo” music
to steer clear of the extant Persian musico-aesthetic scholarship circulating in the early colonial
106 William Jones, Memoirs of the Life, 1: 331-332.
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social-formation, he is utterly unable to dispense with the Tuhfat. Time and again in the “Musical
Modes,” Jones invokes this text and its author in making his own way forward, revealing,
thereby, a pertinacious anxiety that constantly threatens the unity of his discourse, something that
then needs to be corrected and disciplined. Under a separate heading, I will then draw attention
to two key ‘moments’ in the “Musical Modes” that clearly mark the essay as a text of power.
Moments, where the will to (musical) knowledge and the will to (colonial) dominance assume an
organic unity, morphing the text into a discursive medium that (re-)inscribes the colonizer’s logic
on ethico-moral and civilizational grounds, first, by mobilizing the trope of the Oriental Despot,
and then by adducing the benefit of a colonial government in India for researches into its music.
An Impossible Disavowal: Mirza Khan’s Tuhfat-ul-Hind in Jones’ “Musical Modes” To begin, let us briefly revisit William Jones’ disposition towards Mughal music scholarship discussed earlier in this chapter. In an instantiation of Thomas Trautmann’s point that “[British]
Indomania,” exemplified by the likes of Jones, “…was directed toward the Hindus and not the
Muslims of India, even though the Persian language played a large role in the recovery of
[Sanskritic knowledge]…,”107 we have seen Jones make his mistrust of Persian scholarship produced in India transparent in the “Musical Modes.” Not only that, we have also seen him follow this up with an unequivocal warning to fellow-Orientalists about the pitfalls of being guided by Persian texts in their pursuit of Sanskrit knowledge, notwithstanding how well- regarded they were in the late-eighteenth century native scholarly milieu. In order to safeguard himself from any such eventuality in the “Musical Modes,” we found Jones dispensing with the
Persian translation of Sangitdarpana in favor of a Sanskrit manuscript of Somanatha’s
107 Trautmann, Aryans, 63.
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Ragavibodha, and posit this latter as his master-key to ancient Hindu musical knowledge instead.
Jones was convinced that the Ragavibodha—written in 1609, early on in Jahangir’s reign on the
Mughal throne—was exceptional in the corpus of both Sanskritic and Persian writings on
“Hindoo” music. He believed that it possessed the singular quality of being unknown to the many Brahmin Pandits that Jones had consulted, and therefore unaffected by the general degeneracy of Sanskritic (musical) knowledge that accompanied the many “revolutions of…government [in India] since the time of Alexander[.]”108
Yet, despite staging the Ragavibodha so prominently as the Ur-text for decoding
“Hindoo” music, Jones uses surprisingly little of it in his exposition of the matter. Instead, in his
essay Jones falls back over and over again on two texts: Gajapati Narayanadeva’s
Sangitanaraya, a Sanskrit treatise from the c.1660, prevalent mostly in the eastern parts of India,
and more frequently, Mirza Khan’s Tuhfat-al-Hind: a grand, Persian-language compendium of
discourses on the fine arts and applied sciences in the Bhakha language of the “‘Braj country and
its neighborhood,’”109 extant in later-seventeenth century. It is this latter work that I am
concerned with here.
The Tuhfat-ul-Hind was among the first texts on “Hindoo” arts and sciences to pass
Jones’ way in India, at around the same time that he came across the Persian translation of
Damodara’s Sangitadarpana.110 What makes the Tuhfat particularly pertinent to the present enquiry is Jones’ manifest reliance on this text throughout the “Musical Modes,” even though he unequivocally announces it to be misleading, holding it up as an example of why one ought to be
108 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 83.
109 M. Ziauddin, “Introduction,” in A Grammar of the Braj Bhakha by Mirza Khan (1676 A. D.), trans. and intro. M. Ziauddin, 1-33 (Calcutta: Viswa-Bharati Book Shop, 1935), 7.
110 Ibid., 1.
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skeptical of Persian sources for the recovery of classical Sanskritic knowledge. Interrogating this
contradiction—the explicit dependence on, and overt criticism of, the Tuhfat—in Jones’ essay, I argue that the stark duality in which Somanatha’s Ragavibodha and Mirza Khan’s Tuhfat-ul-
Hind—both seventeenth century treatises, written about sixty years apart—are cast in Jones’ text, derives its logic from the intersection of colonial power and musical knowledge in late- eighteenth century Orientalist discourse. Though the Ragavibodha is touted by Jones as the central text of “Hindoo” music, it does not appear much in the essay, while, in spite of declaring
Persian (music) scholarship as inherently misleading, and, therefore, to be avoided, Jones cannot get away from the Tuhfat.
Ascribed, variously, to different patronages in different manuscripts, the Tuhfat-ul-Hind was written in c.1675 by Mirza Khan Ibn Fakhruddin Mohammad for the Mughal nobility during the waning phase of Aurangzeb’s rule. It was composed with the expressed aim of encouraging this class’ engagement with vernacular literatures of the empire.111 Monumental in its scope,
seven different ‘books’ comprise the text, besides an elaborate introductory chapter, and a
concluding one. The first four books in order are: “On Prosody,” “On Rhyme,” “On Poetics and
Rhetoric,” and, “On Art of Love in Literature;” the fifth book is “On Music”; and the last two:
“On Sexual Science,” and “On the Science of Character Reading.”112
Jones’ deep involvement with this text has been recorded by M. Ziauddin, who, for his
1935 English translation of a part of the Tuhfat’s Introduction, consulted, among other manuscripts, the very same one that Jones had read and commented on some hundred and fifty years prior. Ziauddin reveals that the Tuhfat was presented to Jones, most likely as a gift, by one
111 Ibid.
112 Ibid., 10.
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Ali Ibrahim Khan Bahadur, a year into his arrival in India, in 1784—the same year that Jones
reported to Wilkins his discovery of Sangitadarpana and embarked on his writing the early draft
of “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos.” In the introductory essay accompanying Ziauddin’s
translation, published as A Grammar of Braj-Bhakha, he provides a fleeting description of the
Jones manuscript as he encountered it, revealing not just Jones’ deep immersion into the Tuhfat,
but also the investment into manuscript transcription, on which Orientalist knowledge production
subsisted:
The [manuscript] bears ample notes on its margins in Sir William Jones' hand that show how minutely some of the chapters had been studied by him, specially those of the Grammar and Music and the last which is a Dictionary of the Hindi language…The [manuscript] is written in fair nasta’liq and is dated by the scribe Shahr Yar Khan, on fol[io]. 298a: ‘Finished, 28th Rajab, 1182 A.H., Friday, three hours after sunrise’. Another date in a different hand, on the same fol[io] is: c. 16th Shawwal, 1182 A.H.’ fol. 4316 the scribe concludes: ‘Finished with utmost care in copying from comparison with the original, on the 5th Zi-1-Qa'dah, 1182 A.H.’113
Given the extent of Jones preoccupation with the Tuhfat-ul-Hind, it is not surprising that
in spite of his general reservations with the translational and commentarial inaccuracies that
purportedly proliferated Perso-Arabic scholarship of Sanskrit knowledge systems, Jones could
not help but recognize in “Musical Modes” Mirza Khan’s “diligence” and “ingeniousness.” In
fact, while introducing the Tuhfat in his essay, Jones calls it “a minute account of Hindoo
literature in all or most of its branches.” He also points out that “elaborate chapter on music” in
the text was written, by its author’s admission, after consulting a rich array of Sanskrit and
Persian musico-aesthetic treatises “with the assistance of Pandits[.]114 But immediately thereafter, Jones issues his famous homily about the danger of being waylaid by Persian
“translations” of “Hindoo learning.” This broad pattern recurs in the “Musical Modes” in
113 Ibid., 1.
114 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 65.
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ideologically revealing ways. Jones presents Mirza Khan and his Tuhfat-ul-Hind in aid of his
own endeavor, only to immediately negate the constitutive historiographic claim that this text
made on late-eighteenth century Orientalist discourse. This act of discursive politics in the
“Musical Modes”—the ideological denial of, not historical, but substantive worth to Mirza Khan
and his Tuhfat in the constitution of Jones’ own discourse—directs our attention to how the
relations of power animating the late-eighteenth century colony was projected onto the field of
(musical) knowledge.
Like the writ of Mughal state in the post-Battle of Plassey colony, Jones seeks to render
Mirza Khan’s Tuhfat of only token-value in his essay—a symbolic authority, whose executive
seal could be acquired under a relation of dominance, without granting it any sovereignty. Jones
is loathe to have Khan and his text bear positively in the genealogy that he outlines in his own
project. Yet, clearly, it would not have been possible for Jones to write the “Musical Modes”
without the active, contributive presence of the Tuhfat in it, just as it would have been impossible
for the early colonial Company-State to rule India without taking recourse to the form and
content of the Mughal state apparatus. Indeed, despite intentions otherwise, the Tuhfat-ul-Hind
ends up haunting the “Musical Modes.”
Considering himself fortunate that he had maintained his critical alacrity while consulting
the Tuhfat, referencing it only for relatively trivial concerns, Jones says of Khan: “…had I
depended on him for information of greater consequence he would have led me into a very
serious mistake.”115 But, in an act of ‘fetishistic disavowal’116—Persian scholarship is disavowed
115 Ibid., 76.
116 The term, ‘fetishistic disavowal’ is abstracted here from its original home in psychoanalytic theory, and its recent currency in critical theory owes to its re-fashioned deployment by Slavoj Zizek. As Zizek points out, an act of fetishistic disavowal is implicated in a sentence of the following structure: “I know very well, but still… .” [Slavoj
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en masse but still is persisted with—Jones returns to the Khan and his Tuhfat no less than seven times over the course of the “Musical Modes.”117 He does so, it seems, on important issues, not
trivial at all, as he would have the reader believe his consultancy of the Tuhfat was. For example,
Jones’ elucidation of the basic cosmological structure of “Hindoo” music, comprising “four
principal matas or systems,” borrows its categories explicitly from the Tuhfat,118 but is prefaced by the condescending qualifying phrase: “If we can rely on Mirza Khan,…”119 Elsewhere, when
he adduces directly from the same text the notation of the “Cacubha” ragini, he calls this a trivial
dependence. At yet another place, towards the end of the essay, where Jones lays out in table-
form the notation of each of the six ragas and thirty raginis as stated in the Tuhfat-ul-Hind, he
precedes it with the following disclaimer: “On the formulas [of ragas] exhibited by Mirza Khan,
I have less reliance; but, since, he professes to give them from Sanscrit authorities, it seems
proper to transcribe them[.]”120
This desire in Jones to overcome the Tuhfat, and his impossibility to do so, directs our
attention to the structural coincidence of the politics of Orientalist (musical) knowledge
formation and the political process of colonization. If the emergence of a colonial regime in the
subcontinent required subduing and subsuming the Mughal imperium, then the emergence of a
Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 18] In other words, persisting something that otherwise the (persistent) subject ‘knows’ is worthy of rejection fetishizes that which is persisted with, i.e., holding on to something that is expressively disavowed adds a value to the object that is over and above its ‘objective’ appraisal. In our case, Jones’ engagement with Mirza Khan’s text is an instance of the concept brought to bear in the literary realm. Jones is secure in his knowledge—it does not matter whether this ‘knowledge’ is right or wrong— that the Tuhfat is incorrect on many counts, and yet he carries on with it as if the ‘truth’ he seeks to produce is entirely contingent on a repetitive ‘disavowal’ of the Persian text.
117 See Jones, “Musical Modes,” 65 (twice), 67, 76, 79, 81, 83.
118 Ibid., 67-68.
119 Ibid., emphasis added.
120 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 81.
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colonial regime of knowledge required subduing Mughal knowledge. Thus, the declared move in
the “Musical Modes” to discredit Mirza Khan, the unfettered voicing of mistrust of Persian texts
on supposedly Hindu matters, I argue, must be read as a fundamentally political gesture, a
gesture through which colonial power strives to determine musical knowledge in and of the colony. This argument will be extended further, more starkly, in the next example, where we will see Jones explicitly invoke European rule in India as the necessary enabling and ennobling condition for the production of Orientalist (musical) knowledge.
‘Oriental Despotism’ and Colonial Enlightenment: Reading the “Musical Modes” as a Text of Power That the ‘Oriental Despot’ was one of the most resilient tropes mobilized by European powers to understand the moral character of the Asiatic states and the functioning of their government is today well-established in critical scholarship. As has been pointed out by the likes of Perry
Anderson, Edward Said, Thomas Metcalf, et al, this category has been integral to the hierarchical construction of a civilizationally superior European Self and its Oriental Other, of a historically/geographically distinct ‘West’ and ‘East.”121 Beginning with Aristotle’s deployment
of only the noun—despot—to describe the non-Greek, Barbarian states, which then acquired its
inseparable ‘Oriental’ index through the anxiety generated in Christian Europe over the Ottoman
empire’s westward expansion, an entire gamut of European thinkers, both pre- and post-
Enlightenment, from Bayle and Montesquieu to Hegel and Marx, actively participated in the
perpetuation and reification of this trope, even if unto different ends. Cathected onto the figure of
the vice-ridden ‘absolute’ ruler, whose arbitrary execution of kingly power put paid to notions of
121 For details, see, Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; repr. London: Penguin, 2003); Thomas Metcalfe, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6-14; Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974); see, in particular, Anderson’s long-note on the “Asiatic Mode of Production,” Ibid., 463-549.
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private property, justice, and liberty—indeed, freedom—from taking root in their domain, it was in this figure that Europe would look for, and find, the necessary ethico-moral self-justification for establishing and extending colonial rule in Asia and Africa. In the following paragraphs I trace the tropological play of the Oriental Despot in William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” where it bursts to life on the narrative plane for a fleeting instant in Jones’ sudden and signal invocation of Siraj-ud-daulah—the erstwhile Nawab of Bengal, whose defeat at the
Battle of Plassey in 1757 famously paved way for the British to wield effective suzerainty over this critical “bridgehead” to subcontinental dominance.
Siraj-ud-daulah’s volatile appearance in Jones essay occurs in a rather curious context.
Exemplifying the deep emotional and visceral affect that music generates in sentient beings,
Jones writes:
I have been assured by a credible eye-witness, that two wild antelopes used to often come from their woods to the place where a more savage beast, Sira Juddaulah, entertained himself with concerts, and they listened to the strains with an appearance of pleasure, till the monster, in whose soul there was no music, shot one of them to display his archery…122
Siraj appears in Jones’ essay as if a bubble; it hits the surface to release an energy otherwise
well-contained throughout Jones’ essay, and then disappears. But, in this single, and singular,
mention that he finds in the “Musical Modes,” Siraj is unequivocally the Oriental Despot, worse
than bestial. Even the antelopes have music in their soul while “the more savage beast[,]” Siraj’s,
is devoid of it. The power of Oriental music could charm animals, but the power of the Oriental
Despot reduced music to a mere accessory of power, enslaving it, just like he did, as a whole
122 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 57.
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generation of British writers self-righteously belabored upon, his subjects.123 In this entirely unanticipated detour to insert Siraj-ud-daulah into his narrative of “Hindoo” music, Jones
appears to have momentarily abdicated his discursive restraint (which, as we have seen
previously, has been read in contemporary scholarship as the first substantive steps towards ‘de-
Orientalizing’ and ‘de-recializing’ European discourse on non-western musics). In the sudden
‘freedom’ of this moment he communes with the more popular league of Europeans not similarly
encumbered in their articulations, and recites what, by then, was already a century-old cultural—
specifically, Oriental—attribute of the despotism: the Oriental Despot was a mortal enemy of
music.
As I have already alluded to in discussing the discursive politics implicated in the Jones’
framing of a textual canon for “Hindoo” music earlier in the chapter, the Oriental Despot’s total
disregard for music owes its existence to the Italian Niccolao Manucci’s account of Aurangzeb’s
banning of music and its subsequent “burial” enacted by lamenting musicians during the
eleventh year of the emperor’s reign. In that context I had cited Manucci only to stress that
current historical research has soundly disputed the historical claim that is allegorized by the
“burial of music” story. Indeed, it has been shown that quite contrary to being a time when music
was forced ‘underground' by the despotic Aurangzeb, his rule witnessed an unparalleled flourish
in music scholarship in late-medieval/early-modern India. Now, I take a closer look at the story itself and argue that Jones’ telling of Siraj-ud-daulah’s killing of the two antelopes naturally attracted to the mellifluent sound of music in the “Musical Modes” follows genealogically from it.
123 See for this, Thomas Metcalf’s brief and excellent discussion of the constitution of the Oriental Despot as a concept-metaphor in and through the colonial discourse of the late eighteenth century, constituted by the writings of Zephania Holwell, Alexander Dow, Robert Orme, an so on. [ Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 6-14]
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It is worth quoting the “burial of music” incident at length from the second part of
Manucci’s monumental account in Portuguese of seventeenth century Mughal India, where he
spent the significant part of his adult life, before returning to Italy:
Not resting content with the [measures against bhang and wine], Aurangzeb took steps against the excessive number of musicians. In Hindustan both Moguls and Hindus are very fond of listening to songs and instrumental music. He therefore ordered the same official to stop music. If in any house or elsewhere he heard the sound of singing and instruments, he should forthwith hasten there and arrest as many as he could, breaking the instruments. Thus was caused a great destruction of musical instruments. Finding themselves in this difficulty, their large earnings likely to cease, without there being any other mode of seeking a livelihood, the musicians took counsel together and tried to appease the king in the following way: About one thousand of them assembled on a Friday when Aurangzeb was going to the mosque. They came out with over twenty highly-ornamented biers, as is the custom of his country, crying aloud with great grief and many signs of feeling, as if they were escorting to the grave some distinguished defunct. From afar Aurangzeb saw this multitude and heard their great weeping and lamentation, and, wondering, sent to know the cause of so much sorrow. The musicians redoubled their outcry and their tears, fancying the king would take compassion upon them. Lamenting, they replied with sobs that the king's orders had killed Music, therefore they were bearing her to the grave. Report was made to the king, who quite calmly remarked that they should pray for the soul of MUSIC, and see that she was thoroughly well buried.124
It is precisely this stereotype—the Oriental Despot’s dispassionate negation of an art that
operated fundamentally by the stirring of passions—that is formally transposed by Jones on to
Siraj-ud-daulah: “the monster, in whose soul there was no music.” Both in Manucci as in Jones,
the executive denial of the pleasurable affect that music engenders in sentient beings operates as
an allegory of despotic power, as a characteristic property of the Oriental Despot.
While I do not possess the evidentiary wherewithal to determine, as Shahab Sarmadee
has done in the case of Aurangzeb, if (or not) the historical ground was different for Siraj as well,
it should not detract us from the fact that Jones’ story too, like Manucci’s earlier, acquired a
mythical status. Indeed, this passage had a remarkably fecund printed life in England since after
the publication of Jones’ essay until around the mid-nineteenth century. It was singled out for
quote in a wide array of pamphlets, magazines, journals, and even scholarly publications,
124 Manucci, Storio do Mogor, 2: 8.
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serving, usually, a dual purpose: to relate the fantastic effects on animals that Orientals attributed
to music, as well as to point out the mortal danger that music faced under despotic rule.
That a scholar as rigorous as Jones momentarily jumps the track of the narrative at hand
to take a swipe at the much reviled figure of the Oriental Despot underscores how foundational
the trope was to Orientalist discourse, in general. It permeates, in the most unexpected manner,
an essay on music by a figure who two decades earlier had desisted from anointing Nader
Shah—believed by then-contemporary Europe to be the “most infamously wicked” of Oriental
Despots—as such.125 But, Jones’ relatively sensitive treatment of Nader Shah ought not lead us
to conclude that he was any the less politically motivated in his scholarly practice than other
more vulgar votaries of the same métier. Indeed, as Edward Said so cogently pointed out in the
context of his famous complication of the “pure knowledge”/ “political knowledge” binary in
Orientalism, it was structurally impossible for Orientalist discourse to be otherwise, not just when the field of discourse is/was, by thematic consensus, ostensibly “political,” but even in domains that are/were, by the same token, considered to be outside its purview—broadly, the realm of the ‘cultural.’ For, as the major thrust of Said’s critique alerts us, the latter “acts dynamically along with brute political, economic, and military rationales to make the Orient the varied and complicated place that it obviously was in the field [called] Orientalism.”126
Being a treatise on an important component of culture-discourse in Enligtenment Europe,
the “Musical Modes” is a fascinating canvas on which the necessary entwinement of the political
and the cultural in Orientalist knowledge formation comes into relief. Jones’ abrupt reference to
125 S.N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 38-40
126 Said, Orientalism, 12.
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Siraj-ud-daulah—the erstwhile Nawab of Bengal, the architect of the infamous Black Hole of
Calcutta, and the chief political thorn in British colonial ambitions in the region until his defeat in the Battle of Plassey in 1756—is, I argue, a symptomatic gesture of this entwinement. It marks
a locus in the text where “brute” political power momentarily breaks through the cultural surface
of musical knowledge to politically and morally validate the latter. And this belies a foundational
anxiety in Orientalist musical discourse: that despite its truth-claims proclaimed as results of
objective ‘scientific’ enquiry with articulate methods and methodological coherence, they were
not self-sufficient; they needed to be validated ethico-morally as well. Hence, the necessity to
draft Siraj into an essay on music, the need to stage a singular incident: his killing of a musically
spellbound antelope for the “display of archery”—an incident that pithily allegorizes the
degeneracy of the Oriental Despot, as it imprecates the general structure of power in which the
scholarship was situated, and dignified Jones’ own labor.127
It is also true, however, as S. N. Mukherjee suggests, that Jones was certainly not an
eager perpetuator of this trope as a shorthand to express the civilizational difference between a
self-consciously Enlightened Europe and an illiberal, despotic Orient—under the sway of a
government that stymied the development of the creative impulses and the natural liberties of
Man. Though never in doubt of his own structurally empowered, colonizing and civilizing role in
India, it is true that Jones considered it less necessary than many other fellow-Europeans to
discursively enact his authority and objective distance from things colonial by ritually positing
an exemplary Other as an absolutist executor of arbitrary power, a meta-signifier of the Orient’s
127 The killing of deer in acts of archery, though predicated differently, also acts, as a generative pulse in each of two great Hindu epics, the Ramayana (King Dasaratha—Rama’s father—mistaken killing of a young boy filling water, thinking he was deer quenching its thirst) and the Mahabharata (King Pandu’s—the father of the Pandavas—killing of sage Kindama and his partner upon mistaking them for a mating deer couple).
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present decay. Rather, with his face turned firmly to the past—idealized as a glorious one—
Jones’ primary investment was in producing the Orient in and as knowledge, validating in the
process his meta-theory of the Indo-European language group,128 and enabling his Genesis-
inspired Mosaic ethnology. Jones’ register of discourse, being that of the “new Orientalism of the
Calcutta Sanskritists[,]” was nothing if not refined. But it is precisely this that galvanizes one’s
attention to the instances in his work where the trope of the Oriental Despot is actually staged.
For, such a move, when it occurs, is always a self-conscious one.
If we recall from earlier, Jones actually made it a point to iterate right after his summary critique of the doyens of pre-colonial Persian scholarship in the subcontinent, that he had
‘spoken’ only after “an attentive perusal of their works.” After all, scholarly method and protocol is what accorded Orientalist discourse its authority, authority that, as Trautmann has emphasized, was founded on their grasp of the languages of the Orient, rather than the simple eye-witness recollections of earlier European travelers to the East.129 It is then doubly surprising that Jones
adduces in an evidentiary mode—in an otherwise formal scholarly treatise aimed at a
comparative scientific understanding of “Hindoo” music—something that he himself admits is
hearsay, and “probably…exaggerated and embellished.”130 The truth-value of this evidence on
“the astonishing effects [on animals] ascribed to music” in the Orient is not dependent on its
empirical veracity but on a deeply subjective, paternalistic compact with a “credible
eyewitness”—a ‘native,’ surely—who, according to Jones, could have had “no interest in
deceiving [him].” On the whole, Siraj, then, functions in the “Musical Modes” as the direct
128 This idea he formally inaugurated in his ninth discourse to the Asiatic Society on “the Origin and the Family of Nations.” For details see Jones, The Works, 3: 185-204.
129 Trautmann, Aryans, 33-34.
130 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 58.
90 obverse of Jones’ own labors: the Oriental Despot smothered the life of music in the India by killing even its most innocent audience, while the latter had committed himself to the textual resuscitation of its “ancient” musical system, which now supposedly existed only in corrupt forms.
There is yet another significant instance in the “Musical Modes” where the relation of power within which the essay was produced finds terminal expression in print. It serves a similar function as Jones’ strident condemnation of Siraj-ud-daulah, but is articulated on a different register, at a higher abstraction. If, with Siraj, Jones busied himself with the specifically Oriental content and the actual figuration of the despotic form, then here he is concerned more with the form itself—the absolutist system of governance, rather than its cruel, musicless governor. Also, if the figure of the Oriental Despot implicated the enlightened European subject only negatively—the latter was ‘not’ what the former was—now Jones takes the opportunity to articulate the positive content of the enlightened statehood and selfhood that Europe had achieved over the course of the eighteenth century. In the process, the colonial/colonizing state is unabashedly posited as something that would not only produce better subjects; it would also restore the musical health of India to its once-glorious salubriousness. Indeed, Jones suggests with utmost confidence that the liberality of British rule in India would not just encourage research into its music, but:
The unexampled felicity of our [English] nation who diffuse the blessings of a mild government over the finest part of India, would enable us to attain a perfect knowledge of the Oriental music, which is known and practised in these British Dominions, not by mercenary performers only, but even by Mussalmans and Hindoos of eminent rank and learning…[T]he best artists of Hindoostan would cheerfully attend our concerts.131
131 Ibid., 62.
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Jones is explicitly aware that he belongs to an inaugural moment of European scholarly interest in the Orient, an interest that, unlike in the past, was now fully integrated into the colonizing process. No longer was it necessary to “lament with [John] Chardin, that he neglected to procure at Isfahun the explanation of a small tract of [music], which he carried to Europe.”132
The days of such lament were an issue now of the historical past. Colonial conquests had enabled the Orientalist scholar to be present in the field in person and “…have an easy access to approved Asiatic treatises on musical composition[.]”133 Thus, Jones draws a paradigmatic distinction between his own discursively Orientalist labors and that of the prior European travelers to the East, on whom Europe had been hitherto be dependent for samples of life and learning in the Orient. Indeed, at this conjuncture in the “Musical Modes,” music emerges in
Jones’ writing as an elevating allegory for colonial rule. On this allegory rides the Orientalist fantasy of perfect colonial order, the perfect interlocking of power and knowledge, of the musical string and the military sword. In a passage that will guide us towards the conclusion of this chapter, Jones writes to complete the idea floated in the above quote:
We [in the colony] may here examine the best [musical] instruments of Asia, may be masters of them, if we please, or, at least, may compare them to ours; the concurrent labours, or rather amusements, of several in our own body, may facilitate the attainment of correct ideas on a subject so delightfully interesting; and a free communication time to time of their respective discoveries would conduct them more surely and speedily, as well as more agreeably, to their desired end. Such would be advantages of union, or, to borrow a term from the art before us, of harmonious accord, in all our pursuits, and above all in that of knowledge.134
This remarkable quote from the “Musical Modes” would compare favorably in terms of lucidity with any other statement there is of (Orientalist) colonialism and (colonialist)
Orientalism—so pithily are its broadest coordinates cast. In that, it owes as much to the
132 Ibid. Isfahun is a province in contemporary Iran.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid.
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rationalist/empiricist faith in objective knowledge during the Enlightenment, as it does to a
subjective immersion in self-fulfillment, which would soon reach maturity with the Romantic
movement during the early-nineteenth century. It suggests both the ontology (“We may here
examine…,” we “may be the masters…”) and the epistemology (“may compare them to ours…”) of the discourse. Indeed, in the colonial ‘state’ that Jones weaves (both in the sense of a condition, and as an apparatus) with such idealistic flourish, instruments of rule and instruments of music both work (for) the same colonizing body—“our own body,” as Jones calls it. Here, in this will to “mastery,” to “attainment of correct ideas,” to “free communication,” the colonizers’
“labors” and “amusements” become coterminous, as constitutive parts of the embedded existence as civilizing subjects in the colony, not as some alienated, atomistic endeavors, acting out of concert.135 And I use the word ‘concert’ advisedly. To Jones, music, especially that of
“harmonious accord”—‘harmony’ being the outstanding achievement of European civilizational
progress in music, and the concert its phenomenal expression—discloses itself as the most
capacious allegory that captures and projects colonial rule in its ideality, the condition to which
the “concurrent labors” of its different organs ought to aspire. The “pursuit...of knowledge,”
stymied hitherto in India by the Oriental Despot and his rule, would not only be a critical
ingredient for achieving such a state—one that conducts itself with the harmonic synchronicity
and purpose of (European) music; it would also be the paramount expression once such a state is
achieved.
135 The ideas of labor and leisure and their relation to music in the late-eighteenth century Anglo-India society in India will be theoretically elaborated and discussed at length in chapter 3 of this dissertation.
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Conclusion
This chapter has been intended as a critique of both William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” as well as a dominant strand of the contemporary scholarship interested in this seminal essay. It is grounded in a critical hermeneutic that interprets the Jones’ tract first and foremost as a text of power, and finds in the latter’s particular engagement with it an ideological suspension of the very question of power from which the “Musical Modes” would have drawn its epistemic authority in its own time. As I have argued, the fact that the explicit coincidence of power and knowledge in Jones’ essay has largely passed below the critical scholarly radar is symptomatic of a credulous musical humanism in the relevant literature on the West’s encounter with Indian music and music discourse, and the concomitant tendency therein to bracket out the political from the field of music. This renders contemporary scholarship interested in the study of the late-eighteenth century colonial encounter and music (discourse) formally susceptible to the reenactment of the same operations of discursive power that it desires to sublate. Viewed in this light, what secures the genealogy between, say, William Jones and Bennett Zon is not a continuous history of progressive evolution that West’s engagement with non-western music has supposedly undergone from the late-eighteenth century to the twenty-first. Rather, this genealogy is secured by a universal humanist confidence in the author-subjects from two ends of the temporal spectrum that the musical Other can indeed be fully apprehended and represented in and through modern (scientific) discourse. This fundamental claim has not changed in the two- hundred odd years separating Jones and Zon; if anything, it has only gained strength over time.
What has changed, however, is the latter’s claim to a more advanced science and well-rounded ethics—unavailable to Jones by the constraints of his own episteme—to realize such an end.
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It is in this context that my relook at the “Musical Modes” in this chapter assumes
significance. For Jones’ essay is a unique portal to the many worlds of the Orientalist knowledge
production in late-eighteenth century India—more than what has been recognized, either for
appreciation or for critique, in extant scholarship.136 On one level, this uniqueness results from the fact that the “Musical Modes” was, by self-suggestion, both an early work and a late work, belonging at once to two different stages of Jones’ involvement with Orientalist knowledge production in India and its institutional mediation through the Asiatic Society of Bengal. On another level, the essay also provides an exemplary glimpse into the actual crafting of Orientalist
knowledge in the early colonial social formation. It reveals that the apparent self-assurance of the
final article of knowledge in print masked a reality of constitutive uncertainties—both, material
and discursive—that dogged the process of its production. But above all, what it discloses in
clarity when read critically is the Janus-faced nature of the colonial project and its executors at
the late-eighteenth century conjuncture. As a text authored by a passionate Orientalist, the
“Musical Modes” is a backwards-facing attempt to recover a supposedly ancient, classical Hindu
past that would ‘historically’ validate Europe’s own civilizational provenance. On the other
hand, as a colonialist text authored by an empowered agent of the Company-state, it is an idealist
and ideological prognosis of colonial rule—a prospective statement of the beneficial impact that
British colonization of India was sure to have on the general pursuit of knowledge and the arts
in/of the subcontinent.
Though my critique here has proceeded by the way of some recognizable analytics and
tropological signposts identified with postcolonial scholarship in the wake of Edward Said’s
Orientalism and his application of a Foucauldian critical vocabulary, this is not in support of a
136 Bennett Zon’s work is an exception to this.
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totalizing theory of colonialism and culture (including the ‘culture’ of knowledge). My
grounding in a Saidian critical discourse need not imply an uncomplicated adherence to the notion that colonialism was always already a self-assured, vectoral process, executed with certainty on the ground, that Orientalist will to knowledge was also always will to power, and vice versa. Rather, as I have tried to articulate, following Ann Stoler, in my de/reconstruction of the material and discursive uncertainties impinging on Jones’ musico-discursive labors, “rule of
reason” does not appear in the same authoritative light when viewed embedded in the ‘lived
epistemic space’ of a particularly fluid late-eighteenth century India. That said, it has, indeed,
been my intention here to subject Jones’ “Musical Modes” to a robust critique along Saidian
lines. It is for this reason that I have specifically sought out those instances in the text of the
essay where will to musical knowledge and will to power are indeed two sides of the same coin.
And in the discursive space animated by such instances, we have seen Jones anxiously discipline
Mirza Khan’s Tuhfat-ul-Hind, morally deplore the Oriental Despot, Siraj-ud-daulah’s killing of
the antelopes, and idealistically posit music as an allegory of colonial rule.
My aim in foregrounding these decidedly extra-musical passages in Jones’ essay has also
been to highlight their oversight in contemporary discourse, which has restricted its criticism of
the “Musical Modes” to largely two counts: first, from a (comparative) musicological
perspective, pointing out the inaccuracies in Jones’ understanding of Indian/Hindu music theory
and its language; and second, a very valid but hundred and fifty-year old methodological critique
of Jones’ overreliance on music treatises at the expense of music on the colonial ground.137
137 Both these critiques (and others) were, of course, first articulated by N. Augustus Willard in 1834. See, N. Augustus Willard, “A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan, Comprising a Detail of the Ancient Theory and Modern Practice (1834),” in Hindu Music From Various Authors, comp. Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1-122 (Calcutta: Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1882), 2-13, 41, 47-48, 68.
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Beyond this, even in the few instances in recent scholarship where the pioneering Orientalist’s musical labor in the colony have been substantively engaged, the “Musical Modes” has not been pushed critically. The question of musical knowledge and colonial power has been brushed under the carpet of a general consensus and sentimental compact that Jones truly ‘loved’ the Orient.
That his was a more dialogic and sensitive relationship with the colony and the colonized than was the case with the general Eurocentrism that abounded at that time.138 This is often forwarded as evidence in historical ethnomusicological enquiries to stake a so-called post-Saidian position.139 Interpreting Said’s Orientalism as an intervention that only served to reify the West and the East into a structural duality—a reading of his work that Said roundly rejected140— purveyors of this position in contemporary ethnomusicological literature often pose Jones as a counterpoint to (what they consider) a Saidian critique of colonialism and its discursive/representational practices. Thus, where Said reads Jones as one of the two first
138 This idea also sometimes permeates a more critical scholarship that my work is otherwise generally aligned with. For example, Janaki Bakhle, in spite of her acute, even if fleeting, observations on European discourse on Indian music resorts to the same logic while trying to reason out what she perceives as a more blatant disregard for things subcontinental in N. Augustus Willard—the author of A Treatise on the Music of Hindostan—that “Willard had none of Jones’s love for India, nor did he share his respect for paganism, Greek or otherwise....” While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to do a meaningful comparison of Jones and Willard’s approaches to the study of Indian music, such reasoning seems to me to be too facile to reveal anything historically and critically meaningful. [Bakhle, Two Men and Music, 10, 55]
139 I use ‘post-Saidian’ as a shorthand to refer to that position in contemporary postcolonial theory which understands colonialism as a dialogic process, and that colonial knowledge and power, while surely being oppressive, was also productive in multiple ways, not the least in its own undermining and ultimate fall. When deployed in a nuanced fashion this critical orientation still remains indebted to Said’s critique of Orientalism as a western discourse that produced the categories and animated the structures of representation through which the west came to understand and rule the non-western Other in determinate ways. A ‘post-Saidian’ position, while informed by this critique of colonial(ist) discourse, seeks to work around the charge leveled at Said by some critics who argue—by no means in a disinterested fashion—that his critique further essentializes colonial binaries such as East/West, Orient/Occident, etc., and engenders a counter-politics that aims for only an inversion of extant dualities and hierachies, rather than their dissolution. Also, Said’s Orientalism bestows colonial rule and representation with an agency that was not as total as he would have us believe.
140 For details on Edward Said’s response to his critics, see, Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race and Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 1-15.
97 modern Orientalists—the other being Anquetil Duperron—Bennett Zon remarkably credits the same figure with actually de-Orientalizing late-eighteenth century Orientalist discourse of its
Orientalism. On the other hand, Gerry Farrell, with respect to Said, desires to forge an aesthetic
“outside” of both political and economic domination, as well as “[o]verarching theories about the cultural meanings of colonialism[.]”141
My intention here is not to debate how or how much Jones loved India and its music; nor is it definitely to suggest that such a post-Saidian perspective ought not be brought to bear on studies of music and the colonial encounter. What I do indeed suggest is that for such a perspective to be critically effective necessarily requires a dialectical sublation—to also preserve that which is being overcome or changed—of Said’s original critique, not a simplistic disavowal.
Hence, in my view, the post-Saidian position adumbrated by the likes of Farrell and Zon appears hastily conceived and somewhat naïve in their understanding of the colonial encounter and the many forms of violence that attended it. Indeed, such studies have so far not substantively addressed that aspect of Jones’ musico-discursive labor where it is unambiguously indexed to colonial rule and its civilizing mission, where Jones’ fabled love of India is in no way antithetical to his unqualified support and celebration of British colonial rule in India, instances where the language of the sword is brought to bear directly on musical knowledge. It is apropos of this that my rather straight forward Saidian reading—otherwise well-worn in postcolonial scholarship today—of William Jones and his “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” acquires critical traction.
In this chapter my preponderant focus on analyzing the mechanics of power in Orientalist music discourse has come, admittedly at the cost of a proper analysis of musical thought that
141 Farrell, Indian Music and the West, 5.
98 enabled the production of this discourse as knowledge. The chapter that now follows is an attempt to redress this. It may be recalled that the preceding analysis, where I draw attention to the practical anxieties and contingencies of William Jones’ musical labors in the 1780s, had as its generative impulse precisely an opposite concern. My effort to outline the unstable economy of
Orientalist (musical) knowledge production was staged against the backdrop of Jones’ manifest confidence in the epistemological framework of his scholarship, based on which he would attempt to write such contingencies out of the discourse that he finally produced, and posit it as a scientific enquiry true to its method. Indeed, it is only with ascertained faith in his historically- framed rationale of knowability, knowing, and knowledge, could Jones even conceive of, as
Edward Said puts it, “subdu[ing] the infinite variety of the Orient to ‘a complete digest...[,]’”142 that would enable Europe “to know the Orient more scientifically, [and] to live in it with greater authority and discipline than ever before.”143 Hence the focus will now shift from the critique of power/knowledge vis-à-vis Jones’ musicological exertions in India to an enquiry into the episteme—the historically determined space and limits of thought and knowledge—in which
Jones’ was grounded as a subject of the Enlightenment in Europe, into epistemic conditions of possibility for a tract like the “Musical Modes” to emerge when it did.
142 Orientalism, 78.
143 Orientalism, 22.
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Chapter 2 Frames of Musical Knowledge: Towards an Archeology of the Late-Eighteenth Century European Musical Episteme
History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that does not yet exist. But perhaps all we have here, in the concrete forms of the unconscious and History, is the two faces of that finitude which, by discovering that it was its own foundation, caused the figure of man to appear[.]1
In the previous chapter, William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” (“Musical
Modes” hereafter) was marked and read as a text of power. Pointedly highlighted were those
movements in it where its author’s will to musical knowledge and will to colonial power
approached identity, textually aspiring to a condition of ‘harmony’ between the two that the lived
uncertainties of Orientalist knowledge production in early colonial India did not quite allow. In
what follows now, this seminal article arises in prominence once again. Indeed, it is nigh
impossible to bypass the text in any narrative of the West’s categorical understanding and
construction of its musical Other, especially when told from the perspective of the subcontinent.
But here, it will be staged differently.
We will provisionally suspend the guiding concern we have had thus far with unmasking
the relations of power and knowledge imbricated in Jones’ essay. The emphasis now will gather
around the issue of musical knowledge itself. However, instead of concentrating on Jones’
efforts to comprehend and organize Indian systems of music, and we will now view the “Musical
Modes” as constellating a certain map of European, specifically English, musical thought at its
late-eighteenth century conjuncture. My task here will be to outline the historical contours of this
map, contours that animate the epistemological field within which Jones’ essay was relationally
1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; English repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 371
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located, and within which his study of “Hindoo” music” made contemporaneous sense as an
article of musical knowledge in the West.
Accordingly, the focus now shifts from the extra-musical politics constitutive of the
essay’s truth-claim(s) that detained our attention previously to a schematic exploration of its
episteme, i.e., the “…set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that
give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and…formalized systems[.]”2 What, then, comes up for interrogation in this chapter is the theoretical premise and its ‘scientific’ rationale that
William Jones, as a subject of this episteme, uses to enframe his enquiry into “Hindoo” music.
Hence, if the last chapter was broadly aligned to what Michel Foucault calls a ‘genealogical’ critique, sieved through a Saidian lens, then the concerns enlivening this chapter derive, broadly again, from the other mode of discourse analysis that bears Foucault’s signature, the mode that reveals the ‘rational’ grounds and formal configuration of a particular episteme, namely,
‘archaeology.’ The objective here is to read the “Musical Modes” archaeologically, using it as an entry-point for outlining the historically contingent, relational ‘space’ of European musical knowledge—the musical episteme, as it were.
A word now on the structure of this chapter: it is spread over four sections. The first sets up the theoretical frame, addressing the categorical constitution of the concept, ‘music,’ at the emergence of the modern episteme in the West. The second section deals with a timeworn epistemological tension at the heart of Western musical thought that, nevertheless, was still urgent enough in the late-eighteenth century musical episteme for Jones to prominently address
in his essay on “Hindoo” music: is music science, or is it art? The third section follows from the
resolution that Jones effects on the aforesaid problematic. Recall that he expressively chooses to
discourse on music as an art. Given this, what I address is the ranking of arts that Jones provides
2 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (1972; repr. New York: Routledge, 2004), 191.
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at the very beginning of the “Musical Modes” and music’s place in it. Taking a schematic look at
the historical vicissitudes of the inter-art hierarchy in Western aesthetic thought, with particular
regard to music and its relation to poetry and painting, I analyze the arguments that Jones makes
in an earlier work order to support the specific hierarchy he furnishes in the “Musical Modes.”
Having examined this, the fourth and the last section then goes on to trace the philosophical
inspiration behind Jones’ favorable treatment of “Hindoo” music—essentially melodic in its
constitution—at a time when harmony was being championed as the marker of Europe’s musico-
civilizational advancement.
Together, these four concentric layers of enquiry—the first addressing the general,
conceptual level; the second, a specific problematic in musical thought; the third, attending to
one side of this problematic; and the fourth, a particular kind of music—comprise, I argue, the
epistemic condition of possibility for an essay such as Jones’ “Musical Modes” to appear when it
did.
Music as a Universal Positivity
Ethnomusicology, since its disciplinary inception in the Western academy, has been directly or
indirectly involved in the interrogation of Music as a concept-category,3 whose unexamined subsistence in Western music discourse over time has distilled into the common-sensical notion that music is a universal language.4 Ethnomusicologists have consistently pointed to the
3 Throughout this chapter, Music—in upper-case—should be read as flagging the knowledge-organizing, epistemological category under which music is studied, or rationally discoursed upon, in the modern era of institutionalized knowledge production.
4 For a pithy summarization of this position at a time when ethnomusicology was coming into its own as a disciplinary identity in the mid-1960s, see Anthony Merriams’ locus classicus, Anthropology of Music (1964; repr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1980), 10-11; also, see the chapter “The Universal Language: Universals of Music” in Bruno Nettl, Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One issues and Concepts , 42-49 (1983; repr. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
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epistemological limitations of the concept, particularly when it is brought to bear on the study of
non-Western musical cultures and practices where “…the word ‘music’ does not exist.”5 This
has inspired a call within the discipline, voiced by Jean-Jacques Nattiez in this case, that “[t]he
history of the word ‘music’ in various languages needs to be written, as does an account of its
usage among individuals.”6
Necessary and urgent as this is solicitude to produce conceptual histories of music in different cultures and languages, what concerns the present chapter, rather, is its complement.
For, alongside such efforts, it is equally important to particularize the conceptual life of Music in the West, especially as it comes to assume a universal character. Hence, I ask, turning Nattiez’s entreaty around: when, within Western discourse, did Music appear as an epistemological concept-category whose universalism now needs to be destabilized? In other words, when was it in the history of Western knowledge production that Music comes to assume a categorical logic under which all the musics of the world could be organized and classified? I do not pretend here to attempt an exhaustive answer to these questions. That far exceeds the scope of the current undertaking. What I am interested in is to identify that moment in Western—specifically,
English—history when the European idea of Music, and European music as an ideal, encounters and subsumes meaningful sound-activities of non-Western cultures under its own categorical logic. And it is in this regard that recourse to a Foucauldian archaeology proves both methodologically and historiographically useful.
5 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 54.
6 Ibid.
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Critiquing the historicism that dominates the usual ‘History’ of sciences/ideas, Foucault
argues in his tour de force, The Order of Things, that if one archaeologically interrogates the
metaphysical foundations of contemporary (human) sciences, then the topography of knowledge
that comes into relief differs qualitatively from the teleological accounts furnished by such
Histories. Under the archaeological gaze, the chains of continuity posited by the latter, on which
is plotted the progressive advance of scientific consciousness “from the Renaissance to our own
day,” wither away.7 Instead, what is revealed in prominence are “two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture,”8 over which modernity as a process is distributed, and across which, recognition and comprehension in and through knowledge is hardly self-evident for an
enquiring subject in the present. These moments of rupture—the order of temporality that an
archaeological enquiry focuses on—are characterized by setting in motion a fundamental
refiguration of the grounds of knowledge, and the emergence of a new set of “positivities” that
describe the limits of thought and knowability in different epistemes, yielding in each a different
order of empiricities.
In Foucault’s schema, the first discontinuity, congealing around mid-seventeenth century,
ushers in the “Classical age” in the West, breaking with the mode of knowledge and being that
subsisted in Europe up until the end of the sixteenth century.9 The second discontinuity—the one
7 Foucault, Order of Things, xxii.
8 Foucault, The Order of Things, xxi. “Western culture” as a meta-signifier recurs prominently not just in The Order of Things but, more generally, through the entirety of Foucault’s oeuvre. In fact, with specific regard to The Order of Things, Fredric Jameson has pointed out that the periodizations that Foucault crafts and names in the text could appear parochially French to other Western “national traditions.” See Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 62.
9 In the pre-Classical epoch, the world was ordered in/as knowledge through the mode of ‘resemblance,’ with different forms of ‘similitude’ constituting its instruments. [Ibid., 17-25] The Classical age rejects resemblance as erroneous. The form of knowledge it installs in turn is founded on the play of three substantivizing positivities on which the discursive act of ordering is based: natural history, wealth and trade, and general grammar. What unifies the three positivities is the mode of ‘representation,’ the being of knowledge founded on the metaphysics that the
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we will be concerned with here—breaks with the Classical age and heralds the ‘modern’ epoch,
out of which, according to Foucault, we are yet to emerge. Beginning around the turn of the
nineteenth century, it is in this age that the self-conscious Subject, ‘Man,’ is inaugurated.
Defined, in the highest abstraction, in terms of three new positivities, unique to the modern
episteme—“life, need and labor, and language,” to be studied, respectively, through ‘sciences’ of
“biology, economics, and philology”10—the knowledge of Man yields a class of empiricities that
are entirely its own. It is this last bit of Foucault’s theorization that I am interested in. Following
which, I argue that the emergence of Music as a universal category of knowledge parallels the
discursive production of the modern Man in and through the human sciences, beginning in the
late-eighteenth century ethos of European Enlightenment.
The critical point that Foucault makes through his archaeological critique of Western
epistemology is that (the figure of) Man—the “transcendental subject” of humanist narratives
and the metaphysical foundation of the modern human sciences—is but a “recent invention.”
Discursively produced only in the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century conjuncture, it
disappears when cast backwards and beyond its particular frame of immanence. And this renders
the language and disciplines through which Man claims to know itself scientifically to be as alien
outside the episteme of its appearance as modern knowledge claims the medieval and ancient
‘sciences’ are for its own ends. But a historicist narrative (of a human scientific discipline)
founded on the metaphysics of Man—enshrined in various Histories—remains structurally blind
world could be finitely ordered in its most elementary terms and represented through commensurate signs. Thus, the organizing principle in this episteme acquires a tabular form, whose space is then populated by the empirical data that this mode of knowledge yields, viz. enumerable and classifiable identities and differences secured through the operations of “measurement and order.” For details, see, Ibid., 51-62.
10 Ibid., 377. Hence, according to Foucault, there is a theoretical anthropology at the heart of Western thought from the late- eighteenth/early-twentieth century onwards, long before the crystallization of anthropology as a human scientific academic discipline at the end of the nineteenth century.
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to the historicity of its own “invention,” to the limits of its own subjectivity, and to the specific constellation of positivities on which it stands. This ends up yielding a symptomatic paradox. As in, such efforts claim to have retrieved from the past a discipline, which, as a discursive
11 formation, did not actually exist as such prior to the modern epoch.
It is in this regard that Foucault’s archaeology becomes relevant for the present work.
For, as I have shown earlier in this dissertation, this is, in form, the same paradox that is regnant
in Histories of ethnomusicology that unproblematically locate the origins of the discipline in the
late-eighteenth century. If, however, one takes seriously this elementary insight of Foucault’s
archaeology, then William Jones appears before us not as an “early ethnomusicologist”12 but as a subject of his own episteme where such a presentist disciplinary ascription would be entirely anachronistic. Conceiving of intellectual history in epistemic terms, thus, enables one to obviate such paradoxes produced by a historicist self-understanding of a human scientific discipline such as ethnomusicology.
Vis-à-vis our current concern, an archaeological orientation allows us to view scholars of music more or less contemporary to Jones—most famously, Charles Burney and John Hawkins, against whose disparaging remarks on non-Western music in their works Jones’
‘ethnomusicological’ sensibility is favorably contrasted13—as belonging to exactly the same
episteme. In fact, all of them occupy the transitional moment of rupture between the classical and
11 As Foucault puts it, using the discipline of biology as example: Historians want to write histories of biology in the eighteenth century; but they do not realize that biology did not exist then, and that the pattern of knowledge that has been familiar to us for a hundred and fifty years is not valid for a previous period. [Ibid., 126]
12 Bennett Zon, “From ‘Very Acute and Plausible’ to ‘Curiously Misinterpreted:’ Sir William Jones’s ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindus’ (1792) and Its Reception in Later Musical Treatises,” in Romantic Representations of British India, edited by Michael J. Franklin, 197-219 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 197.
13 Ibid.
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the modern episteme that Foucault elaborates, scattered, roughly, between the years 1775 and
1825.14 Viewed in this light, it becomes clear that Jones’ explicit placement of his own treatise
on Indian music in the footsteps of Charles Burney’s music scholarship was not an empty
gesture.15 Rather, this was a self-conscious discursive act in recognition of the aforementioned
epistemic fellowship.
This leads to the main point that I want to make in this section: it is during this time, the
late-eighteenth century, that Music first emerges in Western, specifically, English, knowledge
formations, as a positivity with universal aspirations, alongside the triad of great positivities that
Foucault identifies as ultimately ushering in the era of the discursively bounded Man, the human
subject “as an empirical entity.”16 This point finds further support in the argument that if the axiomatic for the Classical age was to organize knowledge in spatial terms—therefore, its elaborate tables and classificatory schemas—in the modern age it is temporality that becomes the regnant concern, and History emerges as “the fundamental mode of being of empiricities upon the basis of which they are affirmed, posited, arranged, and distributed in the space of knowledge for the use of such disciplines or sciences as may arise.”17 It is, then, no mere coincidence that it
was precisely during this historical conjuncture that a profusion of music treatises bearing
“History” in their title start to appear in England, beginning with Charles Burney’s A General
History of Music, and John Hawkins’ A General History of the Science and the Practice of
Music, both published in 1776.
14 Ibid., 220.
15 William Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos.” Asiatick Researches: Or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal For Inquiring Into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature of Asia 3 (1792): 62.
16 Foucault, Order of Things, 303.
17 Ibid., 219.
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Thus, what we need to pay attention to in this context is not Jones’ exceptionality pace the expressive Eurocentrism of a Burney or Hawkins. Jones’ approbatory appraisal of “Hindoo” music when Burney held non-Western music to be “noise and jargon,”18 was rather an ideological variation articulated from within the same episteme. This becomes further evident if one compares his scholarly attitude with that of Hawkins, who had the following to say in the preface to his General History:
It must be confessed that in some instances, particularly in the discussion of first principles of morality, and the origin of human manners, the researches of learned men have been extended to nations, or tribes of people, among whom the simple dictates of nature seemed to be the only rule of action; the subjects here treated of are sciences and the scientific practice of music: now the best music of the barbarians is said to be hideous and astonishing sounds. Of what importance then can it be to enquire into a practice that has not its foundation in science or system, or to know what are the sounds that most delight a Hottentot, a wild American, or even a more refined Chinese?19
In this obviously ethnocentric ratiocination for precluding the study of non-Western musics in his treatise, Hawkins appears to be the polar opposite of someone like Jones who considered
Indian music to be a “happy and beautiful contrivance.”20 But a closer look reveals that the epistemic foundation is quite the same for both. Jones, too, in his study of the musical modes in
“Hindoo” music is equally reluctant to accord his object of enquiry a scientific grounding in its contemporaneous European sense. He repeatedly emphasizes the ‘naturalness’ of Hindus, their unquestioned veneration of nature, which “enabled them to retain the number of [musical] modes that nature seems to have indicated[,]”21 rather than what was mathematically possible, without any reasoned and rational justification. The difference, therefore, between Jones and Hawkins is
18 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 2 vols. (London: Becket, Robson, and Robinson, 1776), 1: 186; also quoted in, Zon, “From ‘Very Acute and Plausible’,” 197.
19 John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and the Practice of Music, 2 vols. (1776; repr. London: Novello, Ewer, and Co., 1875), 1: Preface.
20 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 60.
21 Ibid.; emphasis added.
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not their epistemic standpoint that non-Western music is non-scientific and nature-driven, but their ideological perspectives on it. If Hawkins is plain dismissive of cultures whose music he considers to be an articulation of this, then Jones is paternalistically accommodative of the same.
Indeed, as Rosane Rocher, not a votary of a Foucauldian perspective herself, notes, Jones, even if more considered than many of his peers in his views of the colonized, was not entirely unlike them in claiming that “Indians…were unfit for freedom and had to be ruled by absolute power.
There were racist tinges to his views, which were not conducive to a climate of inequality in his exchanges with Indian scholars.”22
To return to the crux of this section, what, then, is of greater import is not the sliding
scale of Eurocentrism that the aforementioned authors evince. Rather, it is what Charles Burney
states at the very beginning of his pioneering General History that is far more significant in
epistemic terms; for it articulately points to the categorical appearance of Music in a universalist
gloss:
The love of lengthened tones and modulated sounds, different from those of speech, and regulated by a stated measure, seems a passion implanted in human nature throughout the globe; for we hear of no people, however wild and savage in other particulars, who have not music of some kind or other…23
Such a viewpoint is, in a formal discursive sense, an entirely new articulation, unprecedented in European knowledge formations prior to the late-eighteenth century. Indeed, it is organic to the inaugural moment of the modern episteme of Man. The normalization of this notion in subsequent music discourse following in the wake of Burney and Hawkins’ ‘Histories,’ and operationalized in scholarship on (the musics of) non-Western peoples of the world
22 Rosane Rocher, “Weaving Knowledge” Sir William Jones and Indian Pandits,” in Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and Influences of Sir William Jones (1746-1794), eds. Garland Cannon and Kevin Brine, 51-79 (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 53.
23 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, 1: 11; emphases added.
109 facilitated by the expansion of European empires, is what gives rise to Music as a universal positivity, as a concept-category epistemologically applicable, as Burney puts it, to all of mankind. Thus, Music comes to assume in the West the status of a humanist meta-signifier referencing a specialized human activity in which all peoples of the world participate, self- consciously or otherwise, in various (lesser) degrees of complexity and refinement vis-à-vis the art music of Europe.
What is elided in the process and becomes an unexamined axiomatic for the Western musical subject is the specific cultural constitution of the category. Consequent of and parallel to this runs the creation of music’s civilizational value, extending and buttressing, thereby, the linear scale on which cultural development (or the lack of it) of Europe’s Other could be
‘objectively’ gauged, classified, and compared. Indeed, without this civilizationally indexed, categorical emergence of Music, William Jones’ essay on “Hindoo” music would not have been possible. Nor would it have been subsequently possible for N. Augustus Willard—whose 1834 A
Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan is the first modern monograph on Indian music—to write, echoing Burney: “Every nation, how rude so ever, has, we see, its music and the degree of its refinement is in proportion to the civilization of its professors.”24 Hence, it is only when we recognize this epistemic terrain, in which music appears as a universal positivity, can we properly appreciate the reorientation of musical knowledge in late-eighteenth century England, of which Jones’ tract is a signal reflection.
In fact, the “Musical Modes” offers one of the first clear examples of how the conceptual equivalence between Music and musical activities under a different conceptual heading in a non-
European language-universe and life-world was drawn, pointing to the epistemic violence
24 N. Augustus Willard, “A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan,” in Hindu Music From Various Authors…In Two Parts, ed. and comp. Sourindro Mohun Tagore (Calcutta: Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1882), 18.
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underwriting the European project of translating vastly knowledge systems into its own fold.
Recall from the previous chapter that Jones in his initial days of research into Indian music and
its discourse was admittedly confused about the “meaning of the word” that was the closest
approximation of the category Music in Sanskrit and Hindustani—sangeet. Jones at that point worked under the provisional hypothesis, mediated by his ‘native’ collaborator, that sangeet meant “melody or a sweet succession of notes[,]” but was expressive about his incertitude.25 This
confusion, instead of achieving clarity, was further exacerbated as Jones’ immersed himself in
acquiring proficiency in Sanskrit. For Jones’ consultation of musical treatises in Sanskrit
revealed that the term sangeet encompassed gana, vadya, and nritya in an immanent fashion, whereby the allied arts of lyric poetry, instrumental music, and dance were treated as intrinsically related to each other, as constituent parts of the same discursive and performative text. While this led Jones to make the functionalist conjecture that sangeet was designed to achieve the maximum affective impact on its audience, it did not help his cause to have it as the organizing principle for his study of Indian music; for then his enterprise would remain untranslatable to the European audience that his scholarship was intended for. Sangeet, therefore, needed to abstracted from its immanence in gana, vadya, and nritya, and made to speak to the categorical logic of Music, as the latter had come to be defined in the 18th century musical episteme in Europe. Jones, perhaps cognizant of this, did not attempt to furnish a logical reason for this discursive move himself.
What he had to say sounds almost like an apologia, an askance recognition of the mutual untranslatibity of concepts, even if cognate, embedded in vastly different knowledge formations:
25 William Jones, “‘Thirteen Inedited Letters from Sir William Jones to Mr. (Afterwards Sir) Charles Wilkins,’” Journal of the American Oriental Society 10, (1872 – 1880): 112. Also see, Chapter 1, p. 29 of this dissertation.
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When such aids that a perfect theatre would afford are not accessible, the power of music must in proportion be less; but it will ever be very considerable if the words of the song be fine in themselves, and…well translated into the language of melody...26
In other words, what Jones seems to be saying is that even though music, when abstracted from
sangeet, undergoes affective devaluation, it can still stand on its own. Here we see how Jones
was firmly allied with Enlightenment musical rationality that projected Music as an objective
category of knowledge and a universal human characteristic.
With the above conceptual framework in place, I now move into an epistemic enquiry of
the “Musical Modes” proper. In proceeding with this, my intention, inspired again by the
archaeological method, is not to “…decide whether [the document] is telling the truth or what is
its expressive value, but to work on it from within and to develop it…[.]”27 As mentioned in the
introduction to the chapter, I will concentrate on two epistemological issues embedded in the
“Musical Modes,” and develop each over a separate section: first, the debate over the proper
locus of musical knowledge; and second, the place of music in the inter-art hierarchy. Before
moving on, however, another thing, suggested throughout in the discussion above, needs to be made clear. The following analysis, it will be found, has very little to do with actual musical practice and its social history as such, be that in Europe, or in the subcontinent. My points of reference are all products of self-conscious intellectual labor in the field of musico-aesthetic
knowledge. This is not at all to erect an intransigent divide between the ‘knowledge’ and the
‘practice’ of music; that would undermine the self-proclaimed Foucauldian moorings of this
26 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 59.
27 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 7. Treating the document thus—the mottled plane on which historical discontinuity is mapped—engenders, as Foucault succinctly points out, a paradox: “it is both an instrument and an object of research;…it divides up the field of which it is the effect[.]” [Ibid., 10] But this paradox, Foucault clarifies, is a productive one. For it brings the historian eminently within the fabric of the discourse she weaves; it necessitates the …integration into the discourse of the historian, where it no longer plays the role of an external condition that must be reduced, but that of a working concept; and therefore the inversion of signs by which [the discontinuity] is no longer the negative of the historical reading (its underside, its failure, the limit of its power), but the positive element that determines its object and validates its analysis.” [Ibid.]
112 chapter. It is rather to highlight the specificity of how music—quintessentially a practical art for which Language necessarily falls short of adequate re-presentation—is actually represented in the language of knowledge, in discursively disciplined contexts, aside from the still-developing language of music’s own sign-conventions.
Is Music a Science, Or Is It an Art?
Let us begin with a general statement on Orientalist discourse already well socialized in scholarship: if the objects of its enquiry were things it considered ostensibly ‘Oriental’ then the subject of its discourse—its author and its address—was, of course, unambiguously European.28
The knowledge produced was, in the first instance, meant for a European audience, to contribute to European scholarship. Jones’ “Musical Modes,” the first extended Western foray into bringing
Oriental/Indian music within this discursive formation, is rather obviously symptomatic of this.
The article begins not with an introduction of its thematic—“Hindoo” music,—but rather its problematic, a concern organic to European musical epistemes over the ages. “Music belongs as a science,” writes Jones,
to an interesting part of natural philosophy, which by mathematical deductions from constant phenomena, explains the causes and properties of sound, limits the number of mixed, or harmonic, sounds to a certain series which perpetually recurs, and fixes the ratio, which they bear to each other or to one leading term; but, considered as an art, it combines the sounds that philosophy distinguishes, in such a manner as to gratify our ears, or effect our imaginations; or, by uniting both objects, to captivate the fancy, while it pleases the sense; and speaking, as it were, the language of beautiful nature, to raise correspondent ideas and emotions in the mind of the hearer:…29
The problematic that Jones is addressing here is one that had already occupied Western musical thought for more than two millennia: Was musical knowledge, the truth of music, best
28 Indeed, as Edward Said made so lucidly apparent, it is through the dialectic between this subject and object that Europe/West and Orient/East arose as substantive representational categories of knowledge, subjectivity, and rule.
29 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 55; emphases in original.
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apprehended through formal and empirical sciences, with mathematics its means, and the
elaboration of natural properties of musical sound its end? Or, does the key to musical
knowledge lie in the aesthesis and affectivity of musical experience and practice? In fact, long
before its late-eighteenth century articulation in a text like Jones’, the proper locus of musical
knowledge had been debated in ancient Greece between “Aristoxenus and the Pythagoreans as to
whether music is for the ear or for the reason as science of numbers[.]”30 History bears witness
that the Pythagorean position that true musical knowledge lay in the latter domain became the
dominant one in European thought, specifically fixing the numerical “ratios that govern musical
consonances.”31 Yet, by no means was this dominance an entirely uncontested issue. The
Pythagorean dominance had to be actively reproduced discursively and institutionally over time.
To return to the “Musical Modes,” in accordance with what still was very much a
minority position in the late-eighteenth century context, Jones ultimately chooses in his essay to
discourse on music considered as an art. But what is particularly relevant for the argument I
make here is that Jones, despite his final choice, still finds it absolutely necessary to work his
decision through an explicit and extended staging of the science/art duality through the first few
pages of his essay. It is this necessity that I am primarily interested in this section.
Up until the dawn of the Classical age in Europe, it was believed that though practical knowledge of music had existed since time immemorial, formal theoretical knowledge of the subject had its beginnings in the mathematical exertions of Pythagoras, Euclid, and Ptolemy. The
Pythagorean tradition of musical thought was carried through the Middle Ages by neo-Platonist,
Christian philosophers likes St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), vide De Musica, and
30 Warren Dwight Allen, Philosophies of Music History (New York: American Book Company, 1939), 9.
31 Calvin Bower, “The Transmission of Ancient Music Theory Into the Middle Ages,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen, 136-167 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141.
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Boethius (c. 480-524 AD), vide De institutione musica.32 In fact, it was the latter who reconceptualized the trivium—the Roman model of education—into the quadrivium, placing music alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as the four disciplines of a model education, with mathematics as the basis of this assortment. Thus, music and arithmetic stood next to each other in the curriculum of medieval universities, with the latter attending to “number in and of itself[,]” and the former, to “number in ratios and proportions.”33 In the pre-Classical universe of knowledge acquired through the establishment of resemblance,34 and conveyed often
through metaphors of kinship, some of the clearest statements on the consanguinity between
mathematics and music can be found in the Scholia enchiriadis—a commentary on the famous
ninth century text that inaugurated the principles of polyphony in European music discourse, the
Musica enchiriadis. Constructed as a catechistic dialog between a student and his teacher, the
anonymous author of the Scholia has the former ask: “How, then, is harmony born of its mother
Arithmetic? And are Harmony and Music the same thing?” In response, replies the teacher:
Harmony is taken to be the concordant mixture of different sounds. Music is the scheme of the concord. Music, like other mathematical discipline, is in all its aspects bound up by the system of numbers. And so it is by the way of numbers that it must be understood.35
Despite the epistemological break with Scholasticism effected by the likes of Francis
Bacon and Rene Descartes with regards to scientific method and acquisition of knowledge, be it
the former’s empiricism or the latter’s rationalism, the notion that music in its essence was
32 Ibid., 140-143.
33 Ibid., 142.
34 Foucault, Order of Things, 17-25.
35 Quoted in Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, eds. Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), 38. The extract from Scholia enchiriadis that is published is translation of an eighteenth century edition by Lawrence Rosenwald. Also, the use of the word “harmony” in the quote is not in the same sense as it would acquire in eighteenth century Europe. This will be addressed in greater detail in the section on Rousseau’s influence on Jones.
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mathematical was perpetuated with vigor by the seventeenth century men of reason. Thus, even
while Bacon recognizes the place of music as one of the two chief “liberal arts,” the other being
painting,36 one also finds him expounding: “[W]ithout the help of mathematics many parts of nature could neither be sufficiently comprehended, clearly demonstrated, not dexterously fitted for use. And of this kind are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, and mechanics.”37 However, what would change fundamentally in what Foucault calls the Classical age is how philosophers (re-)imagined the relation between mathematics and music. Thus,
reflecting the consuming epistemic investment in “measurement and order,”38 a youthful
Descartes would devote himself to “plotting and measuring musical intervals on the monochord[,]”39 arriving at the conclusion in his Compendium Musicae [1618] that musical knowledge was “…built on the analysis of both order and measurement of sound. Out of [which] sound emerges as a distinct object of cognition. The hearer emerges as a self-grounded locus of that cognition.”40
Descartes was certainly not alone in this understanding of music in Baconian Europe.
Isaac Beeckman, the Dutch mathematician to whom Descartes had dedicated his treatise, held
the belief that music in its essence was not an art but “the practical application of physico-
36 Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, ed. Joseph Devey (New York: American Home Library Company, 1902), 198. It needs to be mentioned here that painting’s status as a liberal art, and its pairing with music, was in Bacon’s time a relatively freshly acquired one. This will be dealt with in greater detail a little later in the essay.
37 Ibid., 174. Bacon considered music to fall under the domain of “mixed mathematics,” as different from “pure mathematics.”
38 Foucault, Order of Things, 51-61. Also see, Fn. 7 in this chapter.
39 Thomas Christensen, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, 1. The monochord is a one-stringed musical instrument from ancient Greece that was later used as a laboratory instrument in the service of acoustic science.
40 Jairo Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 52.
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mathematical principles.”41 The consequence of this reconfiguration of music and mathematics
in the scientific revolutions of the Classical age, the time when Natural Philosophy makes its
disciplinary appearance with the progressive “mathematization of physics[,]”42 was the virtual separation of the science and art of music. Hence, though bitter rivals for much of their later life,
Gottfreid Leibniz and Isaac Newton—the two titans of late-seventeenth/early-eighteenth century
European Natural Philosophy—were largely united in their approach to musical knowledge.
“Music is a hidden exercise in mathematics, of a mind unconscious of dealing with numbers[,]”43
wrote Leibniz, going so far as to claim that knowledge of arithmetic, while not enough to ensure
musical genius, could nonetheless enable “…a man who does not know anything about music, the way to compose without mistakes.”44 On his part, Newton admitted to “not have so much
skill in [musical] science as to understand it well.”45 But that did not impede him from working out the mathematics of a given “musical progression,”46 and hinting in his treatise on Optics at a correspondence between the seven notes of the musical scale and the seven colors that he had just refracted through a prism.47 One thus finds, in keeping with the dominant thrust of the
41 Ibid., 53.
42 Penelope Gouk, “Role of Harmonics in the Scientific Revolution,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, 224.
43 Quoted in R. C. Archibald, “Mathematics and Music,” The American Mathematical Monthly 31, no. 1 (1924): 1.
44 Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Geiger, Art in Theory, 1648-1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 236.
45 Correspondences of the Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century, Including Letters of Barrow, Flamsteed, Wallis and Newton, 2vols. (Oxford: The University Press, 1841), 2: 394.
46 “In finding the aggregate of the terms of a musical progression there is one way by logarithms very obvious (viz. by subducting the logarithms of each denominator by that of the numerator, &c)…” [Ibid., 288]. Also see, Ibid., 309-311.
47 “[A]s the harmony and discord of sounds proceed from the proportion of aerial vibrations, so may the harmony of same colors, as of a golden and blue, and the discord of others, as of red and blue, proceed from the proportions of the aetherial.” [David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 2 vols. ( Edinburg: Thomas Constable and Company, 1855), 2: 408]
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seventeenth century episteme, musical knowledge was considered attainable primarily through
scientific enquiry, i.e., through mathematical analysis and laboratorial experiments. But the
primacy of this was to be challenged over the course of the eighteenth century when systematic
arguments drawing attention to aesthetics, in general, and musical aesthetics in particular, began
gathering momentum.
This direction is apparent in one of the early treatises on aesthetics in English, authored
by Francis Hutcheson. Voicing his disapprobation of the post-Cartesian subjectivism that he
believed was subsuming different modes of enquiry into the “human nature” in its grand
rationalist sweep, Hutcheson wrote in the prefatorial note to his 1725 work, An Inquiry into the
Original [Sic] of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; In Two Treatise:
We…generally find in our modern philosophic Writings nothing farther on the [various pleasures which the Human Nature is capable of receiving] than some bare division of them into Sensible and Rational and some trite common-place arguments to prove the latter more valuable than the former. Our sensible pleasures are slightly pass’d over and explained only by some instances in Tastes, Smells, Sounds, or such like, which Men of any tolerable Reflection generally look upon as very trifling Satisfactions.48
Following this critical tendency, the drive to reclaim music for its aesthetic knowledge and value
gathered ballast through the eighteenth century,49 culminating ultimately in the Romanticist reversal of the rationalist approach to the study of music by the century’s end. Succinctly phrasing the actuating spirit of this reversal, Friedrich Schlegel, an outstanding figure in the
German current of Romanticism, would write in 1798: “One has tried for so long to apply
48 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original [Sic] of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue; In Two Treatises (1725; repr. London: J and J Knapton, et al, 1729), x-xi; emphases in original.
49 For French and German efforts in this regard, see, Edward Lippman, History of Western Musical Aesthetics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). It ought to be mentioned here that though musical aesthetics would acquire gradual importance over this century the categories of aesthetic analysis itself, as we shall see, would not remain the same.
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mathematics to music and painting; now try it the other way round.”50 The question that will enliven the subsequent paragraphs here is: where and how does one ideationally locate William
Jones’ essay on “Hindoo” music against the changing landscape of eighteenth century European music discourse, its growing discomfort with the sway of mathematics and Natural Philosophy, and defense of the “sensible,” initiated at one end by the likes of Hutcheson and executed at the other by the likes of Schlegel?
Dwelling on the issue, Jones writes in the “Musical Modes”:
[I]t is the province of the philosopher to discover the true direction and divergence of sound propagated by the successive compressions and expansions of air, as the vibrating body advances and recedes; to show why sounds themselves may excite tremulous motion in particular bodies, as in the known experiment of instruments tuned in unison, to demonstrate the law, by which all the particles of air; when it undulates with great quickness, are constantly accelerated and retarded…and, generally, to investigate the causes of the many wonderful appearances which [music] exhibits; but the artist, without considering, and even without knowing, any of the sublime theorems in the philosophy of sound, may attain his end by a happy selection of melodies and accents adapted to passionate verse, and of times conformable to regular meter; and, above all, by modulation, or the choice and variation of…[musical] modes.51
Jones’ detailed consideration of this problematic in an essay on Indian music reveals the urgency
of addressing the structural duality in the late-eighteenth century European musical episteme: the
self-conscious, abstract knowledge of music as an objectifiable acoustic phenomena, whose
causal relations are universally available to scientific enquiry; and, the embedded aesthetic
knowledge of music as realized in musical practice and experience, which could hold ‘true’
entirely independent of the former.
While clearly betraying affinities with the aesthetic end of musical knowledge, Jones
could not go the Romantic distance like, say, Schlegel. He could not posit autonomy for the
musical phenomenon itself, and call for a reorientation of music’s relation to knowledge and the
knowing subject. Natural Philosophy’s claim-to-truth on music was still constitutive enough in
50 Quoted in Andrew Bowie, “German Idealism and the Arts,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks, 239-257 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 241.
51 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 55-56; emphases in original.
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Jones’ episteme for it to demand, and receive, due respect in discourse, even when the intention was to move away from it. In this sense, Jones is still within the ambit of the discourse inaugurated by the likes of Francis Hutcheson in the early-eighteenth century. Like Hutcheson who began his treatise on aesthetics by prefacing it with the epistemological tension between the
“Rational” and the “Sensible,” Jones too felt it necessary to begin his own treatise on music by staging the duality, ‘music-as-a-science’ and ‘music-as-an-art.’ It looms large, unresolved, over the grounding moves of the essay’s narrative. And, it finds expression in statements where scientific knowledge of music obtained through laboratorial experiments and mathematics is placed in direct opposition to the practical knowledge and sensuous affect of music. Thus, in the above-quoted passage Jones lists the observable effects of laboratorial experiments demonstrating the physical laws governing sonic phenomena, only to assert immediately thereafter that this knowledge is entirely irrelevant to the actual practice of music. Oppositions like this recur in the essay. Anxiously mindful of justifying his own orientation to musical knowledge in the “Musical Modes,” Jones needs to revisit such dualities—between music as science/art, between the natural philosopher and the artist—at least four times before properly training his focus on “Hindoo” music. Thus, at another instance one finds Jones directly invoking
Newton’s experiment with (the correspondences between) sound and color that we have encountered earlier; only to highlight forthwith, almost in a leap of faith, the equal knowledge- worthiness music as “perception,” as opposed to “phenomena”:
Why any one series of sounds, the ratios of which ascertained by observation and expressible by figures should have a particular effect on the organ of hearing and by the auditory nerves on the mind will then only be known by mortals, when they shall know why each of the seven colors in the rainbow, where a proportion analogous to that of musical sounds, most wonderfully prevails, has a certain specific effect on our eyes;…but without striving to account for the phenomena, let us be satisfied with knowing, that some of the [musical] modes have distinct perceptible properties and may be applied to the expression of various mental emotions[.]52
52 Ibid., 60-61.
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Symptomatic, then, of the knowledge formation that he belonged to, Jones is left unable
to resolve the tension between music-as-a-science and music-as-an-art within the parameters of contemporary European musical thought. But this does not mean he leaves the problematic hanging. As I have mentioned earlier, Jones ultimately chooses, with reason, to pursue “Hindoo” music as an art, not science. However, the justification forwarded for this is nowhere as detailed as his staging of the science/art problematic earlier. Having prominently laid out this deep-rooted concern regarding the eighteenth century English musical episteme at the start, Jones writes in a pithy segue-statement thirteen pages into the essay, betraying as much relief as ‘reason’:
Let us proceed to the Indian [musical] system, which is minutely explained in a great number of Sanscrit books by authors, who leave arithmetic and geometry to their astronomers, and properly discourse on music as an art confined to the pleasures of imagination.53
And here lies the specificity of the Orientalist mutation of metropolitan music discourse, in the
conditioned relativism that it seems to forward. What is an obtrusive problematic in
contemporaneous European musical thought is immediately resolved when placed in the Oriental
context. Jones’ proto-Romantic discomfort with Enlightenment entanglements of “arithmetic and
geometry” and “the pleasures of imagination” draws relief from what he almost nostalgically
perceives to be a more clear, if not necessarily simpler, arrangement of discursive boundaries in
Indian, specifically Sanskritic, (musical) knowledge systems. In the latter, viewed by the late-
eighteenth century Orientalists as the outstanding achievement of a once-great “Hindoo”
civilization, homologous with classical Greece, music still was first and foremost an art.
“Proper” discourse on it worked the domain of imagination, while mathematics still only played
within fields such as astronomy. And since it was Indian music, not European, that was his
object of study, Jones could reasonably suspend the constitutive duality of Enlightenment
53 Ibid., 64.
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musical knowledge and enthusiastically delve into addressing (Indian) music as it appealed to the
“imagination.”
Indeed, that the treatises on music in Persian and Sanskrit were happily unconcerned with
the exact science of sound would have been apparent to Jones quite early in his enquiries into
Indian musical knowledge. He mobilizes this observation to justify, ipso facto, the decision to
bypass subjecting “Hindoo” music to the same “sublime theorems of the philosophy of sound”
that governed European music discourse. The limit to knowledge posed by the science/arts
problematic was specific and organic to European music discourse, where the mathematical
sciences had historically laid claim on musical knowledge. But it was not incumbent on the
European scholar of ‘Other’ musical systems to be guided by the same parameters. Indian music
could—needed to, in fact, according to Jones—be legitimately distanced from the
epistemological tension that characterized the late-eighteenth century European musical
episteme, and discursively appropriated as an art, leaving be it natural scientific properties. Such
a move, however, would not have been possible for Jones to make strictly within the particular
episteme he inhabited just yet, without marking an explicit break with it, and it is reflective of
Jones musical epistemic subjectivity that he could not do so. As I have argued, this is evident
from the fact that the music-as-science and music-as-art still needed to be emphatically stated as
a problematic of Western musico-aesthetic discourse; only then could his rationale for choosing
to discourse on music as an art make sense within the episteme.
While efforts to usher in such a break were slowly but surely afoot in Europe during the
latter half of the eighteenth century, with ‘imagination’ beginning to be posited as the sovereign
wellspring of the Romantic aesthetic,54 Jones’ musical thought, again, betrays an agonistic
54 Romanticism and its various national manifestations in Europe is a voluminous and contested field of scholarship, and has been so for a long time, spanning many aesthetic and disciplinary fields. It will not be possible within the
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relation between a Natural Philosophic and a Romantic orientation. Elements of both exist in this
thought; but as discrete elements. Though resonant, it is not determinately framed by ideological
coherence of the kind that that Romanticism would acquire in early-nineteenth century England.
Neither has it entirely sublated the constitutive affinities with the dissipating, but still influential, aesthetic ideology that valorized order and rationality in the arts—this will get categorized as
‘neoclassical’ in the late-nineteenth century—and served as the aesthetic counterpart to the objective, scientific approach to musical knowledge championed in the Age of Reason, leading up to the Enlightenment. Indeed, for Jones, the Romantic orientation was not a given. As S. N.
Mukherjee has noted in discussing Jones’ relation to Romanticism, “he may be described as
Burke has been described, as ‘a classicist who appealed to nature before the rules.”55 Such is the emblematic character of the Orientalist music discourse brought into being by “On the Musical
Modes of the Hindoos”: it belongs definitely to the late-eighteenth century European musical episteme, with the characteristic science/art problematic prominently foregrounded. But, within the framework that it elaborates, the science/art duality does not remain as such. In that, the operation of the Orientalist music discourse is markedly different from its metropolitan parent.
Keeping this constitutive tension in the “Musical Modes” in mind, in what now follows, I focus only on one half of the science/art problematic at the heart of Western musical episteme.
For it remains a fact that in the “Musical Modes” Jones decides unambiguously to treat the object of his enquiry as an art. Having outlined above the historical trajectory through which this problematic comes to impinge on Jones’ text and his staging of it, I will now elaborate another
scope of the engagement with Romanticism to convey these nuances. Here I shall stick to what is the standard history of Romanticism, specifically its English articulations in and through the field of poetry, as summarily presented by M. H. Abrams—a representative scholar of this current—in his A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed., (Boston: Heinle and Heinle, 1999), 174-180. I am however aware of the critical theoretical and historiographical debates around Romanticism, vide Jerome McGann, “Rethinking Romanticism,” ELH 59, no. 3 (1992): 735-754.
55 S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 42.
123 plane of discourse that is as pivotal in understanding the late-eighteenth century musical episteme that the “Musical Modes” animates. Hence, leaving the Natural Philosophic concerns with music firmly behind, now we look at music in Western, specifically English, aesthetic discourse, particularly in relation with poetry and painting.
It will be apparent that the historical figures through whom the narrative below is strung together also feature prominently in the liberal humanist historiography of eighteenth century
English aesthetic thought. But my intention here is not simply to provide a summary rehearsal of this well-established historiography. Instead, I focus specifically on inter-art hierarchy—i.e., the hierarchical interrelation between music, poetry, and painting—in Western aesthetic discourse and its concern with ascertaining ‘sister arts’ through pivotal figures, each of whom bear a metonymic relation to a specific aesthetic-historical conjuncture in the West: Leonardo da Vinci, and the high Renaissance; John Dryden and Alexander Pope, and the so-called English
‘neoclassicism’; Edmund Burke and the latter-eighteenth century cusp of neoclassicism and
Romanticism—the moment to which William Jones belongs.
Music in the European Inter-Art Hierarchy
Let us return once again to the beginning of Jones’ “Musical Modes,” specifically to the part where he counter-poses music-as-art to music-as-science. For it is here, in a succinct few lines, he presents the snapshot of the revisionist aesthetic ideology that he brings to bear on the
“Musical Modes.” When music, Jones opines in the inaugural paragraph of his tract,
“speak[s]…the language of beautiful nature,…rais[ing] correspondent ideas and emotions in the mind of the hearer: then, and only then,” can it claim the status of a “fine art, allied very nearly to verse, painting, and rhetoric; but subordinate in its functions to pathetic poetry, and inferior in
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its power to genuine eloquence.”56 To unpack this extremely suggestive quote pregnant with
meaning, I raise here a set of generative questions whose subsequent elaboration will round-off
my attempt in this chapter to bring to fore the epistemic grounds of William Jones’ essay on
Indian music: Why and how does music become indexed to this specific series of qualifications
for it to be considered a fine art? What is the rationale behind the relational proximity that Jones
draws between music and “verse, painting, and rhetoric”? When does the particular ranking of
the arts that Jones furnishes come to be discursively enshrined, what is its underlying logic? And,
why is painting, which just previously is mentioned as an art-form kindred to music, omitted
from this ranking?
In approaching these questions, I will undertake a schematic discussion of European
aesthetic discourse, entering it at the point of its articulation in English criticism during the
period “span[ning] 140 years or so after the Restoration (1660),”57 or, as this epoch of belles- lettres came to be later labeled, the ‘neoclassical’ moment.58 Working my way back and forth
from this vantage, I will map the historical reconfigurations of the inter-art hierarchy in Western
aesthetic thought in terms of the three cardinal arts—poetry, painting, and music—touching upon
its organization in classical Greece, Renaissance Europe, neoclassical England, leading up to the
cusp that Jones inhabits—the moment whose aesthetic ideology rests simultaneously within and
without that of the waning neoclassicism and waxing Romanticism. The reason for this rather
56 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 55.
57Abrams, Glossary, 174-175.
58 As a conceptual paradigm, neoclassicism is a twentieth century invention that refers to certain aesthetic ideology laid in place by authors belonging to the late-seventeenth/early-eighteenth centuries, privileging order, symmetry, the art of classical Greece and Rome and the idea that mimesis was the foundation of art, etc., over innovation, deep interiority, art-for-arts’-sake, and other attributes associated with Romanticism. The term, then, is used to mark off a more or less coherent set of aesthetic dispositions, protocols for valuation of art, and associated ethical considerations, common to epochal authors like John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, among others. For details, see Ibid., 174-176.
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lengthy approach to the musico-aesthetic episteme that produced Jones’ “Musical Modes” is due
to the recursive demands of historical explanation. That is, the rupture set in motion in English
aesthetic thought by the like of Jones in the late-eighteenth century makes sense only against the
aesthetic protocols of the neoclassical epoch that prevailed prior to it. But in order to understand
the latter, one must have a functional comprehension of the classical precepts that were revived
in that period to merit the ‘neo’ prefix. However, this understanding would remain faultily partial
if one ignored the Renaissance mediations that were constitutive in the neoclassical aesthetic
formation. Hence, the ineluctable circuitous route adopted in what follows. That said, though this
schematic mapping of the inter-art hierarchy will hop and skip quite a few centuries and different
regimes of aesthetic thought, it will, nonetheless, retain coherence through a powerful and
unifying first-principle that subsisted throughout: the principle of ‘imitation’—the dominant
theoretico-philosophical orientation in Western aesthetic thought since its classical formulation
in Plato and Aristotle,59 down to the English neoclassical heyday.
‘Ut Pictura Poesis’ and the Mutating Sisterhood of Poetry, Painting, and Music:
It is well-known that neoclassical aesthetics was energized by the idea that poetry and painting
are “sister arts.”60 This notion, central to the inter-art hierarchy supported by the neoclassical
passage in aesthetic thought, originated in two sources: first, in the idea attributed to Simonides
of Chios that painting is silent poetry, and poetry, a speaking picture; second, in the Roman poet-
59 There are of course significant differences in Plato’s understanding of imitation and art, and that of Aristotle’s. While Plato’s notion that art is twice removed by imitation from the ideal concept-world of forms is a rather more austere view than Aristotle’s aesthetics—Plato famously banishes poets from the Republic—both are however united in the rationale of imitation being the basis of aesthetic cognition and artistic representation.
60 See, for example, John Dryden, “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting,” in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 115-153. Also see, Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
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philosopher Horace’s famous phrase—ut pictura poesis, or, as is painting, so is poetry—in his seminal text, the Ars Poetica [The Art of Poetry]. It was via this genealogy that poetry and painting came to be labeled, ‘sister arts,’ giving rise to the theory and practice of ‘literary pictorialism’ among English neoclassicists, whereby, literary forms—prose and poetry—aspired to the same mode of aesthesis as in painting—considered the imitative art par excellence.
The neoclassical renewal of the Horatian maxim in England, of course, was not sui generis. This aesthetic ideology was mediated—positively and negatively—in no small measure,
as we shall see, by the Renaissance interpretation of ut pictura poesis. It is this, founded on the
idea of imitation—both integral to neoclassical criticism—that would come under criticism, bolstering the argument for a shift from imitation to ‘expression’ as the first, and the most gratifying, principle of arts and aesthetics; a move, which, as Edward Lippman points out, began gathering momentum mid-eighteenth century onwards.61 But in order to situate the received inter-art hierarchy in the neoclassical epoch, in what follows I first touch upon comparative aesthetics of the Renaissance, particularly as it finds expression in Leonardo da Vinci’s
Paragone, so that the aesthetic ideology of neoclassicism, and of the cusp that Jones occupies, is highlighted and brought to the surface.
If at the high-noon of classical aesthetic thought, Aristotle—devising a method to
analytically disaggregate the arts based on their “medium, object, and manner”62—had anointed
tragic drama over epic poetry as the noblest of the arts, then by late antiquity, it had changed to
poetry at the summit of the aesthetic order. Still under the giant shadow of Homer as the
unparalleled artist who used words for his craft, aesthetic criticism in Europe prior to the
61 For details, see, Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, 83-136.
62 For details see, Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. and ed. S. H. Butcher (London: Macmillan and Co., 1917), 7.
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Renaissance was largely united in the belief that it was ultimately poetry which had the power to
reveal the soul, something that “no artist, confined to colors and shapes, [could] paint….”63
Hence, as Rensselaer Lee has pointed out, “writers on art,” in an interpretive inversion of
Horace’s phrase, “expected one to read [ut pictura poesis as:] ‘as is poetry so is painting[;]’”64
underlining, thereby, poetry as the primary reference in the analogy on which painting is
dependent. But the aestheticians of the Renaissance—the epoch in which the Horatian idiom
assumed dogmatic status—pushed for a strict interpretation of ut pictura poesis, to read the phrase as one that posited painting, not poetry, at the head of the inter-art hierarchy. The process by which this preeminence was accorded to painting requires a brief excursus that has an explanatory bearing on the aesthetic ideology of the late-seventeenth/early-eighteenth century
English neoclassicists, and therefore, on the counter-aesthetic fashioned by likes of William
Jones.
Despite its edification by Horace and others as an art-form fraternally related to poetry—
the most exalted of the arts in the pre-Renaissance world—painting, and, along with it, the
plastic arts, had for long been unable to shake off the subordinating implication of being
considered “mechanical crafts” of lower aesthetic felicity than the “intellectual” art that poetry
was understood to be.65 However, with painters and pursuant of the plastic arts emerging as important cultural mediators in influential sections of the latter-fifteenth century European society, painting was set on a prolonged period of ennoblement. Demand was made that painting
63 Wesley Trimpi, “The Meaning of Horace's Ut Pictura Poesis,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 28. For further details on the issue of relative de/merits of poetry, painting, and the plastic arts in the post-Horatian interpretive regime, see, Ibid. 21-28.
64 Rensselaer Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 3.
65For details, see, Irma A. Richter, “Introduction,” in Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts, trans. Irma A. Richter (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 12-13.
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be inducted into the Quadrivium of ‘liberal arts’ alongside arithmetic, geometry, music, and
astronomy.66
No less integral to the cultural politics of painting and the plastic arts in the Renaissance
society was, of course, the case made for “How Painting Surpasses All Works of Men By the
Subtle Speculations Connected With It”67 on theoretico-ideological grounds. It is painting,
argued the quintessential ‘Renaissance man,’ Leonardo da Vinci, that most consummately
executes, and in which is best instantiated, the principle of imitation or mimesis—considered the
basis of all arts and the source of all aesthetic delight since Plato and Aristotle.68 Painting
imitates the best, the argument ran, because the aesthesis of painting hails and approximates the
noblest of the sense-organs, the eye. It is the eye, above all, in which the dizzying array of
nature—‘human nature’ included—is most accurately mirrored. Art could only aspire to this
state of perfection as it imitated.69 One, thus, finds da Vinci assert in his Paragone (or, A
Comparison of the Arts),70 his signal treatise on comparative aesthetics and inter-art hierarchy,
66 For a critical history of the cultural politics, aesthetic theorization, and aesthetics as such, animated by the “painted image” during the Renaissance leading into the Enlightenment in Europe, see, Christopher Braider, Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
67 Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts, trans. Irma A. Richter (London: Oxford University Press, 1949).
68 ‘Imitation’ for Aristotle means the faithful reproduction of “men in action,” nature, character-types, emotions, etc. And the art-form that excelled all others in imitation is, according to Aristotle, the tragic drama; for in the drama, more so than its close cognate, epic poetry, the various other art-forms converge to yield their fullest expression. For details, see, Aristotle, Poetics, 10-15.
69 For a detailed discussion of the Renaissance interpretation of the idea, imitation, see Rensselaer Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 9-16. Also, this idea that nature was the art of God, hence, perfect, was also a Renaissance invention. In classical antiquity, for example, art was considered a refined representation of things and beings as they existed in nature. See, Dryden, “A Parallel” in Essays, 119-120.
70 The title Paragone was added posthumously to da Vinci’s original manuscript. As Irma Richter points out in the preface to her English translation of the Paragone, this text is actually the opening chapter of a treatise on painting by da Vinci which was likely culled and compiled from the latter’s original manuscripts by one Francesco Melzi, a protégé of da Vinci’s. According to Richter, “The title ‘Paragone’ was first used in G. Manzi’s edition of the treatise…[in] 1817.” [da Vinci, Paragone, v; fn. 1]
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an impassioned polemic from the point of ‘view,’ literally, of his favored art-form, and an early
manifesto of ocularcentrism in the West:
The eye, which is the window of the soul, is the chief organ whereby the understanding [sic] can have the most complete and magnificent view of the infinite works of nature; and the ear comes second, which acquires dignity by hearing the things the eye has seen.71
Besides involving the eye and its ability to cognize and represent nature more faithfully
than any other art, painting was deemed to possess another innate advantage over poetry. Unlike
the latter, which unfolds through sequential elaboration over time, painting reveals the art-work to its beholder both instantaneously, and in its wholeness. Mocking the lofty claims made on poetry, wrote da Vinci: “If you, oh poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness, and so that it is less tedious to follow.”72
If, as per this logic, it was proved that painting was evidently and indubitably superior to
poetry, then the received hierarchy of arts that glorified poetry—in its essence, an aural art—as
its pinnacle, needed to be reconstituted, such that the ordering reflected the primacy of vision,
and of the art-form it animated.73 Needless to say, music being fundamentally an acoustic
phenomenon even more dependent on the auditory sense than poetry, this had some implication
for its status.
In the aesthetic discourse at the “crossroads of early and high-Renaissance,” of which da
Vinci’s Paragone is a classic articulation, the fraternal bonds between painting and poetry were
71 Ibid., 54.
72 Ibid., 54-55.
73 Da Vinci had no doubt that: [p]ainting serves a nobler sense than poetry and represents the works of nature with more truth than the poet. The works of nature are much nobler than speech which was invented by man; for the works of man are to the works of nature as man is to God. Therefore, it is a nobler profession to imitate the things of nature which are the true and actual likeness than to imitate in words the actions and speeches of men. [Ibid. 53] The not so veiled critique of Aristotelian idea of ‘imitation’ as “men in action” is evident here.
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first dissolved and then reinstituted to sustain a new relation: now between painting and music.
Having encountered above da Vinci’s derogation of hearing and poetry, this new coupling seems
less than obvious. But under a section titled, “Music May Justly Be Called the Younger Sister of
Painting,”74 one finds da Vinci arguing the kinship of painting and music on the following
grounds:
[In music] harmony is composed of the union of its proportional parts sounded simultaneously rising and falling in one or more harmonic rhythms [that] surround the proportionality of members composing the harmony…just as the contour bounds the members from which human beauty is born.”75
Despite this suggested affinity with painting, music, however, could not aspire to the exalted
status of the latter for two reasons: first, because it was a sense-activity that involved putatively a
lower order sense-perception; and second, because it was fundamentally transient in nature. In
the aesthetic ideology of the Renaissance, which, besides apotheosizing the visual register and
the simultaneity of perception that it afforded, also valorized permanence as a preeminent
attribute of the art-work, music as an art-form, even as a ‘sister’ art, would necessarily have to
occupy a lower rung. As the master himself put it: “[P]ainting excelled and ranked higher than
music, because it does not fade away as soon as it is born, as is the fate of unhappy music.”76
Thus, if painting came to supplant poetry at the top of the aesthetic order during the
Renaissance, music replaced painting as the lesser sibling in a new fraternity of art-forms.
Poetry, as result of all this, fell from the highest perch to, now, shore up the rear of the new hierarchy. Indeed, despite music and poetry both being aural passions—ergo, by then-prevalent norms, arts inferior to painting—the latter, which in classical aesthetics enjoyed a happy concurrence with music, was now deemed firmly subjacent to it. The reason adduced in the
74 Ibid., 74.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
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Paragone for this is again based on the idea that the aesthetic value of an art-form was structured, in the last instance, by its ability to synchronously project of the object of representation to the witness of art—man. It was this, besides its unparalleled capacity to approximate the eye in imitating both nature and man-in-nature, which made painting the most felicitous of all arts, the singular exemplar of the imitation-principle. But if music fell well short of painting in its imitative power, it did, however, square-up partially up with the latter in one crucial aspect: the simultaneity in the expression of its constitutive moments, notwithstanding the fact that such moments were arranged in a flow over the linear passage of time. That da Vinci could make this counterintuitive argument was based on the fact that by the time of high
Renaissance European music was firmly embedded in the principle of harmony, wherein different musical notes, proportionally bound, came together in a single articulation. Hence, the simultaneity of expression. Indeed, it is this logic that allowed music, despite being the function of a baser sense and of an entirely temporal essence, be designated “the younger sister of painting,” and led da Vinci to reason:
[T]hough poetry like music enters through the ear to the seat of understanding, [a poet] is unable to give an equivalent of musical harmony…[I]t is beyond his power to say different things simultaneously as the painter [can] in his harmonious proportions where the component parts…react simultaneously and can be seen at one and the same time both together and separately….For these reasons the poet ranks far below the painter in his representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things. 77
In sum, then: the inter-art relation that nourished the Horatian maxim, ut pictura poesis,
is sundered, and poetry and painting discursively proscribed to the far-ends of the aesthetic
spectrum. Music, in the new schema, emerges as the mediating art-form between painting and
77 Ibid., 79.
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poetry, and the inter-art rivalry of the epoch was cast not between poetry and painting, but,
rather, between the latter and the other plastic arts—most prominently, sculpture.78
This is, however, not to suggest in any way that the principle, ut pictura poesis, was rendered obsolete during the Renaissance. In fact, history’s assertion is quite to the contrary.
Line number 361 of the Ars Poetica, emerged as a dogma precisely during the Renaissance.79
But, as a dogma it was applied first and foremost, as da Vinci’s Paragone so clearly evinces,
towards the ennoblement of painting (and the plastic arts) as a fine-art in its own right, and not
because prior poetic sensibility had deemed it so.80 We thus find that Renaissance aesthetic
discourse, while retaining the Aristotelian principle of imitation as the “common principle of the
Arts of Poetry, Music, Dancing, Painting, and Sculpture,”81 employed it such—via a strict
interpretation of ut pictura poesis in Horace’s Ars Poetica—that it accorded with the ideological positioning of painting (and the plastic arts) as the highest of the art-forms, followed by music,
and then poetry. Implicit in this hierarchy is also the ideology that lionized simultaneous and
78 The inter-art rivalry between painting and the other plastic arts during the Renaissance was carried on by the likes of Vasari, Pontormo, Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, among others. For details, see, Peter Hecht, “The ‘Paragone’ Debate: Ten Illustrations and a Comment,” in Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 14, no. 2 (1984): 125- 136; Fredrika H. Jacob, “An Assessment of Contour Line: Vasari, Cellini and the ‘Paragone,’” Artibus et Historiae 9, no. 18 (1988): 139-150; George P. Mras, “ Ut Pictura Musica: A Study of Delacroix's Paragone,” The Art Bulletin 45, no. 3, (1963): 266-271.
79 In fact, the historiography of European aesthetics usually agrees on the fact that the sway of Horace’s Ars Poetica, particularly that of the idiom ut pictura poesis, continued well into eighteenth century, until it was systematically refuted by the German thinker, Gottfreid Lessing, in his Laokoon, published in 1766. See, Paul Guyer, “The Origin of Modern Aesthetics: 1711-35,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy, 15-44 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 28-29.
80 The scalar equilibrium that had been achieved in Simonidean-Horatian aesthetic criticism, whereby ut pictura poesis could be read back and forth to mean both, ‘as is painting, so is poetry’ and ‘as is poetry, so is painting,’ hardened into vector in the dominant discourse of the Renaissance, with painting as its the referential head. And the clearest expression of this is found in da Vinci’s antithetical inversion of the Simonidean formula that painting was silent poetry, and poetry, speaking painting. Rephrasing this dictum with vision as the primary sense-reference, wrote da Vinci: “[I]f you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting.”[ da Vinci, Paragone, 55]
81 Aristotle, Poetics, 1.
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immediate expression of the art-work. Painting was deemed the most consummate art-form by da
Vinci not only because he believed that it surpasses other arts in imitation, but also because it reveals the content of the art-work to the apprehending subject instantaneously and
simultaneously. The mode and medium of poetry on the other hand structures its content such
that it unfolds gradually over time. So ran the Renaissance logic for justifying the supremacy of
painting over poetry and music, a logic, which, as will be apparent to any scholar of classical
criticism, resonates significantly with the Longinian idea of the ‘sublime’—in simple terms, the
most intense affect generated in the perceiving subject that disrupts the harmonious elegance of
reason and overwhelms the sensorium.
Longinus, in his uncertainly dated, classic treatise from circa second century AD, had
advanced, among other qualities, instantaneity and simultaneity as constitutive properties of the
sublime. Deliberating on the sources of the qualitatively different affects referenced by the two
central categories of classical rhetorics, ‘amplification’ and ‘sublime,’ he argued that the latter is
“often comprised in a single thought,”82 This notion of the sublime for obvious reasons resonates very well with painting as the art-form best suited to mediate the sublime. For, if the
loftiest affect emanates from a “single thought,” then painting, which immediately presents to the
viewer a potential variety of subjects and action as they appear at a single point in time, in a
single frame, ought to generate the most elevated affect as well. Let us keep this correlation
between painting and the Longinian sublime in mind, for it will have some bearing as we next
consider the field of neoclassical aesthetic criticism in early modern England.
Affinities between the aesthetic ideology of the Renaissance and that of the neoclassical
epoch in England can be evidenced on multiple registers. But each epoch articulated its specific
82 This, as opposed to ‘amplification’ which trucks in abundance of details and magnitude. W. Rhy Roberts, trans. and ed., Longinus On the Sublime (Cambridge: University Press, 1899), 77.
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interests differently, resulting, thereby, in a different hierarchization of the arts. For example, the
central paradigm of imitation as the basis of all arts was also vigorously reiterated by the English
neoclassicists, from Dryden to Burke.83 But in the neoclassical period, the concept came to imply
mimesis not just of ‘nature,’ as was the case in the Renaissance, but also of the ‘ancients,’ by
which “were meant [classical] Greek and Roman writers, who had imitated nature in the first
place and who could well illustrate how it could be imitated”;84 hence the coinage, neoclassical.
Similarly, Horace’s theory of art, articulated in the Ars Poetica, was of pivotal importance to aesthetic thought in both epochs; as was, relatedly, pictoriality.85 But the issue at hand for the
English neoclassicists was not so much to perpetuate painting at the top of the aesthetic pile, as it
was to reinstate poetry, which had been pilloried by the likes of Leonardo da Vinci during the
Renaissance, alongside painting once again; it was to revive the Horatian idiom, ut pictura
poesis, in its original spirit, and rehabilitate painting and poetry as ‘sister arts.’86
This articulation of comparative aesthetics in late-seventeenth/early-eighteenth century
England, in fact, reveals a bias that is quite particular to that country itself. Indeed, the art-form to find the English ground most fecund for its own efflorescence was poetry, certainly more so than either painting or music. For eminence in the latter arts, the English preferred to look across
83 In fact, imitation, for the English neoclassical critics, was not just retained but re-posited specifically in a normative fashion. In that, it did not just suffice for imitation to be accurate re-presentation of nature—again, human nature included—but nature in its ideal form, distilled of all naturally occurring imperfections. For example, see, again, Dryden’s “A Parallel.”
84 Herbert Schueller, “‘Imitation’ and ‘Expression’ in British Music Criticism in the 18th Century,” The Musical Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1948): 545.
85 Regarding neoclassicists viewing Horace as an ideal to be emulated see, Abrams, Glossary, 174-175.
86 See, Hagstrum, Sister Arts; Wallace Jackson, “Affective Values in Later Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 4, no. 2, (1965): 309-314.
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the channel to Italy, Germany, or even France.87 It then symptomatic that John Dryden, weaving in the epochal rivalries of painting and poetry, would write:
…I might observe, that [during the Renaissance], neither Ariosto, nor any of his contemporary poets, ever arrived at the excellency of Raphael, Titian, and the rest, in painting. But in revenge, at this time, or lately, in many countries, Poetry is better practised than her sister art.88
But “better practice” of poetry did not mean that painting was to be made subjacent to it. The
mode through which the latter acquired and transmitted aesthetic value was still considered
paramount. And here, the impact of the Longinian sublime on some of the English neoclassicists
is the most apparent.89 It is foundational to the theory of ‘literary pictorialism’ that they
championed,90 based on the notion that the highest, or the most profound affect generated in the mind of the reading or viewing subject issued from “…the electrifying and transporting image or passage, rather than [from] the larger aspects of plot and design….”91 Enunciating the underlying logic for this most clearly among authors that are arrayed under the category, neoclassical,
Dryden contends, almost echoing da Vinci:
I must say this to the advantage of Painting, even above Tragedy, that what [the latter] represents in the space of many hours, the former shews us in one moment. The action, the passion, and the manners of so many persons as are contained in a picture are to be discerned at once, in the twinkling of an eye[.] 92
87 In fact, in 1710, Joseph Addison, also considered a preeminent neoclassicist of the eighteenth century, while commenting on the popularity of the Italian opera in England, satirically noted of the English musical attitude: “At present, our notions of music are so uncertain that we do not know what it is we like: so if it be of a foreign growth, let it be Italian, French, or High-Dutch, it is the same thing. In short our English music is quite rooted out, and nothing yet planted in its stead.” [This extract is from Joseph Addison’s note on music in the first volume of the journal he edited along with Richard Steele, The Spectator. [The Spectator; With Notes and a General Index, vols. 1-8 (Philadelphia: Hickman and Hazard, 1822), 22]
88 Dryden, “A Parallel,” 130.
89 For details, see, Wallace Jackson, “Affective Values in Later Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24, no. 2, (1965): 309-314.
90 Ibid.; Hagstrum, Sister Arts.
91 M.H. Abrams, quoted in Wallace Jackson, “Affective Values,” 309.
92 Dryden, “A Parallel,” 131. Also quoted in, Ibid., 309-310. Here, when Dryden brings forth Tragedy to compare it with painting, he is actually controverting Aristotle, who, in Poetics, argued that Tragedy is the most noble of all arts.
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The question that now remains is: what position did music occupy in the neoclassical ordering of
the arts?
Greatly influenced in their comparative aesthetics by Horace’s Ars Poetica, and therefore
restricting their critical energies primarily to poetry and painting, exemplary figures of the
neoclassical canon do not actually comment substantively on music. Nevertheless, music
registers a shadowy presence throughout, particularly latent in the many ‘odes’ that were penned
during this era. This is, of course, in keeping with the general revival of the classical aesthetic
sensibility and criteria for artistic production championed by English critics of the time—the
very impetus for which they later came to be canopied under the category ‘neoclassical.’ For in
Greco-Roman antiquity, poetry and music were innately connected as the former was often sung
in performance. “The underlying reason for [this] ancient association between music…and the
constitutive power of poetry [was] the belief that specific musical modes create specific
psychological effects…”93 Thus, even if theorization of musical aesthesis did not detain the critical attention of the neoclassicists to the extent that poetry and painting did, it is perhaps of some significance that John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope—three of the outstanding figures whose work signify the neoclassical field—each wrote an ode in celebration of music.94
93 O. B. Hardison and Leon Golden, eds. and trans., Horace for the Students of Literature (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1995), 49.
94 For Dryden, Pope, and Addison, their respective odes for music were merited by the occasion of St. Cecilia’s Day—a festival first instituted by the Catholic church to honor the eponymous patron saint of musicians. The trend was begun by Dryden, and then Addison and Pope followed suit. Dryden’s piece appeared in 1697, and was titled “Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Music: An Ode in the Honour of St. Cecilia” [John Dryden, The Poetical Works of John Dryden (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1867), 166-168]. This Ode by Dryden widely praised and was set to music later by three different composers, most famously, in 1736, by the famous German-born composer, George Frideric Handel—perhaps the single most important musical figure in England of the era. For more, see, “A Life of the Author” written by Walter Scott for the eighteen volume compilation of Dryden’s writings, which he annotated and edited as well [John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, 18 vols., ed. Walter Scott (London: James Ballantyne and Company, 1808), 1: 410]. Next came Joseph Addison’s “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day at Oxford,” published c. 1700 [Joseph Addison, The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison (Oxford: D. A. Talboys, 1830), 1: 33-35]. Addison’s ode was followed, in 1708, by Alexander Pope’s “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day”
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Also noteworthy is line number 143 of a young Alexander Pope’s acclaimed Essay on Criticism
[1711], which, evoking the Horatian phrase, ut pictura poesis, reads “Music resembles
Poetry[.]”95 But this line had nowhere the same historical impact on subsequent aesthetic thought
as did Horace’s. Appearing in the context of Pope’s proposition—characteristic of the
neoclassical tendency, in general—that heightened felicity in poetry and music owed to a genius
that was naturally bestowed,96 it remains only a cameo in the Essay. In fact, later in the piece,
Pope excoriates those who assay lyric-poetry only by its vocal-musical content. And here, Pope comes very close to da Vinci in the Paragone in his criticism of the auditory sense. He differs only insofar as his objective is simply not to subordinate poetry in favor of painting but precisely to salvage the former from the prison-house of ‘hearing’ and recuperate it for its formal and ideational worth.
But most by numbers judge a poet's song, And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong: In the bright muse, though thousand charms conspire, Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire; Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear, Not mend their minds; as some to church repair, Not for the doctrine, but the music there.97
[Alexander Pope, The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, 4 vols., ed., R. Carruthers (London: Nathaniel Cooke, 1853), 2: 170-174]
95 Line number 143 of “Essay on Criticism,” in Pope, The Poetical Works, 2: 194]. The part of the poem, lines 141- 145, in which it appears runs thus: Some beauties yet no precepts can declare, For there's a happiness as well as care. Music resembles poetry; in each Are nameless graces which no methods teach, And which a master hand alone can reach.
96 One of the characteristic features of the neoclassical aesthetic ideology was that genius was naturally endowed; it could not be acquired through teaching and learning. [Abrams, Glossary, 175-176]
97 Lines 337-343 of “Essay in Criticism,” in Pope, The Poetical Works, 2: 200.
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On the whole, then, in the absence of any categorical statement from the neoclassical
luminaries on the status of music in the inter-art hierarchy, it can be argued that, though
considered allied arts, for the likes of Dryden and Pope, music was seen as latent in poetry but
secondary to it.98 And if one now has to frame the neoclassical hierarchy of the arts from what
has been discussed above, it would run thus: painting and poetry appear at the top; the latter,
restored there, after having been decried during the Renaissance, to (re-)establish the original
fraternity of the ‘sister arts.’ Music, which da Vinci had instated as painting’s “younger sister,”
and above poetry, however, is now relegated below the latter.
Further, the inter-art hierarchy so defined was ideologically grounded in the Longinian
belief that a “single” thought, an arresting “image or passage,” as opposed to an “abundance” of
“successive details,” imparts the most intense aesthetic charge and possesses the loftiest affective
quality—the sublime. It was, then, painting and the mode of aesthesis innate to it—disclosure of
the single moment captured on canvas in its wholeness, in an immediate instant—that came
closest to embodying this ideal. And, if the ancient Simonidean principle and its distillation in
the Horatian maxim, had to be properly imitated—as the neoclassicists were generally wont to
do of the ‘ancients’—then poetry, it was deemed, had to aspire to the same mode of aesthesis as
painting.99 Undergirding all of this, of course, was the two millennia old, foundational idea—a truism by the neoclassical era—that imitation was the basis of all arts.
98 A more definitive statement on inter-art hierarchy, and the position of the three major art-forms therein, recorded during the neoclassical epoch owes its presence not to the afore-mentioned luminaries but to James Harris. In 1744, Harris published the Three Treatises, the second of which, titled, “A Discourse on Painting, Music and Poetry” sought explicitly, quite in the mould of da Vinci’s Paragone, “to consider in what [the arts] agree and what they differ; and which upon the whole is more excellent than the other two.” [James Harris, Three Treatises: The First Concerning Art, the Second Concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry, the Third Concerning Happiness (1744; 4th ed. London: C. Novrse, 1783), 50]
99 This was the founding logic of literary pictorialism of the era. See, Wallace, “Affective Values,” 309-310.
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William Jones and the Critique of Imitation: From ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’ to ‘Ut Poesis Musica’:
Having outlined above the historical constitution of the neoclassical aesthetic ideology and the inter-art hierarchy it buttressed, now we can contextually appreciate the import of the counter- aesthetic that began to take root within the neoclassical field itself from the mid-eighteenth century onwards; something that would culminate into full-blown Romanticism by the end of the
century. This counter-aesthetic, which fundamentally contravened many of the central
neoclassical precepts, while at the same time remaining circumscribed, in an epistemic sense,
within its doxa, found one of its most succinct and forceful articulation in the writing of William
Jones. However, it is not the “Musical Modes” where this is primarily expressed. Rather, it is in
another tract that appeared exactly two decades prior, in 1772, titled, “An Essay on Arts
Commonly Called Imitative,” (“Essay on Arts” hereafter) that Jones enunciates his counter-
aesthetic ideology. This
Jones’ “Essay on Arts” can be considered a theoretical prolegomenon to the “Musical
Modes.” Its traces are scattered throughout the latter, and its crux is distilled into the opening
paragraph, which I have used as a fertile platform to build the analysis presented here. Likewise,
in the “Essay on Arts” as well the inaugural passage is absolutely critical. For Jones opens with a
scathing broadside against one of the holiest sacraments of Western aesthetic theory—the idea of
imitation:
It is the fate of those maxims which have been thrown out by very eminent writers, to be received implicitly by most of their followers…[O]ne of this is the assertion of Aristotle, that all poetry consists in imitation, which has been so frequently echoed from author to author that it would seem a kind of arrogance to controvert it; for almost all the philosophers and criticks, who have written upon the subject of poetry, musick, and painting, however little they may agree on some points, seem in one mind considering them as arts merely imitative: yet it must be clear to anyone, who examines what passes in his own mind, that he is affected by the finest poems, pieces of musick, and pictures, upon a principle, which, whatever it be, is quite distinct from imitation.100
100 William Jones, “Essay on the Arts Commonly Called Imitative,” in The Works of Sir William Jones, 13 vols., ed. Lord Teignmouth (London: John Stockdale and John Walker, 1807), 10: 361-362.
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The “Essay on the Arts”—widely cited in the historiography of English aesthetic thought
as a “locus for pre-Romantic literary criticism”101—belongs to a generation of scholarship engaged in a critical reappraisal of the neoclassical aesthetic precepts. Following on the heels of efforts already afoot in France under the expedience of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos,102 English critics, such as James Harris, Daniel Webb, Lord Kames, and Edmund Burke had begun expending renewed vigor into properly demarcating the inter-art boundaries, delineating modes of aesthesis and affect specific to each art-form, and defining the scope and content of the central analytic categories, beautiful and sublime.103 In the process, as Wallace Jackson has noted, there emerged
a critique of “the theme of ut pictura poesis and the concept of literary pictorialism which [were]
so prominent a part of English Criticism [of the] period.”104 Consequently, the inter-art hierarchy put in place by the late-seventeenth/early-eighteenth century neoclassicists came to be reordered, and their lionization of painting and the mode through which painting produced aesthetic affect, progressively devalued. By the mid-eighteenth century, not just painting and
pictoriality, but the two millennia-old principle of imitation that had survived earlier
reorganizations of the inter-art hierarchy to stand tall as the basis of all arts and aesthetic
gratification, came under scrutiny as well. The inspiration of Jones’ own critique of imitation can
be sourced directly to a seminal mid-eighteenth century work authored by Edmund Burke—a
figure that Jones held in high esteem until they drifted apart over the latter’s zealous prosecution
101 Michael Franklin in Sir William Jones, Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael J. Franklin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), 104.
102 For, Du Bos’ specific importance to musico-aesthetic theory, his notions of the inert-art hierarchy, see, Paul Guyer, “The Origin of Modern Aesthetics,” 28-29; Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics, 87-88.
103 Jackson, “Affective Values.”
104 Ibid., 309.
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of corruption charges against the deposed Governor General of the East India Company, Warren
Hastings, in the 1780s. Burke too, like Jones, is usually accorded a pride of place in the neoclassical canon, despite certain crucial differences on aesthetic issues with its early purveyors and affinities with the later Romantic disposition.105
In 1757, Burke, in his famous treatise, A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, had made the case for some fundamental modifications to the then-prevalent understanding of imitation and the sublime. He argued that contrary to painting which provides an accurate description of an external reality through imitation, the purpose of poetry (and rhetoric) is quite different. Rather than furnish faithful description, in which poetry clearly falls short of painting, the former’s “business is to affect…by sympathy than [by] imitation[.]"106 Poetry’s true end lies more in displaying “…the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves.”107 Therefore, asserts Burke, “[P]oetry, taken in its most general sense, cannot be, with strict propriety, be called an art of imitation.”108 With regard to the sublime, too, Burke had a revisionist argument.
He challenged the prevalent notion that the source of the sublime aesthetic experience lay in the
105 Mukherjeee, William Jones, 40-42.
106 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: With an Introductory Discourse Concerning Taste (1757; repr. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1860), 213
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., 213-214. Elsewhere in the same text, imitation is posited by Burke, along with ‘sympathy’ and ‘ambition,’ as the three cardinal “passions” that belong to and serve “the great chain of society.” [Ibid., 56-65] Through a two-fold operation, he broadens the scope of imitation far beyond the aesthetic realm to posit it as a foundational to the bonding of society and in the constitution of a social being. Then, as a corollary of the first move, he proposed a delimitation of imitation in the domain of arts. Burke argued that imitation subsists only in those instances where the object imitated by the poet or the painter was such that one had “no desire of seeing in the reality.” [Ibid., 63-64] On the other hand, when the object of art elicited a contrary desire, then it was the case that “…the power of the poem or picture [owed more] to the nature of the thing itself, than to the mere effect of imitation, or to a consideration of the skill of the imitator, however excellent.” [Ibid., 64]
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force of a ‘single’ and simultaneous impression upon the senses. Instead, Burke reasoned,
drawing on an example from architecture to posit that it was successive exposure and impression
that generate the sense of the sublime in the perceiving subject:
[In] a colonnade of uniform pillars planted in a right line ... the rays from the first round pillar will cause in the eye a vibration of that species; an image of the pillar itself. The pillar immediately succeeding increases it; that which follows renews and enforces the impression; each in its order as it succeeds, repeats impulse after impulse, and stroke after stroke, until the eye long exercised in one particular way cannot lose that object immediately; and. being violently roused by this continued agitation, it presents the mind with a grand or sublime conception.109
Thus we see, that Burke firmly advocates rethinking the primacy accorded to the power of “one
impulse” in production of the sublime, and argue out a case for “a succession of similar
impulses” as its proper source.
Though efforts, such as Burke’s, to reevaluate received aesthetic categories and concepts
are increasingly visible in England from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, it is William Jones,
perhaps more than any other English aesthetic theorist prior to him, who pushes this critical
direction to its logical extreme, and posits a break with the dominant aesthetic ideology of the
time, particularly on the issue of imitation.110 “[W]hatever be said of painting,” Jones
unequivocally avers in his tract on aesthetics, ideologically rephrasing Edmund Burke’s earlier
observations: “it is probable that poetry and musick had a nobler origin [than in imitation]….”111
In what is an early prefiguration of expressionism, Jones offers the view that the arts, in the first
instance, are expressions of “human passions,”112 reasoning analogically that “A man who is
109 Ibid., 175. Also quoted in, Wallace, “Affective Values,” 310.
110 M.H. Abrams, in his path-breaking The Mirror and the Lamp, credits Jones as the “first writer in England to weave [prior] threads into an explicit and orderly reformulation of the nature and criteria of poetry and of the poetic genres.” [M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 87]
111 Emphases in original. William Jones, “Essay on the Arts,” 362.
112 Ibid., 363. It needs to be mentioned that as a concept and a period in the history of Western aesthetics, ‘expressionism’ is most strongly associated with the latter-nineteenth century artistic movement in Germany that accorded primacy to the
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really joyful or afflicted, cannot be said to imitate joy or affliction.”113 And here, in justifying the
negation of imitation in favor of expression, Jones’ immersion into Oriental studies—already a
decade-long in 1772—comes to good use. Mobilizing his knowledge of Perso-Arabic aesthetics
to exemplify the generation of aesthetic affect that circumvents imitation, Jones writes:
[I]n some Mahometan [sic] nations[,] where sculpture and painting are forbidden by the laws, where dramatick poetry of every sort is wholly unknown, yet…the pleasing arts, of expressing the passions, in verse, and of enforcing that expression by melody, are cultivated to a degree of enthusiasm. 114
Going further on the issue of imitation, and almost echoing Burke adverbatim, Jones reckons that
even when one is deeply moved by an art deemed fundamentally imitative, such as painting, the
source of the affect lies not in imitation but “arises…from sympathy[,]” which is correspondence
of passions and emotions rather than projection of pure resemblance.115
Let us now turn our attention from the critique of imitation to its implication on the
ranking of the hierarchy of the arts. The new inter-art hierarchy that comes into being through
labors such as Jones’ is apparent in the afore-quoted passages from his “Essay on the Arts.” As a
consequence of the devaluation of imitation, painting—the imitative art par excellence—and the
mode of its aesthesis—instantaneous revelation of the whole—from being assigned the highest
value during the high-noon of neoclassicism gets relegated below both poetry and music in the
aesthetic order championed by the likes of Jones. Relatedly, the Longinian idea of the sublime
play of emotions and struggle of the soul over and above any imperative to faithfully imitate objective nature and man therein. For more on the topic, see for example, R. S. Furness, Expressionism (London: Methuen and Company Ltd., 1973).
113 William Jones, “Essay on the Arts,” 373. It should be mentioned here, as a point of clarification, that Jones’ argument in favor of expression over imitation is not so much to entirely deny the latter any function in the aesthetic process as it is so say that the “greatest effect” in art owes not to imitation—a point uncritically perpetuated since Aristotle—but to expression. [Ibid., 362]
114 Ibid., 362; emphases in original. For other instances of Jones’ sharp criticism of the idea that imitation is the aesthetic foundation for all arts, see, Ibid., 373-376.
115 Ibid., 375.
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that subsisted on the exaltation of pictoriality, gives way to the notion of sublime, forwarded by
Burke, that is indexed to “successive impressions” over time—the mode of affectation that is formally advantageous to poetry and music—rather than simultaneous expression.116 In the process is cleaved the ‘sisterhood’ of painting and poetry forged by Jones’ neoclassical predecessors. Poetry, in this scheme of things, emerges unrivalled amongst the arts, particularly as it inheres in the lyric-form.117 Then follows music, on the basis that the “…principal sources
of poetry…[are] of music also[.]”118 The confluence of the two arts is now posited as that which possesses the highest capacity to stir the passions. Citing Sappho’s ode as a classic articulation of such confluence, Jones deposes:
[I]f the…ode, with all its natural accents, were expressed in a musical voice…if it were sung in due time and measure, in a simple and pleasing tune, that added force to the words without stifling them, it would then be pure and original music; not merely soothing to the ear, but affecting to the heart; not an imitation of nature, but the voice of nature herself. 119
Though the elevation of lyric-poetry in Jones at the first glance appears to be a continuation of the trend set in motion by the likes of Dryden and Pope, it needs to be pointed out that Jones’ valorization of the same poetics form results from a clear discursive break. In the first third of the eighteenth century, both poetry and music, and their concomitant positions in the inter-art hierarchy, were ideologically structured by the Horatian dictum, ut pictura poesis. But in the last third, as we have seen, the ‘sisterhood’ of poetry and painting, and the principle of imitation on which it was founded, is set to decay by the likes of Burke and Jones. In a reworked kinship freed of any determination owing to painting and pictoriality, Jones’ essay presents
116 For a detailed treatment of this see, Jackson, “Affective Values.”
117 M.H. Abrams argues that with Jones, the lyric is posited as a “prototype for poetry as a whole.” [Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 87]
118 Jones, “Essay on the Arts,” 366.
119 Ibid., 368.
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poetry and music as the new ‘sister’ arts, with the former ensconced as the elder sibling. This
new juxtaposition is explained in the following terms by its architect: “musick…is poetry
dressed to advantage,” and “…true musick [is] no more than poetry, delivered in a succession of
harmonious sounds, so disposed as to please the ear.”120
To summarize the argument, then: if ut pictura poesis from Horace’s Ars Poetica conveyed in an idiomatic form the crux of English neoclassical aesthetics of the early eighteenth century, a similar phrasing for the proto-Romantic, expressionistic aesthetic advanced by Jones in the last-third of the same century would read, in the strict sense: ut poesis musica—as in
poetry, so in music;121 or, as it is usually coded more loosely in extant scholarship, to make it
formally accord with the original Horatian expression: ut musica poesis—as in music, so in
poetry. And this movement—from the classical Horatian dictum and its neoclassical recovery in
the late-seventeenth/early-eighteenth century to the latter-eighteenth century rearrangement of
‘sister’ arts, based on a new inter-art hierarchy—I would like to suggest, was constitutive in
creating the historical condition of possibility for humanistic music scholarship to take off in
England. Coupling of music with poetry at the top of inter-art hierarchy elevated the former,
largely muted if not absent in English aesthetic thought prior to the second-half of the eighteenth
century, to the forefront of the discourse. It is no coincidence that serious music scholarship
takes off in England precisely around this time, under the initiative of both amateur scholars like
John Holden and John Hawkins, and specialists like the pioneering Charles Burney. And it is this
120 Ibid., 371.
121 For more on ut poesis musica, see, Gerard Genette, Essays in Aesthetics, trans. Dorit Cohn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), 100; Gerard G. LeCoat, “Aspects of the Theory of Expression in the Baroque Age,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 5, no. 2 (1971-1972): 216, 221.
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epistemic conjuncture that William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” both belongs
to and animates.
Dignifying Man in Nature and Melody: The Influence of Rousseau on Jones
If William Jones’ radicalization in “Essay on the Arts” of Edmund Burke’s earlier arguments concerning the ‘sublime,’ and the limits of the imitation-principle constitutes, as I have argued
above, the prior aesthetico-theoretical grounds of the “Musical Modes” then another towering
figure of eighteenth century European thought—indeed, of European Enlightenment, with which
he shared an agonistic bind—leaves his mark on the latter text as well. And this figure is Jean-
Jacques Rousseau.
Scholars commenting on Jones’ relation to Rousseau have perhaps tended to undervalue his influence on the great Orientalist, pointing out that Jones upon reading his works “found them “wonderfully absurd.”122 However, in light of the “Musical Modes,” it appears that this
evaluation, made in 1772123—the same year that Jones published “Essay on the Arts,” must have
undergone some change in the twenty years that separate the two essays. For in the later tract,
Jones writes of Rousseau in lambent terms:
For all that is known concerning the music of Greece, let me refer those who have no inclination to read the dry works of the Greeks themselves, to…the Dictionary of Music by Rousseau, whose pen, formed to elucidate all the arts, had the property of spreading light before it on the darkest subjects, as if he had written with phosphorus on the sides of a cavern[.] 124
Though here Jones declares Rousseau’s contribution only with specific regard to Greek
music, this acknowledgement, by implication, exceeds the ambit of its immediate reference,
particularly when one considers the larger Orientalist thesis on the ancient homology of Indo-
122 William Jones quoted in S. N. Mukherjee, William Jones, 42.
123 Ibid., 155; Fn. 8 to p. 42.
124 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 61-62.
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European languages, indeed, cultures. As A. Fox-Strangways would note more than a century down the line from Jones, articulating this homology apropos of music in clear terms: “The study of Indian music is of interest to all those who care for song, and of special interest to those who have studied the early stages of song in medieval Europe or ancient Greece.”125 To wit, this comparative frame—placing the “musical modes of the Hindoos” alongside Greek modes in order to make sense of the former—is apparent throughout the “Musical Modes.” Thus, it can be said that Jones’ understanding of Indian music through this schema is inflected by his reading of
Rousseau’s thoughts on Greek music. My intention in this section, however, is not to trace the specific instances of this inflection. It is, rather, to reveal a deeper imprint of this maverick thinker on the “Musical Modes.” Indeed, I will argue here that Rousseau’s interventions earlier in the eighteenth century constitute yet another element in the epistemic conditions of possibility for Jones’ essay. If for John Hawkins, as we saw in the opening section of this chapter, it was the non-Western peoples’ putative reliance on “simple dictates of nature” instead of scientific reason that justified the occlusion of their musics from his General History, then it is Jones’
Rousseauvian affinities that, I contend, both justified and dignified his own study of a musical system (explicitly deemed by him to be) similarly reliant on nature. And in discussing this, the paradoxical nature of Jones’ epistemic location will become apparent once again.
As S. N. Mukherjee points out, though Jones valued “classical learning and his sympathies were with the men of Reason[,]” though he was convinced that the “real source of human happiness and prosperity was in commerce and labour[,]…yet in him there was a tendency to dislike ‘civilization,’ to love the ‘primitive,’ and the ‘natural.’”126 It is for
125 A. H. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindustan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), v. 126 Mukherjee, Sir William Jones, 111-112.
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understanding this proto-Romantic aspect of Jones’ thought that Rousseau is crucial. For it was
he, more than the other eighteenth century philosophes, such as Voltaire and Diderot, who were
also looking East in order to understand the Western Self and its limits,127 that provided the
philosophical basis for such a position.
As is well known, Rousseau, in the first of his two famous discourses, the Discourse on
the Sciences and Arts [1750], had launched a scathing attack on the Enlightenment project, to
which he was previously aligned, in toto. He argued that subjecting everything under the cold
light of reason and the thirst for knowledge that the purveyors of Enlightenment championed had
lapsed into solipsism, “divorced from the real needs of society and citizens.”128 This is the
Rousseau that Jones, the “Whig radical” and indefatigable pursuant of rational enquiry, would have found unengaging and, as he put it, “absurd.” But the same cannot be said for Rousseau’s writings on music, and his second discourse, published as the Discourse on the Origin and
Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind [1754]—a text enshrined as foundational in the genealogy of Romanticism. These writings, I will argue through selective elaborations below, leave a long shadow on Jones’ “Musical Modes.”
Unleashing a fierce polemic, aimed at eviscerating Enlightenment Europe’s pride in its civilizational advancement and rational temper in the face of entrenched social inequality,
Rousseau contends in his second discourse that such advancement had resulted in denuding human beings of their happiness and moral virtue and creating a deeply hierarchized society. To frame his argument, he elaborates a speculative anthropology, contrasting the object of his critique, the European, “civilized man” in a “state of society” and the “savage man” in a “state of
127 For details, see, Ibid., 5-16; . A. H. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindustan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), v.
128 Susan Dunn, “Introduction: Rousseau’s Political Triptych,” in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 3.
149 nature.”129 The latter, despite being in a lesser state of civilizational development, was nonetheless more immanently related to nature, characteristically reflecting, in an unmediated manner, the impingement of physical geography in which he was located and its climatic patterns. The savage man was independent of any external measures for securing his own happiness, and, therefore, enjoyed a greater sense of natural freedom.130 Beginning with this,
Rousseau then charts the stagist d/evolution of human society, identifying the emergence of industry, private property-based social organization and concomitant legal structure as the beginning of human abasement. Rousseau extends this line of thought into some geo- civilizational essentialisms:
I would observe, that, in general, the inhabitants of the north are more industrious than those of the south, because they can less do without industry; as if nature thus meant to make all things equal, by giving to the mind that fertility she has denied to the soil.131
The non-European world, thus, appeared in Rousseau’s discourse on inequality as a living history of Europe’s own past, of what it left behind as its society developed from the “pure state of nature.”
While Jones took care to obviate the extremes that Rousseau’s thought navigates, one can reasonably speculate that he would have found the latter’s idea of “simple” concordance of man and nature in “what must have been the happiest and most durable epoch”132 in human history—
129 For details, see, Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind” in Ibid., 69-148. As examples of “savage man” in his own time, he pointed to the “Orinoco Indians” of America, [Rousseau, Ibid., 96] the “Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope,” [Ibid., 95] and the “Caribbeans,” who he considered to have “deviated least from the state of nature.” [Ibid., 110]. Also, It also needs to be mentioned that the shorthand usually used to convey Rousseau’s formulation in this discourse, the ‘noble savage,’ was never actually used by him and is an accretion from other sources. [Robert Bellah, “Rousseau on Society and the Individual” in Ibid., 271.
130 It is from this state that the progressive descent into unfreedom and inequality begins. Thus, Rousseau forwards the point that if humans were ‘naturally’ equal to begin with then it must be society that was to blame for its current state. [Dunn, Ibid. 6]
131 Ibid., 97.
132 Ibid., 119.
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the period “between the indolence of the primitive state, and the petulant activity of self-
love”133—an attractive justificatory trope for his own Orientalist enquiries. In fact, he found
much of Oriental arts to be an exemplifying proof of this trope, from the “pastoral poetry” of
Yemeni Arabs134 to the music of the “Hindoos.” As regards the latter, Jones’ would write:
Whether it had occurred to the Hindoo musicians, that the velocity of slowness of sounds must depend, in a certain ratio, upon the rarefaction and condensation of the air, so that their motion must be quicker in summer than in spring or autumn, I cannot assure myself; but I am persuaded that their primary modes, in the system ascribed to Pavana, were first arranged according to the number of Indian Seasons. [D]evotion comes also to the age of music, and all the powers of nature, which are allegorically worshipped as gods and goddesses on their several holidays, contribute to the influence of song on minds naturally susceptible of religious emotions.135
In this and other instances scattered throughout in the “Musical Modes,” Jones appears as adding
ballast to the Rousseavian thesis that man was happier in a state of nature, and only such a
congruity could produce a musical system that cared less for scientific reason as its basis, and
produced music which, reflectively, was a “happy and beautiful contrivance.”
The second register on which Rousseau assumes importance in the context of William
Jones’ study of Indian music pertains to what over time has come to be identified as the
fundamental difference between (post-medieval) European art music and its subcontinental counterpart. The latter is essentially melodic—based on succession of related notes that form a united whole; and the former, essentially harmonic—based on “simultaneous sounds (chords)”
that are “joined with respect to their architectonic, melodic, and rhythmic values and their
significance.”136
133 Ibid.
134 For details, see, William Jones, “An Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations” in Jones, The Works, 10: 329- 360.
135 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 73; emphases added.
136 Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony (Berkeley: California University Press, 1983), 13.
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Though efforts at combining musical sounds had been afoot in the West since the tenth
century through experiments in discant, part-singing, counterpoint and polyphony, it was only in the eighteenth century that principles of harmony acquired extensive and sophisticated theorization.137 At the vanguard of this development was the theorist and composer Jean-
Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), who authored a series of tomes on the subject. Importantly,
Rameau, the most preeminent music scholar of the times, enshrined harmony as the musical
hallmark of West’s civilizational progress, as the proper reflection in music of the reason and
intellection signifying the Enlightenment ethos. “Melody arises from harmony[,]” Rameau
declared,138 arguing that the former needed “to be put in its place. [For] [o]ur sensitiveness to
[melody] comes early and it is a mark of an untrained mind to go no further…[.]”139 Thus, melody came to be decisively subordinated to harmony. An important consequence of this was the devaluing of the song—the repository of melody and its conjunction with lyric—and the theoretically validated rise of instrumental music.140
As is well known in the annals of Western music history, Rousseau, a proponent of
Rameau’s music theory when he arrived in Paris in 1741, would thereafter turn famously against it. The ensuing Rameau-Rousseau controversy is one of the most important events in the world
of eighteenth century European music discourse, resulting in a string of publications with each
defending their own positions and critiquing the other’s. Delving into this in any appreciable
detail is beyond the remit of our current concern. Relevant, rather, is a fundamental issue in the
137 For details on the history of harmony in Western music, see, Chas Macpherson and H. Ernest Young, Short History of Harmony and the Living Touch in Music and Education (Montana: Kessinger Publications, 2003), 15-80.
138 Jean-Philippe Rameau, quoted in Cuthbert Girdlestone, Jean-Philippe Rameau: His Life and Work (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 535.
139 Ibid.
140 For details, see, Ibid., 531-535.
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discord: the primacy that Rameau accorded to harmony over melody. Dismissing this notion,
writes Rousseau in On the Principle of Melody, or Response to the “Errors on Music” [1755]—
his reply to Rameau’s critique of his entry on music in the famous Encyclopedia brought out by
the philosophes of the Enlightenment:
… Melody or song, a pure work of nature, does not owe, either among the learned or amongthe ignorant, its origin to harmony, a work and production of art, which serves as the evidence for a beautiful song and not its source and whose most noble function is that of setting it off to advantage.141
He then goes on to say:
[I]f the Musician thinks only of his harmony, if he neglects the essential part, which is the melody, in order to chase after chords and filling it out, he will produce a great deal of noise and little effect, and his deafening Music will give much more pain to the head than emotion to the heart.142
This argument, that melody constitutes the essence of music, and therefore, music which displayed greater melodic refinement is correspondingly of a superior kind, is presented and developed by Rousseau in all of his other writings on music leading up to his major works on the subject, Dictionary of Music [1768], and the Essay on the Origin of Languages: In Which
Melody and Musical Imitation are Treated (posthumously published in 1781).
The implication of Rousseau’s defense of melody faced with the ascendance of harmony in European art music on William Jones’ study of Indian music ought not to be too opaque in light of the above discussion. One particular passage in the “Musical Modes” is particularly evocative of the Rousseauvian influence on Jones as it brings together all the elements that have been discussed above. “It is obvious,” he writes,
that I have not been speaking of a modulation regulated by harmony, with which the Hindoos, I believe, were unacquainted; though, like the Greeks, they distinguish the consonant and dissonant sounds; I mean only such a transition from one series of notes to another, as we see described by the Greek musicians, who were ignorant of harmony in the modern sense of the word, and,
141 Rousseau, “On the Principle of Melody, or Response to the ‘Errors on Music,’” in Roussaeu, Essay On the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, ed. John T. Scott (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), 260.
142 Ibid., 269.
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perhaps, if they had known it ever so perfectly, would have applied it solely to the support of melody, which alone speaks the language of passion and sentiment.143
That music in India was essentially melodic must have been immediately evident to Jones
upon his exposure to it, as would have been the fact that melody itself had already achieved a
high degree of refinement in its constitution, composition, and elaboration. But this did not lead
him, like Rousseau, to conclude that Indian music, therefore, was superior to its European
counterpart. Instead, Jones would reiterate elsewhere in the “Musical Modes” that
“…Hindoos…seem ignorant of our complicated harmony[.]” In this articulation, the absence of harmony in “Hindoo” music is phrased as a lack. And this again points to the fact that Jones was not interested in following Rousseau to the extremes of the latter’s thought. Rather, and this is the argument I would like to make at the end of the above discussion, he drew substantively but selectively on this stalwart of eighteenth century European thought, but only to the extent that this dignified and ennobled his own enquiry in both ideological and methodological terms.
It is suggestive that Jones chose to acknowledge Rousseau in the “Musical Modes” and not Jean-Philippe Rameau, who definitely enjoyed greater credibility as a music scholar in
eighteenth century Europe than his famous opponent. Indeed, Rameau’s emphasis on harmony as
an index of musico-cultural evolution would not have allowed Jones to draft him into study in a
favorable light a music that was entirely melodic in its constitution. Relatedly, neither would
Rameau have allowed Jones a comfortable framing of the comparative schema with ancient
Greek music that, in keeping with the general thrust of Orientalist scholarship, appears so
prominently throughout the “Musical Modes.” Rameau did not have much patience for
music/theory of the ancient Greeks, in which, he contended, the “ear” did not accord with
143 Jones, “Musical Modes,” 85
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“nature” and demonstrated “the false relations of which all ancients systems are made up.”144 It was only Rousseau amongst all eighteenth century European thinkers who could provide a philosophical basis for the chief elements that Jones would have bear upon his study on
“Hindoo” music: melody, and the simple, happy concordance of man and nature in the ancient past.
One, then, wonders why Rousseau does not figure more prominently in Jones’ writings on aesthetics in general, not just the “Musical Modes.” The reason for this perhaps lies in a critical, even irreconcilable difference in their understanding of aesthetics. If, as we have seen in the previous section, Jones was one of the early champions of ‘expression’ as the motive principle of aesthetics, then Rousseau never questioned the primacy of ‘imitation’ in the same process. Also, contra Jones, and a la da Vinci, it is painting, not poetry, to which music is deemed a fraternal art-form by Rousseau. Enunciating this relation and its foundation in what he thought is the arche of aesthetics, he writes:
As painting is…not the art of combining colors in a way pleasing to the sight, no more is music the art of combining sounds in a way pleasing to the ear. If there were nothing but this in them, they would both be counted among the ranks of the natural sciences, and not the fine arts. It is imitation alone that elevates them to that rank.145
This formulation, it ought to be evident in the light of the discussion in the previous section, contravenes the basic precepts of the aesthetic paradigm Jones articulates in his “Essay on the Arts.” Hence, Jones’ appropriation of Rousseau remains selective and largely subliminal while being at the same time essential to his essay on “Hindoo” music. In sum, Rousseau’s thought can be said to have appealed differently to the two paradoxical aspects bound together in
144 Jean-Philippe Rameau quoted in Girdlestone, Rameau, 525.
145 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages: In Which Melody and Musical Imitation are Treated” in Rousseau, Essay On the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, ed. John T. Scott ( Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998), 321.
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Jones’ own thinking. The former’s all-encompassing critique of the Enlightenment did not find an active pursuant in Jones; but his compassionate reading of man in a “state of nature” in the ancient past—conceived as a critique of European civil society, his observations on melody
emanating from such a state leave, as I have attempted to show in and through the instance of
“Musical Modes,” their indelible mark on Jones.
Conclusion
My intention in this chapter has been to subject William Jones’ “On the Musical Mode of the
Hindoos” to a Foucault-inspired, archaeological method of reading, such that its epistemic
foundation—the field of ideas that made this article of late-eighteenth century music scholarship
possible in the first place—is revealed. Operationalizing this archaeological treatment, I have
proceeded through isolating four constitutive ‘layers’ in the essay and then analyzing each layer
through the specific history of ideas that it animates. Thus, the first layer addressed the issue at
the highest level of abstraction: the emergence of Music as a universal concept-category of
knowledge in the West during the late-eighteenth century. And it is apropos of this that my
specific dependence on Foucault’s on Order of Things is the most perspicuous. Selectively following his grand exposition of the archaeological method applied to the discourse of human sciences, I argued that Music’s categorical appearance at the late-eighteenth century conjuncture be considered another positivity alongside the three fundamental ones that, according to
Foucault, marks the modern epoch. The logic behind setting up the argument thus was/is to view the “Musical Modes” and its author as belonging to the same (musical) episteme as contemporaneous European scholars of music who held explicitly ethnocentric opinions, and not as a pioneering ethnomusicologist that current research portrays Jones to be through historicist
156 readings of the “Musical Modes.” If this layer formed the meta-theoretical level—in that, the attending analysis was not dependent on the text at hand for its arguments—then the subsequent three were all read off of it.
Hence, the second layer addressed an epistemological problematic in the “Musical
Modes” that was laid out elaborately by its author: how is knowledge of music to be had: through scientific analysis of the sound phenomenon? Or, is it to be had through aesthetic analysis that is proper to a practical art and its systemic, formal precepts? In historically tracing this problematic, I argued that it was a symptom of the musical episteme that William Jones belonged to, where the claim made by Natural Philosophy on musical knowledge was still insistent enough to necessitate a subject of this episteme to expressively address it, even if the actual intention was to move away from a scientific analysis. The third layer of the archaeological reading in this chapter pertains precisely to this intention in Jones, for he actually did discourse on “Hindoo” music as an art, which, in turn, opened up a set of epistemological issues entirely its own. This I have addressed through an analysis of the changes in the inter-art hierarchy at certain critical historical moments in the Western, specifically English, aesthetic thought. My argument here was that the reconstitution of this hierarchy that installed poetry and music at its head as the ‘sister arts,’ coupled with the emergent critique of imitation as the foundational principle of the aesthetic process during the late-eighteenth century created the condition of possibility for an effort such as Jones to come to fruition. The last layer brought to the fore Jones’ indebtedness to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which allowed him to dignify the object of his enquiry, “Hindoo” music, at a time when savants of the European Enlightenment had condemned melody—the lifeblood of music in the subcontinent—as decidedly subordinate to music based on harmony.
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Importantly, analysis of each of the three layers delineated above points to the paradoxical nature of the episteme of which Jones was a subject, making him, therefore, a transitional figure. In the first case, we find Jones caught between a scienticist and an aestheticist approach to musical knowledge; in the second, we find both elements of a crepuscular neoclassicism and incipient Romanticism present in Jones’ musical thought without it identifying completely with either; in the third case, we discern strong Rousseauvian affinities in his essay, despite him having declared Rousseau’s thought to be absurd elsewhere, particularly in his navigation of an essentially melodic form of music at a time when harmony was being championed in Europe as it musico-civilization acme.
To conclude: through the analyses in this chapter and the previous one, I have attempted to unearth in detail the ideological and philosophical foundations of Orientalist music discourse as instantiated in its foundational text—William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos.”
Indeed, whatever its musicological merit, this little disquisition would open up subsequent, and more rounded, studies of Indian music by Westerners. If this chapter depended on an archaeological reading of this pivotal text to demarcate and analyze its epistemic address in the
West, then the previous one looked at the historical process of its production and publication in the colony, as well as the mechanics of power /knowledge inhering in it. Through them, I have tried to capture the totality of the “Musical Modes” as a knowledge formation—the constellation of thought that it activates when one looks West, and the field that it opens for modern discourse on Indian music. In the chapter that now follows—the one that will conclude Part I of this dissertation—we will return to the specificity of the colonial encounter in late-eighteenth century
India once again. But there, we will leave our concerns with musical knowledge behind and look,
158 instead, at musical subjectivity through the lens of a subject whose production was organic to the colonial encounter—the Anglo-Indian.
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Chapter 3
When Sang the Hybrid Muse: The Anglo Indian Musical Subject and ‘Fusion’ Music in Late-Eighteenth Century India
It is a popular perception—reiterated by the media, national/global popular cultures and cultural histories—that ‘Indian fusion music’ originated in the mid-1960s. The chronological slotting of the ‘origin’ of this genre is usually indexed to Pandit Ravi Shankar’s collaborations with the late western classical violinist, Yehudi Menuhin. The appearance of their musical labors as a commodity in the global music market was solemnized by the multinational music label HMV-
EMI that called its debut release of Shankar and Menuhin’s collaborative efforts in 1966, West
Meets East. The epochal newness suggested by this descriptive moniker is apparent. Shankar and
Menuhin feature not only as musical referents but as civilizational metaphors for East and West respectively. The synergic outcome of their efforts has since then been hailed as the provenance of a ‘new’ musical genre, one that defies smooth identification with either of the two quite different musical systems that combined to birth it: ‘Indian’ and ‘Western.’ And on international concert stages, vinyl discs and ferric-oxide tapes, the two did meet.1 In fact, it is only in the late
1960s that one can discern the maiden appearance of ‘Indian fusion music’ in music discourse as a classificatory rubric, as a musical genre. And one can derive a fair sense of the standard narrative that circulates from the following quote from the official website of University of
California at Los Angeles on the topic:
The history of collaboration between Indian and Western musicians dates to the 1960s, when Ravi Shankar first started playing alongside Western musicians. Ravi Shankar was present at the music extravaganza known as "Woodstock". In subsequent years, the sarod maestro, Ali Akbar Khan, and the tabla maestro, Alla Rakha, the father of Zakir Hussain, also worked with Western
1 Crucial in this matrix was the role played by the culture industry surrounding youth-based popular cultures in the West, particularly the recorded music aspect of it. Experimentations with musical forms, in the last instance at least, had to be deemed commercially viable by record company mandarins, for it to enjoy any circulation outside the immediate sphere of its performance.
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musicians. Other successful collaborations over the years have been between Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, Ustad Sultan Khan (on the sarangi) and Marco Guinar (on the Spanish guitar), and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Ry Cooder.2
Put in formal terms, the musically path-breaking experiments of Shankar and Menuhin
belonged to a conscious effort, blessed by the multinationally oligarchic recording industry, to
sublate a remarkably resilient dichotomy, that between harmonic music and melodic music.
Discursively posited first, not surprisingly, in Orientalist scholarship,3 and like other dualities
thrown up by modern colonial episteme, harmony/melody distinction too was animated in
hierarchy. Western harmonic music was what its melodic Eastern counterpart could never
‘become’ despite being homologous.4 Today, however, politically sanitized of its colonial
heritage, the difference between the two musical systems is seldom articulated in terms of an
essential ‘lack’ on the part of Indian music. Nevertheless, the harmony/melody dichotomy still
remains a robust analytic for authenticating Indian music vis-à-vis that of the West, and vice
versa.
2 www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Culture/Music/fusion.html, accessed on July 31, 2006.
3 It needs to be mentioned, however, that William Jones did not make harmony/melody an explicit analytic in On the Musical Modes of the Hindus, though its subtextual presence can be discerned all through it. As I have shown in the previous chapter, in the context of tracing Jones’ debt to Rousseau, Jones’ dignification of ‘melody’ was an apparent gesture to the harmony/melody duality and the cultural politics around it, even though he did not put it forth explicitly in his text. There is only one instance in it where he comes the closest to doing so, when, explaining scale- intervals of “Hindoo” music, he says: “Hindoos…seem ignorant of our complicated harmony.” [William Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” Asiatick Researches: Or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal For Inquiring Into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature of Asia 3 (1792): 60] The harmony/melody analytic, to the best of my knowledge, was staged in its proper discursive sense first by N. Augustus Willard in his William Jones in 1834 A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan. [“A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan, Comprising a Detail of the Ancient Theory and Modern Practice (1834),” in Hindu Music From Various Authors…in Two Parts, ed. and comp. Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1-122 (Calcutta: Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1882), 54-63]
4 This, as is well known, was the ideological foundation of Orientalist scholarship informing philological endeavors to demonstrate the putative homology between Sanskrit and Latin, between Indian music and Western music, etc. This was elevated to the status of an axiom in the highest abstraction: the common provenance of Indo-European civilizations.
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The present study too concerns the history of musical ‘fusion’ in India. It is, however,
framed against the originary narrative that attends to most discussions of Indian fusion music, of
which the quote above is an example. The sedimentation of such discourses subjects to historical
erasure other historical possibilities of Indian and Western musicians coming together to produce
a hybrid—‘fusion’—form of music prior to 1960s. Did two centuries of British colonial rule in
the subcontinent engender no attempts at all to ‘fuse’ harmonic and melodic forms?
There exists considerable evidence that this indeed was not the case. Latter-nineteenth
century onwards examples abound of conscious attempts to harmonize Indian melodies in
orchestral set-ups featuring both Indian and western musical instruments. As early as the late-
1860s/early-1870s, Raja Sourindramohun Tagore, the chief protagonist of Chapter 5 of this
dissertation, and his mentor Kshetramohan Goswami, had organized an ‘Indian’ orchestra and set
a range of songs based on Indian ragas to western staff notation, to make them amenable to band
and orchestral performances.5 Sourindramohan’s more illustrious Jorasanko relative,
Rabindranath Tagore, too, experimented with Indian melodies in a harmonic context, though with not entirely satisfactory outcomes. To quote Arnold Bake, the renowned folklorist/musicologist who knew Rabindranath personally:
Once or twice he tried harmony, but it was too strange to him and he abandoned it altogether. He did, however, come to the conclusion that some kind of heterophony within the boundaries of a given raga—but only in a few chosen ones—would not clash with the spirit of Indian music. He discussed the possibility of having a choir divided into two parts, one singing the refrain built upon prominent notes of the chosen mode, against the other continuing the development of the melodic line…6
5 See for example: Sourindro Mohun Tagore, The Musical Scales of the Hindus: With Remarks on the Applicability of Harmony to Hindu Music (1884; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1979).
6 Arnold Bake, “The Impact of Western Music on the Indian Musical System,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 5 (1953): 59.
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The impetus to include Indian and western elements in the same musical script gathered further steam during the turn of twentieth century. Like elsewhere, the corporate advent of mechanical technologies of art reproduction and mediation in India, such as the gramophone and cinema in the first decade of the new century,7 followed by radio in 1936, revolutionized musical performance, production, mediation, and dissemination. It is not possible to discuss this history and its socio-aesthetic implications on native musical culture in any appreciable detail in the context of this chapter. Pertinent here is the fact that these technologies increased the exposure to western music on a quotidian level manifold for large sections of the urban upper/middle classes.
This was bound to favorably impact the native practice of western music.
Not surprisingly, as the HMV catalogs for Bengali music from around 1930s onwards reveal, discs of Indian ragas played by native musicians in an orchestral set-up, or, on quintessentially harmonic western instruments like the piano, the organ, and the harmonium, were being released frequently under the category jantrasangeet (instrumental music). Such attempts by native musicians to combine two different systems of music theory and practice together in a single musical text reflect, among other things, the solidification of a new professional class of native musicians conversant in western musical idioms and instruments. To even undertake such musical projects would require a general awareness on the part of the native musicians of the constitutive difference between Indian and Western systems—‘difference’ posited in formal discourse as a dichotomy: harmony/melody. Even mimetic reproduction of western music necessitated acquired skills on musical instruments that were organic to a
7 For details on the history of the gramophone in India, see, Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); ------, “Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 2 (1993): 31-53. For details on the history of Indian cinema, see, Ashish Rajdhyaksha and Paul Willemen, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
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different musical tradition altogether. Only then could such differences be consciously overcome
through certain musical maneuvers. In other words, to be able to bring the two independent
systems of music into conversation within a single musical piece, the musicians had to be, at
least mimetically, bi-musical; conscious of the two different musical languages. The following example bears out this proposition.
In July 1938, the then-Director of European Music, All India Radio, Delhi, John Foulds, organized an “East and West Concert” in the city. The performing orchestra featured within itself
a western and an Indian section. Reviewing the occasion, Foulds wrote to the editor of the
journal The Musical Times:
Sir,—your readers may be interested to hear of a musical experiment which reached fruition recently in an Indo-European orchestral concert given in Delhi… …Europeans dislike Indian music; the Indian quite as cordially dislike and despise the ‘inordinately complicated cacophony’ which we [Westerners] call music. Exceptions are extremely rare—perhaps more so on the European side. … …I arranged the Indo-European concert as an experiment in bridging the gulf. 8
Foulds, however, did not think much of the native experiments with efforts to combine Indian
and western music. He regretfully notes:
[O]wing to the impact of Western music in India through radio, films, and gramophone…Indian professional musicians are importing just these methods to be up to date and are plastering Occidental harmonies, jazz rhythms, and mongrel orchestration upon a basis of their own beautiful melodic, subtly rhythmic and exotic instrumental art.9
Prescient of events to take place three decades down the line with the Shankar-Menuhin
collaboration, Foulds too, in the late-1930s, was interested in conscious, authentic, not
“mongrel” ‘fusion’ music where the two different musical languages would be intentionally and apparently set in conversation. As a postscript by the editor of The Musical Times informs the readers: the program, among other interesting compositions, featured an “Indo-European
8 John Foulds, “An East and West Concert,” The Musical Times 79, no. 1146, (1938): 623.
9 Ibid.
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March…in which Eastern and Western characteristics were combined and contrasted…Two
Songs of East and West...[and] Final March for combined Indian and European [sections of the]
orchestra.”10 Here we see that Foulds too is acutely aware of the differences between harmonic western and melodic eastern music. For him the Indo-European concert he arranged was a
conscious and intentional overcoming of these differences, to the extent he made the Indian
musicians in the orchestra learn western staff notation. One thus finds that experiments with
hybridizing Indian and western music, to yield a fusion form that was neither entirely Indian nor
western, were being conducted in India since long prior to the 1960s.
The present work, however, while keeping this knowledge as reference, explores the
possibility of ‘fusion’ music in a different temporal context—the latter-eighteenth and early-
nineteenth centuries. Indeed, as we shall see, one finds evidence of musical forms from the
period that might have sounded structurally similar to what we call ‘fusion’ music today.
Searching for ‘fusion’ music in an even earlier epoch is not simply to locate similar
instances deeper in the past, and therefore further destabilize the extant originary narrative of this
kind of music by positing another one instead. Such endeavors, as recent critical historiographic
interventions warn us, are de facto liable to serve the hegemonic ideology of historicism; yet another exercise towards accumulation of ‘facts’ in order to fill out the linear space of “empty, homogeneous time.”11 Had this been the purpose here then the more definite evidence of ‘fusion’
music from the turn of the twentieth century, some of which we have encountered earlier, would
have sufficed better. A closer look at structurally similar musical forms in the late-
eighteenth/early-nineteenth centuries is, however, worthwhile on the grounds that the
10 Ibid.
11 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schoken Books 1968), 262-263.
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harmony/melody dichotomy had not yet congealed discursively; it had not yet become reified.12
What, then, was the possibility of making music that was neither Indian nor European, but both,
in this context?
I have suggested before that the late-nineteenth /early-twentieth century experiments to
combine Indian and western idioms in the same musical text were founded on a conscious desire
to overcome the harmony/melody divide. This, however, could not have been the motive force
behind similar experiments a century before; Orientalism, the field of knowledge in which this
duality was hypostatized, was only an emergent discourse then. Hence, the urge or necessity of
overcoming this duality could not have actuated the experiments with ‘fusion’ music during the
late-eighteenth century in the same way that it did later.
But surely, it was apparent to the British that Indian music was primarily melodic,
different from European music. Crucially, however, this difference, as evidence shows, was just
being encountered in the course of very first substantive interactions between English musicians
and Indian musicians during the 1780s and ’90s. The formers’ attempt at transcribing Indian
songs is where the difficulty of accommodating the unique nuances of Indian melodies in a
western musical language first arises and is articulated.13 However, this articulation was still in
12 The discursive journey, as noted in the previous chapter, began with Jones. It was eminently reiterated next by Capt. N. Augutus Willard in 1834. Since then it has figured in all most all researches on Indian music in the colonial period. It figures prominently in C. R. Day, Fox-Strangways, et al. The dichotomy finds strong resonances in works by Indian scholars as well, in the colonial period, as well as after. For details see, Jones, “Musical Modes”; A. H. Fox Strangways, The Music of Hindustan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914); Willard, “A Treatise”; C. R. Day, The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern Indian and the Deccan (New York: Novello, Ewer, and Co., 1891); S. M. Tagore, Universal History of Music (1896; repr. Varanasi: The Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1963); Ashok, D. Ranade, Indology and Ethnomusicology: Contours of Indo-British Relationship (New Delhi: Promilla and Co. 1992); and Roger Ashton, ed., Music East and West (Bombay: Bhatkal Books International, 1966).
13 The product of such transcriptional efforts was called ‘Hindostannie airs’ (dealt with in details later in the chapter), the collection and performance of which was very much in fashion among the British at the time. Margaret Fowkes—a leading enthusiast in this—puts her difficulty at transcribing Indian songs thus:
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the immediate context of musical practice and experience. The harmony/melody dichotomy was
yet to acquire any appreciable degree of solidity as a universal truth-claim. It does so, as we have seen, only by the mid/late nineteenth century, through discursive and practical repetition,
mediated by institutions of formal knowledge production.
Strictly speaking, as with much of this dissertation, this chapter is not about music, per se. It is rather about the (material) conditions of musical practice, musical ideology, and, by
implication, musical subjectivity in late-eighteenth century India; and particularly so, that of the
Anglo-Indians.14 Hence, one of the major queries that I attempt to unpack: how do we understand musical labor of the British at a time when modes of European entertainment were yet to solidify on the subcontinent, and when their apparent raison d’etre in a land far-off from home was to reproduce the dominance of a nascent fiscal-military Company state and/or service personal profit? Second, I try to see how their socio-musical activities were crucial to the production of hybrid subjectivities of the Anglo-Indians; of which ‘fusion’ music was an expression and an instrument.
Through this I hope to show that it were the ideological imperatives of colonial rule post-
late-eighteenth century that put paid to the emergence of a hybrid form of music—acknowledged
and recognized as thus—in the subcontinent. As we shall see, there were significant experiments
with musical hybridity being conducted during the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The strings of the Guittar were all tuned in unison. Through the whole air they continue sweeping these strings which produces an uninterrupted Buz, resembling that of an insect which I have often met with. They merely sound the open strings of the instrument, so that you hear nothing but the key note through the whole air. By this account you see there is nothing like Harmony in their music. This Guittar in my opinion is a miserable accompaniment and I think that the Hindostannie band deserves a better. [Quoted in Ian Woodfield, “Collecting Indian Songs in Late 18th-Century Lucknow: Problems of Transcription,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 3, (1998): 74-75]
The “Guittar” in the above quote is clearly the tamboura—the drone instrument.
14 The term ‘Anglo-Indian’ is used in this chapter to refer to the British residents in the subcontinent during the eighteenth century, as it was back then. ‘Anglo-Indian’ is used interchangeably with ‘British’ in this paper.
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This, in spite of gradual separation of the social spheres of the two that began following the
measures implemented by Governor General Cornwallis in 1787. Throughout the latter-
eighteenth century, in keeping with the momentum initiated by the English Nabobs,15 and
furthered by the Orientalists, there were significant interactions between the British and their
native subjects. These were yet to be decisively mediated by a reified notion of all-encompassing
British supremacy vis-à-vis the peoples of the subcontinent—something that becomes
perspicuously evident by the time T. B. Macaulay pens his famous “Minutes” in 1835.
A necessary clarification: this paper, admittedly, is susceptible to charges of being
‘presentist;’ insofar as I take ‘fusion’ music to mean what it does in the present context and then
use it as lens to view hybrid musical texts in the late-eighteenth century. This, however, is a
historiographic strategy: by transposing a contemporary classification on the past, I try to suggest
that Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin (and the ensembles that followed) did not script an
entirely new ‘text’ in the Sixties. Its ‘originality’ has more to do with the reification of the
harmony/melody difference(s) in music discourse, cultural-politics of nationalism in the colonial
period, its post-colonial fruition and convergence with a globalizing capitalist culture industry.
Indeed, as Roland Barthes puts it:
Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text.16
15 The Nabobs constituted a nouveau riche class of British in India who made their fortunes, often unscrupulously, through new commercial possibilities presented by the expanding colonial Company-state. They modeled their lifestyles, particularly in terms of conspicuous consumption, after that of the indigenous land owning aristocracy under whose patronage nautch largely flourished before the British developed a taste for it. For details, see Percival Spear, The Nabobs: A Study in the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India (1932; repr. London and Dublin: Curzon Press, 1963), 37-38; Pran Nevile, Nautch Girls of India, New Delhi: Prakriti, 1996), 1-44.
16 Roland Barthes, “Theory of the Text,” in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 39.
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Western Music in the Early Colonial Social Formation: Beyond Historicism
Musical life in colonial society of eighteenth century India has been taken up in scholarship in
recent times, particularly by scholars engaged in the historicizing the ‘evolution’ of European
(art) music from a global perspective and musicological analyses of its developmental stages.17
Researching musical life in European social formations in the colonies provide them with this
‘global perspective.’ Factoring in the colonial context allows these accounts to chart the scope of
dispersal of European music, the changes that creep into this music owing to the difficulty of
maintaining European musical instruments in the colonies, the influence of the new musics on
the colonizer, and, sometimes, how the colonial encounter impacted ideologies of music in
England.
With regard to India, path-breaking in this small corpus are Ian Woodfield’s essays and
his monograph titled, The Music of the Raj.18 As will become apparent, this chapter depends
rather heavily on Woodfield’s scholarship for its factual information. Cobbling together a
breathtaking array of published and unpublished sources, ranging from personal correspondences
and diaries, inventory listings of musical instruments, to contemporary advertisements related to
music, etc., the author constructs a compelling and evidentially rich historical narrative of how
quotidian British musical life was (made) possible in late-eighteenth century India, the encounter
17 For example, see, T. Tolley, “Music in the Circle of Sir William Jones: A Contribution to the History of Haydn’s Early Reputation,” Music and Letters 73 (1992): 525-550; Owain Edwards, “Music in the Circle of Sir William Jones” in Music and Letters 74, no. 4 (Nov., 1993): 652-653; Ian Woodfield, “Haydn Symphonies in Calcutta,” Music and Letters75, no. 1 (1994): 141-143; Richard Leppert, “Music, Domestic Life, and Cultural Chauvinism: Images of British Subjects at Home in India,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, eds. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
18 Ian Woodfield’s work on music of the British in eighteenth century India and other related topics, includes: Ian Woodfield, Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); ------, “The ‘Hindostannie Air’: English Attempts to Understand Indian Music in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 119, no. 2 (1994): 189-211; ------, “The Keyboard Recital in Oriental Diplomacy, 1520-1620,” Journal of Royal Musical Association 115, no. 1 (1990): 33-62; ------, “Haydn Symphonies”; ------, “Collecting Indian Songs.”
169 of amateur English musicians with Indian music, and the scope of such encounters; informed, as these activities were, by gender ideologies of music prevalent in then-contemporaneous England.
Music of the Raj and the essays leading to it are particularly useful for yet another reason: large sections of the fascinating sources that Woodfield consulted are reproduced in toto in the texts.
Also, musicological analyses based on transcriptions recovered from the sources provide substantive musicological details regarding the specificities of the musical ‘texts’ that were produced by the Anglo-Indians.
Woodfield’s work, while being a long due and necessary intervention in the study of colonial cultural formations in general, I think, falls short of doing full justice to the incredibly rich details of quotidian music-making in late-eighteenth century Anglo-Indian society that he presents. This, however, is a problem of overly historicist works in general. For, the implications towards the formations of Anglo-Indian subjectivity are too often sacrificed for accurate historical reconstruction and musicological analyses. The historical material is tied into causal chains that fill up what Walter Benjamin calls “empty, homogeneous time.”19 Also, as Dipesh
Chakrabarty has cogently argued, such accounts are, if not by intention, structurally Eurocentric, expressed in the ‘disciplinary’ formula: “first in Europe, then elsewhere.”20 This propensity is
(mutedly) present in Woodfield as well; particularly so, in his efforts to understand the late- eighteenth century British fascination with (strands of) Indian music. He locates the motivational factors behind this fascination entirely in ideological predicates of the contemporaneous
Picturesque movement in Europe (discussed later). While the influence of Picturesque movement in this British tendency is preeminent, it ought not to imply that this movement was the sole
19 This is not to undermine Woodfield’s pioneering efforts in any way. It is just to point out the structural limitations of such endeavors.
20 Quoted in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 7.
170 determinant. I try to show later that the British desire to be ‘authentic’ in its mimesis of native cultural expressions also owes to the specificity of the colonial situation.
While I borrow liberally from Woodfield throughout this essay, the fundamental concerns here are very different from his. If Woodfield’s primary intention is an accurate historical reconstruction of Anglo-Indian musical life in the late-eighteenth century, then, based on this information, I ask: what did the ‘act’ of music-making mean for the British in the early colonial context? How did the musical lives, and the (‘fusion’) music, of the Anglo-Indians reflect and constitute the formation of hybrid subjectivities that characterized the Nabobs and Orientalists among them. The starting premise here is what Woodfield’s fascinating reconstruction leads him to conclude: the musical life of Anglo-Indians reflects the acculturating tendencies evident in
British during this period.21 The broad purpose of this chapter, then, is to build on Woodfield and in a very limited way probe the formation and expression of hybrid Anglo-Indian subjectivities through the optic of ‘fusion’ music during the latter-eighteenth century. Hence, the present effort is also an exercise in interpretation.
Framing Musical Hybridity: Anglo Indian Musicality in the Late-eighteenth Century Colony As indicated above, this chapter does not contribute much towards enriching the existing scholarship on Anglo-Indian musical-life in the last third of the eighteenth century in terms of any new historical data pertaining to music of the Anglo-Indians in latter-eighteenth century
India. In fact, much of this has been very ably put forth by Woodfield. The intended thrust of this work is theoretical, insofar as the extant data is viewed through an overarching analytic structure; one that attempts to locate musical activities of the British during the period in terms of
21 Woodfield, “The ‘Hindostannie’ Air,” 207-208.
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historically contingent categories: ‘work,’ ‘study,’ and ‘play’—all entailing the enactment of physical-intellectual labor in general. It is through the structure of relations between these three
categories of labor and its enactment that I attempt to understand the production of hybrid
subjectivity, particularly it socio-aesthetic dimension, and the enactments of musical hybridities.
I view the experiments with hybrid, ‘fusion’ music in the late-eighteenth century both as an instrument of hybrid (musico-aesthetic) subjectivity production as well as its expression: one that
was organic to their experiences in the subcontinent under colonial conditions specific to the
time. Since these concept-metaphors occur quite frequently later in the chapter, it is necessary to
elaborate on how I use them in slight detail. The central analytic of this paper, concerning
(musical) labor is dealt with in detail in the subsequent section. Here I will only dwell on the
concept-metaphor ‘hybrid subjectivity’, beginning with the root concept. As we know,
‘hybridity’ and ‘subjectivity’ are among the most philosophically, theoretically, and politically
fraught issues in current critical scholarship. Hence to be sure, any discussions of these concepts
can at best a superficial and partial one within the scope of this paper.
It is well known that the notion of the subject as a knowing, rational individual
constitutes the ideational cornerstone of modern philosophy, post-Descartes. Indeed, it is the
‘subject’ conceived thus—unified, self-conscious, and sovereign Self—that allows modern
philosophy and the sciences it has engendered to make their truth-claims, by definition unitary,
and posit fixed identities. Subjectivity, then, in purely humanist terms, is identical to the Self-
consciousness “of perceived states;”22 what the solipsistic Self perceives, is what it is. Thus,
according to humanist discourse, subject and subjectivity are one and the same. This ideal
correspondence between subject and subjectivity has a corollary: the external world, its ‘object,’
always already appears to the subject in the sharpest relief. This notion of an all-comprehending,
22 This in fact how the Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘subjectivity.’
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supremely-conscious subject, the ‘I,’ is what animates the subject/object divide in hierarchy—the foundational premise of modern philosophy and sciences.
One is now only too well aware of the Euro/phallo-centric moorings of the
Enlightenment subject and the repressive certainty of his rationality. As the Structuralist intervention demonstrated, language actually makes sense not in terms of identity of a sign with its referent out there, but in terms of differences;23 that lurking under the supremely-conscious
Self is a busy unconscious;24 and that relation to production determines how one apprehends the world.25 These Structuralist analytics destabilize the idea of a coherent, self-knowing, unified subject and shift the focus to subjectivity and its constructed nature, thereby ‘decentering’ the subject and opening up subjectivity as the proper realm of study.
Poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist theories have gone further. They make clear that not only was the Self (that humanist discourse claimed as its subject) historically contingent, discursively constructed, and patriarchal, the attendant processes validating its truth-claims, whenever and however ‘noble’ in aspiration, have historically been extremely violent on the
Other.26 The liberal humanist illusion of the Subject is sustained through the both naked exercise
and disciplinary technologies of power, as is evident under colonial rule for example.
Structuralism too comes under the hammer for remaining trapped in the very terms it sets out to
critique by necessarily re-positing dichotomies that, similar to the foundational one in humanist
thought, are also hierarchized.27
23 This is the strand of Saussureian linguistics/semiology.
24 This pertains to Freudian psychoanalysis.
25 This, of course, is the Marxist strain.
26 Here, as is evident, I am referring particularly to the thrust of Michel Foucault’s work.
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Here, following the poststructuralist direction in general, I approach production of
subjectivity of the Anglo Indians during the latter eighteenth century through their conscious
musico-cultural experiences in the social field of play and their discursive practices in the realm
of study. It is this, I submit, that resulted in the constitution of a hybrid aesthetic subjectivity for
the Anglo-Indians, organic to their station in the subcontinent; structured, as these experiences
were by asymmetric power relations of colonialism, the character of early colonial social
formation, and how the British were located therein. Indeed, this was a time when liberalism had
not congealed as the ascendant political ideology which would usher in radical reforms in
England in the 1830s. How this liberal reformist zeal contemporaneously played itself out in
India is well known. What concerns me here particularly is the liberal perception back in
England that the state of East India Company and its functionaries was severely compromising
not only the objectives, aspirations, and responsibilities of a colonial government, but also the
fact that they were becoming ‘Indianized,’ thereby, besmirching the lofty ideals of not only
liberalism but ‘English-ness.’28 This brings me to the issue of the ‘hybrid’ and hybridity.
Historically, the word ‘hybrid’ has had a longer categorical life in the biological sciences than in its social counterpart or the humanities.29 In fact, its entry into these discursive realms is quite recent. Here too, it finds more usage in its conditional and processual forms: hybridity and hybridization. In this chapter, I use it in conversation with Homi Bhabha’s theorization of these
terms, whose work has been largely responsible for their present critical currency.
27 This idea owes its philosophical exposition to Jacque Derrida.
28 For a detailed analysis of this, see: Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
29 For details, see: Brian Stross, “The Hybrid Metaphor: From Biology to Culture,” Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 254-267.
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In the terrain of critical theory one of its earliest deployments can be found in Mikhail
Bakhtin’s famous essay, Discourse in the Novel. Used in its processual form, “hybridization,” for
Bakhtin it means:
…a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.30
Bakhtin identifies two different kinds of hybridity: organic and intentional. The former refers to
“unintentional, unconscious hybridization [that] is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages [;]”31 While in an intentional hybrid “it is obligatory for two linguistic consciousnesses to be present, one being represented and other doing the representing, with each belonging to a different system of language.”32 In other words, it is in the intentional hybrid that the political contingencies of hybridization become apparent through their specific dialogical articulation—a tension that is produced precisely through the active incommensurability of the two linguistic consciousnesses, two world-views, that are brought together in the same text.33 As Bakhtin goes on to say:
[T]he intentional double-voiced and internally dialogized hybrid possess a syntactic structure utterly specific to it: in it, within boundaries of a single utterance, two potential utterances are fused, two responses are, as it were, harnessed in a potential dialog. It is true that this potential can never be actualized, can never be fused into finished utterances but their insufficiently developed forms are nevertheless acutely felt in the syntactic construction of a double-voiced hybrid.34
30 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 358.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 359.
33 Ibid. The difference between the two is crucial. In the case of organic hybridization, while two or more linguistic consciousness, and by implication, commensurate number of different world-views, can inhere, “the mixture remains mute and opaque, never making use of conscious contrasts and oppositions.” On the other hand, in the case of intentional hybrids “two points of view are not mixed but set against each other dialogically.”
34 Ibid., 361.
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If one considers European colonialism to be one such meta-text, then the applicability of
Bakhtins’s formulations become readily apparent.35 No surprise then that Homi Bhabha builds
on the Bakhtinian ‘intentional hybrid’ to propound his own ideas of hybridity.36
In the aftermath of Said’s Orientalism, the overwhelming emphasis has been to focus on how colonial modes of knowledge and structures of representation have contributed to colonial domination. What gets lost in such endeavors is precisely the historical slippages in enactments of colonial power, and resistances against it. In this regard, Homi Bhabha’s intervention has been signal. Bhabha proposes that the effort to Orientalize must always fail since the colonial subject is constructed in, “a repertoire of conflictual positions”; these render him or her, “the site of both fixity and fantasy” in a process which cannot but be uneven, divided, incomplete, and therefore potentially resistant.37
It is in this context that Bhabha invokes Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘intentional hybrid’.
Bhabha has reconfigured Bakhtin’s ideas to address the dialogical situation of colonialism, where it describes a process that “reveals the ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority.” For Bhabha, hybridity becomes the moment in which the discourse of colonial authority is threatened as the sole meaning generating Agent. This occurs when the colonized arrogate the very same language of the colonizer to mean different things. The identity of signs maintained through colonial domination is therefore destabilized and ruptured; colonized’s
35 What makes European colonialism different from, say, the advent of Islam and the formation of Islamic empires in the subcontinent, is precisely the fact that the former was an intentional hybrid where the dialogic nature constituted in fundamental differences in world views could not be “muted;” where as in the case of the latter, its hybridization was historically, or over time became, an organic one.
36 For a fuller exposition of this, see, Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).
37 For details, see, Anthony Easthope, “Bhabha, Hybridity and Identity,” Textual Practice 12, no. 2 (1998), 341.
176 appropriation of the colonizer’s language—what Bhabha calls ‘mimicry’—tends to erase the very constitutive “difference” that enables colonialism in the first place. The consequent of which is a ‘hybrid’—neither the Self, nor the Other as posited by the Self. To quote Bhabha:
Produced through the strategy of disavowal, the reference of discrimination is always to a process of splitting as the condition of subjection: a discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different—a mutation, a hybrid. 38
It is in this double articulation scripted by colonialism that the colonial dialogic resides.
In this chapter, I extrapolate the crux of Bhabha’s theorization of colonial hybridity— double articulation and splitting of the ‘stable’ subject—to interrogate hybrid subjectivity of the
Anglo-Indians in the late eighteenth century. In its implications, I believe, this provides an interesting complement to Bhabha’s analysis. In Bhabha, hybridity and mimicry are staged against the Anglicist/Utilitarianist interventions of the 1830s, specifically, Macaulay’s Minutes
(1835), and the emergence of a class of native intellectuals. My intention is to look at the colonial social formation prior to this, when the Company-state, in its intention at least, tried not to involve itself in the activities of the natives and the ‘modernizing’ native intellectuals—
Bhabha’s mimic-men—were yet to emerge in force. In the context of the latter eighteenth century, the mimicking/mimetic agents were indeed the British themselves. As we will see, in the era of Nabobs and Orientalist, it was their subjective arrogation of the colonized’s
‘language’—in this paper, specifically musical ‘language’—rather than the reverse (as in
Bhabha’s case), that tended to destabilize the discourse of colonial domination.
Before moving on to the next section, one thing needs to be clarified. Hybrid need not imply the preexistence of two or more ‘pure,’ ‘authentic’ factors. Indeed, the very purpose in this chapter is to question claims of ‘authenticity.’ In its most general sense, hybrid implies a
38 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 111.
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denouement that is a commixture of the at least two or more factors with otherwise relatively
independent histories of elaboration, such that the outcome cannot be completely identified with
any one of its constitutive components. If this is the case then the proliferation of hybrids is not
something unique to the subcontinental colonial experience. It has been happening since time
immemorial. The British subjectivity on the eve of their arrival in the subcontinent too was a
hybrid one, shaped by historical processes in Europe and other parts of the world. The same can
be said of its Indian counterpart on the eve of colonization. What, however, is particular, is the
specific colonial articulation of it. The Anglo-Indian subjectivity that I interpret as hybrid was
organic to the experience of colonization by the British themselves during the latter eighteenth
century. Hence, if hybrid has to be a critically effective category then it needs to be seen in its
conditional sense, hybridity, in the context of the historical contingencies that produce them and
the political contingencies that either suppress hybrid formations or deny them altogether. For,
indeed, it is the tendency of the liberal Self to invariably claim ‘authenticity’ for itself.
Music of Play and Music of Study: British Musical Labor in Early-Colonial India As has been noted before, the activities of the British administrator and trader in this period, located as he (literally) was within the structural ambit of emergent colonial capitalism, encompassed more than just the bare necessities of securing a fledgling colonial state and perpetuating its rule. It included his civil-social sustenance and other extra-professional pursuits as well. How, then, are we to understand British engagements with music in the above context?
How did they relate to the ‘new’ musics and musical contexts that they encountered in the subcontinent? What kind of an ‘activity’ was music for them in a world where access to any
European music was calibrated to one’s location in the colonial order of hierarchies, specifically the one structuring the burgeoning British society in India?
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In what follows, I approach music in the lives of the British during this period through the broad analytical metaphors: music of study and music of play. Here, both study and play are considered to be different kinds of physical and intellectual labor within the more composite realm of ‘leisure;’ beyond the realm of work. This is not to suggest that music as work did not exist for the British. Professional musicians were brought in especially from England to serve in the Governor’s Band. However, they were too few in number to significantly influence quotidian music-making in the eighteenth century.39 This was largely carried out through amateur initiatives. Their numbers would increase when avenues of European entertainment became more organized in the colony. But that would not happen until roughly the 1830s. It is for this reason that I have not included music for/as work in the present discussion.
It needs to be clarified that labor, as such, is understood in this analysis as “an ontological condition of human existence…”40 Hence, it can be reasoned that work and leisure are types of
physical-intellectual labor, differentiated on the bases of the structurally determined conditions in
which the enactment of labor takes place, the ‘sites’ of its enactment, and to whom the fruits of
the labor accrue. In other words, it is not that the expenditure of active physical-intellectual
labor, per se, necessarily implies work and vice-versa; or that leisure necessarily implies
physical-intellectual passivity. Application of physical-intellectual labor is a condition of human
existence, common to work as much as leisure. And it is the context of its performance that labor
becomes meaningful as either work, or leisure, or as some activity in the interstices of the two
the dyads. To put it differently, both work and leisure are historically constituted, and contingent,
categories.
39 However, as Woodfield has shown, the history of the ones present during this interim period makes for a fascinating study. For details, see: Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 49-75.
40 Herbert Marcuse, “On the Concept of Labor,” Telos 16, Summer, 1973, quoted in Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), 34.
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The following paragraphs, where a distinction between work/ leisure for the British in the colonial context has been made, needs to be put in the perspective of Jean Baudrillard’s critique of (what he sees as) Marx’s and Marxians’ essentialization of human nature in terms of productivity and labor. He argues that such an essentialist conception of ‘human nature’ leads to divergent dichotomies of labor/leisure, alienated labor/unalienated labor, work/play, work- time/free-time, etc. In such analyses, labor, as such, remains locked in “negativity,” implying that the sphere of leisure (the right-hand terms in the dyads above) “is always merely the esthetic sublimation of labor’s constraints.” This, he concludes, is almost similar to what happens under bourgeois political economic analysis: the tendency of labor and leisure to become “pure,”
“institutional” forms oppositionally signifying each other; “negative” labor, and beyond it: its aestheticized transcendence. Marxist analysis thus remains trapped in very terms of political economy that it sets out to critique and, hence, is not useful as truly revolutionary idea.41
It is not my purpose here to evaluate the revolutionary potential, or the lack of it, in
Marxist exegeses on “the factual content of labor.” I employ the Marxist analytic as a diagnostic, conceptual device considering work and leisure as historically constituted categories. In fact my analysis can be readily subjected to a Baudrillard-ian critique on the account that it does seem to suggest that activities in the sphere of leisure to be the “esthetic sublimation” of “negative” labor expended in the sphere of work for the Company state. My intention here is much less ambitious.
It is simply to suggest that against the historical context of the mid/late eighteenth century, with the subcontinent being drawn into the political economy of transcontinental colonial capitalism, such a separation between work and leisure could be made for the British residents in India precisely because these categories were in a sense indeed calibrated to the unfolding narrative of
41 Baudrillard, Mirror, 33-41.
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capitalist political economy.42 However, where I intend to differ from more orthodox Marxist formulations is that I consider work and leisure as not as hermetic and homogeneous categories. I show that the realm of leisure—the space that I interrogate in this paper—was an internally differentiated one in the period under consideration. The labor of study that I locate in leisure
actually lies somewhere in between the idealist leisure of completely unalienated labor and
structurally determined realm of utterly alienated labor. It is study, locatable more in leisure than
in work in the early colonial context, which secures the internal relation between the two. In
other words, I understand labors of work, leisure, and play with regard to the historically
constituted structure of relations in which they reside.
In the context of latter-eighteenth century colonial social formation in the subcontinent,
the realm of work for the British can be seen as being constituted by a range of ‘bureaucratized’
activities to ensure the functioning of the East India Company. In other words, work entailed the
expenditure of physical-intellectual labor and time necessary and sufficient, at the least, to
reproduce the apparatus of dominance of a nascent and bare fiscal-military Company state. It is
in lieu of this labor that the ‘laborer’—whatever his official status—earned his salary/wage. This
particular reproductive labor—work—expended by the British to fulfill the demands of their
formal, official station in India, be that in the capacity of a subaltern in the army or an
administrative/judicial bureaucrat, was “imposed” “externally” by the Company-state. Or, to put
it in structural terms, for the British, in the first instance, their labor in India was not towards
self-fulfillment, both in the social and individual sense. It was to reproduce the Company-state in
dominance. William Jones was first a High Court judge in the employ of the Company-state, the
reason for his factual presence in the subcontinent, and then an Orientalist.
42 For details, see, Ibid.
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It could then be said labor for work expended by the British for the Company, following
Marx, was performed “not [for] the satisfaction of a need, but only as a means for satisfying
other needs[;]”needs of self and social reproduction of the British in India.43 And the labor expended in servicing these “other” needs, I contend, was locatable mostly in the realm of leisure. Comprising a range of activities, entailing the investment of physical-intellectual labor, systematic or otherwise, over and above what reproducing the Company state necessitated. This is not to imply that leisure was innocent, outside of the logic of colonial domination. leisure, indeed, was a dynamic complement of the British quest for structural dominance in the subcontinent. The ideologies of difference, of civilizational superiority, reflecting and constituting the ethico-moral Self-justification necessary to establish and maintain rule over a colonial subject population, drew much of their substance, and expressed themselves vitally, through enactments in the realm of leisure, especially as colonialism unfolded in its aesthetic dimension. From the British point of view, then, the activity of music at that time was one such constitutive element in the larger superstructural complex.
The ‘systematic’ aspect of this proposition is borne out by Rajendralal Mitra, the secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in the 1880s, albeit in a very different historical context. Regretting the conflicting responsibilities that were impeding British scholarly participation in Orientalist knowledge production, he says:
43 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosphical Manuscripts of 1844,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. and ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), 125. The manner in which “work” has been conceptualized in this chapter refers(while not disregarding it) not so much to the ‘forces’ of a capitalist mode of production in which the ‘worker’ participates; but more to the ‘forces,’ in a Weberian sense, of ‘bureaucratized’ work and its attendant ‘ethics’—the ‘spirit’ of unfolding capitalism in the early colonial social formation. It needs to be clarified here that the term “worker,” as Bertell Ollman points out, has dual referents that intersect in Marx’s elaboration of the concept of ‘alienation.’ It implies the “species man;” as well as the proletariat. [See, Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 136] In the early subcontinental colonial context, with the germ of colonial modernity and capitalism just taking root, the ‘worker’—one who expends physical-intellectual labor in the sphere of work—is, for all practical purposes, the “species man” and not so much the “proletariat.”
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Such (i.e. literary and scientific) pursuits require leisure and ease of circumstances, early literary training, and an affluent retired life. Europeans coming to India have to fight the battle of existence, or to discharge onerous official duties, and when they have earned a competence and run through their allotted course of official career they return to Europe to enjoy a life of ease.44
Clearly, for Mitra, ‘systematic’ Orientalist research required the investment of physical-
intellectual labor-time by the British in leisure. What is interesting here is not the quantum of physical-intellectual invested but that ‘research’ and “onerous official duties” were two constitutively different contexts of labor: research was located in leisure and the latter in work.
There is, however, as mentioned before, a further analytical distinction to be made
between musical labors in leisure: music of study and music of play. The former implies a
systematic inquiry by some British Orientalists into the musics of the subcontinent. This
warranted the expenditure of considerable physical-intellectual effort towards acquiring from
performers and pedagogues of subcontinental musics the practical/theoretical knowledge
necessary to comprehend and decode vastly different musical systems in the first place. The
knowledge thus acquired then would be ‘recodified’ in English and Western modes of musical
transcription; within an epistemological framework heavily informed by contemporaneous ideas
on comparative civilizational histories of the peoples of the world (or the lack of one, for some),
emanating from the Scottish Moral Enlightenment. This is the strand of musical leisure—the
labor invested in ‘studying’ the subcontinental musics—that was undertaken by Orientalists like
William Jones and N. Augustus Willard among others; yet another element in the constitutive
superstructure of unfolding British colonialism in India.
‘Music of play,’ on the other hand, implies the musical labor expended by the British, in
general, not just the Orientalists, towards their own social, cultural recreation, and/or
44 Rajendralal Mitra, ed., Centenary Review of the Asiatic Society of Bengal: From 1784-1883 (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Company, 1885), 9.
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reproduction within the colonial social formation—informed, as it were, by the aesthetic and
gender ideologies back home in England.45 This category thus refers to the musics that the
British themselves played and/or heard at sites of play, such as, the domestic sphere and other
places of entertainment that they frequented. This is not to imply, however, that the sites of play
were ideal ‘liminal’ spaces46 where the structural relations of power, determining and determined by social behavior, would be wholly suspended. Neither were these spaces such that the evolving hierarchies of race, gender, class and official station would be held in complete abeyance for inverted or perfectly equitable interactions. However, sites of play were indeed spaces where the nature of the occasion would itself invite a degree of commingling among people who otherwise belonged to different rungs in the solidifying ladder of colonial hierarchies, especially in a
temporal context when the certitude with which British superiority was asserted later was yet to
congeal. Such sites then can be better understood through the lens of emergent social hierarchies and networks, between not just the British and the ‘natives,’ but equally importantly among the
British themselves. Nowhere were these processes more apparent than in the Presidency towns of
Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay—places where British social life in India crystallized and blossomed.
From a British point of view, then, the two musical activities could be seen as different enactments of relatively unalienated labor, belonging to the composite realm of leisure; one concerning the objective study of the Other; the other concerning the subjective play of the Self.
It is the latter domain in which the practice and performance of western music resided along with
45 For details, see, Ian Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 2001; Richard Leppert, “Music, Domestic Life, and Cultural Chauvinism,” 63-104.
46 I employ the term ‘liminal’ in the sense that Victor Turner has used it. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 95-96.
184 other musics of play. And importantly for this chapter’s focal thematic, it is at the interstices of study and play, on different registers, that we will encounter hybrid ‘fusion’ musical forms; ones that were neither completely locatable in western musical systems nor its Indian counterparts.
Before moving on to the next section it needs to be clarified that considering music of study and music of play as engagements of relatively unalienated labor need not imply a retrospective romanticization of the musical life of the British. The intention here is to draw attention to the fact that from the point of view of the British in the subcontinent musical labor, as such, could not be considered ‘alienated,’ be that in the sphere of study or play. There was neither a market, even if there was demand, for the performance of Western music, nor was there any significant professional class of Western musicians during the mid-eighteenth century in the subcontinent. Likewise, the Orientalists’ study of subcontinental musics during this period cannot be said to have been calibrated to any market-generated readership in any significant manner. Nor was there a class of ‘specialists’ in the field of knowledge production, in its academic bureaucratic sense, on the horizon yet. Such endeavors, in study and/or play, were undertaken largely out of a personal, amateur initiative. It is in this sense that music of study and music of play can both be seen as relatively unalienated labor, enacted in the realm of leisure.
The ‘Nautch,’ Its Music, and Musical ‘Fusion’
For the better part of the eighteenth century, the basic institutional infrastructure and the demographic base necessary for the re-creation of a socio-economically sustainable cultural life similar to back home in England was not available to the British in India in even nominal forms.
It was only around the 1770s that venues offering various European entertainments slowly began
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to appear on the subcontinent.47 Hence, the British had to satisfy their entertainment needs largely through the native forms available. As pointed out by Percival Spear among others, two parallel currents can be discerned during this period: (a) further popularization of forms of entertainment already extant in the subcontinent among the British; (b) development of sites of
European entertainment, especially in the Presidency towns of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta.48
In what follows, I discuss the implications of the two points made by Spear to see how the latter-
eighteenth century British experience and study of Indian cultural expressions resulted in the production of hybrid subjectivities for the British.
Nautch-Music:
It is well known that the most popular form of ‘native’ entertainment among the British was the nautch—a dance form born out of a history of previous encounters between Persian styles of dancing and dance-forms that flourished under pre-Islamic court patronage and temple economy.49 British predilection for this particular form of entertainment is evident from the regular attention accorded to nautch as a social-cultural event in a wide range of colonial ‘texts,’ until well into the nineteenth century.50 There is then every reason to believe that nautch was a
47 For details, see: Rev. James Long, “A Peep into the Social Life of Calcutta During the Second-Half of the eighteenth Century” in P. T. Nair, (ed.), British Social Life in Ancient Calcutta, Calcutta: Sankrit Pustak Bhandar, 1983; William Carey, The Good Old Days of Honorable John Company; Being Curious Reminiscences Illustrating Manners and Customs of the British in India During the Rule of the East India Company, from 1600 to 1858, Etc., 2 vols. (1882; repr. Calcutta: R. Cambray and Co., 1906-07); Spear, The Nabobs.
48 Spear, The Nabobs, 28-41.
49 For further details on ‘nautch,’ see, Spear, The Nabobs, 33-37, 133-137; Pran Nevile, Nautch Girls, 1-44
50 These ‘texts’ range from paintings and sketches to memoirs, journals, travelogues, and personal correspondences, gazettes, newspapers, and pamphlets to more serious historiographic and sociological endeavors on the social life of the British in India.
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vital socio-aesthetic constituent of, to put it in terms delineated in the previous section, British
leisure, specifically of British play, in the latter-half of the eighteenth century.
Popularity of nautch among the British suggests at least two things. First, nautch provided an important stage for the interplay of the different initiatory social-cultural encounters between the colonizer and the colonized. The undoubted popularity of nautch suggests that venues hosting nautch-performances had to be among the preeminent spaces of civil-social interaction between the two. Second, the colonizers’ self-subjection to nautch implicates the formation of a new aesthetic subjectivity in Anglo-Indian society. Importantly, provenance of this subjectivity lay uniquely in their encounter with, and their experiences of, subcontinental cultural expressions, catalyzed, of course, by colonial conditions specific to the late-eighteenth century. It was the elaboration of this hybrid subjectivity that I suggest made Nabobs51 out of
Englishmen.
With the coming of the British, nautch underwent significant structural changes. For one,
its dependence on older circuits of cultural economy began to attenuate gradually. Owing to its
growing popularity among the British, nautch, probably more than any other form of native
cultural expression, underwent significant commercialization and commodification. New patrons
and audiences, augmenting older ones, began to emerge in the form of the British, and the
indigenous class of elite merchants, traders, and zamindars, especially, in the burgeoning British settlements of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. This initiated the dispersal of nautch troupes beyond their capitals of performance like Lucknow and Benares to places where the new
51 The Nabobs constituted a nouveau riche class of British in India who made their fortunes, often unscrupulously, through new commercial possibilities presented by the expanding colonial Company-state. They modeled their lifestyles, particularly in terms of conspicuous consumption, after that of the indigenous land owning aristocracy under whose patronage nautch largely flourished before the British developed a taste for it. For details, see Spear, The Nabobs, 37-38; Nevile, Nautch Girls, 1-44.
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clientele was concentrated. Capt. Thomas Williamson, who lived and traveled in India during the
late-1770s and the ‘80s noted in this regard:52
The people of Hindostan have undergone a change of character , within the last thirty years, in consequence of the introduction of Europeans and their customs, among the superior classes of the natives. Whether from that circumstance, or the great influx of young officers, &c. that arrived from Europe, between the years 1778 and 1785, it is certain, that the prime set of dancing girls quitted the city, and repaired to the several cantonments, where they met the most liberal encouragement.”53
There was, however, a difference for the “young officers, &c. that arrived from Europe” in the manner they consumed this entertainment. As Percival Spear puts it: “To see a nautch [for the
British in India] was something like attending the ballet in Europe.” The difference was “that the troupe always came to a private house[.]”54
This ‘difference’ is a signal one, however. It implies that the troupe would go only for the
right price, unless coerced. The nautch would even travel along with contingents of the colonial
army as mobile units of entertainment, for officers and subalterns alike, suggesting new networks
involvement.55 Indeed, the arrival of the British at the ‘scene’ of nautch as a major clientele
irreversibly altered the economy—in all its senses—on which it was hitherto predicated.
52 Capt. Thomas Williamson’s 1813 The European in India remains one the most important sources for gauging not only British opinions on nautch in late-eighteenth century India but European social life in the early colonial social formation. The book also contains twenty prints of engraved plates prepared especially for it from drawings and sketches by Charles Doyley. Of them, three Plates, 14, 15, and 19, present mise-en-scenes with nautch the central event. Williamson also distinguishes in details between the “dancing girls” of the Upper Provinces and that of Bengal, mentioning that the British had a predilection for the former. For details see, the aforementioned plates by Doyley and commentary by Williamson in Williamson and Doyley, The European in India (London: Edward Orme, 1813). Also see, Woodfield, Music of the Raj, particularly, 149-180.
53 Ibid. See Williamson’s commentary to Plate 15.
54 Spear, The Nabobs, 35; Nevile, Nautch Girls, 45-53. It is important here to briefly dwell on this “difference.” Prior to the coming of the British, the sites of nautch performances were determined by the existing structures of patronage; in the sense that a nautch troupe would be commissioned by the nawabs and other feudatories whose courts provided the venue. Otherwise, it operated out of houses that catered not only to the performance of the nautch but also doubled as the residence of the troupe members.
55 Nevile, The Nautch Girls, 52-53; Williamson, The European in India.
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The predicative change that the culture of nautch underwent during this period of
structural flux in the subcontinent can be found in the emergence of ‘star’ performers— nominated, for the first time, by the informal market of nautch. This is definitely not to say that nautch artistes of individual fame did not exist prior to the British. However, the process through which they were now identified, as we will see below, was different. Such microcosmic changes in the realm of culture are indicative of the specific impact of early colonialism towards the unyoking of indigenous cultural ‘texts’ from their previous structural contexts. It may even be possible to suggest that in the reorganization of nautch according to a new economy of patronage, one sees the germs of capitalist, market-driven cultural economies that emerge later.
As relevant documents from the era, and others (re-)printed by Woodfield in his essays
and monograph, reveal: Khannum, Chumbailie, Goolabie, and Nikki—all Kashmiri nautch
girls—enjoyed particular popularity among the British during the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.56 It is, however, unlikely that the ‘star’ status accorded to these nautch girls
was prompted by any deep understanding of the technicalities of nautch on the major part of the
British audience;57 something that must have been an important consideration before the British developed a taste for it. How, then did the above-named dancers acquire their fame amongst the
British?
For the British, it was the spectacle of nautch that initially galvanized their attention. An important component of this spectacle, clearly evident in the paeans penned and canvases
‘brushed’ to their beauty and grace in a range of colonial texts, was the sexual allure of, and
56 For details, see, Nevile, Nautch Girls; Woodfield, Music of the Raj.
57 Though there was a significant minority of exceptions in the form of the Orientalists, and Englishwomen collectors of Hindostannie Airs (in details later). Woodfield has commented on extra-musical factors in the popularity of nautch in passing. See, Woodfield, “The ‘Hindostannie Air’,” 203-204. ------, “Collecting Indian Songs,” 73-74.
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potential of sexual liasons with, the nautch girl. At a time when Englishwomen were much too
few in number and fear of miscegenation and degeneracy had yet not proliferated subjective
worlds in the same way, British took ‘native’ mistresses and wives. The children born out such
unions were accepted within the British fold as one of their members, something, that would
change dramatically with the reification of racial difference.58 We thus find, in the new
circumstances, both sexual fetish (existing before in all likelihood but actively reiterated by the
British) and commodity fetish (specific to the advent of capitalism in its early institutional forms)
intersected in the body of the nautch girl. This over and above the nautch girl’s proficiency in her
art, was instrumental in her ascent towards stardom.
The commercialization of nautch thus invites our attention to two concurrent processes: first, the way by which nautch, determined hitherto by pre-colonial structures of patronage, started becoming abstracted from their prior spatial locations of performance; second, how the form of entertainment itself became increasingly subject to the actuating factors of a solidifying culture market—a process that would ultimately lead to the gradual waning of its appeal among the British as the nineteenth century wore on. The nautch troupe would now “[go] to private houses” for the right price. It is not surprising then that nautch emerged as “the recognized form of entertainment for an Indian merchant to provide for his English guests.”59
The British could, then, witness nautch performances in two qualitatively different kinds of spaces: they could either hire a troupe to perform in venues inside British residential areas, both civil and military, where the audience would primarily comprise fellow Europeans, though
58 For details see, Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class Under the Raj:Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980; Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990
59 Spear, The Nabobs, 35.
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stratified along emergent class demarcations in British Indian society;60 or else, as mentioned
above, they could witness a nautch in the residences of the Indian merchants, nawabs, and
zamindars. Entertaining British Company officials was deemed crucial by this native elite of the
era, largely comprador to colonial interests by the late-eighteenth century after the Permanent
Settlement, for securing and maintaining the privileges granted to them under British rule. The audience in these sites would usually comprise British officials, often in the company of English women, the Indian hosts, and their ‘native’ peers.61 In Calcutta, for example, the festivities
surrounding Durga Puja regularly occasioned nautch performances that the British would attend.
Wrote an indignant English observer in 1807, rationalizing the attraction that this form of
entertainment held for Europeans in Calcutta at the turn of the nineteenth century:
The public amusements of European society in Calcutta, if nit throughout British India, are so limited in number and variety, that it is not at all surprising, that even a Calcutta Nautch should engage the attendance of those who have repeatedly experienced its insipidity; while to those who are strangers, and have had not previous opportunity to witness any specimen of religious pageantry of Bengal, curiosity alone will raise a desire, personally to behold one of the most celebrated and costly rites of paganism. From the operation of these causes, the Nautches of the Doorgah Poojah, are more fully attended by Europeans, than we should expect, were the amusement or entertainment they afford considered as their sole attractions. Another motive gives a number of visitors to this ceremonial. Many gentlemen, filling the higher stations, and other, at the Presidency, attend an invitation to a Nautch, as a matter of compliment to the parties inviting, who are highly gratified by this acquiescence, which they consider as a mark of respect and condescension, and of much more weight than a complimentary visit on any other occasion. 62
We see, then, that in both sites of nautch performance it was the British who were the
primary intended audience for such performances, either as guests of ‘native’ elites or as hosts
themselves. The composite totality of the experience of nautch in such sites—the choice of
venue, the performers, the dance form, the music attending it, interpretation of the event, etc.—
60 Ibid., 37 .
61 See for example Zoffany’s paintings of a nautch scene reproduced in Nevile, Nautch Girls, 56.
62 “Description of a Calcutta Nautch, at the Last Grand Anniversary of the Festival of Doorgah Tackoor, October, 1807” in The Literary Panorama 5 (1809): 130.
191 was heavily inflected by the presence of this new audience. In other words, it was the ‘native’ artists performing to a new audience, in new spaces, circumscribed by the evolving hierarchies of early colonial social formation that gave nautch its ‘new’ meaning in mid/late-eighteenth century. Hence, I characterize the venues of nautch as ‘hybridizing sites’—spaces that engender specifically hybrid experiences, both for the performers as well as for the audience, and thereby play a central role in producing hybrid subjectivities.
The question now arises: what does the British fascination with nautch tell us about their musical lives during the period under consideration? How does nautch figure in a discussion on musical hybridity? The answers begin to suggest themselves when one considers the fact that it was the attendant music of nautch which (co-)animated the dance. One could even posit that it was this music, which importantly had a vibrant life outside of its complementary kinesics, which was instrumental in repeatedly drawing the British back to the ‘spectacle’ of nautch in the late-eighteenth century. The sustained popularity of nautch among the British during this period of colonization implies an even greater interaction with the music that informed the dance, if not for any other reason then for a very practical one. It can be argued that when it came to carrying back home a cultural artifact as a memento of late eighteenth century British social life in the colonies, a musical artifact seemed the logical choice, for at least a particular class of British in
India. With transcription of nautch-melodies and their performance already in vogue, music seemed to exhibit more mobility that any other subcontinental art form, easily amenable for transportation to England. What is more, since the reproduction of transcribed pieces back home necessitated active musical participation and performance, nautch-music would have been a medium par excellence in triggering and fostering colonial nostalgia for the repatriated British.
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This much is perspicuous from the British fascination and fashion of collecting ‘Hindostannie’
airs (discussed later) from nautch singers and musicians during this time.63
It should be clarified that British presence at nautch performances did not change its
‘text’—the song, music, and dance—in a strict sense. What actually changed is the ‘context.’
Collating various sources on nautch recitals, Pran Nevile has commented on the genres of music that accompanied the dance(s):
The predominant musical forms in which the nautch girls or tawaifs specialized from the eighteenth century onwards were the thumri and the ghazal…The thumri is one of the most popular genres of Hindustani music with a strong visual aspect…The text [of thumris] usually consisted of three or four lines expressing the longing of the lover for the beloved and their pangs of separation…The ghazal is in Persian origin and its text was more subtle and richer and its main attraction lay in the melody and the dance expression.64
Indeed all the musical genres in which dance recitals were set had histories of elaboration that
anteceded British arrival. The predicative factor in nautch’s alterity in the late-eighteenth century
was that, even if the music and the dance substantively remained the same, the structural
conditions of its performance had changed. Nautch-music was not hybrid, in the sense that it could not be identified against pre-existing genres. But it had become organic to a new, hybrid experience—a constitutive product of ‘hybridizing sites’ that, as I have argued earlier, were the venues of nautch occasions. It is in this sense that nautch-music was a factor in the constitution hybrid socio-aesthetic subjectivity for the British in that particular temporal context.
The British’ appreciation of this music in an aesthetic realm beyond the dance-form it attended to is expressed often in colonial documents from the era, particularly by those literate in
Urdu and/or Persian—the most commonly used languages for the lyrics that informed the
63 For details, see: Woodfield, Music of the Raj; ------, “The ‘Hindostannie’ Air,” 189-211; ------, “Collecting Indian Songs,” 73-88.
64 Nevile, Nautch Girls, 89.
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musical forms.65 For example, in mid-1830s, Emily Eden, visiting India under the aegis of her brother Governor General Auckland, though herself unenamored by the music, quotes an unnamed Persian-literate Englishman in her journal: “Well this [music] is really delightful—this
I think is equal to any European singing—in fact there is quite nothing like it.”66 But this
appreciation was hardly a spontaneous one. Francois Bernier very early on confessed to
something that would become a trend with other Europeans that followed:
On my first arrival [Indian music] stunned me so as to be insupportable: but such is the power of habit that the same noise is heard by me with pleasure; in the night particularly, when in bed and afar, on my terrace this music sound in my ears as solemn, grand, and melodious.67
It is precisely this habit, the voluntary and repeated subjection to entirely new forms of music, of
which the event of nautch was the primary mediator, in the production of a new, hybrid
subjectivity for the British.
In the above discussion I have endeavored to highlight the sociocultural and
socioeconomic contexts of nautch and, by association, the music informing it, post-1757. The
much-endured British fondness for this ‘native’ expressive culture, if not anything else, clearly
indicates one thing: congealing of a hybrid aesthetic subjectivity during this period. The
cognitive apparatus that mediated the British experience of nautch in India, in the first instance,
had to be European. This is not to impose a homogeneous aesthetic sensibility on the British.
Unfolding colonialism brought to the subcontinent subjects that hailed from a range of ethnic and
class backgrounds in Britain. No doubt that this sensibility was differentiated. My point is simply
to suggest that however differentiated it might have been, depending on the class and ethnic
65 See Ibid.; Woodfield, “Collecting Indian Songs,” 73-74.
66 Ibid.
67 F. Bernier, Travels in the Mughal Empire. Translated by Irving Brock, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1826), 1: 296. Quoted in Spear, The Nabobs, 154.
194 origins of the British, it was still, for all practical purposes, European. Hence, nautch, in the final analysis, became a hybrid experience: a precolonial form of ‘native’ entertainment filtered through European tastes, leading to the coalescence of socio-aesthetic codes born out of cultural encounters forged by colonialism.68 Music of nautch, the music that attended this favorite British play during the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can then be said to have, by association, been a vital aesthetic constituent of the developing hybrid subjectivity, an ontology acknowledged in the hyphenated moniker that signified the British in India during the period under consideration: Anglo-Indians. This now begs the moot question: how was the hybrid subjectivity expressed musically? Before, however, delving into this inquiry we need to consider the other necessary constituent of the particular kind of musical hybridity that this paper seeks to address: European music.
European Music in Calcutta:
If, on the one hand, the dearth of European entertainment in the subcontinent during the early phase of colonialism facilitated the acculturation of British into available Indian modes—nautch being the most prominent—then the gradual elaboration of colonial rule also made it possible over time for British to “reproduce as far as possible…the characteristic social features of their national lives.”69 Indeed, this constituted a parallel movement in opposite directions. With the scope of the colonial project widening, the concomitant increase of British population in India required the establishment of institutions necessary for the structural and ideological reproduction of the colonial state. The colony, clearly, was not just an abstract territorial
68 Evidence for this can found in the British descriptions of nautch where it is often compared, favorably or otherwise, to some form of European entertainment.
69 H. R. Panckridge, A Short History of the Bengal Club 1827-1927 (Calcutta: n. pub., 1927), 2.
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acquisition coughing steam into the expropriation of colonial capital. It was an arena where, in
the constant presence of Europe’s civilizational Other, ideas of a superior ‘Britishness,’ evolving
alongside the global matrix of the British Empire, solidified. These ideas were founded, above
all, in popular and ‘scientific’ discourses of racial superiority of the European Self.70 In spatial
terms, this is most clearly evidenced in the delimited space of the ‘White town’ in every major
British settlement. In Calcutta, this area was bounded by the seven kilometer circumference of the ‘Maratha ditch,’ with the old Fort William as its center. This is the heterotopic domain where the visible symbols of colonial power in the subcontinent, such as, courts, jails, schools, churches, residences of colonial bureaucrats, etc., were spatialized. The period of intense reconstruction that had followed the recovery of Calcutta in 1757 from Siraj-ud-daulah, who had
sacked the town the year before, changed the town’s architectural landscape. Palatial buildings in
then-popular European styles, emblematic of the sense of permanence beginning to permeate the
colonial project, came up during this period, making the ‘White town’ a distinctive architectural
terrain.71 By the inaugural years of the nineteenth century, Calcutta had earned the epithet, City
of Palaces.72 In one of the earliest mention of the city as such, wrote a suitably impressed
Englishman in 1803 under the nom de guerre of Asiaticus: “Calcutta…[is] one of most opulent
cities in the world—a city of palaces, and the bank of nations.”73 The concentration of these buildings that earned the city this appellation within the delimited space of the White Town
70 For a detailed discussion of this, see: Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the origins of British India, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 120-155.
71 For details, see, Dhriti Kanta Lahiri Chowdhury, “Trends in Calcutta Architecture, 1690-1903” in The Living City, vol. 1, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1990); J. P. Losty, Calcutta, City of Palaces: A Survey of the City in the Days of the East India Company (New Delhi: Arnold Publishers, 1990).
72 This label was the title of a popular poem dedicated to the city composed by James Atkinson in 1824. For details, see, Losty, Calcutta, 7-8.
73 John Hawkesworth, Asiaticus: In Two Parts (Calcutta: Telegraph Press, 1803), 14.
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highlighted their visual and visceral difference vis-à-vis the ‘mixed’ and ‘native’ quarters that lay
beyond it, a ‘difference’ that reflected and directed the spatial separation of the ruler and the
ruled.
Importantly, also appearing in this part of town, alongside formal colonial institutions, were venues of exclusively European entertainment.74 The swelling ranks of British socialized
into European ways of living, unlike the East India Company factors of an earlier generation who had lived much of their adult lives in the colony, necessitated this. As is well known, the new arrivals from roughly the 1770s onwards significantly altered the demographic constitution of
British society in India.75 Three new streams in the emergent demographics, though still
marginal in absolute terms, contributed significantly to the availability and practice of European
music in India. These were the Englishwomen, the Royal soldiers, and the high level
functionaries in the colonial judiciary and administration.76 Ian Woodfield, in his book Music of
the Raj, has admirably brought to light how each group, in interrelation with others, fostered the
cultivation of a European musical culture in Calcutta, and how this was made possible by, while making possible, a “small but vigorous” second-hand market77 in western musical instruments.
Recent work by scholars on European music during the early colonial period demonstrates that there was a continuous effort to replicate the musical tastes and preferences
74 For example, The Harmonic, regarded as the “handsomest house of its day” was established in 1780. The Calcutta Theatre came up in 1792. See, Carey, Good Old Days, 1: 71-72.
75 For details, see P. J. Marshall, “The Whites of British India, 1780-1830: A Failed Colonial Society?” The International History Review 12, no. 1 (1990): 26-44.
76 See Spear, The Nabobs, 35-38.
77 “It was simply uneconomical for anyone returning to London to pay for the transportation of heavy goods back to England….The second-hand market was further augmented by the exceptionally high mortality rate.” Hence, the vibrant second-hand market in European musical instruments. [Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 4]
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prevalent in London by the Anglo-Indians in Calcutta.78 These authors show how British traveling to India would carry their music along with them. For example, the music of German and Italian composers like Handel and Corelli, high fashion in London during the 1750s and
’60s, was regularly performed by amateur enthusiasts or, more sporadically, by professional musicians from England, in Calcutta with only a minimal lag imposed by the time taken to travel
from England to India. Within the passage of two decades one finds the decline in the popular
interest in the music of the likes of Handel in favor the ‘new’ music of composers like Haydn
and Pleyel in London being reflected in Calcutta. 79 This is not surprising. It was precisely this period that witnessed the advent of new demotic constituents in India from Britain. One thus finds that European music, though still in restricted access even for many British—particularly the subalterns—slowly becoming available as music of play for them alongside nautch-music in
sites of evolving colonial cosmopolitan urbanity like Calcutta. It is not my intention here to re-
present Woodfield’s and others’ adroit reconstruction of western musical practice in the city
during the latter eighteenth century. Instead, in what follows, I pursue from the previous section
the production of a hybrid socio-aesthetic subjectivity in the British to see how it was affected by
the increasing presence of new classes of British in the subcontinent.
It is necessary here to briefly summarize the specific impact of new arrivals, the Royal
soldiers, Englishwomen, and the civil servants. Probably the least significant in relation to the
production of hybrid subjectivity were the Royal soldiers. They arrived on the subcontinent with
the knowledge that their stay here was only an interlude—albeit a profitable one—in their
78 For details, see, Woodfield, Music of the Raj; Leppert, “Music, Domestic Life,” 63-104; T. Tolley, “Music in the Circle of Sir William Jones,” 525-550.
79 For details, see, H. Diack Blackstone and R. Fiske, eds., Music in Britain: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990).
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military career.”80 These professional soldiers who owed their primary allegiance to the King,
not the Company, were less liable to imbibe tastes and preferences for indigenous forms of
entertainment, like the nautch, knowing that their station in India was only temporary. As they
were more likely to indulge in European amusements, though in scarce supply, rather than attune
their socio-aesthetic sensibilities to appreciate either the natives or their cultural expressions,81
their presence created a demand for European music. Not only was this a necessary attendant to
one of the most popular of all exclusively British civil-social play, both in cantonments and in
cities, during this period—ballroom dancing82—European music was a mode of entertainment in
its own right that the newly arriving British could patronize and, perhaps more importantly,
participate in. Hence, it can be said that the disposition of the Royal soldier was oppositionally
directed vis-à-vis the formation of a hybrid subjectivity for the British in the subcontinent.
The same, however, cannot be said about the Englishwomen and civil servants. The
former began arriving in India at a time when the colony was emerging as a significant marriage- market with eligible middle-class bachelors in the form of the Royal soldiers and civil servants,83
80 Michael Edwardes, “Introduction,” in John Corneille, Journal of My Service in India, ed. Michael Edwardes (London: The Folio Society, 1966), 13-14.
81 James Long, “A Peep into the Social Life of Calcutta During the Second-Half of the 18th Century,” in British Social Life in Ancient Calcutta, 1750-1850, ed. P. T. Nair (Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1983), 81-83; Spear, The Nabobs, 33-39.
82 See Carey, Good Old Days, 118-137.
83 That the Anglo-Indian society of the mid-eighteenth century was an overwhelmingly male preserve is a well- known fact. However, with the stationing of covenanted Company and army officials in India, and rising number of fortune-seeking free-merchants, the newly acquired and expanding colony gradually began to emerge as a significant marriage-market for women from the fast-congealing English middle-classes back home. A key cultural attribute sought in a well-groomed bride—in accordance with the prevailing gender ideology in latter-eighteenth century England that inseparably calibrated the socio-economic status of women to that of their husbands—was her ability to play music. Women of the new English middle-classes arriving in India usually received formal musical training with the view that this cultural capital could be converted into socio-economic profit later in the marriage market. For details, see, Woodfield, Music of the Raj; James Long, “A Peep”; Carey, Good Old Days.
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while the latter arrived to man the rapidly institutionalizing executive, judicial, and civic-social
organs of the Company-state.84 Though, like the Royal soldiers, both groups hailed from the
emergent middle-classes in England, their engagement with Indian cultural expressions was
much more substantive. Englishwomen were the primary enthusiasts in the collection and
performance of ‘Hindostannie’ airs, not to mention quotidian music-making.85 On the other
hand, the civil servants, as is well known, were central to the systematic study of indigenous arts,
sciences, and civilizational ‘histories.’ Indeed this was the social class to which most renowned
Orientalists belonged. As can then be gauged, their practical engagements with Indian music
both in the realms of study86 and play were instrumental not only in the production of a hybrid
aesthetic subjectivity but also its expressions: experiments with hybrid musical forms.
There is however a significant difference to be made between the hybrid subjective
worlds that the Orientalists, Englishwomen, and the Nabobs respectively inhabited. Since I talk
about the Englishwomen in detail in the next subsection, here I will briefly dwell on the
differences in the aesthetic subjectivities of the Nabobs and the Orientalists. As has been shown
84 Such as educational, research, and medical institutions. The last, though it will not be addressed in this paper, was very important to the success of British colonialism both in Asia and Africa. If the health of the fiscal-military Company state depended on its administrative, judicial, and military organs, then the physical and mental health of the revenue-collectors, juridical officers, and the soldiers, showing very high mortality rates during the early colonial era, had to be ensured. Hence, the science and the practice of medicine became crucially yoked to European colonialisms, in general. Their, often fatal, encounters with diseases—hitherto unknown to them—in the far flung reaches of the world made the specter of death far away from home an ever lurking presence.
85 Reverend James Long, with a retrospective distance of almost a century, noted that in the mid-eighteenth century “There was little music, for there were only two dozen ladies in Calcutta….” This correspondence between the lack of European music in Calcutta and the lack of English ladies there becomes apparent when one considers the ideologies of gender inhering in the practice and performance of music in Britain. As pointed out by both Richard Leppert and Woodfield, women were the primary music-makers on a quotidian basis, both in the aristocracy, as well as the new middles classes emerging in Georgian England. [Long, “A Peep,” 13-14; Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology, and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 76- 126]
86 For British women, ‘study’ need not mean the conscious production of discourse in the same way as the Orientalists. For the former, ‘study’ was incidental to their fashionable intent of collecting ‘Hindostannie’ airs.
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by E. M. Collingham and Percival Spear, Islamic court culture extant at the time of colonization
greatly impacted the affective world of the British present in India. As the very rubric, Nabob,
suggests, these British arrogated what they considered the symbolic epitomes of Oriental
splendor and luxury in their bodily, embodied, and aesthetic practices.87 In a milieu of British
ascendancy, such practices and their experience produced a hybrid subjectivity unique to
subcontinental colonial experience.
However, if the provenance of this subjectivity lay in the Nabobs’ lived fascination with
Indian expressive cultures, then the same cannot be said to having been the predicative factor in
the formation of the hybrid subjective world that Orientalists occupied. As noted before,
belonging to the new middle-classes in England and arriving in India when Nabob-dom was
slowly tapering off, the new arrivals were already well socialized in European customs and
manners to be similarly captivated by what they saw on the Indian ground. The production of
hybrid subjectivity for the Orientalist had a decidedly more formal, discursive basis rather than
an affective one. Indeed, the Orientalists were not much concerned with their phenomenal
experiences of India. For them the hybridizing factor was not what they witnessed in India but
what they ‘read’ about it. To quote Edward Said: the actuating impulse for the Orientalists was
“[to] rule and to learn, then to compare the Orient with the Occident…”88
87 For details on the bodily and embodied practices that made Nabobs out of Englishmen, see, E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
88 Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; repr. London: Penguin, 2003), 78. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the signifier ‘Orient’ while signifying the ‘exotic East’ had as its territorial referent, largely, the Near East of the Islamic ‘Other.’ The subcontinent was yet to be firmly integrated within its territorial reference. This is evident from the documents from the era. One finds in these writings the terms ‘Oriental despot’ or ‘Eastern despot’ used by the authors to refer to specifically the Muslim rulers in India. Furthermore, though clearly exoticized, ‘Gentoos’—the Portuguese moniker for Hindus—were clearly viewed in a sympathetic light as ‘noble savages’ whose past glory had been depredated by successive Muslim ‘invasions’ with specifically ‘Eastern’/‘Oriental’ characteristics. This goes not only to show—vindicating Edward Said’s choice to focus Near/Middle Eastern Islam in Orientalism—that the primary ‘Other,’ in whom inhered the real threat to Western
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I have argued earlier, this ‘learning,’ or study, of indigenous cultures, should be viewed as one of the components in the larger realm of leisure for the British,89 leisure that, of course, was imbricated in the ideological constitution of colonial rule. It is only this aspect of
Orientalists’ leisure—study—that has traditionally received scholarly attention, i.e. how this class of civil servants through their regular interactions with ‘natives,’ in work and in study—
came to produce the discursive terrain of Orientalism. In the process, study has become the only
optic of looking at this particular class of British civil servants.90 Hence, the descriptive label
attached to them: Orientalists. However, in order to have a more rounded picture of the
ideological predicates of developing hybrid subjectivity in the subcontinent, one needs to
consider the role of play in the lives of the Orientalists. For, in the sphere of play—the other
component of leisure—they also expressed strong affinities for cultural tastes that were unambiguously European; similarly attuned to contemporary fashionable trends in London; over and above their scholarly fascination with subcontinental cultures and cultural histories that they
imbibed and inculcated in both study and play. It is this, the dual accents inhering in the life- practices of the Orientalists in India that, I propose, produced a hybrid aesthetic subjectivity for them.
Christendom, was Islam; it also brings to light that the territorial entity of the Indian subcontinent was yet to be discursively integrated within either the conceptual signified or the referential ambit of the sign ‘Orient.’ The pale of the ‘East’ at that time ended, for most Western Europeans, in the Near East. This would however change rapidly with the onset and progress of British colonial rule in India.
89 Though not in the same terms, this distinction is alluded to by Edward Said in his brief discussion of William Jones in Orientalism. Though he does not expand on it further, he notes the difference between “official work” and “personal study.” For details, see Ibid., 77-78.
90 The validity of this argument can be tested against extant scholarship on Orientalism. See, for example: David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); W. Norman Brown, India and Indology: Selected Articles (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978).
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With particular reference to music, this intersection of study and play is perhaps most
evident in none other than William Jones. Jones, whose official station in India was in the
capacity of a judge at the Supreme Court in Calcutta, not only penned the first published volume
on Indian music, titled “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” in 1792, he was also an avowed
enthusiast of European music—both, the “‘ancient repertoire’” of Handel and Corelli; as well as
the ‘new’ fashionable music of Haydn and his likes.91 He also helped organize both formal and
informal performances of European music in Calcutta. In a letter to John Shore (the later Lord
Teignmouth) in 1787, likening European music to medicinal supplement that he deemed
necessary for good health, Jones wrote:
You will not (though you dislike medicine) object to my prescription: Take a concerto of Corelli An air of Leo, or Pergolesi —a trio of Haydn, etc Mixtura fiat Would I could be as good a physician to you, as I am etc.92
Jones, clearly, was not singular in his predilection for European music. Francis Fowkes, the
British Resident of Benares who under the influence of Jones inculcated an interest in Indian
‘classical’ musics and published an article on the vina in Asiatic Society’s journal, was an avid
listener and practitioner of European music as well, as, evidently, was John Shore.93 Jones also
maintained contact over musical concerns with Francis’ sister, Margaret Fowkes—a central figure in trend to collect ‘Hindostannie’ airs.94
91 For details see: Tolley, “Music in the Circle of Sir William Jones,” 525-550.
92 Quoted in Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 93.
93 A significant part of Woodfield’s narrative in Music of the Raj is based on correspondences between Francis Fowke and his sister, and fellow musical enthusiast, Margaret Fowke. A substantial time was spent in these letters on discussing music; and the way it circumscribed a range of quotidian emotions for them. See, Ibid.
94 Woodfield, “The ‘Hindostannie Air,’”189-211; ------, “Collecting Indian Songs,” 73-88.
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What this reveals is that though the new civil servants arriving in India during the 1770s,
specifically the Orientalists among them, famously “codif[ied] …the infinite variety of the
Orient [into]…‘complete digest[s]’ of laws, figures, customs, and works…[,]”95 this does not
imply that they smothered their tastes and preferences for things European. In that they differed
from the earlier Nabobs who became subjectively ‘Indianized.’ A proof of this can be found in
the difficulty that many Nabobs faced in re-socializing back into British society upon their return
to England.96 The Orientalists on the other hand, in spite of significant interactions with
‘natives,’ especially the educated and landed elite among them, or perhaps because of it, maintained an objective cultural distance from their subjects of study. They imbibed in play equal measures of European amusements, particularly European music. Hence, the hybrid subjectivity that these civil servants embodied was a more intellectually and formally predicated union of the Orient and the West than in the case of the Nabobs. This union was secured not so much through lived experience but discursively in civilizational ‘histories’ of common provenance—Greco-Roman Europe and ‘Hindu’ India.97 The latter, however, had evidently
fallen into a state of disrepair since its civilizational acme due to successive Islamic invaders
who now ruled the country. The Orientalists made it their personal quest to salvage it from
complete ruin and discursively reconstruct its old glory in order to revivify the present.
What is then implied is that the production of hybrid aesthetic subjectivity of the
Orientalists owed more to their discursive and institutional practices, in which they vigorously
engaged things Indian, than lived-experiences. Conversely, for the Nabobs, as the term itself
95 Said, Orientalism, 78.
96 See, Spear, The Nabobs, 37.
97 A claim, for which they found ‘objective’ validation through comparative philology, among other emergent academic disciplines. See, Said, Orientalism, 78-79.
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suggests, it was the urge to live the very reason ascribed by the Orientalists for present abjectness
of India—the ostentatious and luxury-loving Islamic culture—that was central in the forging of hybrid aesthetic subjectivity. To put it differently: the hybridizing site for the Orientalist was the realm of study, while for the Nabobs it was the realm of play. Common to both hybridities,
however, was the fact that they were unique to, and made possible by, subcontinental
colonialism.
‘Fusion’ Music:
So far here, we have seen how the British “addiction” to nautch gave rise to ‘hybridizing sites’ of
entertainment; ‘spaces’ where the Anglo-Indian imbibed a taste for not only the primary
aesthetic/erotic content of nautch, inhering in the dance and the danseuse, but also the music that
attended it. We have also seen during the same period a parallel increase in the practice and
performance of European music (the other music of play), a result of demographic change and
increase in the British population that accompanied colonial expansion. This subsection focuses
on the ‘new’ hybrid musical expressions—‘fusion’ music—that were born in such ‘hybridizing
sites,’ out of occasions where subcontinental and European musics were brought together.
Englishwomen in India, wittingly, and unwittingly, were instrumental in the production
of ‘hybrid’ music—music that was neither western nor Indian. It has been mentioned before that
these women, arriving in increasing numbers on the subcontinent to find a suitable hand in
marriage, were the one social group in the contemporary Anglo-Indian society that practiced and
performed European music on a regular basis (mostly informally but at times formally as well).
They were also a group that, more than others, kept abreast with fashionable cultural trends in
London. If not anything else, it enhanced their value in the marriage market. It was the
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combination of these two facets that made it possible and provided the impetus, respectively, for
Englishwomen to transcribe Indian songs in western musical notations. Products of their labor were called ‘Hinsdostannie airs.’98
Ian Woodfield has located the ideological basis for collection of ‘Hindostannie airs’ in the contemporaneous ‘Picturesque’ movement in England; that from being “[o]riginally a movement in opposition to the formal, classical concept of the garden…broadened to include a fascination with anything colorful or exotic in the natural or human worlds.”99 The musical
expression of this ‘fascination’ crystallized in the new-found enthusiasm to collect “national
airs”—a constitutive reflection of the movement to demarcate ‘national’ identities for peoples of
the globe; a denouement of European nationalisms of the previous century. Influence of the
‘Picturesque’ movement was played out on the subcontinent in the drive among the
Englishwomen to transcribe and collect the music (and musical instruments) of the ‘exotic’
‘Hindostan.’ Accordingly, Musicians and singers in nautch troupes would often be asked to
perform in the residences of the British officials for the ladies to transcribe the pieces.100
Woodfield reckons that the Englishwomen’s urge to participate in the ‘fashion’ of
collecting ‘Hindostannie’ airs had its roots in the European Picturesque movement. Also, he
calibrates the withering of British interest in these airs to the decline of the same movement in
Europe. This, however, detracts attention away from actuating factors in the production of these
98 For details, see, Woodfield, “The ‘Hindostannie Air,’’’ 189-211.
99 Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 151. For details, see Mildred Archer, Indian Painting for the British, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.
100 Woodfield, Music of the Raj, 157-161. This effort undertaken by Englishwomen was in some senses symptomatic of the contemporaneous Orientalist projects to “codify” the diverse expressive cultures of the subcontinent. Importantly, this phenomenon draws our attention to the role played by women in creation of the discourse of Orientalism—normally believed to be a male preserve; particularly in ‘recording’ living popular musical cultures of the subcontinent.
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‘airs’ that had their roots in the ideological world of the then-contemporary Anglo-Indian social
formation. As the historical information furnished by Woodfield himself suggests, the desires
and practices of mimicry that characterized affective world of the Nabobs seems to have rubbed
off significantly on the Englishwomen collectors and performers of ‘Hindostannie’ airs. To quote
Woodfield: “At the height of the fashion, pieces were performed at fashionable soirees, often to
great applause, with the singers sometimes wearing Indian dresses to add to the ‘authenticity’ of
the presentation”101 Also, as the same author points out, owing to their lack of technical knowledge of Indian music, the criteria for evaluating performances was learnt mimetically from native experts.102 The practical coordinates of this British ‘fashion’ could only be procured in the
subcontinent. From this, it is difficult to believe that these attempts in masquerading as nautch-
singers had its ideological basis solely in the Picturesque movement. Even if it did, there is no
basis to privilege the ideological over the practical. Indeed, the two always inform each other. It
is then perhaps more instructive to view this phenomenon in terms of a hybrid aesthetic
subjectivity of the Englishwomen, produced as much by the said movement as by the ideological
practices unique to latter-eighteenth century Anglo-Indian social formation. Consequently,
reasons for decline of British enthusiasm in ‘Hindostannie’ airs can be better comprehended
taking into account not just the dissipation of the Picturesque movement but the way colonialism
unfolded in the subcontinent as well (discussed later in detail).
To return to the issue of hybridity in the musical texts: the translation of musical material
of a vastly different system of music, with different melodic structures and time signatures that
most British were exposed to for the first time in India in terms of another musical language, was
bound to result in slippages. Ian Woodfield notes:
101 Woodfield, “The ‘Hindostannie Airs,’” 189.
102 For details, see Ibid., 202; ------, “Collecting Indian Songs,” 73-75.
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The resulting [‘Hindostannie’] airs could hardly be said to bear much resemblance to their Indian originals, yet the use of drones, irregular meters, unusual ornamentation patterns, and occasional 103 attempts at mode demonstrates the intention (at least) was to produce authentic versions.
Such efforts, as Woodfield material and analysis reveal, however, did not just stop at just
transcription. The ‘sheet’ music would actually be performed on a pianoforte or harpsichord—
deemed acceptable for women to play in accordance with prevailing gender ideology among the
British—by the interested Englishwoman in concert with Indian musicians on their own
instruments. The above author writes of Margaret Fowkes—an active enthusiast of collecting
and performing ‘Hindostannie’ airs and Francis Fowkes’ sister—attempt at this:
[Her] method was to get the Indian musicians to tune her harpsichord so that she could ‘play along.’ This would of course have destroyed at one stroke the intonation system, but, given the intractable problems of keeping a European keyboard instrument in tune and the dismal tuning skills of Europeans in India…it cannot be assumed that any consistent European system was substituted.104
With such impediments, and despite them, the music that emanated out of such undertakings, clearly, was neither Indian nor was it transposable onto any European musical system. The resultant sound was a musical hybrid, ‘fusion’ music: Englishwomen on harpsichords or pianofortes accompanying Indian musicians on their own instruments, playing transcribed versions of Indian music that were not amenable to perfect transposition onto
European musical modes. Importantly, the ‘fusion’ music produced in such sites was a result of slippages in musical signification owing to the partial intranslatibility of one musical system into another musical ‘language’ whose system of transcription was rooted in a very different aural culture and cultural economy.105 The signifiers in the European notational system were not
103 Ibid., 8-9.
104 Ibid., 161. This problem and its resolution will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5.
208 simply designed to signify the range of notes, meters, intonations that characterized subcontinental musics. The intention of the British was not to create a ‘fusion’ but to replicate the original piece: a musical mimesis that was destined, in spite of best efforts, to be “partial” from the very beginning.106 This is what is particularly significant, as Woodfield points out: the fact that the British transcribers and performers of ‘Hindostannie’ airs believed their pieces to be exact reproductions, ‘authentic’ versions.107 It is in this very denial of (even the possibility of) of otherwise apparent hybridity in the transcribed and performed ‘Hindostannie’ airs that the delimitations inscribed by the colonial situation towards the articulations hybrid subjectivity lies.
The implicit belief of the colonizer that the colonized could be represented as it is.
This brings us, finally, to the experiments with ‘fusion’ music that were conducted in the other kind of ‘hybridizing spaces’ during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, again, made possible by the culture of nautch in its new incarnation. These were the venues provided for nautch by the emergent indigenous elites, especially the ones that had begun to concentrate in and around Calcutta. The nautch in such venues could either be occasioned as a precursor to mollify a Company official before negotiating business favors with him; or, as a relatively new, but important, part of self-sponsored religious festivities—especially the Durga
Puja.108 As we have seen before, British presence in such sites as guests considerably augmented
105 Woodfield has provided detailed musicological explanations of these slippages. For details, see: Woodfield, “Collecting Indian Songs,” 77-88.
106 The term is Bhabha’s. He uses it to signify the ‘incompleteness’ and ‘virtuality’ of the process of mimicry. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.
107 For details, see: Woodfield, “Collecting India Songs,” 75-76.
108 It needs to be mentioned that the integration of nautch into such festivities was relatively new among the ‘Hindu’ elites—both the old landed class and the new merchant class. The ‘nautch,’ as noted earlier, prior to British overlordship in India, was thrived mostly under the patronage of Islamic court culture of the nawabs and the Mughals. But with its redoubtable popularity among the British during the latter eighteenth century, the Hindu elite, whose socioeconomic privileges depended greatly on keeping the East India Company officials in good humor,
209 the prestige of the event. Indeed, these events featured importantly in the matrix of British play during the period under consideration. The prevailing significance of nautch in such sites can be gauged from the attention it merited in contemporary English newspapers published by the
British. The Calcutta Gazette of November 1, 1825, advertised a ‘festival’ to be held at Babu
Ruplal Mullick’s residence between the 25th and the 27th of the same month. The festival would host nautch performances, as well as an English Band “in a style superior to everything of the kind before given in this settlement.”109 In this one finds further evidence of the efforts undertaken by the Bengali elite class to not only warm up to the British but also to engage their peers in one-upmanship to attract public attention. The ‘English Band’ playing at an increasingly important ‘Hindu’ festival was a means to achieve both ends. Its presence is expressive of a hybrid subjectivity (albeit different from that of the British earlier) developing among indigenous elite community (discussed later) and the possibility of musical ‘fusion’ arising out of such a situation. Documentary evidence of such ‘fusion’ actually happening can be found a few decades earlier in Rajah Sookmoy Roy’s Puja festivities:
Of the nautches at different great houses, those at Sookmoy Roy’s afforded by much the most satisfaction, not only on the account of the superior number of singers and dancers but of the coolness of the place; no low crowds being admitted, and two large punkas being kept constantly in motion The only novelty that rendered the entertainment different from those of last year, was the introduction, or rather the attempt to introduce, among the Hindoostanee music. 110
Here, clearly, ‘fusion’ music was not an accidental outcome of efforts to replicate the ‘authentic,’ as we have seen was the case with performances of ‘Hindoostannie airs’ by Englishwomen.
Rather, the musical ‘fusion’ was intentional. Carey, however, goes on to say that “[t]his
nautch began to creep into their festivities; marking, thereby a change in the culture of religious festivities itself. This style of celebrating a religious occasion, particularly the Durga Puja, was taken up by the urban and suburban middle-classes in Bengal later down the road.
109 Calcutta Gazette, November 1, 1825.
110 Anon., The Calcutta Chronicle, September 18, 1792.
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innovation seems not to have succeeded, ‘owing to the indifferent skill of the musicians.’”111 It is important to note here that there is no further reference of such experiments with ‘fusion’ music being conducted either at that time or afterwards in published accounts of social life of British in
India.
Does this mean, then, that what happened at Rajah Sookmoy Roy’s residence was a singular event? Despite the absence of other similar records from the period, an argument can be made that this seems unlikely. At a time when ‘native’ elites were vying for the attention of the
British for administrative favors and commercial privileges, it is appears logical that the
“innovation” would be replicated in other similar gatherings. Moreover, some three decades down the line, Babu Ruplal Mullick’s extravaganza with a European band and nautch troupes performing on the same card, suggests that such musical ‘fusion’ became a distinctive feature in the prevalent cultural repertoire. However, if the “innovation” at Rajah Sookmoy Roy’s residence is taken as a one-off incident, then the question arises: why was such an experiment so readily abandoned? Could it be really because of the “indifferent skill of the musicians” involved? Or, were there other forces at work that ultimately smothered the possibility of experimenting with music that combined “English airs with Hindostannie songs”?
The Fission of ‘Fusion’:
Let me first counter the reason ascribed by the source quoted in Carey’s Good Old Days of the
John Company—that musicians involved were not proficient enough to sustain the
“innovation”—was the one that put an end, if at all, to further such experiments. If this type of musical ‘fusion’ was truly a novelty for its time—a new, distinct ‘type’ of musical ‘text’ born
111 Ibid.
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specifically out of the colonial encounter, then it can be said that there was nothing similar
against which the proficiency of the musicians involved could be compared and gauged. For, as
we have been told by Derrida and others, it is through “repetition and difference” that a genre
begins to solidify.112 This implies that at the time of the emergence of a new form of music,
‘skills’ that inform it remain abstract for certain period of time; over which a type/genre is made to acquire constitutive ‘members.’ Only then can the skills informing one cultural ‘text’ be compared to another within that genre. Hence, if there were no such other “innovations”—which
I think is unlikely considering the cultural politics of the time—then the “‘indifferent’ skill of the musicians” appears to be an improbable reason for its ‘disappearance’ from the “continuum of history” of music in the subcontinent.
Rather, this needs to be viewed in the context of, to borrow Sudipta Sen’s phrase, a more general “decline of intimacy” between the British and their ‘native’ subjects as the eighteenth century drew to a close and the nineteenth century unfolded. This is evident in the concerted effort by the British to ‘purify’ the hybrid subjectivity that characterized the lives of the eighteenth century Anglo-Indians.113 For, in its lived-experiential constitution and expression,
this hybrid subjectivity—most perspicuous in the figure of the Nabob—was a product of latter
eighteenth century ‘colonial mimicry;’ one that threatened to dissolve the Self-justification of
colonial rule.
This register of colonial mimesis, however, is different in its historical constitution from
Homi Bhabha’s well-known analysis of the same. According to Bhabha’s elucidation, mimicry
of the British, a process initiated by the British themselves, by the modernizing indigenous elite
112 Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980).
113 Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (New York: Routledge, 2002).
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of the nineteenth century threatened to rupture the discourse of colonial dominance. For, the acts
of mimicry by the natives, their arrogation of the same language that had enabled British
colonization, threatened to erase the very constitutive differences that separated the colonizer
from the colonized in the asymmetrical power relations of colonialism. In the colonized ‘mimic-
men’ the colonizing Self saw a mirror-image, a “double articulation,” that split its a priori, Self- conscious unity.
However, unlike in Bhabha’s case, where it is the new native organic class that mimics its colonial masters, in the latter eighteenth century we find the colonizing British-Self mimicking the colonized Other. We see in the Nabobs an inverted image of Bhabha’s nineteenth
century mimic-man. There is, however a crucial difference to be made between the two
diachronic registers of colonial mimesis. Even though both eighteenth and nineteenth colonial
mimeses had formally the same effect, the actuating factors were very different in the two
epochs. If, as Bhabha notes, for the later indigenous elite “to be Anglicized [was] emphatically
not be English,”114 then it was the opposite, “Indianizing’ trend of Nabobs, that threatened to
“‘rupture’ the discourse of [British] domination”—a threat that was palpably felt and articulated not so much in India but back home in England by the Evangelists and Utilitarians. Thus, the
‘fusion’ music which was an outcome of the eighteenth century hybrid subjectivity of the British could not be sustained in the ideological atmosphere that followed. In fact, over time, it was pushed deeper into historical amnesia that was inherited by the collective memory of the Indian nation-state in 1947.
Historically, the ‘decline of intimacy’ achieved finality in the liberal politico-legal-
economic reforms imposed on the subcontinent by the Anglicists/Utilitarians during the
114 Ibid., 87; emphasis in original.
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1830s.115 As is well known, by the end of the eighteenth century Indian affairs of the Company
had entered the arena of public debate in England. At the center of this maelstrom were well-
founded accusations of rampant financial irregularities by Company officials who had amassed
huge fortunes through bribes, commissions, and personal trade. This not only corroded Company
earnings but compromised English national pride—yoked significantly to its imperial ventures.
This was apparent in its depredation of its colonial subjects, whose welfare the Company was
putatively committed to by virtue of being their ruler. If Edmund Burke trenchantly articulated
this in his deposition at Governor General Warren Hastings’ impeachment hearings in London in
1788, then the Utilitarians and Evangelists, converging on common concerns from different ends
of the ideological spectrum, summarily discredited the very ideology of rule espoused by the
Company in India. Unlike Burke, whose cardinal concern was the economic and moral
corruption of the Company officials and not so much the nature of the colonial state in India,
liberal radicals of the Industrial Revolution era like the Utilitarians James Mill, his son John
Stuart Mill, and T. B. Macaulay, and Evangelists like Charles Grant, saw the Company’s
espousal of traditional structures of governance, inherited from the Mughals, at the root of the
decadent state of affairs in the colony.116 The general fascination of the Nabobs and Orientalists with Indian culture and history was reflective and constitutive of this malaise, leading to the wholesale debunking of their attitudes and efforts by the radical reformists, as well as by those advocating increased missionary presence in the subcontinent. This malaise could be corrected only through the imposition of necessary reforms that would lift India out of its present gloom and cast it on the road to modernity. Marquis Cornwallis, who arrived in India in 1787 as
115 For details, see: Stokes, The English Utilitarians; Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence.
116 Hutchins, Illusion of Permanence, 1-19.
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Governor General after the loss of the American colonies to replace Warren Hastings,
immediately initiated this process, which gathered enough steam by 1835 for Macaulay to pen
his minutes on education in India.
This zeal ultimately manifested itself in the consequent segregation of the British and
their ‘native’ subjects, justified in terms of fast reifying notions of racial superiority of the
former, something that mingling with ‘natives’ could seriously jeopardize. A resonance of this
can be found in an article in the India Gazette of 1832, penned by a British correspondent who
clearly had not forgotten the ‘grand nautch’ held at Ruplal Mullick’s mansion seven years ago:
‘…it is much to be lamented that these nautches are not kept more select. I can see no motive for allowing so indiscriminate a mixture of people. Surely it cannot be for the interest of those who give these entertainments, to admit all kinds of people without any, the least, distinctions. If the givers wish to make unto themselves a respectable one, by admitting such a mass of low-lived creatures as they do, it would redound [sic] much more to their honour, if they were to admit only those who are respectable and meet to mix in respectable society.’117
Thus, with the ‘hybridizing sites’ of play that made possible the practice and performance
of ‘fusion’ music rapidly shrinking, public and private experiments with any kind of formal
union of European and subcontinental cultural ‘texts’ with exponents of each physically present
in one place, became a gradual impossibility. This, coupled with the arrival of increasing number
of Englishwomen that resulted in the dissipation of the sexual allure that nautch held earlier for
British males, contributed to it becoming a subcontinental cultural ‘token’118— a far cry from
being the play that in the 1780s and ’90s invited active participation of the British, either as
patrons, or participants, or both. What followed was more an era of work—a consequence of the
congealing of the colonial governmental apparatus. Their disenchantment with nautch—the
117 Quoted in Narendra Kumar Nayak, ed., Calcutta 200 Years: A Tollygunge Club Perspective (Calcutta: Tollygunge Club Limited, 1981), 114.
118 Spear, The Nabobs, 35-36
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motive force behind the configuration of ‘hybridizing spaces’—is apparent in European nautch
paintings from later nineteenth century. While the depictions by Zoffanys and Solvyns during the
1780s show the British paying undivided attention to the performance in front of them, the ones
from roughly 1820s onwards show nautch to be just an appendage to social gatherings with the
British audience involved in other merriments as the song and dance recital went on.119
Yet another factor played an important role in purging subcontinental elements out of
British play during this period: this was the establishment of social clubs in the White town in
Calcutta. H. R. Panckridge noted in his volume commemorating the centenary of the Bengal
Club—the first of the many institutions of its kind to come up in India in 1827—at a time when the subcontinent had already been brought under Crown rule and ‘Britishness’ in the colonies corresponded to a great degree with the same at home:
It is the practice of European peoples to reproduce as far as possible in their settlements and colonies in other continents the characteristic social features of their national lives. Thus it is that the footsteps of France are marked by the café, those of Germany by the beergarden. For more than a century no institution has been more particularly British than the social club…In the tropical possession of the British Crown the idea of the club makes special appeal to a large number of men, who are compelled by circumstances to be separated from their wives and their families…120
The social clubs were spaces of exclusively British sociocultural interaction that barred
even preeminent ‘native’ elites of Calcutta from membership. “It [was] said that the personal
habits of Bengallee gentlemen [could not] in the relaxing moments of convivial intercourse be
found agreeable to the rest of the members.”121 Not surprisingly, as can be seen from
119 For example, see the nineteenth century plates reproduced in Nevile, Nautch Girls.
120 Panckridge, A Short History of the Bengal Club, 1-2.
121 Anon., “The Bengal Club and Calcutta Society,” Hindoo Patriot, Calcutta, May 24, 1855. Reprinted in Benoy Ghose, ed., Selections from English Periodicals of 19th Century, vol. 3 (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1980), 172.
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contemporary advertisements in newspapers and the program cards issued by the clubs, these
institutions also became the primary venues for European music recitals.122
Conclusion
It has been my effort in this paper to interrogate the dynamics of musical hybridity at a time
when the harmony/melody dichotomy had not become reified, which it does over the course of
the nineteenth century and after. This is a constitutive part of the same process that, as scholars
have noted, birthed a new hybrid subjectivity, inhering this time in not the British but the native
intellectuals. Ironically, we have seen earlier, this was as much an outcome of efforts made by
British reformists to ‘purify’ the hybrid subjectivity of the Anglo-Indians as it was their intention
to produce ‘brown sahibs,’ or Bhabha’s “mimic men.” With particular reference to music, this
new hybrid subjectivity, and the repetitive mimicry that molded it, is perhaps nowhere more
evident than in a meeting that took place in Paris in 1844 between the famous German Indologist
Max Muller and Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, one of the preeminent ‘native’ elites of his era. The
next chapter of the will narrate and analyze this encounter at length. Suffice it to say that by the
late-nineteenth century, one finds musical difference being articulated in starkly oppositional
terms, positing harmony and melody against each other. As Dwarkanath’s illustrious grandson,
Rabindranath Tagore, would put it:
122 For example, see the ones reproduced in Nayak, Calcutta 200 Years, 114-121. An important fact needs to be mentioned here. This history of the movement away from ‘things’ Indian largely affected the upper stratum of the Anglo-Indian society. For, not every British had access to the social clubs that ostensibly opened its doors to only the “respectable” members of British society. What happened to the musical entertainment of low-level British bureaucrats, the subalterns in the army, and those that served in the Railways, away from urban areas merits independent enquiry; something, that I have not been able address at all in the current paper but intend to follow up later as an important component of my larger research.
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The world by the day is like European Music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord. But the night world is about Indian Music; one pure, deep, and tender raga.123
Though highly debatable in the present musical context, especially from an
anthropological perspective, the issue here is not so much about whether western music is
‘actually’ harmonic and Indian music, melodic. Rather, it is about the complex of scientific,
institutional, practical processes under asymmetric power relations that reify this difference.
When reified and oppositionally staged, ‘Indian’ and ‘Western’/‘European’ become
classificatory signs that signify not two different musical systems; rather, they produce two
oppositional musical subjectivities, each claiming ‘purity’ for itself. It is through such claims that
a fear of contagion is revealed.
This ‘fear’ is apparent in the way that ‘Indian’ music was ‘purified’ during the era of anti-
colonial/nationalist struggle. As the political imperatives of nationalism became more immediate,
so did the clamor to posit a cultural ‘authentic,’ deemed necessary to validate the claims of an
‘Indian nation.’ Building on earlier Orientalist efforts, this was discursively traced to a glorious,
originary civilizational past; the continuous evolution of which, if disturbed by Islamic
‘invasions,’ had been ruptured by British colonialism. The nationalist movement was to restore
that continuity. The musical referent of this cultural ‘authentic’ was to be found in Indian
classical music, whose origins apparently could be traced to the Sama Veda.124 The denouement of this was a state of denial. For, on the (then-contemporary) ground, popular music, including nationalist songs,125 was an eminently hybrid text, in which inhered liberal usage of western
123 Quoted in Roger Ashton, ed., Music East and West. (Bombay: Bhatkal Books International, 1966), 24.
124 See, for example, S. A. K. Durga, Research Methodology for Music (Madras: Center For Ethnomusicology, 1991), 1.
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idioms and instruments, things that could otherwise jeopardize the claims of a musical
‘authentic.’
Thus, the ‘history’ of music—as a constitutive element in the larger “continuum of
history”—has no problem in locating the birth of Indian ‘fusion’ music in the post-colonial epoch in the 1960s; when, ‘sanitized’ from its colonial pasts, the newly-independent nation-state of India found vindication of its claims of an ‘ancient’ civilizational origin in the acceptance of subcontinental classical musics on a global stage (read, recording and concert industry). The latter thus became the ‘authentic’/‘pure’ musical referent of the meta-signifier ‘India;’ out of whose ‘marriage’ with Western musical forms was born the genre, Indian ‘fusion’ music—with multi-national record companies playing the high priest. The bastard musical child of another epoch remains forgotten.
However, such fears of contagion did not exist (in the same way) during the latter- eighteenth century. Indeed, this was an era before polygenetic ideas of race kindled the fear of miscegenation—suspected of resulting in the degeneracy of the superior British masculine Self and its progeny; an era, before ideas of the supposedly enervating impact of the tropics, with its heat and miasmic air, on the ‘temperate’ European were solidified; and before other ‘scientific’
Self-justifications of rule had been firmly incorporated in the ideology of colonial dominance.
This epistemic regime—operationalized to a large extent in colonial ‘laboratories’—would
125 Examples of nationalist songs in western musical forms set to vernacular lyrics are aplenty. Employment of western musical forms is particularly evident in many popular nationalist songs composed by Kazi Nazrul Islam. This is not unusual considering Nazrul had served in the Allied Forces in the World War I and had been stationed in Egypt among other places during the war. The appearance of such compositions also coincides with the radicalization of the nationalist struggle during the 1920s. This time simultaneouly witnessed the imposition of kinesthetic practices such as drills and marches to inculcate discipline and militant spirit among activists. Thus it is not surprising that many nationalist songs were composed in the ‘march’ form. To cite a few well-known examples from Nazrul’s repertoire: “Chal, chal, chal…,” “Jaago duster pathaynaba jatri jaago jaago,” “Sangshunya laksha kanthay baajichhay shankha ei,” and so on. The examples have been taken from: Satish Samanta, Muktir Gaan (Songs of Freedom) (Calcutta: Orient Book Company, 1947), n. pag.
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ultimately become the dominant discourse by the mid-nineteenth century resulting in, and
maintaining, the social segregation of the British and the indigenous peoples.126 However, prior
to the formalization of this separation, especially between the 1770s and early-1830s, when ideas
of civilizational and biological superiority had not yet become reified, we find a strong tendency
of acculturation among the British in the subcontinent. Yet, in the same frame we find little
whirlpools of counter-current to these acculturating tendencies that a little later down the road
coalesce to become a flow in a very different direction.
Locating oneself in the present, it becomes apparent that ‘fusion’ music of the late-
eighteenth century was doomed to decay by the very condition that enabled it: colonialism.
Walter Benjamin, in his attempts to understand history through the allegory of Baroque ruins, says: “In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting.”127 This ruinous historical
‘setting’ is an invitation to the person who encounters it to make it whole again. At the very same time, its factual presence as a ruin, in a state of decay, renders this futile, and the ruin stays fundamentally fragmented. Likewise, the contemporary historian too encounters ‘fusion’ music of the late-eighteenth century in a state of ‘ruin.’ Carey had noted: “[t]his [musical] innovation seems not to have succeeded….”128 The “innovation” was abandoned. The point here is not one
of factual veracity: whether or not this particular musical practice was stopped altogether. As I
have argued earlier, in all likelihood, it was not. The fact, however, is that it was abandoned in
history, it was set to decay. Hence, any effort on the historian’s part to make ‘whole’ a once
possible ‘moment’ of different (musical) future is simultaneously ‘ruinated’ by the historical
foreknowledge of how colonialism unfolded in the subcontinent.
126 See, Sen, Distant Sovereignty, 119-149.
127 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 177
128 Carey, Good Old Days, 118-119.
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Chapter 4 Making of the Bhadralok Musical Subject: The Pre-history of Musical Modernity in Colonial Bengal, c. 1800-c. 1850
Thus far in (Part I of) this dissertation, the subject of my enquiry into music in and of late-
eighteenth century India has been the European colonizer. The focal points in the preceding
chapters have, respectively, been his—I use this gendered pronoun advisedly—will to
power/knowledge, epistemic location, and musical life in the colony. In the two chapters that
follow, comprising Part II of the dissertation, the historical-analytic gaze now shifts to focus on
the colonized Indian and his musical world. The narrative that I fashion here to animate this
musico-cultural complex takes the onset of nineteenth century as its chronological point of
departure. Not because music was any less of a vital presence in Indian social life prior to this.
But because it is at this conjuncture that the colonized can for the first time be discerned “…to
possess[,]” even if not yet in an ideologically coherent fashion, “a ‘subjectivity’ which he can
himself ‘make’.”1
Focusing on colonial Bengal up until the mid-nineteenth century, the present chapter attempts to shed light on different social spaces and acts of music enlivened by two individuals—well incorporated otherwise in the standard historiography of modern India as its pioneering vanguards—Rammohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore. As this chapter shows, it is in their self-articulation as musical subjects that one can identify the beginnings of musical modernity in colonial Bengal—a ‘modernity’ whose production was no longer the exclusive prerogative of the European colonizer. Since various aspects of Rammohan’s life and work are
1 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986), 38. As Chatterjee’s seminal study makes clear, the ideological coherence will congeal only around the 1870s—the time that he considers to be the “moment of departure” for Indian nationalism proper.
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already well known in scholarly literature, I begin this chapter with a brief and strictly topical
biographical sketch of Dwrakanath.
“He Promised to Become a No Mean Amateur”: Dwarkanath Tagore, the West, and Western Music
For much of his life, Europe loomed large over Dwarakanath Tagore’s [1794-1846]
consciousness. To partake in its civilizational achievements stirred in him an unremitted drive.
British colonialism, he believed until his dying day, had arrived in the subcontinent as a
benevolent, civilizing force to topple the centuries-long “Mahommedan conquest” of India and
to shake Hindus out of the putative stupor induced by it.2 He was born the same year as William
Jones’ death, into the still-staunchly Vishnavite Tagore family of Jorasanko, a family that had
made capital out of the sweeping political economic changes effected by the colonizing British in
Bengal over the latter half of the eighteenth century. As its scion, Dwarakanath was only too
aware that allying with the colonial project and cultivating proximate relations with Europeans of
eminence would not just further his class interests but also enhance his role as a mediating agent
between the colonial state and ‘native’ society. Indeed, Dwarakanath was, as Blair Kling
appropriately nominates him, in every sense a ‘partner in empire.’3
It would, however, be somewhat reductive to color Dwarkanath’s propinquity with
Europeans as purely instrumental. He had been conditioned in determinate ways into socializing
with India’s ruling race, differently so than other Indians hitherto. Young Dwarakanath, in the
opening years of the nineteenth century, was amongst the earliest Bengalis to receive some
2 Dwarakanath Tagore quoted in Anon, “The Native Character,” The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register For British and Foreign India, China, and Australasia 27 (January-April 1839): 251.
3 Blair Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarakanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
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formal education in English. He, and his equally well-known cousin, Prasanna Kumar Tagore,
were the first Indian wards to be admitted into Mr. Sherbourne’s school for Europeans.4 Then, in
his youth, he was placed under the tutorship of Rev. William Adam5—the Baptist missionary, soon to turn Unitarian, who had taken up residence in Calcutta in 1821.
It was also during this time that he became an employee of the East India Company.
Joining its Board of Customs, Salt, and Opium, as a serishtadar in 1822, he performed ably and interacted closely with European officials, rising to the post of a dewan, before resigning in
1834.6 Thereafter, as one of imperial Calcutta’s most prominent ‘absentee landlords,’7 as a
pioneer of native business enterprise, as a generous patron of new institutions of learning, and as
a champion of his close friend and mentor, Raja Rammohan Roy’s social reform agenda, he
ventured further than any of his peers in intimately interacting with Europeans of note and
position in the city. As an erstwhile English resident later wrote: “[Dwarkanath’s] villa near
Calcutta…[was always] crowded with Europeans.”8
Such proximity with ‘casteless’ foreigners was not, of course, viewed appreciatively in
all quarters. Dwarkanath’s violation of Brahminical orthopraxy often raised the caste-Hindus’
ire. Doggerels circulated in the popular domain,9 lampooning him and the supposed
4 See, Shibnath Shastri, Ramtanu Lahiri O Tatkalin Banga Samaj (Ramtani Lahini and Contemporaneous Bengali Society) (1904; repr. Calcutta: New Age Publishers, 2003), 162; also see, Krishna Kripalini, Dwarakanath Tagore, A Forgotten Pioneer: A Life (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1981), 22.
5 Saratchandra Deb, “Kolikatar Itihas (History of Calcutta),” Shilpapushpanjali 1, no. 4 (1885), 135. This periodical was edited by Amritalal Bandopadhyay.
6 For details, see, Kling, Partner, 37-40.
7 For more on the class of ‘absentee landlords’ of nineteenth century Calcutta and the cultural ethos that developed around them, see, Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
8 Anon., “Indian Society” in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature Sciences and Arts 25, no. 423 (1862): 96.
9 One such doggerel, penned by the famous songster, Rupchand Pakshi, went thus: Ki mawja achhe re laal jawle (Oh what fun there is in red water)
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‘debaucheries’ that he played host to in the baithak-khana of his Jorasanko residence and his
European-style villa in Belgachhia.10 The heat of censure encroached upon even his family life;
salacious rumors reached the ears of his wife, Digambari Devi—a remarkably strong-willed and
god-fearing woman. So disturbed was Digambari, it is said, by what she heard that flouting the
norms of propriety incumbent upon a married caste-Hindu woman of status, she stepped out of
the Jorasanko’s andarmahal (inner-chambers) and went down to the baithak-khana to confront
Dwarkanath. Jolted by what she witnessed there, or, as Chitra Deb describes it with dramatic
flourish, seeing “…her husband in the radiantly-lit room, engrossed in wining and dining with
European ladies and gentlemen…[on] food cooked by a Muslim chef…[,]”11 Digambari decided
to disavow all conjugal relations with him—a pledge she apparently stayed true to until her
death.12 Her husband, however, remained largely undeterred by such censures and indignations.
He continued apace in his heterodox social conduct, to the extent that in 1842, staking enormous social opprobrium, he went on to break one of Brahminical Hinduism’s most assiduously
Jaanen Thakur Company (Knows Tagore Company) Mawder gunagun amra ki jaani (What do we know of the wonders of booze) Jaanen Thakur Company (Knows Tagore Company) [Quoted in, Chitra Deb, Thakurbarir Andarmahal (The Inner Chambers of the Tagore Family) (1980; repr. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 2003), 7; translation mine.]
10 The literal Bengali translation of baithak-khana is “sitting chamber,” signifying the room in which guests are received and entertained.
11 Deb, Thakurbarir Andarmahal, 7-8. Also see, Tapan Raychaudhuri, “Love in a Colonial Climate: Marriage, Sex and Romance in Nineteenth-Century Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 2 (2000): 361. Deb opines that it is difficult to ascertain factually if Digambari Devi actually violated ‘purdah’ and left the ‘inner chambers’ of the Jorasanko complex for its baithak-khana to see for herself if what she had heard through the rumor mill was true or not. What, however, is certain that disturbed by what she had seen she solicited the opinion of Brahmin pandits on what the appropriate course of action for her ought to be. The opinion came back recommending that she stay true in her devotion and duties to her husband but break off conjugal relations. Digambari abided by this decision until her death.
12 Raychaudhuri, “Love in a Colonial Climate,” 361.
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guarded taboos. On January 9 that year, he set sail across the forbidden ‘black waters’ aboard his
own frigate, India, and journeyed to Europe.
Dwarakanath’s visit to the West, the first by an upper caste Hindu Bengali since his
illustrious predecessor Rammohan Roy’s celebrated trip twelve years prior, was, by all accounts,
a sensational and successful one.13 It was there that the honorific ‘Prince’ came to be prefixed to his name, bestowed by his suitably impressed hosts who ranged from Queen Victoria to the Lord
Mayor of London.14 In fact, the only regret he voiced arriving back in Calcutta later in the year
stemmed not so much from the flak he received from conservative Hindus for refusing to
prosecute purificatory rites for crossing the seas. What he regretted most was, rather, the limited
time he could afford in the imperial metropole. Resolving to set this right, Dwarakanath set sail
again on March 8, 1845, prepared this time for an extended stay, especially in France, whose
language “he laboured hard to acquire…as a passport to those of Europe[.]”15 He would never
return home from this trip. Bound by the same irony of fate that befell Rammohan, he died in
London on August 1, 1846, quite alone in his quarters at St. George’s Hotel, a far cry from the
public presence of his life in Calcutta. A brief note recognizing Dwarkanath as the
personification of England’s civilizing mission in the Indian colony—symptomatic of the
13 Of the first things that Dwarakanath did upon reaching England—as if a redemptive duty had been weighing on him—was move Rammohan’s mortal remains to the Arnos Vale cemetery, run by the Bristol General Cemetery Company, and had it reinterred with due respect and recognition. The impressive ‘chhatri’ that serves as Roy’s mausoleum still stands at Arno’s Vale was financed by Dwarakanath. [Ibid.; also see, Sophia Dobson Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, 1900, ed. Hem Chandra Sarkar (Calcutta: A. C. Sarkar, 1914).
14 As an anonymous contributor wrote in his piece in the Chambers Journal: Although Dwarkanath was “…nothing more than a Calcutta merchant of respectability, he was commonly received as an ‘Indian Prince,’ and on some occasions was actually announced, on entering a drawing-room, by the title of ‘his highness.’” [Anon., Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal 12 (1849): 115] Also see, Edward John Thompson, Rabindranath Tagore: His Life and Work (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), 4.
15 “Dwarkanauth Tagore,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 25 (September 1846): 320
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national-imperial cultural pride underlining the colonial project—appeared a couple of weeks
later on August 13:
The conformity of a few men of wealth and influence like Dwarkanauth Tagore to European habits and manners, will do more to unite the people of India with those of England than can be effected by any other means; and it is greatly to be desired, for the benefit of India especially, that his liberal example should find many followers. 16
Given the extent to which he concerned himself with Europe and Europeans throughout
his life, and given the latters’ fascination with him in turn, it is not surprising that Dwarakanath
surfaces in a wide range of nineteenth century publications of European authorship—from
articles and notices in newspapers, magazines, and journals of the day, to personal memoirs
published later. In the many contexts that Dwarakanath, a strangely exotic yet surprisingly
familiar Bengali “Baboo” to the European, makes his appearance in the European print-world, one singular attribute of his is often isolated for exceptional mention: his love of music—not that of his inherited culture, but of European music.17
What seems to have doubly piqued the Europeans’ curiosity was that Dwarakanath’s involvement with their music was not limited only to discerning and appreciative audience—a quality not entirely unexpected of an affluent and English-educated Baboo, well-known for keeping European company in the colonial capital. That he also possessed a fair degree of performative competence, particularly as a vocalist, was something which took his western
16 Allen’s Indian Mail and Register of Intelligence From British and Foreign India, China, and All Parts of the East 4, no. 58 (1846): 510.
17 The exotic-yet-familiar affect that Dwarakanath induced in Europeans in best summed up in the personal remembrances of Sir Frederick Pollock, who was, also, in a case of amusing coincidence, “sometimes the Queen’s remembrancer [sic]”: Dwarkanauth Tagore has been here, and I have seen a good deal of him, and liked him as a pleasant, agreeable companion, as well as a well-informed and highly intelligent person. He speaks English perfectly, and is so familiar with English manners and all the gossip of the day that, meeting him in a mail coach at night (if such an adventure were possible nowadays), you would be surprised to see his swarthy face and turban when the morning broke upon our conversation. [William Frederick Pollock, Personal Remembrances of Sir Frederick Pollock, Second Baronet, vol. 1, London: McMillan and Co., 1887]
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interlocutors by admitted surprise, without exception. Enthusiastic comments by Europeans
praising Dwarakanath’s taste for and felicity in European music abound. The standard obituary
that circulated in English newspapers and journals after Dwarakanath’s death in England reflects
the general tenor of their appreciation: “[Dwarakanath]…took delight in various
accomplishments of [European] society, especially that of singing, and more particularly Italian
and English music. Had his life been spared he promised to become a no mean amateur.”18 Of the various western sources in which Dwarakanath, the European music aficionado, makes an appearance, there is one that immediately stands out under scrutiny. But its author, Friedrich
Max Muller, was no ordinary European himself. Expectedly then, his narration of Dwarakanath’s investments in European music is more substantive than the rest of his brethren. In that he goes much further than just its usual mention as novelty, as ‘cultured’ Europe’s exotic-familiar.
Dwarkanath was the first Indian that a young Friedrich Max Muller had the chance of properly meeting. Thus, when he began reflecting towards the end of his career on the world of
India in his life—a world that he helped produce as an idea, a world that he sampled through his encounters with Indians and Indian texts in Europe, but never actually visited—it is with an account of this meeting that Muller began his narrative, serialized under the title, “My Indian
Friends.”19
18 “Dwarkanauth Tagore,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, 320. Abridged variations of this obit also appeared in other publications. For variants, see: Allen’s Indian Mail and Register 4, no. 59 (1846): 513; The Annual Register, Or a View of History and Politics for the Year 1846 (London: F & J Rivington, 1847), 272.
19 Muller’s account of encountering Dwarakanath in Paris appeared in the first installment of the essay series he penned for serialized publication in the June 1898 issue of the journal, Cosmopolis, under the heading “My Indian Friends.” [Friedrich Max Muller, “My Indian Friends,” Cosmopolis: An International Monthly Review 10, (June 1898): 627-646] These essays along with other new ones were then compiled and published together a year later as a two-volume memoir under the title, Auld Lang Syne: My Indian Friends (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899) . The quotes used in this chapter are taken from the first edition of latter.
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Dwarkanath’s anomalous penchant for European music, surely enough, surfaces for mention in the essay as soon as Max Muller is done historicizing the circumstances of their first encounter in Paris. In fact, apart from this contextualization, Muller’s entire recall of
Dwarakanath is narrated on the register of music. And it is this portion of Muller’s larger essay, which subsequently moves on to discuss his other “Indian friends,” that I am interested in. For
the musical subject that is enlivened through the figure of Dwarakanath in this narrative, at
whose heart is the account of a fascinating musical exchange between the two one Parisian
morning, provides a dramatic entrée into the broad musico-historical formation and its
constitutive processes that the present chapter addresses, namely, the new, transformative
practices of musical self-making in the emergent Bengali Bhadralok society during the first-half
of the nineteenth century. In the following paragraphs, I reconstruct the historical context of the
musical encounter between Tagore and Muller, before moving on to a close, thematic reading of
the latter’s telling of it in the aforementioned essay. This exercise, we shall see, will clear the
conceptual ground for pursuing certain symptomatic elements of the ‘pre-history’ of musical
modernity in colonial Bengal over the rest of the chapter.
Dwarkanath and Musical Double Consciousness: The Thematics of a Musical Encounter in Paris, 1845
When a young and freshly doctorate Max Muller arrived in Paris from Berlin to study Sanskrit
under the guidance of the French Orientalist, Eugene Bournof, in 1845,20 word had already
reached him that “a real Hindu [had] made his appearance” in the city, causing “a great
20 For an account of Max Muller’s time in Paris, see: Georgina Adelaide Muller, ed., The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller, 2 vols. (New York: Longman, Greens, and Co., 1902), 31-50.
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sensation.”21 This “real Hindu,” was, of course, Dwarakanath Tagore. Proceeding as per plan on his second visit to Europe, Dwarakanath had taken up residence “...in the best suite of apartments in one of the best hotels in Paris.”22 Aware that a rare chance had presented itself, as “Indians did
not travel so freely abroad[,]…[for] the crossing of the Black Water had not then lost its terrors
[for Hindus ]…”, Muller was “filled with a strong desire to make his acquaintance.”23 The
opportunity came by at one of Bournof’s lectures at Institut de France. Upon hearing from him
that Muller had “copied and collated” a manuscript of the Rig Veda, Dwarakanath began taking
“a lively interest” in him, and the two soon struck up a friendship. They “often spent the[ir]
mornings” together, “talking about India and Indian customs.”24 Crucially, such conversations apart, their meetings were also animated by collaborative music-making—making European music, that is.
“Strange to say,” writes Muller, as nonplussed by Dwarakanath’s singular musical abilities as any other European, “he was devotedly fond of music, and had acquired a taste for
Italian and French music. What he liked was to have me accompany him on the pianoforte, and I soon found that he not only had a good voice, but he had been taught fairly well.”25 One
morning—not too far from their first meeting, one can presume—Muller decided to broach the
topic that must have been playing on his mind from the moment a musical rapport took seed
between the two. I will quote him in full here; for, as mentioned earlier, this passage, and the
21 Max Muller, Auld Lang, 6.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 7.
25 Ibid., 8.
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incident it narrates, opens up generative tracks of enquiry into various issues pertaining to music
and colonial modernity at their early/mid-nineteenth century conjuncture in Bengal.
After complimenting him on his taste for Italian music, I asked him…to give to me a specimen of real Indian music. He sang…what is called Indian but really is Persian…This was not what I wanted, and I asked whether he did not know some pieces of real Indian music. He smiled and turned away. “You would not appreciate it,” he said; as I asked him again and again, he sat down on the pianoforte, and after striking a few notes began to play and sing. I confess I was somewhat taken aback. I could discern neither melody, nor rhythm, nor harmony in what he sang; but when I told him so, he shook his head and said: “You are all alike; if anything seems strange to you and does not please you at once, you turn away. When I first heard Italian music, it was no music to me at all; but I went on and on till I began to like it, or what you call understand it. It is the same with everything else. You say our religion is no religion, our poetry no poetry, our philosophy no philosophy. We try and understand whatever Europe has produced but do not imagine that we therefore despise what India has produced. If you studied our music…our poetry, our religion, and our philosophy, you will find that we are not what you call heathens or miscreants but know as much of the Unknowable as you do, and have seen perhaps even deeper into it than you have!” He was not far wrong. He became quite eloquent and excited, and to pacify him I told him that I was quite aware that India possessed a science of music, founded, as far as I could see, on mathematics. I had examined some Sanskrit MSS. on music, but I confessed that I could not make head or tail of them. 26
This quote from Muller’s essay on his Indian friends is a rare one. It is one of the few
extant accounts that enlivens a frankly ‘civilizational’ encounter from mid-nineteenth century
between an Indian and a Europe on the register of music. It is also a quite well-known passage at
the same time, going by the number of times the essay from which it is extracted, “My Indian
Friends,” has appeared in various editions anthologizing Max Muller’s writings over the past
century, since its first publication in the journal, Cosmopolis, in June 1898. In fact, the exact same quote was extracted the very next month and printed in The Literary Magazine’s July issue, under the heading “Real Indian Music.” Attached was the following remark:
One of Prof. Max Muller’s many interesting friends whom he is telling the world about nowadays bore the name of Dvarkanath Tagore. He was a Hindu, the representative of one of the greatest and richest families of India, and he made his appearance in Paris in 1844 where Professor Muller made his acquaintance… .27
26 Ibid., 8-9; emphases added. The same text was also reproduce later in F. Max Muller, Rammohan to Ramkrishna (Calcutta: Rupa and Company, 2002), 13-14.
27 “Real Indian Music,” The Literary Magazine 17, no. 4 (June 1898): 100. Note that the year given for Dwarkanath’s “appearance in Paris” is incorrect. It ought to be 1845.
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Curiously, despite being one of the most evocative and critical passages in Muller’s
larger essay, reprinted well into the recent past this fascinating musical encounter, and the
narrative through which one encounters it in print, has stayed under the radar of, specifically
English-language music scholarship. The only music scholar so far to have recognized the value
of this passage is Dilip Kumar Mukhopadhyay—one of the most important music historians of
modern Bengal, whose work, owing to its linguistic medium, remains inaccessible to the wider
audience it richly deserves. In any event, the Tagore-Muller encounter appears prominently in
Mukhopadhyay’s seminal monograph, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha (Cultivation of Raga Music
by Bengalis),28 pointing to Dwarkanath’s grasp over both Indian and Western music, and his
“deep sense of nationalism.”29 We will have ample occasion in this chapter to parse out the
implications of the encounter in a nuanced manner. Suffice it to say here that Mukhopadhyay’s
designation of Dwarkanath as a ‘nationalist’ is both anachronistic as well as redolent of the
Whiggish narrative of musical modernity he espouses throughout his book.
This instance apart, the only other text where the import of Tagore-Muller encounter is realized to an extent is Sunil Gangopadhyay’s landmark work of historical fiction charting the colonial constitution of the Bengali Bhadralok as a social class, Shei Shomoy (Those Days).30 In the first volume of this expansive work, Gangopadhyay uses his fictional license to extend the time-frame of the conversation between Dwarkanath and Max Muller over “real Indian music,” heightening, thereby, its dramatic effect. If, according to Muller, the exchange took place over one particular morning, then Gangopadhyay spreads it out across several meetings, with Max
28 Dilip Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha (Cultivation of Raga Music by Bengalis) (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1976), 426-427.
29 Ibid., 428.
30 Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shei Shomoy (Those Days), 2 vols. (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers Private Limited, 1996).
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Muller each time requesting Dwarkanath for some “Indian marga sangit” and the latter
demurring, before finally relenting one day.31 Of the sequence of events that followed this, the novelist writes, allowing a hint of ideological nationalism to tinge his otherwise solidly Marxist thrust, that such was the force of Dwarkanath’s repartee to Muller’s nonplussed response to his performance that the latter was left “entirely deflated” at the end.32 While such rearrangement
and re-visioning of facts is not permissible within the protocols of disciplinary history, I take
inspiration from Gangopadhyay’s historical imaginary that was alert to the importance of the
Tagore-Muller encounter as a unique musico-civilizational event. But instead of weaving this
event into a historical narrative, fictional or otherwise, I abstract it conceptually, and ask: what
kind of a musical subject comes to relief when we analyze Muller’s narration of this meeting?
It is worth mentioning at this point that Muller had another occasion to recall his meeting
with Dwarkanath in a different context prior to his writing of the essay, “My Indian Friends.” In
a letter addressed to the Royal Academy of Munich, dated October 17, 1874, wrote Muller:
Dvarka Nath Tagore paid a visit to Europe in the year 1845. I write from memory. …I saw him frequently in Paris. Many a morning did I pass in his rooms, smoking, accompanying his on the pianoforte, and discussing questions in which we took a common interest. I remember one morning, after he had been singing some Italian, French, and German music, I asked him to sing an Indian song. He declined at first, saying that he knew I should not like it; but at last he yielded, and sang, not one of the modern Persian songs, which commonly go by the name of Indian, but a genuine native piece of music. I listened quietly, but when it was over, I told him that it seemed strange to me, how one who could appreciate Italian and German music could find any pleasure in what sounded to me like mere noise, without melody, rhythm, or harmony. “Oh,” he said, “that is exactly like you Europeans. When I first heard your Italian and German music I disliked it; it was no music to me at all. But I persevered, I became accustomed it, I found out what was good in it,
31 Ibid., 1: 169. It is interesting that Gangopadhyay translates Muller’s undefined “real Indian music” into Bengali as the well- defined “marga sangit”—the term used to signify music offered to the Gods in ancient India, to be performed in strict accordance with its codification in treatises and formal music pedagogy. Marga is contrasted with Desi (regional) sangit, i.e., music that subsisted in the popular, outside the marked time-space of formalized devotion. [For details, see, Ashok D. Ranade, Music Contexts: Concise Dictionary of Hindustani Music (New Delhi: Promilla and Co., 2006), 199-201, 225-226]. Gangopadhyay’s naming of “real Indian music’ as “marga sangit” conveys the impression that Muller already knew the latter to be the former, and was merely seeking an example of it from Tagore. This however, as should be clear from the discussion so far, is a fictional modification of the actual account in English, where Muller appears to be quite clueless about “real Indian music” is.
32 Gangopadhyay, Shei Shomoy, 169.
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and now I am able to enjoy it. But you despise whatever is strange to you, whether in music, or philosophy, or religion; you will not listen and learn, and we shall understand you much sooner than you will understand us.”33
Comparing the two different narrations by Muller of the same event, one does not notice
much substantive difference, except for one small detail. In the above account, Dwarkanath acquiesces to Muller’s request for an “Indian song” by performing “a genuine native piece of music” straight away. But the more detailed 1898 account has Dwarkanath singing two songs.
Muller says that upon his entreaty for a sample of “real Indian music” Dwarkanath first sang for him a piece that he recognized as Persian. Only upon further insistence did Dwarkanath reveal the “real” thing. This anomaly apart, the basic precepts of Muller’s narration of the event in the two different instances remains the same. Hence, assuming that the words he attributes to
Dwarakanath and to himself in “My Indian Friends,” though filtered by fifty years, are not too far afield of what actually might have verbally and musically transpired between the two, in what follows, I elaborate on the nodal points of the critique that the Indian makes in his dialog with
Muller. For in this critique we see the stirrings of a new form of self-consciousness in the colonized, a ‘double consciousness’34 whose cultural content—music, poetry, religion, etc.—is
33 Friedrich Max Muller, Chips From a German Workshop, vol. 4 (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1876), 356.
34 It is necessary to clarify the sense in which I am using the term ‘double consciousness.’ For, while a formal symmetry is maintained with the manner in which it is usually deployed in contemporary critical scholarship, here I have abstracted the concept from the particular historical experience that enlivens it in W. E. B. Du Bois’ landmark, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, where the Du Boisian idea is expanded and further developed. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)] In both, the concept signifies a condition that is organic to the history and historical experience of Black slavery, of cycles of violent dislocation and relocation, and of visceral and structural racism, that inscribes in the African American at the turn of the twentieth century a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” a sense of “two-ness.” [The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8] The formal homology of double consciousness of the African American and the Bengali Bhadralok obtains from this two-ness, from the “longing” in the colonized/racialized subject “to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self…” in a way that “…neither of the older selves [is] lost.” [Ibid., 9] The parallels of this subjectivity articulated by Du Bois to one that Dwarakanath Tagore articulates in his response to Max Muller are apparent. But this is where the homology between the two ends as well, for their real historical content imprecates in each case a very different relationship to the Western knowledge and power, and its violence.
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explicitly indexed to civilizational value, worked out in essential difference but categorical
uniformity with that of Europe. Both are agreed in principle, for example, on the validity of the
category, “real Indian music”; it is around validating its referential content that the cultural
politics of the encounter acquires charge.
It is as much to Muller’s credit as it is perhaps to the historical context in which he was
writing—the turn of the twentieth century—that in the reconstruction of his dialog with
Dwarakanath, the latter is presented as an equal articulator, if not arbiter, of the musical difference and untranslatability. He accords Tagore a first-person voice and the last instance authority on the topic at hand. Indeed, while both seem to know what real Indian music is, only
Dwarakanath is positively secure in its knowledge, both intellectually and as a performer, Muller
could only approach this negatively: it is definitely not French and Italian, nor is it Persian that is
often confused as Indian. Moreover, Dwarakanath is prescient of the fact the Muller will not like
it. And when his conjecture—an informed one, we can assume, given that Tagore was no
stranger to European musical sensibilities—gets validated in the admittedly confounding effect
on Muller of his illustrative performance of “real Indian” music, he is attributed by the latter a
memorable declamation. A declamation that in and through music not only articulates a critique
of (post-)Enlightenment universalism and its epistemic violence, but one that at the same time
admits to being constitutively conditioned by it.
Unlike the outright racist violence animating African slavery at all levels of the social, the parvenu Bhadralok class that congealed in Bengal by socially and economically exploiting the new opportunities opened up by British land, trade, and education policies in the late-eighteenth and the first-half of the nineteenth century India flourished under colonial rule during this period—a period when the ‘rule of colonial difference’ had not yet come together in properly racialized terms to affect either the class-interests and or the deep sense of loyalty that this class had towards the Company state. This is the class to which Dwarkanath belonged. And, as we see him in Muller’s quote, he is a proud and willing bearer of double consciousness. His condition is not the agonistic one forced on Du Bois’ “American Negro” who “simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.” [Ibid.]
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The unique manifestation of this conditioning, expressed here in the form of
Dwarakanath’s manifest bimusicality, in his performative grasp over contemporary European socio-musical idioms alongside that of his native tradition, imprecates, how so ever contingently, a plane of dialogic equivalence between the two. Here both are animated as agents, and not strictly as the European Self-Subject-representor and the colonized Other-object-represented. It is from this ground of contingent levelness that Tagore then enunciates an epistemological dead- end for West’s (musical) knowledge of its Oriental Other, a dead-end that simultaneously marks, by implication, the latter’s inassimilable ‘core’ which remains obdurately out of the former’s grasp, despite the force of its universalist assertions. This limit, demonstrated by Tagore through the specific instance of real Indian music in a spontaneous performance, is then generalized to include poetry, religion, and philosophy, viz. to include culture as a whole, as a marker of civilization.
It is suggestive that the ‘Dwarakanath’ Max Muller presents in his 1898-memoir verbalizes his critique of the latter’s inability to appreciate real Indian music on, primarily, an epistemological level, as an issue concerning “study,” “knowing,” “understanding,” and the ethics associated with these acts. Dwarakanath appears to argue through the words Muller ascribes to him that the European Subject’s self-image as the universal locus of knowledge and knowability leads it to a precipitate dismissal of that which appears immediately “strange” to his framework. Such an unreflexive gesture, despite all claims to self-consciousness of the (post-
)Enlightenment European Subject, poses a structural limit to the latter’s ability to truly understand ‘difference’ through open-minded “study”—a limit, beyond which, the distinction between ordinary Europeans’ ill-informed understanding of the Oriental Other, and that of the specialists’ more informed one, becomes blurred. To wit, Muller writes of Dwarakanath telling
236 him in an accusatory voice: “you are all alike.” The ‘we’—colonized Indians, coterminous with
‘Hindu’ in Tagore’s civilizational understanding—implicated by this ‘you’ cannot, however, indulge in such hasty dismissals.
“We try and understand whatever Europe has produced[,]” Muller recalls Dwarakanath insisting. Thus, despite Italian music having sounded just as “strange” and impenetrable in the first instance as “real Indian music” did to Muller, he had patiently persevered, resulting in the positive integration of it in his (musical) subjectivity. The qualification that Dwarakanath appends at this point in the dialog is of some importance. He warns Muller that his love of
European music ought not to be construed as implying an unlearning of “what India has produced.” Muller, on his part, would be better served in his efforts to understand Indians and
Indian music, indeed, Indian culture, if he remained mindful of this. It is this assured self- positioning as an organic bearer-claimant of a dual civilizational history and heritage—Sanskritic
Hindu India, and Greco-Roman Europe—which enables Dwarakanath to interpolate himself agentically in the conversation with Max Muller.
So we find him, in his response to Muller’s inability to either be sensorially affected or intellectually understand “real Indian music,” express the need for a more ethically-grounded epistemological practice on part of the Europeans, demanding from the latter patience with, and repetitive subjection to, cultural difference, such that it could truly be overcome, and not simply dismissed at the first trial. This response, whose critical pivot inheres in Dwarakanath’s claim to an organic location in (the knowledge and cultural practices of) both the ‘East’ and the ‘West’— a received structuration that he participates in and perpetuates, even if by the way of a critique— reflects, I argue, a new mode of being musical in native society, inaugurated by its intellectual
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vanguards like Rammohan Roy and their patrons like Dwarakanath Tagore, during the first
decades of the nineteenth century.
The ‘newness’ of this subjectivity lay in the particular interrelation of its limiting and
enabling forces, historically cast in the form of a central contradiction:35 As members of the still
gelatinous but firmly emergent Calcutta-centric Bhadralok class, the educated and respectable folks of the Hindu upper-castes, whose social prestige and economic privilege mostly, if not
always, overlapped—the likes of Roy and Tagore had remained largely shielded from the
viscerality of colonial violence; in fact, they directly and indirectly benefitted colonial rule. But,
on another level, being the educated class of natives in the early/mid nineteenth century colonial
social formation, it was they, imbued with the cultural capital of traditional knowledge and social
authority, who felt the full force of Europe’s epistemic violence, which created for them a
structural imperative to ‘know’ and ‘understand’ both—their own world and that of their colonial
masters’. And here lies the torque of the contradiction, for it is precisely this epistemic violence
that also capacitated them with agentic articulation and strategic cunning, with the power to
negotiate the conditions of their own subjection and nurture hegemonic aspirations. Indeed,
Dwarakanath’s self-conscious bimusicality, on which rested the strength of his critique, was
made possible by this very constitutive dialectic of Bhadralok subject formation. In this lies the
root of the civilizational double consciousness that empowered Tagore in the dialogic of the
musical encounter with Muller, positing a subjectivity that necessarily exceeded the epistemic
economy of Europe’s drive to know the Orient and the Oriental, to render them transparent in
and through knowledge—musical knowledge, in this case. It is this ‘excess’—the essence of
35 The allusion here is, of course, to Partha Chatterjee’s seminal formulation of the thematic/problematic of Indian nationalist thought in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. [Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 36-53]
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what is really ‘Indian’—that capacitates Dwarakanath’s agency in his critique of Muller, his
calling into question of the civilizational “you” for which Muller serves as a metonym.
One, then, discerns from Muller’s account that the subjectivity that Dwarakanath inhabits
at the mid-nineteenth century conjuncture does not submit itself as a mere object of European
knowledge. Dwarakanath arrogates to himself the power to formulate musico-civilizational
difference in his own terms. The expression of this power lies not in a frontal disputation of the
violating episteme—not yet—but lies in the recasting of this difference as a fundamental anxiety
into the certitudes of European discourses about the colonized Other, be that of the Orientalist or
the Anglicist kind.36 The last words that Max Muller attributes to Dwarkanath in his recollection of their singular exchange enunciates precisely such an act: “If you studied our music…our poetry, our religion, and our philosophy,” the latter says, “you will find that we are not what you call heathens or miscreants but know as much of the Unknowable as you do, and have seen
perhaps even deeper into it than you have!”37 Or, as Muller recalled Dwarkanath saying in his previous 1874 letter: “we shall understand you much sooner than you will understand us.” The anxiety was still alive in Muller fifty years later when he retrospectively observed that
Dwarakanath’s claim, while not correct, was “not far wrong.”
Thus, on a discursive plane, we see in the Muller-Tagore exchange the idea that music is
an index of civilizational measure firmly installed. Muller’s admitted perplexity when subjected
36 Anglicist/Orientalist controversy refers to the vigorous debate between the British over the colonial state’s education policy in India in the early/mid-1830s. The so-called Anglicists like T. B. Macaulay, William Bentinck, inspired by the Benthamite thought and James Mills’ 1817 History of India, along with the support of the Calcutta- based Bengali Bhadralok class, pushed to install modern European learning in India through English and vernacular languages at the expense of Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit-based ‘traditional’ learning that thus far received government direction and patronage. Besides the professionally invested keepers of traditional knowledges, such as the Qazis, Maulavis, Munshis, and Pandits, the opponents of the Anglicist education policy also counted amongst themselves some well known British names, like H. H. Wilson, James Princep, and so on. For details of the debate, see, Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, eds., The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781-1843 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999).
37 Max Muller, Auld Lang, 9; emphasis added.
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to “real Indian music” rouses Dwarakanath enough for him to launch into a passionate defense of
the civilization that produced it, to the extent that, in Muller’s witness, Tagore’s passion
threatened to spill over the boundaries of dialogic protocol. He had become, according to the
German, “quite eloquent and excited.” Equally suggestive of the modern content of this new
musical subjectivity is that Muller could “pacify” Dwarakanath only by assuring him that his
disconcerted response to the real specimen of Indian music ought not be construed as a
civilizational affront; on the contrary, he was in fact “…aware that India possessed a science of
music, founded…on mathematics.”38 This placatory gesture, and its presumed acceptance, can be seen to serve a dual purpose: it restores scientific reason back into the affective overspill threatening the dialog, while extending the mutual indexicality that science and civilization had come to assume by this point in European thought to Indian music, validating, thereby, the latter’s claim to civilizational excellence.
The coupling of music and science in the context of Indian music by a European
Indologist is particularly interesting and marks a discursive shift. Recall that in the case of
William Jones it was precisely the manifest unconcern with mathematics and acoustic science in
Sanskrit musical treatises that allowed him to obviate the regnant epistemological concerns of contemporary Western music discourse and write ‘freely’ on “Hindoo” music as an art. This provides an appropriate segue for highlighting certain points of convergence and divergence between mid-nineteenth century Indological discourse and its Orientalist antecedent.
The motive spark of the dialog between Tagore and Muller that animates the present
analysis—the latter’s desire to hear some “real Indian music”—reveals the enduring appeal of
late-eighteenth century British Orientalism and its quest for a ‘real’ India, an India unbesmirched
by Persian imports into and ‘corruptions’ of its culture, for a mid-nineteenth century European
38 Ibid.; emphasis added.
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scholar of India like Muller. As he confesses at the very beginning of his essay, in words that would not have been out of place if ascribed to William Jones fifty years prior: for him “…India was not on the surface, but lay many centuries beneath it.”39 And like Jones, he makes it explicit
later in the same text that by “real Indian music” too meant “ancient Hindu music.”40 However,
the apparent continuity of ends between Jones and Muller notwithstanding, the altered discursive
context of the latter’s scholarship alters to some extent the scope of its historical possibility.
The site and situation of Tagore and Muller’s coming together was, indeed, vastly
different from that involving the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century amateur English
Orientalist in India—usually an empowered functionary in the employ of the Company state—
and his native informant. The Tagore-Muller encounter, however, played itself out far from the
colonial ground, in metropolitan Europe, between an exceptionally forward member of the
Bhadralok elite then living in Paris “in truly magnificent Oriental style,”41 and a German tyro on
the way to becoming an academic specialist on India. Again, at the late-eighteenth century
conjuncture, Orientalist knowledge produced in the colony, or out of colonial experience, was
the primary lens for framing and knowing the Orient(al). It also informed in significant ways the
practices of the colonial state. But by the time Muller was training to be an Indologist in the
1840s, the Orientalist project had come under vociferous attack from both—Christian
missionaries for being morally suspect, and the Anglicist/Utilitarianist liberals for being
economically inefficient and practically useless for enlightened statecraft in the colony.42
39 Max Muller, Auld Lang Syne, 5.
40 Ibid., 10.
41 Ibid., 13.
42 For details, see, Bart Schultz and George Varouxakis, eds., Utilitarianism and Empire (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2005); especially see therein, Javed Majeed, “James Mill’s History of British India: The Question of Utilitarianism and Empire,” 93-106.
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The significance of the colonial government’s executive policies and juridical
promulgations under the aegis of radical Benthamites like Lord Bentinck and T. B. Macaulay is
too well known to recite here.43 Noteworthy in this context is the fact that it is precisely around the time of late-eighteenth century Orientalism becoming irrelevant to the new technologies of rule on the colonial ground that we see it remorphed and appropriated in two different domains that would become increasingly connected over the rest of the nineteenth century and after—the discourse of the European academy and the Hindu Bhadralok’s discourse of its ‘historical’ self- understanding and national identity. For example, Max Muller’s neo-Orientalist Indo-Aryan theory would be received with unbridled enthusiasm by members of the Bhadralok intelligentsia during the latter-nineteenth century, like the Brahmo reformers Debendranath Tagore and
Keshab Chandra Sen.44 Indeed, it is owing Max Muller’s discursive dint in this area that the term
‘Arya,’ now specifically racialized in its signification, came to enjoy a vigorous categorical life
in India during this period, prefixed to a series of cultural-civilizational rubrics, such as jati
(people/nation), bhumi (land), sangit (music), etc.45
We will now consider a final dimension of the Tagore-Muller encounter: this concerns
the very music that Dwarkanath performed for his European interlocutor. Recall that there exists
a discrepancy between the two extant accounts furnished by Muller of the Paris meeting. In the
43 For details, see, Ibid. Also see, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774-1839 (Berkeley: University of Calfornia Press, 1974).
44 Max Muller drew on William Jones’ prior work on the Indo-Aryan language to revise it as specifically a racial theory, whereby, people of India, Persia, and Europe were seen to belong to the same racial stock. [Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 141- 143].
45 In late-nineteenth /early-twentieth century century Bengal, there were vigorous debates over whether Bengalis as a people were Aryas or not. For details, see, Dwijendranath Tagore, “Arjyami O Sahebiana (Being-Like-Aryans and Being-Like-Europeans,” in Prabandhamala (Collection of Essays). 103-14.( Santiniketan: Dinendranath Tagore, 1321 (1914)); Birendrakumar Basu, “Anarya Bangali (Un-Aryan Bengalis),” Sabujpatra 1, no. 5, (1321 (1914)): 377-341.
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1874 letter, he states that upon his request for some Indian music Dwarkanath performed for him
only one song—“not one of the modern Persian songs, which commonly go by the name of
Indian, but a genuine native piece of music.” In “My Indian Friends” on the other hand—the text
that I have depended on for the analysis presented here—he mentions that Dwarkanath actually
performed two songs. The first one, Tagore’s initial response to his request for “real Indian
music,” Muller discerned was “really Persian,” and let his opinion be known. By the silence he
accords to Dwarakanath at this point in his narrative, it appears that the latter accepted his
judgment that the music performed was actually Persian, though it had been presented as Indian.
Only upon further insistence was a “real” sample of Indian music disclosed by its possessive
agent. What is of concern here is not this anomaly in the two narrations of the same event; in
either case, Muller claims to have ‘known’ the music that was often paraded as “Indian” was,
what he calls, “really Persian.” Rather more interesting is the question: what was the musical
genre that Muller appears to have had prior acquaintance with—the apparently Indian music?
And, what was the genre, unknown to him, that was presented by Dwarakanath as really Indian?
Muller, unfortunately, leaves no clue to either of the two questions, except in very general terms that we have already encountered before. In view of the fact that fifty-odd years separated the event under scrutiny and its recollection by Muller, one would have expected him, as the foremost Western Indologist of his time, to have acquired a more felicitous vocabulary while referencing the music of the culture he studied. Instead, we have him confessing that intimidated by the complexity of the subject and the time it would take him to achieve theoretical and practical proficiency in it, he “…gave up…all hope of ever mastering such texts as the
Sangita-ratnakara…and similar texts, though they…often tempted [his] curiosity in the library of
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the East India House.”46 Nonetheless, Muller’s laconicity with regard to Indian music leaves
open a tantalizing aperture for a speculative exercise in determining what they might have been.
As I will show below, one can reasonably speculate that the music that Max Muller found
familiar, or claimed to have prior familiarity with, was most likely a Hindustani khayal; and the
one that so discombobulated him, the one that he variously calls “a genuine native piece of
music” and “real Indian music,” was probably a Bengali song in the dhrupad ang/gayaki.47 What
justifies this inference?
The type of Indian music with which Muller was most likely to have had nominal
familiarity with in the mid-nineteenth century—still in his early years as an Indologist, and never
having visited India—is the khayal, the most popular genre/style in which north Indian ragas are
performed in vocal music.48 Importantly, khayal was the musical vehicle for some of the finest
46 Muller, Auld Lang Syne, 10.
47 Ang/Gayaki approximately means the style/genre of vocalization. The dhrupad, of course, is such a genre of vocalization in Hindustani raga music, known for its rigid and elaborate form, spare style, lofty panegyrics dedicated to gods ands and kings, and musical self-sufficiency. It was formalized in the royal court of Gwalior, in the fifteenth century, during the reign of Man Singh Tomar (1486-1517), and became, by the time of Akbar’s reign (1556-1605), not only the court music of the Mughal emperor, but the “mass’s favorite” as well. According to one strand of music historiography, it evolved as the “secular counterpart” of the Bishnupad, which rose to concomitant prominence with bhakti devotionality in the Braj region of north India. [Syed Nurul Hasan, “Foreword” to Faqirullah, Tarjuma-i- Manakutuhala and Risala-i-Ragadarpan, ed. and annot. Shahab Sarmadee (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts, 1996), xiii] For a general history and detailed analysis of the hermeneutic and performative worlds of the dhrupad ‘tradition’ in South Asia, see, Ritwick Sanyal and Richard Widess, Dhrupad: Tradition and Performance in Indian Music (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004).
48 As is generally accepted in musico-historical scholarship of Mughal India, the formalization of the khayal began around the time of the shift of the Mughal capital from Agra to Delhi during the reign of Shah Jahan in 1649. More ornamental in style and less elaborate than the four-sectioned form of the dhrupad, it reached formal maturity during the eighteenth century, and became hugely popular, both in the court and in the commons, displacing the former from its earlier preeminence. The authoritative work on the khayal in contemporary scholarship is Bonnie Wade’s Khyal: Creativity Within North India’s Musical Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). But for a pithy and luminous discussion of the dhrupad and the khayal, particularly, the latter’s origins, in the historical context of Mughal India, see, Shahab Sarmadee’s introduction to, and the main text of, Faqirullah, Tarjuma-i- Manakutuhala and Risala-i-Ragadarpan, xxxii-xxxv, 111-113. Sarmadee adduces that Faqiruallah’s 1666 text was the first to talk about the genesis of the khayal, and its relationship to the dhrupad, at length. For a summary account of, specifically, the popularity of khayal in north Indian vocal music, of its dominance within the gharana system of practice and pedagogy, and its status in the cultural politics attending to the rise of Indian nationalism, see, Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism and Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5-7.
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lyric-poetry in Hindustani—a language formed out of the synthetic incorporation of Persian,
Arabic, Turkic, Prakrit, and Sanskrit vocabulary—with whose historical development the khayal
itself was coeval.49 This lyrical aspect of the khayal, which often employed a heavily Persian- inflected variant of Hindustani called rekhta,50 would have led Max Muller to deem such music from the subcontinent as Persian, and not ‘really’ Indian. Thus, it would appear that, pace his admission that he did not quite understand the formal-theoretical aspects of Indian music, it is the linguistic content rather than the musical form that was the determining factor in this discernment. And here, Muller’s Orientalist prejudice comes forth again: any literary-cultural expression from that part of the world could not be considered properly Indian if it exhibited any trace of Perso-Arabic-Turkic influence and accretions. Hence, Muller’s urge to look beyond, and seek “real Indian music.” What, then, of this latter, whose illustrative performance by
Dwarkanath left him so baffled? This question can be approached by raising another: what could
Tagore have performed for Max Muller as a representative example of the said category? As suggested above, given the context and the conjuncture in which Dwarkanath’s musical socialization occurred, a Bengali dhrupad would have been the most likely candidate for an expository performance. Let us keep this speculative proposition in mind. The rationale for the argument will be provided towards the end of the chapter, as a part of the larger discussion of the musical cultural field in early/mid-nineteenth century colonial Calcutta.
In the preceding analysis, I have tried to outline and extend the theoretical implications of the Tagore-Muller encounter in Paris, 1845, by explaining why Max Muller had remained
49 See, Muzaffar Alam, “The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics,” Modern Asian Studies 32, no. 2 (1998): 344.
50 For details, see, T. Grahame Bailey, “Urdu: The Name and the Language,” in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 2 (1930): 391-400.
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unmoved by Tagore’ rendition of “real Indian” music, and how the latter could correctly
anticipate that this would be the case. Second, I have isolated from Dwarkanath’s musical subjectivity animated in Muller’s account two motive pulses that I argue are symptoms of a specifically colonial modernity, namely, a stratified double consciousness, and notions of national particularity and cultural essence. The appearance of music as an already incorporated category of civilizational merit is another concern that I have drawn attention to. While this indexicality between music and the idea of civilization has also been discussed in the previous chapter on William Jones’ epistemic standpoint, what is significant about the mid-nineteenth century conjuncture is that it now subjectivizes the colonized Indian as well, not just the
European scholar of India.
It needs to be acknowledged at this point that the thrust of the analysis thus far has clearly been a hermeneutical one—a close, extended reading of a fleeting dialogue between a
European and Indian one morning in Paris. Indeed, the Tagore-Muller encounter has been treated as a singular event, abstracted from the nineteenth century conjuncture and narrative of musical
modernity in the colony that constituted its condition of possibility through Dwarkanath’s
presence. In what follows, I rehabilitate him to the colonial ground, within the ongoing
refiguration of musical matters in contemporary Bengal, specifically Calcutta. I frame this
enquiry using as an optic a unique property of the musical subject vivified in Max Muller’s
account: Dwarakanath’s manifest ability to perform European music and play a keyboard
instrument—both practically alien to the subcontinent prior to the advent of Europeans.
Bengali Bhadralok and Western Music in Early/Mid-Nineteenth Century Calcutta
As is evident from the different European sources we have already encountered—the most prominent being Muller’s account—Dwarakanath Tagore was perhaps the first intentionally
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bimusical Indian of note. This intentionality is implicated in his passion for a music that was not
only a relatively recent denizen on the subcontinental musicscape but was also inextricably
linked to the cultural power of the colonizing race and its claims to civilizational supremacy.
Importantly, what Dwarakanath’s bimusicality also implies is that by the time he sailed to
Europe in 1842, the necessary material conditions had begun crystallizing in Calcutta for native elites like him, with requisite socio-economic means and musico-cultural desire, to access
Western music, restricted hitherto to exclusive sites of Western entertainment such as European- only social clubs and gatherings.
It needs to be emphasized in this context that European music was not a fad that
Dwarkanath had picked up on his European travels. His investments in it long anteceded his foreign sojourns. And what allowed for this was a fast congealing market—both formal and informal—in Western modes of (musical) entertainment, including musical theatre, circumventing, thereby, the general proscription of the subject race, besides as servant bodies, from sites where Western music largely found its field of play in the colony.51 In what follows, I
will trace the Dwarkanath Tagore’s socialization into such modes, prior to his departure for
Europe, through three aspects of this emergent entertainment economy in the capital of British
India, each indicative of the new spaces of Western musical access for the Bengali elite: (i) the
public subscription theatre; (ii) opulent galas hosted by him at his residence; and (iii) informal
arrangements with Europeans for music lessons. I then extend this enquiry beyond Dwarkanath’s
lifetime and look at Calcutta’s first institutional site of Western music pedagogy among the
Bengali Bhadralok social class.
51 See, Ian Woodfield, Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in the Late-Eighteenth Century Anglo-Indian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4-5.
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Theatre was the form of recreational entertainment most actively pursued by the colonists
in India, especially by those inhabiting the upper echelons of Anglo-Indian society. “After the
recapture of [Calcutta] by [Robert] Clive, the [English] inhabitants built a theatre at the western
corner of Writer’s buildings, before they built a church; but it was burnt down.”52 The first proper, public theatre house in Calcutta, the Calcutta Theatre, was established on December 21,
1773.53 For the twenty-odd years it was in existence, it regularly staged amateur productions by
Europeans stationed in Calcutta, which included, to cite a general assortment, Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice (1784),54 Hamlet (1784),55 and Richard the Third (1788);56 opera and
pantomimes like, Inkle and Yarico (1794),57 and Mungo in Freedom (1792), respectively;58
farces and comedies like Too-Civil by Half (1790) and She Stoops to Conquer (1798), etc. A
Dubliner, Thomas Carter, served as the music director at the theatre in its initial days.59 Though
at times rented by the native elite—such as on September 27, 1798, when Mir Abdul Lateef,
vakeel to the Nizam of Hyderabad, booked it to entertain the Governor General and other
luminaries of the colonial bureaucracy and army on the occasion of his son’s marriage60—the
52 Allen’s Indian Mail and Register 6, no. 108, (1848), 522.
53 For an account of the opening ceremony, see, The Scots Magazine 35 (December 1774): 667-669.
54 W. S. Seton-Kerr, Selections From Calcutta Gazettes, 1784-1788, Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1864, 1: 29.
55 Ibid., 12.
56 Ibid., 247.
57 Seton-Kerr, Selections From Calcutta Gazettes, 2: 585.
58 Ibid., 534.
59 Sir George Grove, (ed.), A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (A. D.1450-1889), vol. 1 (London: MacMillan and Co. 1890), 317.
60 Seton-Kerr, Selections From Calcutta Gazettes, 1798-1805 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1868), 3: 205.
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public that the Calcutta Theatre catered its dramatic productions to was exclusively European.61
And so it remained until it downed shutters on November 1, 1808, when, ironically, a leading
native elite of the time, Gopimohan Tagore of the Pathuriaghata branch of this distinguished
family, bought over the financially-strained property and converted it into a marketplace.62
The Calcutta Bengalis’ first encounter with the proscenium stage and music took place
not at the Calcutta Theatre, but at another one set up by the travelling Russian Orientalist,
Herasim Lebedeff, in 1795, at Dharmatala. As is well known in the annals of vernacular theatre
in India, Lebedeff, having arrived in Calcutta in 1787 from a two-year stint in Madras, and
having since learnt Sanskrit, Bengali, and Hindustani, had “translated two English plays (The
Disguise and Love is the Best Doctor) into Bengali.”63 The debut of Chhadmabesh (the first of the two plays), slated for November, 1795, was announced thus:
By the permission of the Honorable Governor General, Mr. Lebedeff’s New Theatre in the Doomtullah, decorated in the Bengalee style, will be opened very shortly, with a play called The Disguise; the characters to be supported by performers of both sexes. To commence with vocal and instrumental music called The Indian Serenade. To those musical instruments, which are held in esteem by the Bengalees, will be added European. The words of the much admired Poet ‘Shree Bharut Chundro Roy’ are set to music. Between the acts some amusing curiosities will be introduced.64
61 There were also private theatres operated out of their own residences by the British in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Often, Englishwomen living in Calcutta took the lead in organizing such private endeavors. Most well regarded and known amongst them were Lady Campbell and Mrs. Bristow. [Seton-Kerr, Selections, 2: 204, 234] The latter, who operated the theater out of her Chowringhee residence, is particularly important to the history of European dramatics in Calcutta for having introduced women actors into a hitherto all-male domain. [H. E. Busteed, Echoes From Old Calcutta: Being Chiefly Reminiscences of the Days of Warren Hastings, Francis, and Impey (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, and Company, 1888), 138]
62 Seton-Kerr, Selections From Calcutta Gazettes, 1806-1815 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1868), 4: 432-433.
63 Charles E. Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co. Ltd., 1906), 248.
64 Quoted in W. H. Carey, The Good Old Days of Honorable John Company: Being Curious Reminiscences Illustrating Manners and Customs of the British in India During the Rule of the East India Company (Calcutta: R. Cambray and Co. 1906), 132.
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Lebedeff’s second and final play-in-translation was staged in March, 1796, to “great applause.”65 Reported the Calcutta Gazette after the event: “It appears that there was a
tremendous rush and the ‘subscribers’ elbowed their way at the gate. It was a novelty both to the
English and the Bengali audience and we are thankful to this Russian adventurer for the first
endeavours in the Bengali play.”66 We thus see that it was through Lebedeff’s productions that
the local denizens not only experienced a Bengali theatrical for the first time, but also first
experienced music—combining both Indian and Western instruments—at a public, subscription
venue. That said, Lebedeff’s Bengali theatre remained a one-off thing in Calcutta’s late-
eighteenth century cultural landscape.
The institution critical for Western music in the imperial capital was the one that filled
the vacuum left by the demise of Calcutta Theatre as the preeminent venue for Western
dramatics and music—Chowringhee Theatre, inaugurated on November 25, 1813 and, to a lesser
extent, the Town Hall (formerly, the Old Court House). One can get an accurate sense of this
from the short but extremely informative, byline-less article in the journal, The Harmonicon of
1823, titled “The State of Music in Calcutta.”
There is only one theatre in Calcutta, which belongs to the town, and is of considerable dimensions. It is, at present, leased to Colonel [James] Young and Dr. [Horace Hayman] Wilson: a performance is given every Friday evening, from seven to twelve, which however is not, properly speaking, an opera, but rather a kind of connected concert, which consists of a selection of English, Irish, and Scotch melodies. During the acts, symphonies, concertos, etc., are performed by the orchestra. Regular concerts are not given in this theatre; and therefore, when an artist wishes to have one, it can only take place in the Townhall, which is also appropriated to the public balls. The theatre has only one row of boxes, unenclosed. This part is very brilliantly lighted. The orchestra consists, besides the violins, of a double bass, two violincellos, [sic] two bassoons, two flutes, two clarionets, [sic] two horns, two trumpets, and kettle-drums, and is under the direction of Mr. Delmar, who is first violin-player, and who frequently performs solos between the acts of the opera. Mr. Sceitelberger, a violin-player, has lately arrived in Calcutta from Madras. The most distinguished among the singers, are Dr. Wilson, (one of the lessees of the Theatre,) Mr. Bianchi-Lacy, Mesdames [sic] Bianchi-Lacy, Cooke, Kelly, and Miss Williams.
65 Buckland, Dictionary, 248.
66 Calcutta Gazette, March 10, 1796. Also quoted in Hemendra Nath Das Gupta, The Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2009), 236.
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There is but one music-shop in Calcutta, that of Mr. Greenwallers; but the natives also import music, and retail it out as an article of commerce. The piano-fortes which are found here, are almost all of the manufacture of either Messrs. Broadwood, or Clementi and Co. Many quartettos are performed here, and the compositions of Haydn are the greatest favourites. There is no cathedral music in the city: the psalm-tunes are accompanied by the organ. Concerts are given here, sometimes by foreign artists, but chiefly by Englishmen. Tickets of admission are sixteen rupees. A person who comes recommended, and is liked, may easily obtain subscribers for five or six concerts. At that given by music-director, Mr. Kulhan, before his departure for Europe, he cleared 4,500 rupees. … The better sort of professors of music, receive from eight to sixteen rupees for each lesson.67
One gets from here a detailed idea of the spaces, social networks, economics, and
material culture that Western music animated in Calcutta during the early/mid-nineteenth
century, as one does of the musico-cultural centrality of Chowringhee Theatre—the only
contemporary institution to boast a house-orchestra, even if purely musical performances, given
the remit of the venue, were performed at the Town Hall. This policy, however, seems to have
undergone subsequent change. In April 1833, the theatre, hitherto the bastion of amateurs, hosted
the farewell concert of perhaps the most famous professional musician to play in Calcutta at that
point—the famous Italian violinist, Signor Masoni, who was considered “to be in some
particulars equal, [and] in others even superior to his celebrated rival Paganini.”68 The covering
the show, the Bengal Herald reported: “Masoni’s exquisite violin sounded its last note on Friday
evening (April 12th, 1833) gratifying the ears of the largest audience we ever saw within the walls of the Chowringhee Theatre.”69
Importantly for our concerns here, this theatre over time emerged as probably the first public site of leisure in the colony where the colonizer and the colonized came together to
67 “The State of Music in Calcutta,” The Harmonicon: A Journal of Music 1, no. 8 (1823): 111.
68 “Signor Masoni,” The Court Journal 5, no. 243 (1833): 867.
69 Quoted in Ibid.
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socially partake of European entertainment regularly. Wrote Emma Roberts, a pioneering woman
travel-writer who was a resident of Calcutta during 1831-32:70
Parties of Hindostanee gentlemen, beautifully clad in white muslin, and, should the weather be cold, enveloped in Cashmere, which would make the heart of a Parisian lady swell with envy, take their places in the boxes of the Chowringee theatre, sitting in the first row, and as near to the stage as possible. They prefer tragedy to comedy; and when the treasury is very low, and a full attendance of some consequence, the manager, consulting rather the interests of the house than the talents of the actors, announces the representation of Macbeth or Othello, which is sure to crowd 71 the benches with Asiatic spectators.
That “Hindostanee gentlemen” were seen at the theatre during Roberts’ time indicates that the
Bengali elites’ accumulation of European entertainment as cultural capital was well apace by the time. And this had substantially to do, in particular, with the establishment of the Hindu College in 1817—the first institution of its kind, “formed for English Instruction, projected, superintended, and supported, by the Natives themselves[.]”72 It is this institution that spawned
in the late-1820s and ’30s the influential Young Bengal—a group of economically wealthy,
highly westernized, iconoclastic, socially progressive (male) students of the college, schooled in
the precepts of English literature and liberal thought,73 who were inspired by their professor
70 For a brief biography of Emma Roberts, including her stay and travels in India, see, Sarah Joseph Hale, Woman’s Record: Or, Sketches of all Distinguished Women, From the Creation to A.D. 1854 (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1855), 885.
71 Emma Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan With Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society, vol. 1 (London: W. H, Allen and Co., 1835), 87-88.
72 “The Hindoo College,” The Christian Journal and Literary Register 1, no. 23 (1817): 365; emphases in original.
73 As Alexander Duff, the famous Scottish missionary would write about these students of Hindu College (or, Government Anglo-Indian College, as this institution was variously called sometimes) and debating societies they formed: If the subject was historical, Robertson and Gibbon were appealed to; if political, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham; if religious, Hume and Paine; if metaphysical, Locke and Reid, Dugald Stewart and Brown. The whole was frequently interspersed and enlivened by passages cited from our most popular English poets, particularly Byron and Sir Walter Scott. [Duff, India, and India Missions: Including Sketches of the Gigantic System of Hinduism, Both in Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: John Johnstone and Hunter Square, 1839), 615]
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Henry Louis Vivian Derozio to radically question received wisdom of their Hindu tradition.74
To a lesser extent, and on a more personal register, the flocking of the Bengali elite to the
Chowringhee theatre also perhaps owed to the presence of certain English individuals in the role of its manager-proprietors who enjoyed reasonably proximate relationships with elite Indians, namely, Col. James Young, T. C. Plowden, and the famous Indologists, H. H. Wilson, and James
Prinsep, among others.
The first ‘Hindostanee’ gentleman to enter the precincts in organizational capacity was not a student of the Hindoo College. He was, rather, one of its eminent patrons, and personally acquainted with each of the aforementioned figures—Dwarkanath Tagore. Dwarkanath was involved with the Chowringhee Theatre since its foundation as its only Indian share-holder.75 On
July 7, 1831, we find him present, along with Prinsep and Plowden, at the theatre’s annual
“General Meeting of the Proprietors.”76 In 1835, he became its principal owner. Despite its pivotal position in the cultural life of Europeans (and some Indians), the theatre had become progressively insolvent, leading to a proprietorial resolution on August 3, 1835, that it be
…put up for sale by auction, to the highest bidder at the upset price of Rs. 30,000. The theatre was accordingly put up to auction on the 15th, and [was] purchased by Baboo Dwarkanath Tagore, the only bidder, for Rs. 30, 100, being Rs. 100 above the upset price.77
Of the auction, the Calcutta Courier reported:
We understand that [his] purchase is a joint concern, and that his list includes some thirty of the old names, in fact all the most useful patrons of the drama, among them. Their object in transfer of
74 The Bengalis’ acquisition of Western cultural capital would, of course, receive its institutional fillip with the reformulated colonial education policy in the aftermath of Macaulay’s famous minutes on the subject, put forth in 1835. For a critical Marxist take on the Young Bengal see, Sumit Sarkar’s classic essay, “Complexities of Young Bengal,” in Sumit Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985), 18–36. Also see, Sushobhan Sarkar, On the Bengal Renaissance (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1979).
75 Kironmoy Raha, Bengali Theatre (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978), 9.
76 “Chowringhee Theatre,” The Calcutta Magazine and Monthly Register 30, no. 32, (August 1832): 245.
77 “The Chowringhee Theatre,” Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register 19, Part II (1836): 100
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the property has not been to make a speculation, but merely to promote the general interests of the stage.78
Thus, it remained, the Chowringhee Theatre, under Dwarkanath’s principal proprietorship, until
it was destroyed in a fire in 1839 and never rebuilt.
Though we will leave this line of inquiry now, in the preceding discussion it has been my
intention to chart the socialization of Western music in late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century
Calcutta through the institution of theatre. I have tried to show how the Bengali elite, then in the
process of constituting itself as the Bhadralok social class at through newly acquired cultural acts
and reformulation of older ones, was exposed to Western music through the English stage. Not surprisingly, one member of this social formation arose in prominence in this complex—
Dwarkanath. In what follows, I show how he capitalized on his involvement with the public subscription Chowringhee Theatre to inaugurate a new private site of Western musical entertainment in the city for the Bengali elite—the space of their own residence. I then proceed to briefly consider Dwarkanath’s personal acquisition of performative skill in Western music, which also was connected to his ownership of the Chowringhee Theatre in significant ways.
It was not uncommon, as we have seen in the previous chapter, for the parvenu Bengali elite to provide available forms of Western musical entertainment when hosting European guests.
Dwarkanath, however, was exceptional in this regard as well. As Emily Eden, sister of Lord
Auckland, who had replaced William Bentinck as the Governor General of the East India
Company in March, 1836, wrote to a friend in a letter dated September 3: “Dwarkanauth
Tagore…is the only man in the country who gives pleasant parties[.]”79 Western music and
78 Quoted in Ibid.
79 Emily Eden, Letters From India By the Hon. Emily Eden, vol. 1., ed. Eleanor Eden (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1872), 234.
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professional musicians were a regular feature at these events.80 But even in his catalog of lavish
parties, there is one that became legendary in its own time. This was the extravagant soiree that
he hosted at his palatial Belgachhia Villa address on November 28, 1836, to honor Lord
Auckland and Lady Eden. I dwell on this event’s in some detail, for from the coverage it
received in both English and Bengali ephemera of the day, one gets a sense of the range of
Western musical entertainment made available on such occasions.
Of the English-language news publications, The Calcutta Monthly Journal noted:
On the evening of the 28th of November the superb villa of Baboo Dwarkanauth Tagore was throne [sic] open to the Governor-General and a brilliant party of about 300 guests. The order of entertainment was music, vocal and instrumental, fireworks, and quadrilles,—the whole concluded with an excellent supper of rice, champaigne [sic] and other delicacies…[.]81
The Bengali weekly, Samachar Darpan (The News Mirror),82 covered the event in even greater
detail:
Last Monday night, at his exquisite garden villa, Babu Dwarkanath Thakur treated the honorable Governor General and at least three hundred other European ladies and gentlemen to a massive banquet and presented them with some extremely gratifying entertainment. Especially noteworthy was the presence of a variety of dances and instrumental music, as well as an assortment of fine comestibles. The invitees began to gather after eight o’clock in the evening. After the music, fireworks were lit. This lasted for an hour and a half. The entire assembly lavished praise on the show. Thereafter, via some more music, everybody partook a little of the variety of eatables that were served in the basement. Then, the great ball began. Besides the government officers, three Supreme Court judges, Lord Macaulay, two army Generals, and every notable resident of Calcutta had assembled there. The guests later reported with enthusiasm all that their generous host had put together for them. 83
80 Ibid.
81 The Calcutta Monthly Journal 2, no. 25, Supplement for 1836 (July-December 1836): 646.
82 When established in 1818, the Samachar Darpan also had the distinction of being the first such effort in the language. For details, see, Partha Chattopadhyay, Bangla Sambadpatra O Bangalir Nabajagaran (Bengali Newspapers and the Bengali’s Renaissance), (Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2003), 28-33.
83 Samachar Darpan, December 3, 1836. Reprinted in, Brajendranath Bandhyopadhyay, ed., Sambadpatre Sekaler Katha (Accounts of the Past in Newspapers) (Calcutta: Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, 1994), 447-448; translation mine. It seems, however, that such reportage had not been entirely accurate, if we are to go by the witness of one of the two chief guests in whose honor the party was hosted—Emily Eden: “[Lord Auckland], after all, did not go to Dwarkanauth’s party, which was a pity.” [Eden, Letters,1: 260]
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From the point of view of the available music, Dwarkanath’s gala was in luck. It
coincided with the presence in Calcutta for the first time of two professional opera troupes from
the continent—one Italian, and one French—that had been enthralling European audiences at the city’s Chowringhee Theatre (which, as we know, was now under the proprietorship of
Dwarkanath), and the Town Hall. At the time of Dwarkanath’s party the Italian company was already a year into its Indian tour84 and the French one had debuted in Calcutta on August 23 the
same year.85 Not surprisingly, Dwarkanath had drafted the troupes’ personnel to perform at the villa on the occasion. In attendance were, Mr. Linton, the tenor vocalist and occasional leader of the orchestra at Chowringhee Theatre; Signor Pizzoni, and Signora Schieroni, the lead male and female vocalists of the visiting Italian company, respectively. Also present were members of the
French opera: Monsieur Thonon, the leader of the orchestra, Mademoiselle Lemery, the prima donna, and Monsieurs Welter and Fleury, the male leads, among others.86
It was not, however, just the scale of lavishness of such events, or even the provision of
the best European musical entertainment available in Calcutta of the time, that set Dwarakanath
apart. He certainly was not exceptional among Bengali elites in realizing the instrumental
capacity of Western music to act as a social lubricant in their private interactions with members
84 This Italian had been performing operas like Rossini and Rossi’s Tancredi, Rossini’s Eduardo e Cristina and Il Barbiere di Seviglia, Generali’s I Baccanali di Roma, etc., since January 1836. For details, see, The Calcutta Monthly Journal 2 (January-June,1836): 7-8, 41-42, 80-82, 131-133.
85 The French opera and vaudeville troupe’s productions included Unne Affaire d'honneur, Vatel, Maison e Vendre, Boildieu’s Le Nouveau Seigneur du Village, Daleyrac’s Le Tresor Suppose, and so on. For details, see, The Calcutta Monthly Journal 2 (July-December, 1836): 379-380, 473-474, 529-534, 578-580, 629-633.
86 The presence of these musicians is noted in, Santidev Ghosh, Rabindrasangit Vichitra (Rabindra Sangit Miscellany) (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers Private Ltd., 2006), 16. It needs to be mentioned here that the names of the artistes Ghosh provides are mostly incorrect. In his book, he calls Linton, “Liston”; Schieroni, “Siemoni”; Thonon, “Ton”; Welter, “Walote”; and Fleury, “Flobby.” The corrections here have been made by collating/corroborating Ghosh’s information with various reports and reviews of performances by the aforementioned artists printed in the 1836 issues of The Calcutta Monthly Journal cited in the footnotes above.
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of rank and stature in Calcutta’s European society. This property of Western music would been
apparent to Tagore’s fellow ‘comprador-rajas’87—the new class of enormously wealthy Indians whose socio-economic reproduction as such was closely tied to the new trade, land, and revenue arrangements put in place by the colonial state. What did, indeed, make Dwarakanath exceptional vis-à-vis his peers is that his relationship with European music—the taste for which he had first begun cultivating through his friendship with the culturally-minded Secretary to the
Board of Customs, Salt, and Opium, H. M. Parker88—developed into a passion that cannot be reduced to merely an instrumental arithmetic. This is evidenced in the novel arrangements of cultural-economic exchange with European individuals that Dwarakanath often entered into to
learn the art, arrangements that point to a specifically modern moment in the acquisition of
Western music as cultural capital in colonial India. For example, having advanced monetary
loans to Europeans, he would often seek repayment in the form of music lessons. The visiting
Italian opera’s Signor Pizzoni was one such person.89 Miss Charlotte E. Harvey, Pizzoni’s fiancée, was another European in Calcutta with whom Dwarakanath contrived a similar agreement. She remitted the debt she had accrued to the latter by giving him singing classes.90
“My dearest Dwarkanath,” wrote Charlotte in a letter dated October 25, 1837,
You promised last evening that if I would send to you today that you would let me have the receipt which was signed by Signor Pizzoni and myself for the money you lent me. I have not the words to express my gratitude and thanks to you for this favour that you have conferred on me in taking
87 See Sumit Sarkar’s essay, “The City Imagined: Calcutta of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in his Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 159-185.
88 Kling, Partner in Empire, 49.
89 Ibid. Also, see, Joachim Stocqueler, The Memoirs of a Journalist (Bombay: Times of India, 1873), 169. Stocqueler spent a long time in India in different stretches between 1819 and 1843 working as a journalist for publications like the Bengal Hurkaru, The Englishman, Bengal Herald, etc. When Dwarakanath made his second trip to England in 1845, he asked Stocqueler to arrange for him a party in London with social notables in attendance, which the latter duly obliged him with.
90 Ibid., 182.
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me out of this trouble which was preying upon my mind, and which I was the sole cause of bringing on myself. I hope however that when I am married and in my own House to give you as many Lessons as I possibly can in Singing. …91
There are further evidences of Dwarkanath’s efforts at learning European music in Calcutta. On
his debut trip to Europe in 1842, the party of seventeen companions and servants that accompanied him contained “a German musician” as well.92 All of this indicates that the
material conditions of possibility for the Calcutta elite to imbibe Western music were already in
the process of coming together in the form of a stable economy. And it is through such networks
of individuals, sites, and exchange that Dwarkanath emerged as a bimusical subject. Indeed, as
Joachim Stocqueler noted in his memoirs: “Dwarkanath had the good taste to appreciate
European music and theatricals…when in his own country…[.] No wonder, therefore, that he
yielded to the intoxication of similar delights in a large scale when he arrived in England.”93 The
exceptionality of Dwarakanath’s passion for Western music long outlasted his lifetime as a
reputation. An anonymous Englishman would still have the occasion to write in a journal article
on “…European society in India[,]” nearly twenty years after his death:
There are a few instances of native gentlemen mixing in European society, but only a few. The late Dwarakanath Tagore who visited England, and eventually died there, was one of these exceptions and a rather conspicuous one.…He was the only native we have ever heard of who admired English music. But while he became a convert to our melody, he never lessened his appreciation of his own.94
And Max Muller, as we know well, would expand on this pithy estimation by recounting in detail another thirty years later his encounter with Dwarakanath in Paris—just a year prior to the latter’s death in London.
91 Quoted in Kripalini, Dwarkanath Tagore, 94.
92 Satyendranath Tagore, quoted in Ghosh, Rabindrasangit Bichitra, 17.
93 Stocqueler, The Memoirs, 169.
94 Anon., “Indian Society” in Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Sciences, and Arts 25, no. 423 (1862): 96.
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At this point, we take leave of Dwarkanath Tagore, who has served as the pivot of our
enquiry so far into the making of the modern Bhadralok musical subject at its early/mid-
nineteenth century conjuncture. Continuing, however, with the dominant optic through which we have viewed this early phase of musical modernity in colonial Bengal, Western music, we will now turn our attention to the first attempt by the Bhadralok—now more coherent as a social
formation, with the institutional networks of its discursive production rapidly congealing—to institute its pedagogy. And this happened in 1847, when a class in choral singing was established at the preeminent center of modern learning in contemporary Calcutta: the Hindu College for caste-Hindus, inaugurated thirty years prior.
Music Class at Hindu College:
From a music-historical point of view, this decision is of landmark importance in two regards.
One, it marks the first instance of any music class for the natives to be founded outside the
traditional sites/circuits of music-pedagogy like the gharana or the akhara, and constitutes, in a
discursive sense, a signal factor in the formation of the modern musical subject in colonial
Bengal. Even in its own time, the introduction of a music class in an educational institution run by natives was deemed both novel and important enough to receive wide coverage in newsprint, particular in the English daily published out of Calcutta, the Bengal Hurkaru, and the London-
based Allen’s Indian Mail that copiously reprinted the Hurkaru’s reportage. Two, its occasion marks the first known direct involvement of the colonial state in musical matters of the colonized through the office of the Council of Education, which over saw related matters in the Bengal presidency.
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Much, however, cannot be ascertained about the debates and discussions leading up to
the decision to start the class in music at the Hindu College. We first encounter it in the Bengal
Hurkaru of December 13, 1845, in a short report:
The Council of Education, we are glad to hear, have determined on the introduction of a systematic musical instruction in the Hindoo College. A native member of the College Committee had objected to it on the score of expense, time, and its irrelevancy to the objects for which the College was founded; but the objection has been overruled, and, we rejoice to say, that we have heard several intelligent and educated native gentlemen express their cordial approbation of this measure. The time occupied on receiving instruction in music, cannot surely be misspent, because such instruction is decidedly part and parcel of a liberal education.95
Though it is not known which of the eight “native members” serving on the college Managing
Committee at that point objected to the introduction of a music class,96 it, nevertheless, seems
that the deliberation over of the issue had lasted another full year since the appearance of the
above-quoted report. It was only on December 29, 1846 that a teacher for the proposed class was
identified with a degree of finality for this information to find its way into daily news. It was
reported that Samuel Harraden, who had studied music at Trinity College, Cambridge, and had
earlier in the same year taken up appointment as the organist at Calcutta’s Old Mission Church,97
was selected to helm the music class at Hindu College.98 The next day, December 30, a lengthy opinion piece, titled “Professorship of Music at the Hindoo College,” appeared in the Bengal
Hurkaru on the issue.
95 Reprinted in Allen’s Indian Mail and Register 4, no. 46 (1846): 68.
96 The Indian members of the Managing Committee of the Hindu College in this period comprised: the Raja of Burdwan, Mahtabchand; Dwarkanath’s son, Debendranath Tagore, and his illustrious cousin, Prasanna Kumar Tagore; the well-known entrepreneur, Radhamadhab Bannerjee; the scion of the Shobhabazar royal family, Radhakanta Deb; the first Indian Bengali to hold a juridical post in the colonial judiciary as the Junior Commissioner of the Court of Requests, Roshomoy Dutta; and, wealthy Calcutta residents patrons of Indian self- improvement efforts, Srikrishna Singha, and Ashutosh Dey (the latter was also a patron of music). For details, see, Annual Report of the Hindu College, Patshalla, Branch School, Sanskrit College, Calcutta Mudrussa, Russapuglah School, For 1846-47 (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1848), n.pag.
97 For further details on Samuel Harraden, see the short bio-note published after his death in The Musical Times and Singing-Class Circular 38, no. 65 (1897): 626.
98 Bengal Hurkaru, December 29, 1846; reprinted in Allen’s Indian Mail and Register 5, no. 71 (1847): 99.
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Written in a voice of self-correction, but tinctured all through with racist humor and sarcasm, while speculating on the effects of formal introduction of Western music on Bengali society, this piece is singular in its importance to the topic at hand. For it is one of those rare contemporary statements that reveals the colonizer’s estimation of the Bengali musical subject at the mid-nineteenth century conjuncture. Further, it touches upon some issues—such as, music, specifically, Western music, as an index of civilizational progress; its importance as a cultural instrument of the colonial civilizing mission—that we have already encountered while discussing
Dwarkanath, who, not surprisingly, reappears here as an exemplary exception amongst his
“Hindoo” brethren. Owing to its importance on all these counts, let me quote the article—again, without a byline—in full:
The establishment of a Choir of Music at the Hindoo College is an event which must not be passed over with as little notice as would be bestowed on the opening of a village school. It forms an epoch in the history of native education, and its results may be more important than we can yet foresee. It had long been bruited about that Mr. Harriden [sic], the gentleman whose performances on the new organ of the old church produced so much discord a while ago, under whose guidance the ingenious youth of La Martiniere set up a Hullah-baloo louder as well as more musical than that which followed the abstraction of the head master’s wine;—it had been rumoured that Mr. Harriden was to be called in to inoculate the Chatterjees and Ghoses of the Hindoo College with a love of music and the power of producing it. We confess that we were incredulous, and listened to the report as to the very bad joke of some witless contemner of all Chuckerbuttees; but it appears that it was founded on fact, and that it has now come to maturity in a demi-official announcement of Mr. Harriden’s appointment. We hardly know why we should have been incredulous on this subject of the introduction of music among the Hindoos. It is true we were in the habit of considering them deficient alike in ear and voice, and hopelessly bigoted in favour of their own poor gamut and the primitive instruments and squalling voices by which its notes are evoked. But we might have remembered that this is an age of wonders, and that there was nothing more wonderful in the conversion of a Hindoo into a musician that in giving to cotton a voice that will be heard all over the world. Then there is the example of the late lamented Dwarkanath Tagore, who, as we have seen more than once stated, took lesson in singing while in Europe, and was no mean proficient in the art. We must confess, then, that we had no good ground for the incredulity with which received the report of Mr. Harriden’s appointment as Professor of Music at the Hindoo College. Mr. Harriden is, at all events, appointed, and we rejoice in the event. We have no doubt his labours will be rewarded with no small measure of success, or that the salary attached to the newly-established professorship will be money wasted. Now we think of it, we must admit, that the Hindoo generally possess “most sweet voices,” if not very powerful ones; and that if their musical taste has hitherto displayed itself in a very questionable form, the fact is attributable rather to the national prejudice than to a radical defect of “ear.” They will, we are sure, under the teaching of Mr. Harriden, speedily discover the superiority of European music over their own, and pitch their pipes and tabors in the Ganges or exchange them for the cornopean and the Cremona, and bringing down their voices within reasonable compass, no longer make [the] night hideous, with their songs. Young Bengal will soon advance on the march of “the march of the intellect” to
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appropriate music, or learn to beguile his leisure hours with suitable strains of sentiment or jollity. Soft serenades arising from the depths of Burra Bazar will astonish the listening moon; and Chitpore Road will re-echo “We won’t go home till morning,” chanted by the youth of the “new generation’ reeling along four abreast. We might write an essay on the softening and civilizing effects of music—the only difficulty would be in saying any thing original on the subject. But we will content ourselves with speculating on the probable effect of the introduction of real music in to native society, as bringing upon the relation betwixt the sexes. Would it be going too far to assert that the Hindoos know nothing of love because they know nothing of music? At all events, it is clear to us that Hindoo music was never made to be “the food of love;”—it is all lungs and no heart, all sound and no sentiment. Fancy a young Baboo beneath a lady’s lattice yelping out his feelings in notes which he might have learnt from the jackals that are chorussing his tuneless lay. Imagine a love-sick maiden addressing the youth of her affections in a squall like that of the nautch-girls for whose attractions out native fellow-subjects compete so strenuously about Doorgah Poojah time. No! there is no love in Bengalee music, and it is notorious that even Young Bengal, though he may write sonnets on the subject, knows nothing of the passion. But teach him European music, and you inspire him with its sentiment. He will find he has got a heart, and that it is capable of a delightful feeling to which the customs and prejudices of his creed have made him a stranger. We shall then hear that he has discovered that marriage ought to be preceded by the delights of courtship, and that he will no longer allow himself to be literally given in marriage or take what is offered to him in the way of a wife, but that he is determined to woo and win a spouse for himself. He will then find himself under the necessity of making himself amiable, and his fair countrywomen will find it their interest to do the same;—hence will arise a great improvement of feelings and manners of the native community. And when all this comes to pass, it will be seen that the appointment of Mr. Harriden as the Professor of music at the Hindoo College has not been without its good fruits.99
Despite the perception that everything was now in place for the music class to commence, there appeared to be some confusion in the public domain over the modalities of
Harraden’s appointment and the status of the class within the institution. Tempering the enthusiasm evinced in the afore-quoted opinion piece from two days prior, the Bengal Hurkaru again reported on January 2, 1847:
We learn on good authority…that a chair of music has not yet been established at the Hindoo College, as we were led to believe was the case, and that Mr. Harriden [sic] has not received any appointment in the institution, but is merely allowed to give lessons in music in the college to such of the students as choose to place themselves under his tuition.100
The primary objector to the founding of a permanent chair of music at the college turned out to be the office of the Deputy Governor of the Bengal government, the highest executive authority,
99 Bengal Hurkaru, December 30, 1846; reprinted in Allen’s Indian Mail and Register 5, no. 72 (1847): 131-132.
100 Bengal Hurkaru, January 2, 1847; reprinted in Allen’s Indian Mail and Register 5, no. 71 (1847): 99-100.
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served at that point by T. H. Maddock, under whose aegis the Council of Education operated.
The consent of the Council and the Managing Committee of the college notwithstanding, the
Deputy Governor took a dim view of channeling state funds for the post.101
The music class at Hindu College finally began in the month of January, proceeding as per the arrangement mentioned in the Hurkaru’s report quoted above. The initial fee was fixed at
Rs. 2.00 per month for each student, an amount that accrued directly to Mr. Harraden, though he
“subsequently consented to reduce [it] to 1 Rupee per month.”102 Students’ response to the class was more than enthusiastic. In increasing numbers they began expressing their eagerness to join; so much so that faced with over hundred willing applicants, Harraden had no option but to start
“a free class for junior students.”103 By April, such was the interest generated that the moment looked ripe to Harraden for petitioning the Council of Education in a renewed effort to make the class and his post permanent. In a report presented before a three-member college committee deputed to oversee the music class, comprising Radhakanta Deb, Edward Samuells, and Dr.
Frederic Mouat, Harraden submitted that his experience with his students had furnished him with enough proof that “the Hindus” had “great aptitude for music”; that his wards were “desirous to learn…, and the parents quite willing that their sons should prosecute the study of that polite art[.]”104 He also pointed out that he had not received any compensation for his labors with the
junior class. The committee responded “very favorably as to the advisability of establishing a
101 James Kerr, Review of Public Instruction in the Bengal Presidency From 1835-1851, Part I (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1852), 79.
102 General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency For 1847-48 (Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1848), 25.
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid., 26.
263 permanent music class[,]” and forwarded their recommendation to the Council of Education.
Deputy Governor Maddock, however, was still not convinced. He, again, expressed
…strong doubts whether instruction in music ought in any manner to be provided for from the resources of the State, but that as it was represented that a portion of the students were desirous of acquiring a knowledge of music (with the consent of their parents and guardians) by paying a separate fee, His Honor would not object to make a grant of 800 Rupees for the purchase of an instrument and books, on receiving a report that a reasonable number of students had enrolled themselves as pupils.105
Faced with the government’s recurrent reticence to support the music class and his employment at Hindu College on a permanent basis, Samuel Harraden’s position subsequently became monetarily untenable and the class was discontinued. The last we hear of it is in 1852, in the Review of Public Instruction in the Bengal Presidency by James Kerr, the Principal of the
Hindu College in 1847 when systematic Western music education was introduced in its precincts. He leaves us with a pithy summary of the sequence of events and their outcome:
[An] experiment of a Music class was tried at the Hindoo College. After some preliminary enquiries a class was formed, with the sanction of the Committee of Management, on the understanding that the pupils attending it should pay an additional fee sufficient to remunerate the Teacher. This guarded condition damped, in some degree, the zeal of the pupils for instruction in Music. If it could be had gratis, they were eager to learn it. But they were not prepared both to learn it, and to pay for it. The Music class was kept up for some time, as an experiment. Enough was done to shew [sic] that the Hindoos are not without a musical taste, capable of being cultivated and improved. After a while, the fees realized being insufficient to induce the Teacher to continue his services, an application was made to Government to guarantee a fixed salary. A small grant was made to purchase books and a musical instrument; but the Deputy Governor entertained “doubts” whether instruction in Music ought to be encouraged, to any further extent, by the Government, and a permanent salary provided for the Teacher out of the funds of the State. The Music class was therefore relinquished, and the students went back to their graver studies. 106
Two concerns stand out from the experiment with instituting a music class at the Hindu
College in 1847: first, the desire to learn Western music in a formal fashion was self-generated from within a class of Bhadralok Bengalis cutting across the ideological spectrum. Support for it came not just, presumably, from the reformist, socially progressive members of this social
105 Ibid.
106 Kerr, Review, 79.
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formation who either patronized modern, liberal learning in Bengal, or were products of the
colonial state’s new education policy inaugurated in the mid-1830s, but also from its
conservative sections that were, nonetheless, similarly invested in modernizing education. From
the favorable disposition of Radhakanta Deb, the leader of the Dharma Sabha against Brahmo
reformism, and a member of the college sub-committee deputed to oversee the music class, it appears that the latter had a broad mandate among the Bengali Bhadralok. Second, we find that the colonial state was rather reluctant to extend pecuniary support for music pedagogy in an
institution that otherwise depended substantially on government funds for servicing its costs of
operation. And this move, as we will see in the next chapter, would set a precedence; indeed, the
state would subsequently maintain its reticence to directly involve itself in the musical matters of
the natives.
Thus far in this chapter, Western music and its socialization among the emergent Bengali
Bhadralok, starting with an individual, Dwarkanath, and moving on to the broader domain of the
music class in Hindu College, has been the axis on which the construction of a modern musical
subjectivity in early/mid-nineteenth century colonial Bengal has been narrated. In what follows,
we will now ask: how did the modernization of education and socio-religious reformism sweeping through Bengal in this period impact the spaces and practice of Indian, specifically,
Bengali music? And as we will see in the course of our enquiry, a new configuration of the musical social, deeply imbricated in the cultural politics of Bhadralok class formation, emerged for this music in the same period, signaling a set of concerns that would importantly condition the later nationalist musical imaginary and its discursive apparatus in its emergent phase during the 1870s.
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New Sites of Bengali Music: Rammohan Roy, Raga Music, and the Beginnings of Bengali Musical Modernity The historical significance of Rammohan’s founding of the Brahmo Sabha in August 1828, with
the active support of Dwarkanath Tagore, among others, is well enshrined in chronicles of
modern Bengal’s socio-religious history. Catalyzed by the native elites’ interactions with
Protestant Christianity and post-Enlightenment European thought through colonialism, the Sabha
was both an expression and a constituent of a wider process of social, cultural, and economic
reconfiguration in nineteenth century colonial Bengal. It emerged from within the class and
caste-dominant Brahminical Hindu fold to propagate among the educated classes a rationalized,
monotheistic devotionality.107 That the performative site of this new domain of faith was also shaped by Rammohan’s signal musical intervention is a fact that has been historically well- socialized in Bengali Bhadralok society, right down to the present. Indeed, the genre of devotional songs called brahmosangit that Roy formalized in the early-nineteenth century to musically convey the ideals of Brahmo religious philosophy still endures.108 As early as 1911,
Shibnath Shastri [1847-1919] would write in his History of the Brahmo Samaj:
[T]he hymns of Ram Mohun Roy have found a place in the body of our widely circulated national devotional songs. Many who scarcely know his multi-form activities in other directions, know him as one of the composers of some of the loftiest songs in the Bengali language. The introduction of singing as a part of religious service was in itself a great act of reformation.109
107 Though Rammohan was inspired by Protestant Christianity, his monotheistic rearticulation and distillation of Hinduism, as is well known, was based on his reading of the Upanishads as Vedantic texts. There is a profusion of secondary scholarly literature that discusses the (contextual) history of Roy’s social reformism, his religious thought and philosophy, and locates them in a global history of ideas. See, for further reading, see, among others, David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 196-216; Lynn Zastoupil, Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010; Brian Hatcher, “Remembering Rammohan: An Essay on the (Re-)emergence of Modern Hinduism,” History of Religions 46, no. 1 (2006): 50-80. 108 This is courtesy of its popularization beyond the confines of Brahmo worship later by the most famous Brahmo of them all, Rabindranath Tagore, who composed many songs as Brahmo Sangit.
109 Shibnath Shastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj. 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Calcutta: R. Chatterjee, 1919), 78.
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Shibnath Shastri’s assessment of Rammohan’s music for Bengali society was perhaps
truer for his own time than it is for ours. Nevertheless, it is indicative of the rarefied status in
which Rammohan the composer was held by one of the foremost Bhadralok chroniclers of his
own social class at the turn of the twentieth century. I do not intend to reproduce below that
which already circulates in general knowledge. Rather, what I specifically concentrate on is the
cultural politics of Rammohan’s musical ideology, the larger argument being that the new
musical spaces he animated in the early decades of the nineteenth century were constitutive
determinants for the kind of musical modernity that took shape in Bengal and the musical
subject(ivity) that its processes conditioned.
Rammohan’s earliest musical involvement in an institutional context can be dated to nearly a century prior to the publication of Shibnath Shastri’s account. It is in the ‘Atmiya
Sabha’ (Assembly of Friends), an association Roy founded in 1815 along with Dwarakanath, among others, to bring under one umbrella kindred spirits in social and religious dispositions, that he first introduced the practice of devotional singing.110 At the Sabha meetings, “…a well-
known musician of the town, called Govinda Mala, used to sing hymns composed by Ram
Mohun Roy and his friends[.]”111 But at a time when the Hindu orthodoxy generally associated
musical practices in devotion with heterodox and marginal religious formations of the popular
classes and lower castes—to be enjoyed through the extant social hierarchy while abstaining
from any direct participation—Rammohan’s experiments did not find a supportive audience
outside the circle of his collaborators. In fact, fast on the tracks of the Atmiya Sabha’s
110 For more on the Atmiya Sabha, see, Ibid., 23-43.
111 Ibid., 27.
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establishment, critiques of the Roy’s devotional means and religious ends began to emerge in the
colonial print-arena.
Of the earliest of Roy’s vocal critics was Sankara Sastri, the “Head English Master” at
the College of Fort St. George in Madras, and “an advocate for idolatry,” whom Roy
provocatively suspected to be actually an Englishman writing under a nom de guerre.112 Sastri had written a piece in the Madras Courier of December 1816 criticizing the latter’s celebration as a “discoverer and reformer” in a previous article in the Calcutta Gazette, and pillorying him for his incorrect interpretations and violations of Vedic Hindu doctrines. “[D]ivine knowledge[,]” Sastri argued, based on his proclaimed authority of the Vedas,
cannot be obtained without purifying the soul, and such purification cannot take place without performing Yagams, bestowing Danams, by penance, worship, reading Theology and comprehending and reasoning on its meaning, but the holding of meetings, playing music, singing songs and dancing, which are ranked among carnal pleasures, are not ordained by scripture as mental purification. It may be asked why purification cannot be attained by these songs, music, &c. since they are all intended to expressive of the tenets of Monotheisim? I answer that the completion of every undertaking in the world must take place by its respective means, for example the thirst must be quenched by water, milk and such like, but not with sand. These, the aforesaid means for quenching thirst, are known by human experience, but the means to purify the unknown and invisible powers of the intellect cannot be ascertained by human understanding but by the precepts revealed by divine wisdom. Therefore, the setting aside the proper means such as Yagam, penance, worship, &c. and substituting dancing, music, and songs, appear in no way preferable by doctrine. 113
In 1817, Roy published an extended riposte addressed to his detractor, titled, “A Defence
of Hindu Theism,” where he put forth in an itemized fashion his refutation of the charges
brought by Sastri. Point number five in Roy’s “Defence” addresses the issue of music. Here he
not only quotes scriptural authority back to his critic regarding the propriety of music in
112 Rammohan Roy, “A Defence of Hindu Theism, In Reply to the Advocate for Idolatry at Madras” in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 3 vols., ed. Jogendro Chunder Ghosh, (Calcutta: Oriental Press, 1901), 1: 123-142.
113 B. Senkara Sastri, “To the Editor of the Madras Courier,” in Rajah Rammohun Roy, Translation of Several Principal Books, Passages, and Texts of the Veds, and of Some Controversial Works on Brahmunical Theology, 123-134 ( London: Parbury, Alllen and Co., 1832), 130.
268 worship—a discursive strategy that reformers of various hues, from Rammohan to
Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, deployed in debates with their detractors, he also unreservedly admits to his instrumental use of music’s essential quality to affect and heighten the impact of the word in propagating his ideas to a new audience: “The practice of dancing in divine worship,
I agree,” he wrote,
is not ordained by the scripture, and accordingly was never introduced in our worship; any mention of dancing in the Calcutta Gazette must therefore have proceeded from the misinformation of the Editor. But respecting the propriety of using monotheistical songs in divine worship, I beg leave to refer the gentleman to texts 114th and 115th of the 3rd chapter of Yajnyavalca, who authorizes not only scriptural music in divine contemplation, but also the songs that are composed by the vulgar. It is also evident that any interesting idea is calculated to make more impression upon the mind, when conveyed in musical verses, than when delivered in the 114 form of common conversation.
Yet, skepticism over Roy’s advocacy of the use of music in worship remained. Six years later, in a tract, titled, Humbles Suggestions to His Countrymen Who Believe in the One True
God,115 he again had to draw upon the authority of the legendary Yajnavalkya116 to impress upon his critics that music, according to the most elevated of scriptural opinions, was highly desired in the act of divine worship, and so, by all, not just those formally schooled in singing Vedic hymns:
Yajnuvulkyu [sic], with a reference to those who cannot sing the hymns of the Veds, has said “The divine hymns, Rik, Gatha, Panika, and Dukshubihita should be sung; because by their constant use man attains supreme beatitude.” “He who is skilled in playing on the lute (veena), who is
114 Roy, English Works, 1: 133-134. What is most interesting in Roy’s response to Sankara Sastri objections to music and dance in worship is not so much their difference on the issue but their convergence. Roy readily concurs with this critic that dance indeed is scripturally prohibited. The implication of this I cannot argue out in full here. But suffice it to say that if Roy’s introduction of music in devotional practices through the Brahmo Sabha marks a watershed in the historical relation of the Bhadralok musical and the social, then his disavowal of dance from the same announces an agonistic relation between music and the body in Bengali Bhadralok culture that in many ways is yet to be resolved.
115 This tract, attributed to Roy by the editor of his collected works, Jogendra Chandra Ghosh, had appeared in 1823 under the authorial signature of “Prusunnu Koomar Thakoor.” See, Ghosh’s editorial notes in, Roy, English Works, 1: 299.
116 Yajnavalkya is believed to have been a philosopher at the court of the later-Vedic king, Janaka-Vaideha of Mithila. The Shatapatha Brahmana and the Brihadaranyak Upanishad are ascribed to his authorship. For details, see, Sureshwar Jha, Yajnavalkya (New Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 1988).
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intimately acquainted with the various tones and harmonies and who is able to beat time in music, will enter without difficulty upon the road of salvation.”117
If high-Sanskritic Vedic literature provided Rammohan with the scriptural source to argue for the theological legitimacy of music in devotion against the opinion of the Brahminical orthodoxy, then the specific mode of musical devotion he imagined in practice was profoundly influenced by that of the Christian church. As a fresh émigré in the capital of British India, and prior to his floating of the Atmiya Sabha, Rammohan used to regularly attend the congregation at the Scottish Presbyterian church of St. Andrew’s, even “though he did not fully agree with their religious views.”118 Yet, so swayed was Roy by congregational singing of hymns that “[h]e longed for daily domestic service; but alas[,]” as Sophia Dobson Collet (1822-1894), his biographer, tells us, “this hankering remained unsatisfied.” It was this “hankering” that led him to “…visit the Baptist missionaries of Serampore[.]”
[He] stayed for the family prayer in the house of Rev. Mr. Carey, with which, says one of the missionaries, ‘he was delighted’. Mr. Carey presented him with a copy of Dr. Watt's ‘Hymns’. The Raja promised he would treasure up the hymns in his heart; and so he did, carrying the book with him to the last days of his life.119
Collet’s celebratory biography of Rammohan is an attempt at ideologically recuperating its subject as fundamentally a crypto-Christian. This, however, should not deflect attention away from the fact that she was probably not incorrect in her estimation of the impact that the devotional modus operandi of the Christian church had on Rammohan and the association he founded. For simultaneous to his establishment of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, Rammohan also arranged for the publication of Brahmo Sangit—a compilation of hymns composed by him and
117 Roy, English Works, 1: 299-300.
118 Jogendra Chunder Ghose, “Introduction,” in Ibid., lxxix.
119 Ibid.
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his acolytes to appropriately express the monotheistic precepts of Brahmo spirituality, marking
the inauguration of a new genre of Bengali devotional music called, as per the title of the song-
book, brahmosangit.120 This compilation marks an inaugural moment in the convergence of print
and music in Bengal; Brahmo Sangit was only the second book of Bengali songs to appear in the
rapidly proliferating vernacular print-world of nineteenth century Bengal.121 Rammohan’s
hymnal was put to use actively at the Sabha’s weekly services as we see in the following
description of it by a European missionary from 1833:
The hymns…[are] composed by Rammohun Roy, Nilmoney Ghose, Kaleenath Roy and others. One-half of the service consists in singing some of these [monotheistic] hymns, and in this part of it, the audience seemed to me to feel the greater delight, for the sermon or exposition is certainly unintelligible to the majority. The singing and music are very superior to what Europeans are accustomed to hear from Natives elsewhere. And though the style may not accord with their taste or notion of fine music, yet in this display will be found not only considerable execution, but true science. The performance of Golam Abbas on the toblah [tabla], or small conical drum, played upon by the fingers, is truly astonishing, and is well worth seeing, as well as bearing. Bursts of applause frequently attest the admiration which his skill excites. The singing is similar to what is sometimes heard at nautches, but far superior. It is accompanied by the toblah, and also by the tomburu [tanpura], which the gaiak [gayak], or songster, himself plays upon. This instrument is like a guitar, but the reverberatory is a large pumpkin. It is held in the left hand, and the strings, of which there are usually three, are swept by one finger. The bealah [behala] resembles our violoncello, and the mondeere [mandira] are small cymbals, which have a very pleasing effect. These are the only instruments used in the Brumha Subha. 122
The cardinal reason behind Rammohan’s decision to publish Brahmo Sangit, and to
institutionalize it as the hymnal inventory for the new religious order, can be found in his prior
experience with the Atmiya Sabha. It was not just his open adversaries, like Sankara Sastri, who
posed an impediment to Roy’s efforts at introducing music as a part of devotional practices.
120 Others who contributed with monotheistic songs in Brahmo Sangit are Nilmoni Ghosh, Bhairabcharan Datta, Krishnamohan Majumdar, and Nimaicharan Mitra. For details, see, Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit, 134.
121 The first song-book in Bengali appeared exactly ten years prior to Roy’s Brahmo Sangit, in 1818. It was Radhamohan Sen’s Sangit Taranga (Calcutta: n.p., 1818).
122 The Calcutta Christian Observer 2, (March 1833): 109. It needs to be mentioned here that the anonymous writer of the article from which this quote has been extracted misidentified the instrument that he credits Golam Abbas as playing. Abbas was a virtuoso on the pakhawaj not the tabla. In fact, he opened a school for pakhawaj training in Calcutta. For details, see, Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit, 21.
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Given that the concept of “monotheistical songs” was for all practical purposes alien to the
extant musical culture in Bengal at all levels of society, “…many of his followers [at the Atmiya
Sabha], who were unused to the idea, would, when asked to sing, introduce idolatrous songs or
ordinary love songs, when [he] had to interfere, and suggest other particular hymns suited to the
occasion.”123 Dwarakanath’s son, Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905)—responsible for reviving
and reinstituting the Brahmo Sabha as the Brahmo Samaj in 1843, after the parent forum had
disintegrated upon the death of his father and Rammohan in England—also provides a similar
testimony:
[Rammohan’s friends in Calcutta] did not fully enter into the spirit of [his faith]. One day [he] suggested that it would be nice if good music could be arranged in the Brahma Samaj by eminent musicians, and his friends brought together a large number of musicians, and all sorts of songs were sung. This did not please Rammohun. He wanted songs in praise of…One God.124
In fact, Rammohan himself had railed against the suspect morality of the lyrics and music that
attended existent popular practice of idolatrous devotion in Bengal:
[Krishna] devotees very often personify (in the same manner as European actors upon stages do) him and his female companions, dancing with indecent gestures, and singing songs relative to his love and debaucheries. It is [also] impossible to explain in language fit to meet the public eye, the mode in which Muhadeva, or the destroying attribute, is worshipped by the generality of the Hindoos: suffice it to say, that it is altogether congenial with the indecent nature of the image, under whose form he is most commonly adored. The stories respecting him, which are read by his devotees in the Tuntras, are of a nature that, if told of any man, would be offensive to the ears of the most abandoned of either sex. In the worship of Kali, human sacrifices, the use of wine, criminal intercourse and licentious songs are included [as well.]125
Thus, it was not only his orthodox opponents that Rammohan had to contend with over the appropriateness of music as such in religious observance. He also had to actively discipline his own flock to unlearn—at least within the domain of Brahmo worship—the centuries-old
123 Shastri, Brahmo Samaj, 79.
124 Debendranath Tagore, quoted in Upendranath Ball, “Foundation of the Brahmo Samaj,” in Raja Rammohun Roy: An Apostle of Indian Awakening, 2 vols., ed. S. K. Sharma, 75-92 (New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2005), 1: 89.
125 Rammohan Roy, “A Defense of Hindu Theism” in English Works, 1: 140-141.
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accretion into the Bengali musical landscape of a dizzying array of devotional themes. And this
was a landscape suffused by a multiplicity of devotional song-forms and performative traditions,
such as, Vaishnav and Shakta padabali, kirtan, malshi, mangalkabya, panchali, jatra, etc., and those performance genres straddling the spoken word and the song, like kathakatha.126 These are
the popular musical traditions that Rammohan would have had in his mind in his reference to
songs “composed by the vulgar,”127 songs whose theological vision was vitally voiced through in
and through the emotion of love and companionship on different relational and allegorical
registers—from Jayadev and the many ‘Chandidas’-es to Ramprasad and Kamalakanta, not to
mention the Auls, Bauls, Fakirs and other heterodox traditions.128 What therefore becomes
doubly noteworthy against this backdrop is that when it came to defining the hymnal repertoire
of Brahmo devotion, Rammohan chose to steer clear of the entire continent of extant lyrical and
melodic modes of devotional music in Bengal. Instead, in a watershed event, the vanguard social
reformer chose to inaugurate an entirely new set of songs, with their monotheistic devotional
lyrics embedded in the musical form of “Hindustani ragasangit.” Indeed, as Dilip
Mukhopadhyay points out in his revisionist account of Rammohan’s musical activities, “Acharya
126 For details, see, Sukumar Roy, Music of Eastern India: Vocal music in Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, and Manipuri, With Special Emphasis on Bengali (Calcutta: Firma K.L.M., 1973); Mridulkanti Chakrabarty, Bangla Gaaner Dhara: Hajar Bachharer Bangla Gaan (The Lineage of Bengali Songs: A Thousand Years of Bengali Songs) (Kolkata: Papyrus, 2005); Sudhir Chakrabarty, Bangla Gaaner Shandhane (In Search of Bengali Songs) (Kolkata: Aruna Prokashoni, 1990), especially the second chapter; Sabitri Ghosh, Bangla Gaaner Itibritta (Chronicles of Bengali Song) (Kolkata: Jiggasha, 1976); Hitesh Ranjan Sanyal, Bangla Kirtaner Itihash (The History of Bengali Kirtan) (Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi, 1990); Rajeshwar Mitra, Banglar Gitikar (Songsmiths of Bengal) (Kolkata: Mitralaya, 1956).
127 It is quite another story that the lyric-content of these song forms came to be considered in the nationalist moment as amongst the most elevated examples of Bengali literary production of the time—intimately connected with the development of the language as modern Bengali through the exertions of institutions like the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, and individuals like Haraprasad Shastri, Dineshchandra Sen et al.
128 For reference, see, Barbara Stoler Miller, trans. and ed., Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, 20th anniversary ed. (1977; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Rachel McDermott, Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kali and Uma from Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Hugh Urban, Songs of Ecstasy: Tantric and Devotional Songs from Colonial Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
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Rammohaner Sangit-Prasanga” (“The Subject of Acharya Rammohan’s Music”),129 Roy pioneered the composition of Bengali devotional songs, self-consciously set to the musical structure of north Indian ragas, emplacing, in the process, the latter into the new socius of the
Bengali Bhadralok in its emergent phase. Let us dwell on this further, for the discussion will also be pertinent towards clarifying the logic behind a speculative proposition made in the context of the Tagore-Muller encounter earlier in this chapter, which has so far been left unsubstantiated— the proposition that the “real Indian music” that Dwarkanath performed for Max Muller in Paris in 1845 was a dhrupad set to Bengali lyrics. But first, it is necessary to have an understanding of
Bengal’s musical landscape during the late-eighteenth century/early-nineteenth century before we can address this assertion as this musico-historical context had significant implications for its possibility.
Besides the genres of Bengali devotional-musical traditions already mentioned above—to which must be added the relatively more ‘secular’ but the immensely popular kabigan and akhrai—this period is of signal importance to the history of Bengali music. It was then that raga music made its formal appearance in Bengal. However, it was not Calcutta that was the site of its initial cultivation. At a time when the city was only emerging as a seat of culture, even if it was already established as the preeminent node of concentration for labor, colonial capital and power, it was in the courts of the erstwhile Mughal feudatories and tributaries in the region that raga music—specifically, its north Indian variant—first took root, through royal patronage of ustads and kalawants from the Hindustani heartland. In its very inaugural moment, the practical
129 This essay was serialized over three parts in the Bengali journal Prabasi in 1962, and remains the first, if not the only, sustained scholarly writing on the musical world of Rammohan. Dilip Mukhopadhyay, “Acharya Rammohaner Sangit Prasanga” (“On the Subject of Acharya Rammohan’s Music”) in Prabasi 62, part II, (1962): 631; also see, Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit, 122-153. Mukhopadhyay, later adduced this study as a lengthy chapter to his landmark 1976 monograph, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, 122-153. This, along with the aforementioned article in Prabasi, remains to the day the only authoritative works on the subject.
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cultivation of this kind of music amongst Bengalis became possible through the training
imparted to them by such visiting musicians from north India.
Particularly noteworthy in this regard are the courts of Bishnupur, Burdwan, and Nadia.
Amongst these aforementioned centers, Bishnupur, the seat of the Malla dynasty, occupies a
stellar position in the history of raga music in Bengal. In this preeminent cultural center of the
Rarh,130 a distinct school of dhrupad singing developed from c. 1782 onwards, resulting, over
time, in the formation the only gharana of raga music with its home in Bengal.131 The originary
preceptor of the Bishnupur gharana of the dhrupad was Ramshankar Bhattacharya [1761-1853].
Importantly, he is also the first known musician to formally compose Bengali lyrics for raga
vocalization. As was the norm for the first generation Bengali exponents of the art, Ramshankar
learnt his nous under the tutelage of a travelling pandit from the Agra-Mathura region, who while
passing through Bishnupur en route Puri had been requested by the reigning potentate, Chaitanya
Singh, to adorn his court.132 To the east of Bishnupur, in Gaur Bengal,133 the ascension of Raja
Krishnachandra Roy to the throne of the Krishnagar-based Nadia royal family in 1728 made its
court a welcome home for raga music. The raja was an aficionado of not only the dhrupad but
130 Rarh is the traditional geographic signifier that usually references that part of Bengal which lies to west of the River Bhagirathi. It stretches from Burdwan and Hoogly in the east to the Jangal Mahal and Santhal Parganas in the west. For details, see, W. W. Hunter, (ed.), Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), 385.
131 For details on the formation of the Bishnupur gharana and its lineage, see the authoritative account of it by Dilip Mukhopadhyay, Bishnupur Gharana, Calcutta: Bookland, 1963. Also see, Charles Capwell, “The Interpretation of History and the Foundation of Authority in the Vishnupur Gharana of Bengal,” in Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, eds. Stephen Blum, Philip Bohlmann, and Daniel Neumann, 95-102 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
132 Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, 83-121.
133 Gaur is the counterpart of Rarh in the traditional geographical nomenclature applied to Bengal. It usually references the region lying to the east of the River Bhagirathi. In denotative terms, Gaur was the capital city during the Sen dynasty’s rule in Bengal from 1070AD to 1203AD, and continued to be so under Sultanic rule that supplanted the former under the leadership of Bakhtiyar Khilji. For reference, see, Dineshchandra Sen, Brihat Banga: Suprachin Kal Hoite Palashir Juddho Porjonto (The Greater Bengal: From the Ancient Times to the Battle of Plassey), 2 vols. (1935; repr. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 1993).
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also the khayal, and it was with him that the generous patronage of Hindustani musicians at the
Krishnanagar court began.134 The next Bengali dhrupadiya of note after Ramshankar,
Bishnuchandra Chakrabarty [1808-1900], would emerge out of here. Bishnuchandra trained
under north Indian ustads retained for the court by Krishnachandra’s great-grandson,
Girishchandra, namely, Husnu Khan, Dilwar Khan, and Mian Miran.135 If the promotion of north
Indian raga music at the royal courts of Bishnupur and Nadia produced the first Bengali
dhrupadiyas then the credit of nurturing the first Bengali composer and performer of the khayal,
Raghunath Roy [1750-1836], goes to the zamindari of Burdwan, which he also served in the
capacity of its dewan, or the chief revenue officer. “When [Roy] was nominated to the dewani,
Maharaja Tejashchandra was Burdwan’s overlord. Seeing his dewan’s special affection for music, the Maharaja invited ustads from Delhi and Lucknow [over to Burdwan] and arranged for
[Roy] to learn music systematically.”136 Roy, in due course, effected an exceptional innovation on the khayal song-form by setting it in four parts to his Bengali lyrics137—more typical of the
dhrupad—than the customary two.138 Thus we see that the first line of Bengali composers and exponents of raga music, specifically of the dhrupad and the khayal, emerged in various courts of
Gaur and Rarh Bengal through the active pedagogic mediation of north Indian experts patronized by their respective overlords during the latter-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century.
134 For details, see, “The Territorial Aristocracy of Bengal: The Nadiya Raj” in Calcutta Review 55, no. 109 (1872): 110.
135 Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, 176. For details on Bishnuchandra’s musical career, see, Ibid., 171-204.
136 Durgadas Lahiri, quoted in Ibid., 71.
137 For further details on Raghunath Roy’s innovation, see Ibid.
138 Typically a khayal bandish, or song, comprises two tuks, or parts/sections the sthayi and antara—a simplification of the four-tuk dhrupad song, comprising the sthayi, antara, abhog, and sanchari—which allowed the former greater freedom and flexibility of elaboration and expression.
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Importantly, while raga music was already flourishing in Bengal at the aforementioned
centers (and other sites of lesser renown), its cultivation, as Sudhir Chakrabarty points out, was
for all practical purposes “unknown to the inhabitants of Calcutta” prior to the last decade of the
eighteenth century.139 The kinds of music that subsisted there were largely the same as those
which subsisted in the Bengal countryside, genres that Rammohan Roy would summarily label
“vulgar.” Indeed, at this point in time, as can be gleaned from Sumanta Banerjee’s work on elite
and popular culture in colonial Calcutta, there was no clear demarcation between music of the
‘parlor’ and that of the ‘streets,’140 between the cultivation of an ‘art’ music through court
patronage, and the organic subsistence of various ‘folk’ traditions outside of it.141 Given, however, the centripetal force that the colonial capital soon came to exert on all aspects of economic, social, and cultural life in Bengal, it did not take much longer for raga music to find a home in its precincts. And when the practice and performance of raga music arrived in Calcutta in a concerted fashion, it did not do so on the back of the dhrupad or the khayal. It, rather, arrived via another genre of north Indian vocal music, the tappa,142 before the other two took root.
139 Sudhir Chakrabarty, Bangla Gaaner Sandhane (Calcutta: Aruna Prakashani, 1990), 43. Chakrabarty must rank alongside Dilip Mukhopadhyay as one of the most perceptive historians of modern Bengali music and musical modernity in Bengal. In fact, it is he more than any other scholar of Bengali music writing in the eponymous language, including Mukhopadhyay, who has paid the greatest attention to the discursive aspect of musical modernity in Bengal, particularly in the afore-cited monograph.
140 Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1998), particularly, 78-87. For a short summary musical entertainment available in Calcutta in the nineteenth century, see, Utpala Goswami, Kolkatay Ragsangitcharcha (Raga Music Cultivation in Calcutta) (Calcutta: West Bengal State Music Academy, 2001), 17-64. For an account more contemporaneous to the time under discussion, see, Ishwarchandra Gupta’s 1854 text, Kabijibani (Biography of Poets), ed. Bhabatosh Datta (Calcutta: Pashchimbanga Bangla Academy, 1998).
141 This distinction would take definite form deeper into the nineteenth century with the consolidation of the Bhadralok class as a social formation, a process in which Rammohan was an early vanguard.
142 Tappa’s originary narrative typically sources it to the nomadic camel-drivers of the Punjab region, and its formalization to Ghulam Nabi or Shori Mian of Lucknow in the eighteenth century. It is considered, along with thumri whose innovation is also credited to Shori Mian, one of the ‘lighter’ genres of Hindustani art music. And both are distinguished for abbreviating the four-stage dhrupad form and known for “tonal improvements that are
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Two figures stand out as pioneers of raga music in Calcutta. The first is Ramnidhi Gupta
[1741-1839]—or Nidhubabu, as he was better known—who acquired his music skills from an
ustad while posted as an East India Company employee in Chhapra. Upon taking voluntary
retirement from service at the age of fifty-three, Nidhubabu returned to Calcutta in 1794 after a
gap of eighteen years, and soon became a cynosure of the Bengali Bhadralok’s musical
entertainment.143 Though he was trained in both the khayal and the tappa his compositional and
performative activities centered almost exclusively on the latter. In the process, he innovated a
particular style of Bengali tappa that differed from its typical north Indian counterpart and came
to be known as Nidhubabur tappa (Nidhubabu’s tappa).144
The second preeminent figure at the inception of the city’s raga music scene was also a performer-composer of Bengali tappas—Kalidas Chattopadhyay, alias Kali Mirza. Kalidas was born c. 1750 in the town of Guptipara in Hooghly district. Always a keen student of music, around 1770 he traveled out of Bengal seeking advanced training in the art. After living and learning for about eleven years from different gharana masters in Benaras, Lucknow, and Delhi,
Kalidas returned to Guptipara to begin his career as a composer and teacher. In 1805 he was appointed court-musician at Burdwan by Raja Pratapchand. Dissatisfied, however, with the remuneration he received for his services, he soon moved to Calcutta where he was employed in a similar capacity by Gopimohan Tagore of Pathuriaghata. He enjoyed his position until the
jumpy and flashy.” [Ashok Ranade, Music Contexts: A Concise Dictionary of Hindustani Music (New Delhi: Promilla and Co., 2006), 13-132]
143 For details, see, Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, 1-39.
144 Nidhubabur tappa is, unlike the typical up tempo and ornamentation-heavy typical north Indian tappa, more economical in terms of vocal embellishments and is set to medium tempo. The former also differs from the latter in terms of its lyric content. While the dominant theme in Hindustani tappas songs is that of love and romantic desire between man and woman, Nidhubabu diversified the tappa to include directly religious themes—as different from the allegorical and metaphorical language of love that is often deployed to articulate the relationship between the divine and the devotee—as well as material aspects of life. For details, see, Ibid., 4-5, 122-123.
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latter’s death in 1818, whereupon Kalidas took leave of the city and retired to Benares, where he
died a few years later. Importantly, in a world where music was largely an amateur pursuit for the caste-Hindus of the upper/middle classes, Kalidas was the first professional exponent of raga music in Bengal.145
If, between these two earliest proponents of Bengali tappas and popularizers of raga
music in Calcutta,146 history has been kinder to Nidhubabu in terms of memorializing his
contributions, then for our purposes here Kali Mirza, as Kalidas Chattopadhyay came to be
known both for his proficiency in music and his predilection for Islamic regalia befitting that of a
Muslim ustad, is of greater relevance.147 For Rammohan Roy, after moving to Calcutta in 1814,
became his student, and remained so until the latter’s departure from the city three years later.
I have already mentioned earlier that, in the context of music in Bengal, Rammohan was
a pioneer in self-consciously and formally casting the devotional lyrics for Brahmo worship that
comprised the 1828 hymnal, Brahmo Sangit, to north Indian ragas. But he did not make it
explicit in the text in what ang/gayaki these hymns were to be sung. However, from the early
history of raga music in Bengal and Calcutta at the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century
145 For biographical details, see, Ibid., 40-65.
146As has been mentioned, both Nidhubabu and Kali Mirza were prolific composers. Their lyric compositions are best preserved in Sangit Ragakalpadruma, the remarkable four-volume compilation of songs in forty-five different languages, both Indian and foreign, undertaken by Krishnananda Vyas and published in 1842 under the patronage of Radhakanta Deb (whom we have already encounter in the context of the Western music class at Hindu College), contain around a hundred and fifty songs by Nidhubabu, and around two-hundred and fifty by Kali Mirza. For further reading, see, volume three of Krishnananda Vyas, Sangita Ragakalpadruma, intro. and ed. (Nagendranath Basu, Delhi: Pratibha Prakasana, 2008).
147 It needs to be mentioned here that Nidhubabu too had come into contact with the Brahmos through Utsabananda Vidyabagish—a co-founder of the Brahmo Sabha along with Rammohan. Joygopal Gupta—Niduhbabu’s son— mentions in his foreword to the second edition of Gitratna (Bejeweled Songs)—a compilation of his father’s songs, first published in 1837, two years before his death—that the famous tappa innovator had composed a monotheistical devotional song appropriate for Brahmo worship upon Ustabananda’s request. But due to the latter’s sudden death the song never reached Rammohan or his musical associates in the Sabha, and, hence, was never incorporated into the corpus of brahmosangit. For details, see, Joygopal Gupta, Gitratna, (Calcutta: n.p., 1856), 12-13; also see his quote in Bhabatosh Datta, “Anushangik Tathya” (“Appendix”) in Gupta, Kabijibani, 398-399.
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conjuncture outlined above, we can deduce what styles/genres of north Indian raga music that he
would have brought to bear on the vocalization and performance of these hymns. To be more
specific, as a student of Kali Mirza, his musical sensibility would have been conditioned
foremost by the tappa—the genre that, in any case, enjoyed the maximum patronage and
circulation in Calcutta at the time—and, to a lesser extent, by the khayal, in which his music
preceptor was trained as well. But it is unlikely that Rammohan would have known much about
the dhrupad as there were no known Bengali dhrupadiyas in the city before 1830. Also, there is
no credible evidence of any musical dispersion towards Calcutta from the two centers of dhrupad
cultivation in Bengal, Bishnupur and Krishnanagar, prior to this moment. Given this historical
fact, it is surprising how forcefully the creation-myth that Rammohan was the originator of the
Bengali dhrupad has entrenched itself in both the general and specialized knowledge of Bengal’s
musical past.
Indeed, this notion proliferates in both academic and non-academic considerations of
Rammohan’s musical pursuits, in Bengali and English. The opinion takes the general form that
“In the thirty-two songs that he wrote for the Brahmo Samaj, Rammohun introduced a new element in Bengali music—the dhrupad—hitherto confined to Hindi.”148 Saumyendranath
Tagore in his biography of Rammohan further embellishes this narrative:
Rammohan was the first to compose dhrupad songs in Bengali. That was in 1828. He felt the need of Dhrupad songs, noted for their depth, grandeur, simplicity and absence of decorative tonal effusion, for his Brahmo Sabha meetings. Tappa and Thungri, he felt, were much too frolicsome for such occasions.149
148 Nikhilesh Guha, ed., The Complete Songs of Rammohun Roy (Calcutta: Writer’s Workshop, 1973), 27. It needs to be pointed out that, as I have mentioned earlier, not all the songs in Brahmo Sangit were written by Rammohan. His Brahmo Sabha associates contributed to the volume as well. See, p. 49 of this chapter.
149 Saumyendranath Tagore, Rammohun Roy: His Role in the Indian Renaissance (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1975), 30; emphases in original. Saumyendranath is incorrect in including the thumri (“thungri” in the quote) in his list. This genre of Hindustani vocal music, extremely popular in the Awadh region, did not arrive in Calcutta in any significant fashion until 1857, when, upon the British annexation of Awadh, its Nawab, Wajed Ali Shah—a great aficionado of all arts—was expelled from Lucknow and exiled to Calcutta. It is he who brought the culture of thumri
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The same tale is appears in Bengali essays, for example, by Jogananda Das150 and by Prafulla
Kumar Das.151 Indeed, be it an amateur biographer of Rammohan like Saumyendranath, or historical musicologists/music historians of Bengal, such as Jayasri Bannerjee and Sukumar
Ray,152 or even recent critical scholarship on music and colonial modernity in India, vide Janaki
Bakhle,153 this notion has attained the status of a generalized truth-claim through repetition.
Had this claim been historically accurate, it would have simplified my task of backing up
the assertion I made earlier in the chapter apropos of Dwarkanath Tagore’s presentation of “real
Indian music” to Max Muller in Paris. As an intimate friend of Rammohan’s and an active patron
of the Brahmo Sabha, that Dwarkanath would sing for Muller a Bengali dhrupad would not have
been an unreasonable speculation to make through associative logic. This speculation still holds,
but, as we will see, not for the reason just adduced. For, as Dilip Mukhopadhyay has
meticulously argued in his signal interventions on the matter, particularly in his extended
deliberation in the 1963 essay, “Acharya Rammohaner Sangit-Prasanga,”154 the belief that
Rammohan was the trailblazing pioneer of the Bengali dhrupad is patently incorrect. It is
along with him to the city, where it subsequently flourished due to wide patronage from the Bengali middle classes, as well as elites. For more on the career of thumri in Calcutta, see, Amiyanath Sanyal, Smritir Atale (In the Abyss of Memory), Calcutta: Mitralay, 1953. For a history of its origins, see, Peter Manuel, Thumri in Historical and Stylistic Perspectives (New Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1989), 34-78.
150 Jogananda Das, Jugantar Samayiki, September 6, 1957, quoted in Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, 140.
151 See, Ibid.
152 Roy, Music of Eastern India, 6; Jayasri Bannerjee, The Music of Bengal: Essays in Contemporary Perspective (Bombay: Indian Musicological Society 1988), 60-63.
153 Bakhle, Two Men and Music, 6.
154 See in particular the third installment of this three-part essay in Prabasi (1962): 629-635.
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necessary here to re-present Mukhopadhyay’s arguments for it has been largely ignored in
English language scholarship.
According to him, the opinion that Rammohan was the inventor and a prolific composer
of Bengali dhrupad is erroneous on two fundamental accounts. First, from a chronological
perspective, even if one provisionally considers that Rammohan did indeed compose Bengali
dhrupads for the Brahmo Sabha, Bishnupur’s Ramshankar Bhattacharya, as we have seen in the
outline of raga musical activities in early colonial Bengal furnished above, anteceded the
former’s efforts by at least forty years. Hence, if one has to indulge in the historicist exercise of
identifying the primogenitor of Bengali dhrupads, it is to Ramshankar that this distinction should
be credited. Second, from a musicological perspective, on the evidence of the songs published in
Brahmo Sangit, there are compelling reasons to doubt whether Rammohan had any particular
predilection for the dhrupad at all. And this conclusion finds support from the skeletal
musicological information provided along with each song in the aforementioned volume—the raga and the tal, or the beat cycle/ rhythmic pattern, to which it is set.
As is well known, conventionally, the rendering of a raga as a dhrupad can occur only through a designated set of tals, and these are: chautal, jhaptal, surphaktal (or, sultal), dhamar, and tewra (or, tivra). Importantly, “[w]ith the exception of Jhaptal, which is used in khyal and instrumental music as well as dhrupad, these tals are not normally shared with other genres.”155
Also, it is customary, if not always necessarily binding,156 for the lyrics of a typical dhrupad bandish, or composition, to be prosodically divisible into four tuks, or parts/sections, each of which then corresponds to a necessary constituent passage of the dhrupad, namely sthayi, antara,
155 Widdess and Sanyal, Dhrupad, 9.
156 As Widess and Sanyal point out, two-tuk dhrupads are not entire unknown. The Talwandi gharana of dhrupad singing, for example, has the practice of composing two-tuk songs. For more details, see, Ibid., 19.
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sanchari, abhog, in that order.157 Thus, when a clear indication as to which genre a song belongs
cannot be obtained—as is the case with the Rammohan-edited Brahmo Sangit—it is still possible
to deduce whether a given composition is a dhrupad or not if at least the tal of the song is
mentioned and its bandish furnished so that its tuk can be ascertained.
Of the thirty-two songs presented in Brahmo Sangit, an overwhelming majority—twenty-
three, to be precise—have their tal given as ara-theka—a popular rhythmic pattern in which
tappas and khayals in the Bengal region were composed. Of the remaining nine, two songs are in
ektal; one in qawwali; one in tewat (or tilwada, as it is known in north India); one in thumri;158
two in jhaptal; one in dhamar; and one in, simply, ara. Amongst these, the first four classes of
tals—ektal to thumri, encompassing five songs—are proscribed by convention from dhrupad
compositions; they are mostly used, again, in khayals and tappas. Thus, twenty-eight of the thirty-two songs in Brahmo Sangit are cast in these two so-called ‘lighter’ genres of north Indian
vocal music. This leaves four songs whose genre has to be deduced. Out of these, one is said to
be set in “ara.” However, there is no beat cycle in north Indian music by that name. It is, as Dilip
Mukhopadhyay suggests, most likely a misprint of either ara-theka or ara-chautal. The first of
these two, we know, cannot be used in dhrupad. The second one can be, but on rare occasions,
khayals are set to it as well.159 The condition of sufficiency for determining the genre of this
157 For more on the formal structure of the dhrupad, see, Widdess and Sanyal, Dhrupad As I have pointed out in an earlier footnote in this chapter (fn. 39), a typical khayal and tappa comprise only two tuks, corresponding to their two constituent passages—the sthayi and the antara. For a succinct presentation of the structure of the khayal, see, Ashok Ranade, Hindustani Music (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2002), 60-63; for a more extended analysis, see, Wade, Khyal. A similarly pithy introduction to the tappa can be found in Madhu Trivedi, The Making of Avadh Culture (New Delhi: Primus books 2010), 123-124.
158 This thumri, is, of course, not the Hindistani vocal music genre of the same name but is a tal prevalent in Punjab, [Ranade, Music Contexts, 138] which, as Dilip Kumar Mukhpadhyay points out, comprises eight beats is used in khayal and tappa songs, and in its eponymous song-form (when it arose in the nineteenth century Awadh). [Mukhopadhyay, “Acharya Rammohan,” 633]
159 Wade, Khyal, 13-14.
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song, “Kothay Gaman Karo Sarbakshan” (“Where do You Leave for Always”), then, has to be
derived from the prosodic structure of its lyrics.160 And since the song is a two-tuk composition
in structural terms, in all likelihood it is not a dhrupad. Of the three songs now remaining, the
two set in jhaptal could be dhrupads; rules governing the dhrupad permit this tal. But the two
songs could equally well be khayals as jhaptal is the only beat cycle that is shared by both
genres.161 Again, scrutinizing their prosodic structure for sufficiency reveals one—“Paramatma- e Hao Re Mon Roto” (“Devote Your Mind to the Supreme One”)—to be of the two-tuk form.
Hence, it is very unlikely that this song too is a dhrupad.162 The other song, “Dwibhab Bhabo ki
Mon Ek Bhinno Dui Noy (“Why Think in Dualities, the Mind is One and Never Two”), then is the first of the thirty-two songs in Brahmo Sangit that holds the possibility of being a dhrupad, but not beyond doubt. The only song that is, however, surely of this genre in the volume is the one composed by Rammohan himself and set in the dhamar tal unique to the dhrupad—“Bhoy
Korile Jare Na Thake Onner Bhoy” (“Fearing Whom Negates Fear of All Else”).
What the above analysis, carefully worked out by Dilip Mukhopadhyay in his work on
Rammohan’s music, then discloses is that at most two songs in the entire hymnal that the latter compiled and published in 1828 were composed in the dhrupad gayaki—not exactly befitting of someone who is believed to have sired its Bengali incarnation and popularized it by setting the
monotheistic, devotional lyrics he and followers composed to music in this genre. In light of the
preceding discussion, the issue that becomes interesting is not the obvious incorrectness of this
opinion but the question, how did the opinion come into being and get subsequently socialized?
160 The song is quoted in Dilip Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, 150.
161 Widdess and Sanyal, Dhrupad, 17.
162 Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, 142.
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The logical answer to this lies in the truth of fact that the original Brahmo Sabha, the
Brahmo Samaj that evolved out of it, and the subsequent breakaway factions, all have, indeed, had a major role to play in the development of the Bengali dhrupad. These institutions have
come to be closely associated with this genre in the public realm, particularly through the musical exertions of the most famous Brahmo of all, Rabindranath Tagore, who composed many
songs in dhrupad. And it is this association that has been retrospectively projected backwards to
anoint the movement’s founder, who did in fact inaugurate the practice of setting Bengali
devotional songs to tappas and khayals, as also the originator of the Bengali dhrupad. Hence, if one concentrates on the institution rather than the individual, then the pivotal function that the former has had in the development of the Bengali dhrupad in Calcutta comes into clear relief, as
does the actual role that the its founder played in this regard. For Rammohan did play an important part in socializing the dhrupad amongst the Calcutta Bhadralok. This, however, was not so much in the capacity of a composer. Rather, few months before his departure to the imperial metropole as an emissary of the Mughal emperor in November 1830, he requested
Bishnuchandra Chakrabarty, the accomplished dhrupadiya at the Krishnanagar court, and his brother Krishnaprasad, a fellow pursuant of the genre, to become the sabha-gayak (house- musician) for the Brahmo Sabha, an invitation which the Chakrabarty brothers did not decline.
Their coming to Calcutta and joining the Sabha was an important musico-historical event.
For, as I have indicated earlier, prior to the Chakrabartys’ arrival in the city, “there was not a single Bengali music maestro who cultivated the dhrupad. One can even say that, on the whole, the practice of dhrupad was absent in Calcutta music scene.”163 Thus, Rammohan’s contribution
163 Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, 143. The paucity of Bengali dhrupadiyas in Calcutta would soon change with the influx accomplished students of the Bishnupur gharana of dhrupad singing arriving in number from around the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This will be addressed in the subsequent chapter.
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to the history of the Bengali dhrupad lies not in his compositional contribution—on the other hand, he did compose quite a few songs in the tappa and khayal genres—but in his drafting of the first accomplished dhrupadiya into service at the Sabha. He would not, however, be present to witness the fruits of his act. Soon after hiring Bishnuchandra, Rammohan left for England never to return.
Bishnu’s musical stewardship of the Brahmo Sabha, and of its later incarnation as the
Brahmo Samaj, was determinant in installing the dhrupad as the unique signature of musico- devotional practices there. He also emerged as the key figure in its dissemination in the larger
Bhadralok social, though this was pivotally mediated by contributions from Bengal’s most famous Brahmo family—the Tagores of Jorasanko. Debendranath Tagore,164 Dwarkanath’s son and the resuscitator of the Brahmo Sabha as the Brahmo Samaj, and Bishnu became close collaborators in composing Bengali dhrupads, with the former writing the lyrics, and the latter
setting it to music and performing it.165 Further, Debendranath appointed Bishnu as the music
teacher for the Jorasanko household. As a result, not only did all his thirteen children receive
musical training from him, some of them, namely, Dwijendranath, Hemendranath,
Satyendranath, Jyotirindranath, and, of course, Rabindranath—all doyens of Bhadralok cultural
life—contributed significantly to the musical corpus of Bengali brahmosangit, many which were
dhrupad songs. Rabindranath would later write of his first music teacher:
164 For more on Debendranath, see, Satyendranath Tagore and Indira Devi, (trans.), The Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore (London: MacMillan and Co., 1916).
165 Here it needs to be clarified that neither was Bishnuchandra only a dhrupad-performer, nor was the Brahmo Sabha/Samaj a sanctuary for only the dhrupad genre. Both the individual and the institution supported other genres north Indian raga music as well. Also, Bishnu did not exclusively perform Bengali songs. In fact, given that he at Krishnanagar he was tutored by musicians from north India, he primary expertise lay in performing Hindustani songs. Further, he was primarily not a lyric-writer but music composer and performer.
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Bishnu was a famed singer of dhrupad songs. I used to hear him every day[:] morning and evening, at festivals and parties, [and] at the worship-chamber[.] My kinsfolk, with tambura on their shoulder, used to practice with him in different rooms [of the house.] My elder brothers used to present songs by Tansen and other masters in Bengali [with him].166
Thus, we see from the above discussion that the Brahmo Sabha/Samaj and the personnel
associated with its musical activities were indeed closely associated with the formalization and
popularization of the Bengali dhrupad, particularly in the guise of brahmosangit. It is perhaps
due to this identification that subsequent writers, academic and non-academic, not very mindful
of the actual musicological content of Rammohan’s original compilation of songs in this vein,
came to (re-)produce the myth that the founder of the Brahmo movement was also the originator
of the Bengali dhrupad.
Now we have the proper musico-historical grounding to revisit the proposition that in
Dwarkanath Tagore’s fascinating musical exchange with Max Muller in Paris in 1845, the song
that the former presented as the real “real Indian music,” the one that left the latter in a state of
total musical incomprehension, was a Bengali dhrupad. Dwarkanath had been a follower of
Rammohan and his Brahmo movement since the days of the Atmiya Sabha in 1815 through to
the establishment of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828. After his mentor’s departure for England in
1830 “he assumed the leadership of the Brahmo [Sabha.]”167 He was, then, at the helm of affairs there when Bishnuchandra properly began his musical career as there as the sabha-gayak, and the
Bengali dhrupad emerged as the cornerstone of its upasana sangit (devotional music) through the dint of Bishnu, and subsequently his son, Debendranath. And it was in the shadow of this musical moment that he followed Rammohan’s footsteps to Europe, first in 1842 and then again in 1845, which is when he met Max Muller. My argument that a Bengali dhrupad is what
166 Rabindranath Tagore, “Shiksha O Sanskritite Sangiter Sthan” (“The Place of Music in Education and Culture”) in Tagore, Sangitchinta (Thoughts on Music), 72-79 (Calcutta: Biswabharati Printing Division, 2004), 77-78.
167 Kling, Partner in Empire, 22.
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Dwarkanath sang to the latter is based, in the absence of more definitive evidence anywhere, on this circumstantial reasoning. And to logically speculate further, the reason why Muller found it incomprehensible was because not only was he at that point entirely unaware of the Bengali language, but also because of the fact that the dhrupad as a genre of north Indian raga music had long ceded its earlier preeminence to what became the more popular genres of the art: the khayal, tappa, and thumri.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have delineated the cardinal elements that together, and relationally, reflect the initial formation a modern musical subjectivity in colonial Bengal from around the turn of the nineteenth century until, roughly, its mid-point. As exemplary instantiations of this subjectivity, as modern musical subjects, I have looked at two individuals, closely connected to each other biographically: Dwarkanath Tagore and Rammohan Roy. Through the former, I have charted the historical socialization of Western music amongst the Bengali Bhadralok. We have seen how the resultant bimusicality in Dwarkanath enabled him to agentically dialogue with Max Muller in
Paris, wherein essential civilizational difference, expressed on the register of music, would be claimed by him as a positive constituent of his selfhood, not as lack. Rammohan, on the other hand, has been the defining figure through whom the initial movement to modernize the text and the context of Bengali music has been narrated. Together, these two individuals have also served as the conduit to larger social and institutional sites of musical practice and performance in the city of Calcutta during the first-half of the nineteenth century that they were directly or indirectly associated with: European theatre-halls, the Hindu College, and the Brahmo Sabha/Samaj.
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The first of these sites was where the Bengali elite would publicly experience western music for the first time. The Hindu College was the experimental site for the formal production of Bhadralok Bengalis as performatively bimusical, imbued with Western music as cultural capital. And the Brahmo Samaj was the site where music would for the first time enter the ambit of Bhadralok religious practice, spawning an entirely new genre of Bengali devotional music set to north Indian ragas, disseminated through printed song-books. These new spaces of music, new
ways of being musical, and the attendant ideology that animated them were critical to the
inauguration of modern musical subjectivity in Bengal. In fact, these are the elements that characterize this subjectivity as specifically modern. The question then arises: why have I labeled the narrative that spans this chapter as the “pre-history” of musical modernity in Bengal?
This is because the apparatus of modern (musical) subject formation was still inchoate in the historical conjuncture in which Rammohan and Dwarkanath operated. It was yet to acquire the kind of discursive coherence and institutional mediation that would formalize in the aftermath of the radical overhauling of the colonial educational policy in 1835.168 This is exactly
what the next chapter, the proper history of the Bhadralok musical subject, will deal with. It will
become apparent therein that the elements of musical modernity that have emerged in the course
of this chapter focusing on the early/mid-nineteenth century are precisely that: elementary. The
168 As is well chronicled in the history of modern India, voiced as a set of recommendations by Thomas Babington Macaulay in his famous minutes on education in India, dated February 2, and formally inaugurated in Governor General William Bentinck’s resolution of March 7, this was a watershed moment in installing post-Enlightenment European knowledge systems as the basis of native education in English or vernacular medium. Though as nodal members of Bhadralok civil society Rammohan and Dwarkanath had been involved in substantive efforts to modernize native education along similar lines in Bengal long prior to 1835, their subjectivity and its favorable disposition towards modernization in different ideological fields along western lines was the denouement of individual self-fashioning, not of institutional mediations. On the contrary, both Dwarkanath and Rammohan were primarily products of Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit education. The facility they acquired in English, and western modes of knowledge, was largely out of their own dint, through their personal privileges. No doubt they were—as mediating agents between the colonial State and native society, as members of the middle-class, vide Partha Chatterjee’s understanding of the term in a colonial context—instrumental in putting the institutional structure in place that would produce the modern subject in Bengal. But they themselves were not its product. In that, they were quite different from their immediate generation successor, the Young Bengal, whose members were all products of the Hindu College, and in the founding of which both Rammohan and Dwarkanath were involved.
289 apparatus of musical subjectivation at this moment is still without the necessary discursive, institutional, pedagogical, and economic density to socially reproduce the subject it discretely interpellates—Rammohan and Dwarkanath being cases in point. This necessary maturation of the apparatus will be more or less complete by the 1870s and deepen thereafter. And a defining constituent of modern subjectivity, however suspect its ideological makeup but quintessentially modern nevertheless, will make its appearance in the Bengali Bhadralok’s musical self- projection—a national and historical consciousness. In Dwarkanath and Rammohan, we have seen only suggestions of this. It is for these reasons that I consider the individuals and events that the current chapter deals to constitute a pre-history of Bhadralok musical modernity proper.
That said, it would be anachronistic to expect a national-historical consciousness in
Rammohan and Dwarkanath, for the objective conditions for this simply did not exist at during their time. Nevertheless, as numerous texts on social history of colonial Bengal attest to, they were exceptional figures in their own socio-temporal context. This is true in the case of music as well. Indeed, we do not know of any other Bengali Bhadralok from the period who was similarly experimenting with Bengali devotional lyrics and raga music at a comparable site; or any other individual who was performatively bimusical like Dwarkanath. But despite their apparent achievements in inaugurating the moment of musical modernity in colonial Bengal, another inescapable legacy of their music-related activities needs to be mentioned by the way of a concluding line: it is with them that the class-sequestration of Bengal’s musical culture began in earnest; it is with them the music of the parlors and the music of the streets became divergent melodies.
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Chapter 5 Making of the Bhadralok Musical Subject: Producing Musical Identity in late-Nineteenth Century Colonial Bengal
Around the 1870s, a vocal section of the Calcutta-based Bengali intelligentsia began evincing
serious concerns over the musical aspect of Bhadralok self-constitution. Despite definite progress
made in civic-social and literary domains over the preceding decades of the nineteenth century,
they lamented, the Bhadralok was yet to nurture a musical ethos of its own, one that would
properly reflect its status as the enlightened vanguard of native society. Expressing this concern,
Sourindramohan Tagore [1840-1915]—a scion of the Vaishnavite Pathuriaghata lineage of the
family, and beyond doubt the brightest Bhadralok musical luminary of late-19th century— observed in 1872:
The sad thing is some learned individuals, thinking that the purpose of music is but simply to pleasure the auditory sense, direct their resentment at this art. Enthusiastic participation in musical discussion according to them is to inflict harm upon the world.1
Echoing the same concern, Krishnadhan Bandopadhyay, an important figure in the music-
network animated by Sourindramohan in Calcutta before parting ways with his mentor, wrote in
his 1885 opus, Gitasutrasara (The Essential Rules for Music):
In our land, Bengal, cultivation of music is extremely rare[;] accordingly there is little concern for books on music...Even now, many Bhadraloks harbor the misconception that cultivation of music is useless labor. Who will not agree that this an extremely sad state of affairs? ...2 All countries have their national music (jatiya sangit), but the Bengali has none. In all other countries, owing to the customary presence of patrilineally bequeathed family music for functions and festivals, music practice begins at childhood. Bengalis do not have this custom, hence one does not see a people (jati) as unmusical as the Bengali anywhere, and nobody expresses as much disrespect for music as [him].3
1 Sangit Samalochani (Musical Criticisms) 1, no. 1 (1872): 2; translation mine.
2 Krishnadhan Bandopadhyay, Gitasutrasara (1885; repr. Calcutta: A. Mukherjee and Co., 1975), viii; translation mine.
3 Ibid., 5. It needs to be mentioned that Charles Capwell quotes the same passages from Gitasutrasara in his important article, “Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta as a Component in the History of a Secondary Urban Center” in Asian Music 18, no. 1 (1986): 150. However, his translation of the Bengali prose compromises somewhat the significance of the passage, especially Krishnadhan’s stress on “national music” and Bengali “race.”
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Even as late as 1914, Krishnachandra Ghosh Vedantabagish was forced to bemoan that
[t]hough we have recently begun engaging music seriously, we have not yet learned to show adequate respect to scholars and practitioners of musical arts. We commemorate the passing of a renowned poet or a litterateur with large gatherings. But in our country, the passing of a musician hardly merits any notice.4
The above quotes, the last of which was recorded in the context of honoring
Sourindramohan Tagore’s recent demise, betray an entrenched anxiety in the Bhadralok over what was sensed as a significant cultural ‘lack’ for a social class that had putatively engineered a
‘renaissance’ for itself in the first-half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the self-estimation, so
bluntly voiced by Krishnadhan, that Bengalis are an “unmusical” people arose as a common
refrain in Bhadralok circles as the nineteenth century entered its last third. Yet, as has also been
pointed out in the previous chapter, contemporary Bengal was a musically thriving landscape.
Musical forms/genres like tappa, khayal, akhrai, boithoki, jatra, kobigaan, panchali, and above
all, kirtan, proliferated widely in practice and performance. There was music all around: in the
parlors and on the streets, in the country and the city—so much so that Bengal had even acquired
a reputation abroad for being a musically vivacious region. Wrote an anonymous American
traveller en route to Calcutta in 1823: “I was told that the Bengalese resign the palm of
superiority to the Europeans in all departments of art and science except music[.]”5 Even if what
he heard upon his arrival was not exactly to his liking, he nevertheless observed that “Music…is
a popular amusement in Calcutta.” Indeed, so prominent was it in the city’s soundscape that the
American noted by the way of a sly compliment: “At night the streets are perfectly deserted. The
4 Krishnachandra Ghosh, “Ekta Katha (A Word),” in Biswapati Chaudhuri, Arghya (Dedication) (Calcutta: B. Mukherjee, 1919), n. pag.
5 Anon., “Voyage to Calcutta” in The Port Folio 16, no. 256 (1823): 146.
292 deep silence itself is grateful; but how charming the interruption of music whose chords are softened by distance.”6
A set of intriguing questions, therefore, arises: why, despite this profusion of music in
Bengal, did the late-nineteenth century Bhadralok come to perceive a musical lack in its social body? What was the historical source of this self-understanding and the concomitant cultural anxiety that it produced? How did the Bhadralok proceed to indemnify its musical lack? What kind of musical subject did this compensatory agenda seek to produce? And who/what emerged as its Other in the process?
These are some of the issues that the present chapter addresses, focusing on a period which, in the temporal order of Bengali music history, can be appropriately named the epoch of
Sourindramohan Tagore, an epoch in which his shadow extends over nearly every single significant musical aspect of Bhadralok social life. In periodizing terms, this era of programmatically defining a specifically Bhadralok musical culture begins around
Sourindramohan’s founding of the Bengal School of Music in 1871, and his emergence as the authority nonpareil on all musical matters in native society during the latter-third of the nineteenth century. It extends, roughly, up to the Swadeshi movement in Bengal (1905-1908), the moment that marks his eclipse and the ascendance of another epochal figure on the
Bhadralok Bengali’s musical horizon—Rabindranath Tagore.
In less individually nominative and more techno-social terms, the same forty-odd year span can be alternatively conceptualized as being bookended by two new forces of technology that would fundamentally alter the mode of musical production and its social relations in the colony. At the far end of the period thus defined, the Bengali dandamatrik notation system developed by Kshetramohan Goswami and Sourindramohan in the late 1860s—the first amongst
6 Ibid., 147.
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many such systems to be devised in Bengal during the late-nineteenth century—inaugurates a
manual technology of music reproduction in India. The near end is marked by the appearance of
its mechanical counterpart in the form of the gramophone—in 1902, to be precise, with the
establishment of Gramophone and Typewriter Company’s India office—and its subsequent
socialization among classes with requisite economic means in the subsequent decades. Thus, the
passage in music history emblematized and periodized by the name, Sourindramohan, can also
be seen as the epoch of the notation system as the dominant, manual technology of music
reproduction. Keeping this material context in mind, over the rest of this chapter we will follow
the name, the emblem into our inquiries—if not for any other reason than for the simple fact that
the latter serves as a convenient shorthand enliven a range of nodes and nexuses in the social and
discursive space of Bhadralok musicality.
It is necessary at this point to clarify what exactly is being studied here in thematic terms
and what is at stake theoretically. In the previous chapter, through an analysis of Dwarkanath
Tagore and Rammohan Roy’s musical activities, I isolated new musical elements and concerns
in the then-emergent Bhadralok society that were directly or indirectly the denouement of India’s
colonially-mediated encounter with the West.7 There, my argument was that these elements, while reflective of modernity’s cultural elaboration on the colonial ground over the first half of the nineteenth century, were yet to achieve social and ideological coherence at this conjuncture.
In other words, the relationality necessary to animate these elements into an apparatus of modern musical subjectification was still discursively-institutionally inchoate, historically
unreflexive, and reliant on the dint of exceptional individuals rather than systemic mediations.
Hence, I labeled this prior moment ‘pre-historic’ with respect to the unfolding of musical
7 To recall, these elements are: the induction of Western music, select evidence of bimusicality, fashioning of new sites for Bengali music, adoption of new styles and genres therein, and the early convergence of music and print.
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modernity in Bengal. Only over the period under study in this chapter did the Bengali musical
field acquire its properly modern character, and the apparatus for the production of a
commensurate subjectivity congeal. Indeed, it is only during the era of Sourindramohan that one
sees a ‘musical governmentality’ cohere in colonial Bengal. This theorization of the Bhadralok
musical world in latter nineteenth century Calcutta needs to be expounded further. So, let us
proceed by the way of a historiographic detour, using the opportunity to introduce
Sourindramohan and his life/work.
The Era of Sourindramohan Tagore in History and Historiography: Theorizing the Bhadralok Musical Apparatus Any historiographic discussion of music in colonial Bengal must begin by addressing
ethnomusicologist Charles Capwell’s work. Capwell, through a series of articles published
between 1986 and 2002, is the only scholar who has addressed the epoch of Sourindramohan
substantively and extensively in English language scholarship.8 This puts him alongside fellow- travelers writing in Bengali—Dilip Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Sudhir Chakrabarty, and Rajyeswar
Mitra. Together, they comprise a surprisingly small set of scholars that have attended to the issue of music in Bengali colonial culture in any appreciable detail.
Capwell’s first essay (1986) on Bhadralok music in late-nineteenth century Calcutta remains to the day one of the most substantive contributions on the topic. In this article, using a
8 See, Charles Capwell, “Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta,” 139-163; ______, “Sourindro Mohun Tagore and the National Anthem Project,” Ethnomusicology 31, no. 3 (1987): 407-430; _____, “Marginality and Musicology in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta: The Case of Sourindro Mohun Tagore,” in Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, eds., Bruno Nettl and Philip Bohlman, 228- 243 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and “A Ragamala for the Empress” Ethnomusicology 46, no. 2 (2002): 197-225. To this list, one needs to add Capwell’s work on the Bishnupur gharana that in the latter-half of the nineteenth century had close connections with Bhadralok musical circles in Calcutta: “Interpretation of History and Foundation of Authority in the Vishnupur Gharana of Bengal,” in Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, eds. Stephen Blum, Daniel Neumann, et al, 95-102 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
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manuscript of a musical drama popular on Calcutta stages in mid-1870s, Sati Ki Kalankini (Is the
Chaste Tainted?), as a cipher, Capwell brilliantly charts out the music-network that took shape
around Sourindramohan. Particularly highlighted in this social history are the organic
connections between Bengali theatre and music, and the interaction of Westerners with
Sourindramohan’s circle that ultimately caused the manuscript to end up in Harvard University’s
collections. Capwell followed this up with a similarly rich historical musicological inquiry
(1987) into a singular musical movement begun in the aftermath of Victoria’s inauguration as the
Empress of India in 1877. Under the initiative of group of British imperialists in England in
conjunction with India’s comprador elite, led by Sourindramohan, this movement sought to
install the English national anthem, God Save the Queen, as that of Britain’s Indian colony as
well. The proposal, however, was shot down by the colonial state in 1883, and the movement
dissipated. Capwell’s next essay (1991) attempted to redress the “marginality” of
Sourindramohan and his musicological endeavors as member of the Calcutta intelligentsia in the
“intellectual history of our discipline[,]” that is, the disciple of ethnomusicology. The last of
Capwell’s work (2002) on Sourindramohan is a historically informed interpretive exercise
focused on a singular publication by the latter that was composed in the tradition of ragamala
paintings in Mughal India that represented the six ragas and thirty-six raginis of Indian art music
in figural iconography.9 Capwell reads this book, dedicated to the Queen, as an instantiation in the musical field of the general observation made by historian Tapan Raychaudhuri that “[t]he
9 Sourindramohan Tagore, Six Principal Ragas, With a Brief View of Hindu Music (Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press Company Ltd., 1887). The book is a folio-sized publication consisting of ornately laid out pages alternately sequenced with a panegyric to Queen Victoria set to a particular raga/ragini on one, and a lithograph plate of the same raga/ragini in figural representation opposite the musico-poetic text. Six Principal Ragas first appeared in first appeared in 1876; it was the reissued the following year to commemorate Victoria’s nomination as the Empress of India. A further edition appeared in 1887, this time to commemorate the jubilee year of the Queen’s ascension to the throne.
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nineteenth century Bengali experience is…perhaps the earliest manifestation of the revolution in
the mental world of Asia’s elite groups.”10
Taken together, these essays present an intricately narrated and multi-faceted analysis of the Bhadralok musical world in latter-nineteenth century Calcutta with Sourindramohan at its center. If Capwell uses Redfield and Singer’s sociological model from their locus classicus
“Cultural Role of Cities”11 to analytically comprehend the urban-historical context in which this
world took shape12 then Ashis Nandy’s study of the psycho-dynamics of colonial subjection in
10 Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perception of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Calcutta: Oxford University, 1988), 224.
11 Robert Redfield and Milton Singer, “Cultural Role of Cities” in Economic Development and Cultural Change 3, no. 1 (1954): 53-73. The impact of post-World War II American anthropology on the study of Indian society and culture is well-known, as is Robert Redfield and Milton Singer’s pivotal role therein. Their early framing of what Nicholas Dirks calls “ethnosociology of India,” amplified and perpetuated by the likes of McKim Marriott and others, marked a watershed moment in South Asian Studies in the American academia. Some key works on India produced by scholars involved in University of Chicago’s comparative civilization studies program, see, McKim Marriott, (ed.), Village India: Studies in the Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Milton Singer, (ed.), Traditional India: Structure and Change (Philadelphia: The American Folklore Society, 1959); Milton Singer and Bernard Cohn, eds., Structure and Change in Indian Society, (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1968); Milton Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization (New York: Praeger, 1972). For a general institutional history of South Asian Studies in American universities, and its different emphases and ideological orientations, see, Nicholas Dirks, “South Asian Studies: Futures Past,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton, 230-284 (Berkeley: GAIA Books, UC Berkeley, 2004). For more on the specifically Chicago’s role therein, see, Chapter 5 of Clifford Wilcox, Robert Redfield and the Development of American Anthropology, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004; Mary Hancock, “Unmaking the ‘Great Tradition’: Ethnography, National Culture and Area Studies,” Identities 4, no. 3 (1998): 343- 388. The last is a withering ideology-critique of techniques of field research employed and the conclusions reached by Milton Singer in his When a Great Tradition Modernizes.
12 Redfield and Singer’s influence on Capwell is most apparent in his “Musical Life,” 1986; _____, “Marginality and Musicology,” 1991. In ‘Cultural Role of Cities,” Redfield and Singer introduce a totalizing typology to study different species of cities and their social, cultural, economic constitution in synchronic as well as diachronic relation to the ‘civilization’ within which they are located. They proceed by constructing a series of Weberian ideal types—most prominently, Great and Little Traditions of a ‘civilization,’ primary and secondary processes of urbanization, orthogenetic and heterogenetic cities, and so on. Using this typology Capwell reads Calcutta as a city born of heterogenetic transformation leading to secondary urbanization. Or, to amplify, it is a “city of the technical order…where local cultures [have been] disintegrated and new integrations of mind and society…developed” [Redfield and Singer, “Cultural Role of Cities,” 59] through “contact with peoples of widely different cultures from that of its own members,” [Ibid., 61] rendering the city-space thus formed a habitation of both indigenous peoples as well as of “alien colonists or conquerors.” As a consequence, cities of heterogenetic transformations and secondary urbanization undergo “the freeing of the intellectual, esthetic, economic and political life from the local moral norms, and…[develop]…a revolutionary, nativistic, humanistic or ecumenical viewpoint, now directed toward reform, progress and designed change. [Ibid., 59] Significantly, this act of freeing is mediated not by the old “literati” that act as curators of the Great Tradition in orthogenetically formed primary urban centers, but by “a new
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Intimate Enemy provides Capwell with the framework to analyze the ‘mentality’ behind
Sourindramohan’s project of restoring Indian music to its supposedly once-glorious health.13
Through this theoretical edifice,14 Capwell’s empirically rich work looks at several important
dimensions of the modernizing project headed by Sourindramohan.15 Since Sourindramohan is
also one of the chief protagonists in the present narrative, this chapter, expectedly, draws significantly from, and builds upon, Capwell’s pioneering work. But my intention here is not to repeat what Capwell has already said, and said well. Hence, what I want to delineate now are the differences between his concerns and mine. The first among these is both a theoretical and historiographical issue.
type of professional intellectuals—the intelligentsia[.]” [Milton Singer, “The Great Tradition in a Metropolitan Center: Madras” in Singer, (ed.), Traditional India, 347] One can immediately discern from above why Capwell found the Redfield-Singer framework so appealing. Brought to bear on the case of late-nineteenth century Calcutta, a quintessential colonial city, Sourindramohan and his musical activities, as Capwell sees it, appear to be fitting illustrations of heterogenetic, secondary urbanization.
13 For details, see, Capwell, “Marginality and Musicology.”
14 It needs to be mentioned here that Capwell’s work is not a theoretical engagement with Redfield and Singer’s model. He usually drafts their ideas into his essays as a framing device, introduced through a set of opening statements. But they are left largely unaddressed thereafter. Indeed, there is little that Capwell says about how the material he treats over the course of his thematic elaborations converses with or impacts the concepts through which that he invites the reader to interpret his narrative. Hence, this uncritical reliance on Redfield and Singer causes him to reproduce, by implication, the shortcomings of their framework as well. These shortcomings have been pointed out by various scholars for quite some time now, particularly the inadequacy of the conjoined concepts, Great and Little Traditions, in understanding the Indian situation. For details, see, Mary Hancock, “Unmaking the ‘Great Tradition’”; Kamala Visweswaran, Un/Common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 136-147; Christopher Fuller, Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
15 These are: (i) the influence of Carl Engel’s idea of ‘national music’ in shaping the latter’s discourse on Indian music; (ii) the innovation of a Bengali notation system as the technological cornerstone of Bhadralok musical recovery; (iii) the circuit of patronage that flowed through Sourindramohan and the Pathuriaghata Tagore family, which subsidized not only musical careers of his close collaborators, like Khestramohan Goswami, and Kaliprasanna Bandopadhyay, but nearly all musico-institutional activities undertaken in contemporary Bhadralok society; (iv) the contradiction in Sourindramohan that made him a fervent “nationalist” in the domain of music and a devotedly loyal colonial subject in all other matters; and (v) the trope of ‘Muslim Tyranny’ that the Hindu Bhadralok intelligentsia like Sourindramohan appropriated wholesale from European Orientalists in order to rationalize their own sense of musico-historical decadence.
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Despite the undoubted empirical richness of Capwell’s oeuvre, one gets very little sense
from it of why and how the musico-ideological field that Sourindramohan defined could congeal
only during the time that it did. Attending to this is critical for making analytically visible the
modern rupture in Bengali musical life marked by the Bhadralok program to fashion a new
musical culture that was appropriately ‘cultured.’ Further, in terms of linking the musical with
the social, Capwell’s understanding is entirely mediated by the so-called ‘Bengal Renaissance’
model of interpreting nineteenth century Bengal.16 However, as has been pointed out in critical historical scholarship on modern India, most trenchantly by Sumit Sarkar, the scope of the so- called Renaissance in Bengal, despite its ostensible achievements in pushing socio-religious
reforms and in the formation of a colonial civil society and public sphere, was rather narrow. It
did little to effect any transformative change in extant caste, class, and religious hierarchies, and
the ideologies that sustained them.17 Capwell’s oversight of this critical scholarship leaves open
16 ‘Bengal Renaissance’ is both a periodizing as well as descriptive trope that, drawing self-conscious comparison with the similar historical moment in fifteenth/sixteenth century Europe, was, and still is, used to signify the period of intense intellectual churning in Hindu Bengali Bhadralok social life during the nineteenth century, beginning with Rammohan Roy and stretching all the way up to Rabindranath Tagore and Vivekananda. In terms of historical processes, they refer to the various socio-religious reform movements, the development of a public sphere through print-capitalism, and the ensuing literary efflorescence that characterized nineteenth century Bengal. The first deployment of this term, comparing the Bengali socio-cultural condition with Europe, was first made by none other than Rammohan Roy himself in letter to the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff. [Quoted in David Kopf, ‘Introduction’ in David Kopf and Safiuddin Joarder, (eds.), Reflections on the Bengal Renaissance (Dacca: Institute of Bangladesh Studies, 1977), 4] For details, see, David Kopf, Nineteenth Century Bengal and Fifteenth Century Europe: Some Introductory Notes on Comparative Renaissance (Calcutta: Indian Council of Cultural Relations, 1963); ______, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); ______, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). It needs to be mentioned here that the ‘Bengal Renaissance’ trope features not only in Whiggish narratives of progressive modernization and incremental enlightenment over time that are characteristic of a liberal historiography (David Kopf, the historian that Capwell almost exclusively depends on for his understanding of nineteenth century Bengal, is a stellar exemplar of this historiography) also features prominently in Indian Marxist historiography as well. Early generation of Marxist scholars have understood the supposed liberalism of the so- called Renaissance as the historical condition of possibility for Marxism to take root in India—specifically, in Bengal. For details, see, Binoy Ghose, Banglar Nabajagriti (Bengal’s Renaissance) (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1948); Sushobhan Sarkar, Bengal Renaissance and Other Essays, Calcutta: People’s Publishing House, 1970; ______, On the Bengal Renaissance, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1979.
17 Sumit Sarkar, A Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985); see, in particular, the first essay therein, titled “Rammohun Roy and the Break With the Past.”
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a significant lacuna in his otherwise pioneering work—the role music played an important role in
suturing Hindu Bhadralok hegemony over Bengali cultural life. This is something that I pay
particular attention to in this chapter.
Another major point of difference arises from Capwell’s framing of Sourindramohan
Tagore as a “marginal man.”18 There are two senses in which Capwell deems Sourindramohan to be thus. The first of these is a purely disciplinary-discursive one, and its frame of reference is modern ethnomusicological scholarship. He rightly notes that the various histories of the discipline’s past have ignored Sourindramohan’s pioneering role in the development of a musicologically scientific understanding of Indian music, making him, thereby, a marginal figure—“nearly forgotten” in the ethnomusicology’s history, despite his central contributions.
One, however, needs to be mindful of the specificity of Capwell’s address in considering
Sourindramohan as discursively marginal. For his importance has been duly recognized in
Bengali musico-historical scholarship. At least ten years prior to the publication of Capwell’s first essay, Dilip Kumar Mukhopadhyay, similarly rooted in the ideological framework of
Renaissance historiography, had written in detail about Sourindramohan and his circle in
Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, presenting him as the “Titan of the Renaissance Era (naba-jagaran parber jugpurush)” in the field of music.19 Hence, it needs to be recognized that
Sourindramohan’s marginality is specific to ethnomusicological discourse and its disciplinary history.
18 Capwell, “Marginality and Musicology.”
19 Dilip Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha (Cultivation of Raga Music by Bengalis) (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1976), 336-352, 376-394. Capwell is certainly aware of Mukherjee’s scholarship as he quotes and references him extensively throughout his work on Sourindramohan.
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The problem arises when Capwell extrapolates from this brief to make a generalized
sociological-historical claim. He makes this claim by reading Sourindramohan through the lens of the American sociologist Everett Stonequist’s stagist ideal type of a “marginal man” developed in his eponymously titled 1937 monograph, and through Redfield and Singer’s conception of the intelligentsia in relation to a certain kind of urbanization.20 Let me address
Capwell’s deployment of the latter framework first as it turns on a critical misreading.
Capwell writes that in their essay, “Cultural Role of Cities,” “Redfield and Singer
associate the marginal class with the intelligentsia whom they locate in secondary urban centers
defined as the locus for the colonial contract between an indigenous, established culture and a newly dominant foreign one.”21 It is true that the authors associate the “intelligentsia” with cities
born of heterogenetic transformation leading to secondary urbanization, as different from the old
“literati” that act as vanguards of the Great Tradition in orthogenetic transformation of little folk- societies into primary urban centers.22 Calcutta, a quintessentially colonial city, is one of the former type whose culture is predominated by the intelligentsia rather than the literati.23
However, contrary to Capwell’s reading, Redfield and Singer draw no connection between the
intelligentsia and marginality. What they say, instead, is that in a city of secondary urbanization
20 For details, see, Ibid., 229-231. According to Capwell, following Stonequist, “the marginal person begins in childhood with no awareness of conflict, progresses in adolescence to awareness of his ambivalent position, and then achieves some adult accommodation with is permanent situation between two groups.” [Ibid., 230] Moreover, “a certain degree of personal maladjustment is inherent in the marginal situation.” [Stonequist, quoted in Ibid.] For a brief explanation of Redfield and Singer’s concepts, see fn. 13 of this chapter.
21 Ibid., 230.
22 For details, see Redfield and Singer, “The Cultural Role of Cities,” 57, 61, 65.
23 Also, Capwell says that “The Cultural Role of Cities” contains a “fine description of colonial Calcutta.” [Capwell, “Marginality and Musicology,” 230] This is rather curious. For Redfield and Singer’s essay mentions Calcutta only twice in the body of the entire essay, that too in passing and alongside other “colonial cities” like, Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, and Canton.
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there “appear ‘marginal’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ men and an ‘intelligentsia[.]’”24 Here “marginal” and “cosmopolitan” are two distinct “social types,” and the “intelligentsia” is a third sub-class,
culled, presumably, from the cosmopolitans, not from the marginal segment of the city’s
population. This becomes amply clear from the typology of marginality that Redfield and Singer
furnish in the immediately succeeding sentence: “[T]he…various types of marginal folk
[are]…enclaved-, minority-, imperialized, transplanted-, remade-, quasi-folk, etc., depending on the kind of relation to the urban center.”25 Indeed, besides the fact that both social types occupy the same urban space, there is no overlap whatsoever between the intelligentsia and marginality
in Redfield and Singer’s model.
Second, one of the characteristics of the marginal man that Capwell sees, vide Stonequist
again, inhering in Sourindramohan is “personal maladjustment.” This ‘maladjustment’ is
apparently predicated to the condition of colonial subjection. In my view, such a characterization
is difficult to sustain in the case of Sourindramohan, particularly, on a personal level. As an
enormously wealthy absentee landlord, he worked the apparatus of colonial rule to the fullest
degree for advancing his own class interests and his social stature—something that played no
small role in the diffusion of his fame as a scholar and patron of ‘Hindu’ music. He was
unambiguously loyal to British overlordship in India, going to the extent of extracting one
hundred pounds sterling towards his pet project of installing “God Save the Queen” as India’s
national anthem from the tenants of his zamindari estate—distributed across the length and
breadth of Bengal Presidency.26 Indeed, he is a classic exemplar of the class of comprador
24 Ibid., 61.
25 Ibid.
26 Sourindro Mohun Tagore, Hindu Loyalty: a Presentation of the Views and Opinion of the Sanskrit Authorities on the Subject of Loyalty [In Connection With the Movement of the “National Anthem for India] (Calcutta: Sourindramohan Tagore, 1883), 99.
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bourgeoisie that colonialism in India threw up, hardly betraying any sings of ‘personal maladjustment.’
More pertinently, as Capwell’s own extensive writings on Sourindramohan attest to, the latter was at the very center of the new economy of music in latter-nineteenth century Bengal.
One of the brightest stars in the stellar constellation of the Tagore family, Sourindramohan was
an indefatigable writer and Sanskrit translator. Besides ‘Hindu’ music, which occupied much of his authorial attention, he wrote on diverse subjects, ranging from geography to gemology. By the time of his death in 1915, he had published more than fifty titles in four languages. Not surprisingly, for his untiring efforts to modernize and propagate ‘Hindu’ music, he was covered prominently in contemporary newspapers and journals. Hence, though Sourindramohan never ventured beyond the city-limits of Calcutta during his life-time, his fame extended far beyond. In particular, his founding of the Bengal School of Music in 1871—the first modern institution of musical pedagogy in India, modeled after contemporary European music seminaries—brought him unprecedented renown both within the subcontinent and abroad. Thus, when the Poona
Gayan Samaj was set up in 1874, he was nominated an honorary advisor to the new music society.27 By the end of the decade such was his eminence that it occasioned the following
observation in the Indian Mirror:
India is not wanting in men who have distinguished themselves by the part they have taken in political life, or by their deep knowledge of the antiquities of their country; but we venture to doubt whether any Native scholar can be considered as rivalling Dr. Sourendro Mohun Tagore in the world-wide reputation he has acquired by his works, and in the extent of the correspondence he keep up with the most distinguished men of his time. Travellers of any note from Europe, or America, make it a point to see Dr. Tagore during their visits to India, and often bring letters of introduction to him, as a consequence of the local celebrity he has established in foreign lands.28
27 Hindu Music and the Gayan Samaj (Bombay: n. p., 1887), 47.
28 The Indian Mirror, April 5, 1879.
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Sourindramohan was also an unabashed publicist of his own work and achievements.
Between 1876 and 1879, he published out of his own expense two remarkable texts.29 Clearly
indicative of an emergent historical self-consciousness in the Bhadralok class, these texts must
count among the earliest outcomes of an archival impulse in the colonized. They list in
chronological order every book and pamphlet that Sourindramohan had published until then;
they reproduce an extensive array of English newspaper reports that had appeared covering him
and his initiatives in the field of music, with especial emphasis on his receipt of the degree,
“Doctor of Music,” from the University of Philadelphia in 1875 and the functioning of the
Bengal Music School; further, reprinted in the two texts is perhaps every piece of
correspondence that Sourindramohan had had up until that point with diverse musical and titular
luminaries the world over, as well as facsimiles of many honors, citations and felicitations that
he had received from different academic institutions, learned associations, royal courts, and
national governments.30 In sum: as a scholar, translator, and patron, as an institution builder and pedagogue, he looms large over every inaugural facet of musical modernity in colonial Bengal.
To be sure, there is a certain way that a colonial subject such as Sourindramohan can, indeed, be considered ‘marginal.’ However, this has to be worked out as a political question, not a personal one as Capwell does, contradicting, thereby, the historical evidence that he himself presents. As Partha Chatterjee argues through his notion of ‘rule of colonial difference,’ no matter how well ‘adjusted,’ so to speak, a colonial subject might have been under alien rule, s/he was still bound to remain structurally subordinate and politically excluded. The racist ideology
29 Public Opinion and Official Communication About the Bengal Music School and Its President, Calcutta: Punchanun Mookerjee, 1876. Two supplements were subsequently added to this volume, updating the information until 1879.
30 This last is all the more astounding given that Sourindramohan never ever left Calcutta. Being a devout Hindu, he held seriously the taboo against crossing the ‘black waters.’
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underwriting the colonial project meant that the ‘rights of man’ that its liberal mode of governance was supposedly founded upon would never be extended to the colonized.31 This operative principle of colonial exclusion would energize anticolonial nationalist sentiments in
Sourindramohan’s own lifetime, contributing perhaps to his ultimate irrelevance for being an open loyalist.
There is another, more subjective, sense in which ‘maladjustment’ due to colonial subjection can be reasoned. Such a condition, as Sudipta Kaviraj points out, can be evidenced in symptomatic articulations of an ‘unhappy consciousness,’ through the deployment of irony and satire in discourses of the colonized.32 However, nothing in Sourindramohan’s vast oeuvre reveals any such strategy of expressing felt-marginality owing to colonialism.
In order, then, to obviate the kind of analytical impasses that Charles Capwell’s otherwise
pioneering work leaves us with, it is necessary to reconceptualize the theoretical framework through which we seek to make sense of the Bhadralok musical world of latter-nineteenth century Calcutta. And I believe it will be more theoretically productive if we conceive of the processes and politics inhering in the shaping of this world and its social reproduction as constituting an apparatus of subjectification. It is through the formation of such an apparatus, I intend to show, that the Bhadralok musical subject was produced for disciplining, reflecting a new, modern musical governmentality in the colony. The deployment of this triptych of related
concepts—apparatus, subjectification, and governmentality—that have their origins in the
critical labors of Michel Foucault now bears some explanation.
31 For more on Chatterjee’s concept of ‘rule of colonial difference,’ see Partha Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 16-27.
32 Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
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Foucault uses the concept of apparatus, or dispositif, to signify a
thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.33
Importantly, an apparatus always takes shape in response to a particular historical situation. In
other words, it is a “formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that
of responding to an urgent need.”34 Further, given that it is first and foremost a web of relations,
an apparatus has no fundamental ontology, no a priori, transcendental Subject that exists before or outside an apparatus. What this implies, as Giorgio Agamben points out in his lucid commentary on this central Foucauldian concept, is that “apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectification, that is to say, they must produce their subject.”35 And how is this
‘subject’ produced? It “results from the relation…between living beings and apparatuses[,]”36
i.e., from the dialectical tension between the potential of completely unregulated life as humans
and the potential of complete regulation of life that apparatuses formally aspire to. This brings us
to the last related concept in the triptych: governmentality.
This is not the appropriate place for detailing this central but complex notion in
Foucault’s later works. In very general terms, it can be said that governmentality implies the discursive and disciplinary governance, or management, of the subjects that apparatuses produce
33 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 194.
34 Ibid., 195; emphasis in original.
35 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 11.
36 Ibid., 14.
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into a finite population, into a society as different from the state.37 More pertinently for our
concerns, this concept aids us in thinking through the “form of power [that] not merely
travers[es] the domain of the social, but construct[s] the normative…regularities that positively
constitute civil society[.]”38 It is this aspect of governmentality that we will remain mindful of
here.
Having outlined the form of the theoretical-conceptual framework that I bring to bear upon this study, it is now necessary to impute this framework with its thematic and historical content. In thematic terms, the apparatus that we are dealing with here is, of course, the
Bhadralok musical apparatus, and its historical reference is the era of Sourindramohan Tagore in late-nineteenth century Bengal, the era of manual technology of musical production. The ensemble of related elements that animated this apparatus and characterized its modernity comprised: (i) a concerted scholarly enterprise to define the discursive terrain of a ‘national music’ for India through a slew of publications on the topic that often contained translations of pre-modern Sanskrit music treatises into Bengali; (ii) the reprisal and installation of ‘Hindu’ music—co-terminously used with ‘Arya’ and ‘Bharatiya’ music—as the master category, under which the above enterprise was organized; (iii) the emergence and consolidation of a musico- historical consciousness, evidenced in the publication of biographical pieces on past musicians and composers, of essays and articles on the chronological development music and musical instruments in India, and so on; (iv) the formulation of Bengali notation systems to manually
37 For details on the notion of governmentality, see, Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, 87-104 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For a historical survey of the idea in Foucault’s work and the various valences that he imputes to it, see, Nikolas Rose, Pat O’Malley, and Marianna Valverde, “Governmentality” in Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2 (2006): 83-104. For the relevance of the concept in understanding the mode of power and technologies of European colonial rule, see David Scott’s essay, titled “Colonial Governmentality” in Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 23-52.
38 Scott, Refashioning Futures, 36; emphasis added.
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record and propagate music, thereby, bringing music to the realm of the book and ushering in a
new disciplinary regime of music literacy; (v) the establishment of Bengali music journals to
forge a temporally-bounded musical public through the agglomeration of individual subscribers;
(vi) the institution of new music schools where a modern method of music pedagogy could be
introduced, marking a break with the gharana and other pre-modern systems of music-learning;
(vii) the emergence of the Bhadralok middle class familial space as an important site of private
musical cultivation, mediated by the gender ideology of then-regnant Victoriana and the role of
music therein; and, (viii) the emergence of a musical instrument of Western origin, the
harmonium, as the primary accompaniment for quotidian musical practice in both elite and petty bourgeois households, as well as in sites of worship. The Bhadralok musical subject that emerged in late-nineteenth century Bengal was a product of this apparatus. And it was the governmentalization of this apparatus by the subject in turn that ensured the social reproduction of both.
It is also necessary here to touch upon an important historical condition of possibility for the above-outlined Bhadralok musical program, one that links the structural changes wrought by colonial rule with music. Prior to Calcutta, Bishnupur—the capital of the Malla rajas of
Birbhum—used to be the preeminent center of music in Bengal, home to arguably its only gharana. In the days of its glory Bishnupur used to be known as “Dwitiyo Dilli,” /“Second
Delhi.39 However, the internecine hostilities between such feudatories that followed the fall of
Mughal authority, and the inability to negotiate outstanding taxes with the East India Company,
rapidly pushed the Bishnupur royalty into inexorable decline. The economy of musical patronage
that it had so actively propped up, thus, fell into permanent disrepair. This process temporally
39 Dilip Mukhopadhyay, Bishnupur Gharana (Calcutta: Bookland, 1963).
308 coincided almost exactly with the rise of Calcutta as the site of culture and power in the late-18th century and Bishnupur experienced the systematic outmigration of its musicians to the city from the mid-19th century onwards. Bishnupur stalwarts like Kshetramohan Goswami, Radhika Prasad
Goswami, Bipin Chandra Chakraborty, etc., were readily patronized by the absentee landlords, the compradore-rajas—amongst whom the Tagores were one of the first and the most illustrious.
Crucially, Khestramohan and his peers comprised the first generation of music teachers in
Calcutta, not just to the families that patronized them but also in the new music schools that these families established.
It will not be possible within the scope of this chapter to address each one of the interrelated elements animating the Bhadralok musical apparatus separately. This would require a whole dissertation unto itself. Instead, in what follows, I would like to concentrate on three issues: (i) the extant discursive and historical situation that the formation of the modern musical apparatus in colonial Bengal was responding to; (ii) the identification of a musical Other, a processual necessity in the production of the Bhadralok musical Self; and (iii) the popularization of the harmonium in the social space of Bhadralok music. This last strand of enquiry, as we will see, foregrounds the centrality of print technology in mediating the various constitutive elements of the Bhadralok musical apparatus—addressing, on the one end, the musical public, and, on the other, the musical individual.
The Discursive Anatomy of Bhadralok Musical Anxiety: Europeans on Indian Music I began this chapter by asking the question: why, during the 1870s and after, when there seemed to exist no objective reason to doubt Bengal’s musical salubriousness, did there appear anxious, self-flagellating declarations by musically-invested members of Bhadralok society that Bengalis were an unmusical people—a condition that the programmatic construction of a modern musical
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apparatus was supposed to redress? In what now follows, I enquire into the discursive roots of
this anxiety. How did the Bhadralok intelligentsia arrive at the conclusion that Bengali music
was in a precarious state when evidence from the contemporary musical ground indicate
otherwise? What actuated their vociferous musical auto-critique? The argument I put forth here
for understanding this contradictory but critical passage in the history of Bengali music discourse
and practice is not particularly novel. I contend that the Bhadralok notion of a musical lack was
an ideological fabrication—ideological, in an Althusserian sense.40 It was rooted in the
Bhadralok’s self-consciousness of being a caste- and class-privileged, vanguard social group— educated in and through post-Enlightenment knowledge systems that colonialism had inaugurated in India, and reflexively modern in its constitution.41 From this upper caste/class
ideological vantage, the nineteenth century Bhadralok’s imagined musical relationship “to their
real conditions of existence”42—structured as this was, in turn, by their symbiotic relationship
40 Louis Althusser’s major contribution in reconceptualizing Marx’s notion of ‘ideology’ lay in imbuing this concept with materiality. Ideology in Marx “is conceived as a pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its reality is external to it. Ideology is thus thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud.” [Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 159] Putting a positive and material spin on this understanding of ideology, Althusser redefined the concept as meaning “a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence.” [Ibid., 162] According to him, bourgeois society reproduced its exploitative domination through largely ideological state apparatuses. In order to demystify such bourgeois ideological operations one needed to take recourse to the science that Marx’s historical materialism had made available.
41 One of the main registers on which this ‘modern’ consciousness was articulated was through the self- understanding that the Bhadralok as a social class-formation was unprecedented in the history of Bengal, indeed, of the Indian subcontinent. Despite generational and cultural continuities, the (latter-)nineteenth century Bhadralok was self-aware that the present it inhabited marked a rupture with the past—not unlike the specifically modern, historical self-consciousness in late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century Europe that Fredric Jameson reads Friedrich Schiller gesturing towards when the latter writes: “There can be no past without a powerful present, a present achieved by the disjunction [of our] past from ourselves.” [Quoted in Fredric Jameson, Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 24] In the case of Bengal, the emergence of a formally similar but articulately distinct expression of a modern historical self-consciousness has been discussed by Partha Chatterjee in his landmark essay, “Our Modernity,” first published in 1994. Chatterjee, using the example of author Rajnarayan Basu, shows, among other things, how the Bhadralok was aware of a rupture—for better or worse is a different question—between the present of e kal (these days) and the past of se kal (those days). For details, see, Partha Chatterjee, Empire and Nation: Selected Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 136-152.
42 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 162.
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with colonial rule—was recast as a ‘lack.’ And this, I argue, was not due to an objective paucity
of music on the ground but due to their selective internalization of the overwhelmingly
dismissive colonialist discourse on music in India.
It is true that the few scholarly studies and informed commentaries by Europeans on
Indian music prior to the 1870s usually presented a relatively favorable view of their subject
matter, concentrating primarily on its canonical tradition that flourished under aristocratic
patronage.43 These were, however, exceptions. As a general rule, the Europeans’ representation
of the music they actually encountered on the colonial ground was for the most part denigratory.
The voice of denigration was particularly sardonic when it addressed non-courtly music, i.e.,
music in and of the popular—the constituency that in later discourse would come to be
discursively nominated as the India’s and its national regions’ ‘folk.’44 In other words,
ethnographic opinion of the Europeans was almost invariably prejudiced and pejorative.
This distinction between these two registers of discourse often inheres in a single author.
William Jones is a classic case in point. His elevated estimation of ‘Hindoo’ music was based on
the understanding that the greatness of this music was a matter of the ancient past, not of the
colonial present that confronted him. “[T]he [musical] art, which flourished in India many
centuries ago, has faded for the want of due culture[,]” he concluded in his essay on ‘Hindoo’
43 Almost the entire gamut of such writings by Europeans that appeared between 1792 and 1882 can be found in the collection compiled and published by Sourindramohan Tagore, titled, Hindu Music From Various Authors. Indeed, the very fact that these writings—nineteen in number, Willard’s Treatise being the only monograph-length piece— appear in a publication by Tagore, an ardent crusader of ‘Hindu’ music, is an indication enough that they voice an agreeable view of the music they address. For details, see, Sourindro Mohun Tagore, ed. and comp., Hindu Music From Various Authors…In Two Parts, (Calcutta: Sourindro Mohun Tagore, 1882). Volume One of this compilation was published in 1875. Sourindramohan later added some more essays and the published them together along with the essays in the first volume in 1882. The citation provided here is of the combined publication.
44 In genealogical terms, the ‘folk’ as a concept designating a nation’s ‘peoples’ has its origins in the writings of the German Idealist philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder.
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music.45 Even N. Augustus Willard’s subsequent study, which was much more attentive to
(northern) India’s living musical cultures than Jones’,46 is largely restricted in its address to music of the Sanskrit canon and kingly courts, i.e., music of the so-called Great Tradition, to use contemporary terminology.
That Indian music was “rude” and “noise” compared to the fine achievements of
European music—the invention of harmony being its cornerstone—is a constant refrain in
colonial accounts, from the very early days of colonial rule well into the nineteenth century. As
early as 1775, Robert Orme, the India-born English historian, who was appointed the British East
India Company’s historiographer later in his life, opined in the introduction of his major work, A
History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, that the Indians’ “ideas of
music, if we may judge from the practice, are barbarous.”47 Focusing on southern India during
the turn of the nineteenth century, the French missionary, Abbe J. A. Dubois—furnishing an admittedly European point of view but in a more relativistic fashion—wrote in his famous ethnographic treatise, Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies: “Hindu music, whether vocal or instrumental, may be pleasing to the natives, but I do not think it can give the slightest pleasure to anyone else, however sensitive be his ear.”48 In 1803, Rev. William Tennant, “one of
His Majesty’s chaplains in India[,]” similarly noted in a more forthright tone of dismissal that:
45 William Jones, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” Asiatick Reasearches 3 (1792), 84.
46 For details, see N. Augustus Willard, “A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan,” in Hindu Music From Various Authors, 1-122.
47 Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, vol. 1 (London: John Nourse, 1775), 3.
48 Jean-Antoine Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies (1817; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 588. This is the third, enlarged English translation and edition of Abbe Dubois’ original work in French. The first English translation from the French manuscript was commissioned in 1817 and published under the title, Description of the Character, Manner, and Customs of the People of India; And of Their Institutions, Religious and Civil (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown).
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If we are to judge merely from the number of instruments, and the frequency with which they apply them, the Hindoos might be regarded as considerable proficients in music, yet has the testimony of all strangers deemed it equally imperfect as the other arts. Their warlike instruments are rude, noisy, and inartificial: and in the temples, those employed for the purposes of religion, are managed apparently on the same principle; for, in their idea, the most pleasant and harmonious, is that which makes the loudest noise. In this country, music, or rather noise, is a necessary adjunct of wealth and dignity[.]49
Quoting this passage from Tennant, James Mill in History of British India—a text that
formed the initial discursive bulwark of the Anglicist attack on India’s Sanskritic-Vedic heritage
and its valorization by European Orientalists—added his own gloss on the issue. “Hardly by any
panegyrist [of Indian culture,]” he claimed, “is it pretended that…music of the Hindus are in a
state beyond that in which they appear in early states of society.”50 And then, continuing in the same infantilizing vein:
It is anomalous and surprising that music of the Hindus should be so devoid of all excellence. As music is, in its origin, the imitation of the tones of passion, and most naturally employed, for the expression of passion, in rude ages, when the power of expressing it by articulate language is the most imperfect; simple melodies, and these often highly expressive and affecting, are natural to uncultivated tribes. It was in the earliest stage of civilization that Orpheus is fabled to have possessed the power of working miracles by his lyre. Yet all Europeans, even those who are the most disposed to eulogize the attainments of the Hindus, unite in describing the music of that people, as unpleasing, and void both of expression and art.51
It is rather surprising that Mill, in making this sweeping claim, did not think it
worthwhile to mention William Jones among “Europeans…most disposed to eulogize the
attainments of the Hindus.” Notwithstanding the fact that it was the likes of earlier Orientalists
such as Jones that were Mills’ target in his unabashedly Eurocentric History of British India, it
still remained a fact that the former’s “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos” was, until the
appearance of Willard’s Treatise in 1834, the best known scholarly work by a European on
49 Rev. William Tennant, Indian Recreations: Consisting Chiefly of the Strictures on the Domestic and Rural Economy of the Mohammedans and Hindoos, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: n. p., 1803), 300.
50 James Mill, The History of British India, vol. 1 (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817), 354.
51 Ibid., 357.
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Indian music, one that was not off the cuff dismissive of it like most other Europeans. This
oversight, however, was subsequently addressed in 1832 by an anonymous British writer.
Travelling in the Bengal Presidency, so offended was he by the music he heard that he launched
into a veritable diatribe, upbraiding William Jones in the process for taking this music so
seriously as to produce a felicitous treatise on the subject:
[I was] [k]ept awake all last night by the performance of a marriage-ceremony in the village. We were pitched so close as to have the full benefit of their horrible discord. What is meant by a natural taste for music? Since my arrival in this country, I have begun to suspect it may not be so entirely a gift as one imagines, and that the term, natural taste, means, in fact, nothing. Why are the natives so enamoured of tones which are caricatures of the vilest drone of a Scotch bagpipe, mingled with the shrieks of the most unmanageable horn to which stage-coach guard ever applied the force of his lungs? Why are the voices of their public singers, their nautch-girls, so coarse and tuneless, as to out-herod the most ear-piercing dealer in ballads? Since we believe that the organs of human beings have the same construction, why do these Hindoos feel as much disgust in listening to our most eloquent music, as we feel with the wearisome monotony of their limited scale? Yet, they say, that though Europeans may doubtless excel them in their mechanical and scientific skill in almost any other art, the palm of musical superiority must questionless be assigned to these Asiatics! How could Sir W. Jones, having the gift of his two ears withal, permit himself to compose an elaborate essay on the music of the Hindoos?52
Such quotes can be multiplied as they abound in colonial records. In any event, the ones
cited above should suffice in clearly indicating the low opinion in which Europeans generally
held the music they heard on a quotidian basis in India. But the last quote is of specific interest.
That its anonymous author made his withering assessment of the “natives’” music while
traveling in Bengal is not a coincidence. It is, I argue, reflective of a particular substratum in ethnographic observations made by Europeans in India that viewed the region of Bengal to be especially indigent in musical terms. This view finds a more elaborate articulation in an article by one Horatio Smith in the 1851 issue of the Calcutta Review:
[T]here is certainly music in [the Bengali] of whatever sort. The husbandman in the fields, the pedlar with his pack, the grinder at the mill, the waggoner on his cart—all whistle and sing. Of
52 Anon., The East India Sketch-Book: Comprising an Account of the Present State of Society in Calcutta, Bombay, &c., vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1832), 143-144. Note that the author quotes more or less the same lines penned by the American visitor to Bengal in 1823, extracted and presented earlier in this chapter: “though Europeans may doubtless excel them in their mechanical and scientific skill in almost any other art, the palm of musical superiority must questionless be assigned to these Asiatics!” See, p. 2 of this chapter for the original quote.
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instrumental music, there is not any lack. While we write, our ears are regaled with the choral symphonies of the tom-toms of a marriage procession; and the sounds of musical instruments may be heard at any time in any part of Bengal. But what is the character of their music-both vocal and instrumental? We do not speak here of ancient Hindu music, which, according to Sir W. Jones, was by no means contemptible. It would appear from his learned essay on the musical modes of the Hindus, that music was diligently cultivated in ancient times in India, and that there were four musical systems prevalent, viz., those of Iswara, Bharat, Hanumat, and Kalinath. But whatever may have been the musical attainments of the ancient Hindus and of the modem amateur performers of Delhi, who are said to be exquisite musicians, the music of the Hindus of Lower Bengal at the present day is wretched to the last degree. We do not profess to be connoisseurs; but if harmony be an essential ingredient of music, or rather constitute music itself, nine-tenths of the performances of the Bengalis do not deserve that sacred name. To extract one particle of harmony from a vast deal of their music, is as hopeless as to extract sun-beams out of cucumbers. What music there may be in the Babel discord of tom-toms, dhols, &c., it is impossible for us to determine; and these, it should be remembered, constitute that general music, in which the majority of the people delight. That there is some really good music in the country, it would be unjust to deny; but all of it is learnt from Upper India, whither it was imported, we suppose, from Persia. The Vina is a good musical instrument; but how many Bengalis can successfully play upon it? We never could relish that pumpkin of a musical instrument, dignified with the appellation, par excellence, of Tanpura, as if it was a harmonicon of the sweetest notes in existence. Young Bengal has, of late, ventured to say that Bengali music is better than European music, and that the latter is remarkably devoid of harmony. To be sure; for who in his sober senses would ever prefer the shrill piano-forte to the sweet-toned tom-tom?53
Thus, not only was Bengali music obviously inferior to that of Europe’s—this was the case with
all Indian musics, as per colonialist discourse—it was also inferior to that of “Upper India.”
It needs to be borne in mind that neither Smith nor our anonymous traveler earlier were
attempting to make the case that proliferation of music was any the less dense in the Bengali
social fabric than anywhere else in India. Quite to the contrary; Smith, especially, is quite clear about the fact that “sounds of musical instruments may be heard at any time in any part of
Bengal.” What is rather more significant is the address of their critique, which is directed at examples drawn from the popular musical domain, the domain of the subalterns. The musical subjects that their broadsides animate are the “husbandsman,” the “pedlar,” the “waggoner,” and the musicians in the village “marriage-ceremony.” This is not exceptional to the authors quoted above. Indeed, in record after record, music-making in Bengal is associated by Europeans with
53 Horatio Smith, “Bengali Games and Amusements” in The Calcutta Review 15, no. 30 (1851): 346-347. This article in The Calcutta Review, as the full title at its beginning makes clear, is an extract from Smith’s larger treatise, called, “Festival, Games and Amusements; Ancient and Modern.” This tract was originally published in the journal, Family Library. Further citational reference regarding it is not available.
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lower caste/class groups, the appraisal of the music, almost without exception, is brazenly
pejorative.54
In fact, the tone for such assays pertaining to music in Bengal had been set much earlier,
most prominently by William Ward, the English missionary at the Serampore Baptist Mission.
He professed in his 1811 Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos—a text,
not unexpectedly, deeply colored by its author’s Euro-Christian prejudices—that music was an
ancillary caste-occupation of the twenty-seventh class of the Shudra varna—the “Churmukurus,
or shoe-makers.”55 They, wrote Ward, “are…employed as musicians at the weddings, feasts, and
religious ceremonies of the Hindoos, and the horrid din of this music reminds a European, that
the musicians have been used to no sounds except those of the hammer on the lap-stone.”56
Again, Ward was not an exception in passing such judgments. His famous mentor at the
Serampore mission, William Carey, whose pioneering contributions to the world of Bengali
letters is well-acknowledged,57 felt the need in his memoir to append every other mention of
54 There is one significant exception to this which I will soon address. This is the opinion of C. B. Clarke whose writings on “Bengali music” would occasion a famous riposte by Sourindramohan Tagore in 1874.
55 William Ward, Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos: Including Translations From Their Principal Works, vol. 4 (Serampore: Mission Press, 1811), 119. The more appropriate phonetic spelling of “churmukuru” is charmakar, which literally translates as ‘leather-worker.’ Shurdra, of course, is at the bottom of the four-fold Brahminical Varna system of social classification.
56 Ibid.
57 Carey’s pioneering role was in the socialization of print technology in Bengal. In fact, some modern biographers have even anointed him the “father of print technology in India.” [Vishal and Ruth Mangalwadi, The Legacy of William Carey: A Model for the Transformation of a Culture (London: Crossway Books, 1999), 19] For a more critical evaluation of Carey’s contributions, see, Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778-1905 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49- 50, 110-111, 225-227.
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Bengali music with phrases like “if such it can be called,”58 or qualify it with adjectives like
“horrid”59—perhaps the most profusely used descriptor used by Europeans in the context.
Such subjective evaluations of music in Bengal were further solidified by the supposedly objective classificatory and enumerative practices of the colonial state. For example, the
Memorandum on the Census of British India 1871-72, published in 1875, identified “Dancer,
Musician, Beggar, and Vagabond” as single caste-category for Lower Bengal and Assam—one of the lowest in the list of “69 castes specified”—putting their number at 72,247 in a total of 29,
772, 621.60 A more disaggregated spread of the ‘musician’ caste-occupational category in Bengal
Presidency in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—similarly pegged at the bottom-end of
the caste hierarchy—can be found in the multiple volumes of A Statistical Account of Bengal, published between 1875-1877, under the directorship of W. W. Hunter.
Thus, by the onset of the 1870s—the moment when the modern musical apparatus in
Bengal begins to take wings under the aegis of Sourindramohan Tagore and his associates— colonial discourse had discursively established that music-making in Bengal was largely confined to its lower castes and classes. What, however, was insidious about this was its reification of the deeply prejudicial notion that the station of music-making in the lower echelons of the Bengali social order produced music of a correspondingly inferior quality. The articulate sense of musical lack in the mostly upper/middle class and upper-caste Hindu Bhadralok at the
helm of framing the modern musical apparatus was significantly framed by this truth-claim. The
musico-cultural agenda of the likes of Sourindramohan Tagore, Kaliprasanna Bandopadhyaya,
58 Eustace Carey, Memoir of William Carey (London: Jackson and Walford, 1836), 301.
59 Ibid., 149.
60 Henry Waterfield, Memorandum on the Census of British India 1871-72 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1875), 21.
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and Krishnadhan Bandopadhyay followed the ideological pathmarks of Rammohan Roy whose
musical direction has been discussed at length in the previous chapter.
Indeed, the Bhadralok of the 1870s had little interest in reclaiming Bengal’s existent, and
thriving, musical culture from the ethnocentric distortions of colonial representation. Rather,
their energies were invested in bringing Bengal, in a self-consciously modern fashion, within the
cultural historical frame of shastriya sangit (canonical, raga-based music outlined in ‘ancient’
Sanskrit treatises)—deemed the musical signifier of Hindu India’s ancient civilizational achievement. Given that this music and the associated culture for its cultivation was a relatively recent entrant into Bengal—datable, as we have seen in the previous chapter, only to the latter eighteenth century—it was only through this ideological move that the Hindu Bengali Bhadralok could make ‘region,’ ‘nation,’ and ‘civilization’ musico-historically commensurate. Beyond this remit, the Bhadralok, symptomatically, were quite in agreement with the general tenor of
European opinion regarding music in Bengal: that much of its making/production was a lower caste/class concern, that this music was of poor quality formally, and, by implication, that the
Bhadralok were primarily consumers of (this low-brow) music—not its makers/producers. In other words, the upper-caste, educated, and ‘cultured’ Bhadralok did not have a musical culture of its own; this needed to be fashioned self-consciously; and the only music that was appropriate for the purpose was raga-based shastriya sangit. It was this realization which spurred the
Bhadralok musical vanguard into action.
This, however, ought not to convey the idea that Bhadralok internalization of colonial musical representation was total. Some aspects of it were, as we will soon see, roundly repudiated while some others were unreservedly accepted. Indeed, it is important to dwell on this
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in greater detail as it has a significant bearing on Bhadralok cultural politics surrounding music
in the last third of the nineteenth century.
A Counter-Discourse of Musical Modernity: Sourindramohan Tagore’s Critique of C. B. Clarke The aspect of colonial musical representation that the Bhadralok vociferously remonstrated against was any belittling by Europeans of, specifically, shastriya sangit, or the raga-based,
canonical Indian music, the theoretical and practical precepts of which were putatively contained
in a series of ‘ancient’ Sanskrit treatises. Their cause was substantively aided by the fact that the
Orientalists among Europeans had earlier identified this music as one of the finest achievements
of India’s once-glorious civilizational past, categorizing it under the ahistorical and
homogenizing abstraction of the rubric, ‘Hindu music.’ As we will see below, the Orientalist
strand of colonial music discourse was drawn upon time and again as support in the most famous
Bhadralok rebuttal to a Eurocentric pejoration of shastriya sangit in the nineteenth century—
Sourindramohan Tagore’s 1874 essay, “Hindu Music.”
Written as a response to a review essay on Bengali music, published earlier in the year in
the Calcutta Review, by C. B. Clarke—then the Inspector of Schools, Presidency Circle, and an
“able musician”61—Sourindramohan’s tract was the most forceful iteration in what was perhaps
the first instance of an extended public debate on music between a European and his Indian
interlocutors in colonial India. In early 1873, Clarke had been asked by his superior in the Bengal
Education Department to evaluate whether or not Sarangdeva’s thirteenth century Sanskrit
treatise on music, the Sangit Ratnakara, “was deserving of Government patronage by purchase
61 The Indian Daily News, Wednesday, April 27, 1874; reprinted in Public Opinion, 10.
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and whether it was fitted for use in schools in Bengal.”62 On May 17, 1873 he submitted to the
Director of Public Instruction a report that contained not only his opinion on the brief he had
received from the government but also a survey of the general state of (what he called) “Bengali
music.”63 Subsequently, the director, W. S. Atkinson, decided to print and publish Clarke’s report, setting the stage for an animated debate to commence.
Clarke’s critics were not unjustifiably angered. For not only was he disapproving of
Bengali music in the “official letter,” his general thrust in the piece was also to musicologically
ratiocinate the more flagrant disparagements of Indian music by Europeans, and objectively
demonstrate the superiority of European music. Offended by Clarke’s report, many Bhadralok
intellectuals agitatedly questioned both Clarke’s conclusions as well as his competence on the
subject in various newspapers, journals, and in private letters to the author.
Unfazed by the criticism, Clarke decided to bolster his conclusions with more sources
than just the Sangit Ratnakara—the sole basis of his view expressed in his 1873 official letter.
Proceeding in this, he added to his cache of reference six recently published Bengali books on music that he had managed to lay his hands on since the publication of his original report:
Kshetramohan Gowami’s Sangitasara (1869) and Swaralipi (n. d.), Sourindramohan Tagore’s
Jatiya Sangit Bisayak Prastab (1870) and Aikatana (1873), Kaliprasanna Bandopadhyay’s
Jantrakshetradeepika (1873), and Krishnadhan Bandopadhyay’s Sitar Shikshya (1873).64
Finally, in July 1874, the Calcutta Review published the results of his efforts under the title,
62 C. B. Clarke, “Bengali Music,” in The Calcutta Review, Vol. 58, no. 116 (1874): 243.
63 Clarke’s labeling of the music under his study, as we will soon see, is of some significance.
64 Some of these books, ironically, had been presented to him by none other than Sourindramohan. See, Ibid., 243.
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“Bengali Music.” The article, Clarke clarified, was a “re-issue of the substance of [the]…official
letter in a somewhat different form[.]”65
This event breathed fresh energy to the ongoing debate, with new actors, such as “Mr.
Aldis, Principal of the Martiniere,” joining in.66 A few months later in September,
Sourindramohan Tagore, who had been uncharacteristically silent thus far, entered the fray.
Taking stock of the exchanges that had been raging on, he published his own views on the matter
in a lengthy article in the Hindoo Patriot. And such was the polemical force of his presentation
that it proved to the closing statement in the year-old debate, finally laying it to rest.
Sourindramohan’s essay, thus, is central for an understanding of the discursive framework attending the Bhadralok project of musical rejuvenation, and it is this that we will now turn our attention to. But in order to comprehend the discursive import of his intervention, it is first necessary to briefly outline the signal points of his interlocutor’s essay that was at the eye of the storm.
C. B. Clarke, in his article in the Calcutta Review, set out to accomplish two sets of objectives: one methodological and demonstrative, and the other, subjective and judgmental. The hallmark of the first set is its movement through a series of elaborate mathematical steps. These are deployed by Clarke to determine the ‘interval ratios’ of what he identifies as the “commonest
Bengali mode,”67 and establish the existence of “enharmonic differences” in European major and
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid., 246-250. He considered this move as essential because determination of interval ratios, according to him, was the basis of any music theory, which was entirely lacking in the texts under his review. He then concluded, based on the results of his mathematical enquiry, that the “Bengali mode” was exactly the same as in European music, comprising twelve semi-tones.
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minor modes—the existence of which, according to him, his Bengali critics had disputed.68
Clarke’s second set of interests converge around the following: (i) arguing Bengali music is inferior to European music because it is devoid of a basis in rational, scientific, and mathematically demonstrable music theory, particularly the determination of the correct interval ratios of its scales and modes; (ii) debunking wholesale both the concept and occurrence of twenty-two shrutis, or microtones,69 in an octave as mathematically “impossible,” 70 “arrived at from a mistaken induction.”71 (iii) showing that the “Nationalist Bengali musical notation,”
devised by Kshetramohan and Sourindramohan in the late-1860s, “is valueless and ought to be
superseded at once by the [European] stave”;72 (iv) declaring the sitar to be the Bengali’s
“national instrument”73 from which “the modes in use in Bengal are all derived”;74 and (v) berating Bengali writers on music for not clearly defining the musical concepts that they used.
68 Ibid., 259-263.
69 It needs to be mentioned that ‘microtones’ is the contemporary standard English translation for shruti. In the late- nineteenth century it was often translated as “quarter-tones.” When expressed in English, it is as such they appear in both Clarke’s and Sourindramohan’s articles.
70 Ibid. 257.
71 Ibid., 258.
72 Ibid., 265. In adopting this position Clarke was entering into an already fraught field that had Sourindramohan, Kshetramohan, and Kaliprasanna—Clarkes’ “Nationalists”—on one side, and Krishnadhan Bandopadhyay—whom Clarke identified as the leader of “progressive” party for championing the espousal of the Western notation system for notating Indian music—on the other. The debate centered around whether the Western system adequate to represent the microtones deployed in Indian raga music, called shruti. The “Nationalists” thought the Western stave was inadequate for the purpose while Krishnadhan argued the opposite. Clarke, clearly, joined the weight of his opinion with the latter. For the details of Clarke’s arguments on the notation issue, see Ibid., 243-244, 255-257. In contemporary scholarship, Charles Capwell has written on the aforementioned contretemps. See, Capwell, “Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta,” 146-149. It needs to be mentioned here that many competing notation systems were devised in Bengal/i during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. For a brief survey of these, see, Mukhopadhyay, Bangalir Ragsangit Charcha, 420-423; James Kippen, Gurudev’s Drumming Legacy: Music, Theory and Nationalism in the Mrdrang aur Tabla Vadhanpadhati of Gurudev Patwardhan (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006), 53-58.
73 Clarke, “Bengali Music,” 252. This, of course, was/is patently incorrect, as Sourindramohan would point out.
74 Ibid., 253.
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Clarke, however, did not simply contain himself within the thematic remit of his essay.
Reeling, perhaps, from the criticisms (“some…very violent ones,” he claimed) that Bhadralok
respondents to his earlier “official letter” had heaped on him, he also chose the occasion to
connect his reservations about Bengali music (discourse) to the Bengalis’ character:
Nothing is so repugnant to the Hindoo mind as any absolute conclusion. He likes to say on every possible point, “Well, I know that Europeans think so, but we think the contrary.” He is quite liberal and willing to allow you your opinion, and only asks to be allowed to hold his own. Where he fails is that his love for leaving every question suspended appears to prevent his perceiving that on many points there must be absolute truth on one side or on the other. When he does perceive this, he instinctively shrinks from facing it. This tendency of the Bengali mind has been finely illustrated to me a hundred times in discussions on the native performance of music: for many Bengalis will maintain that the performance of a tune is done better by native than by European singers. It is little use that you explain to them that the question whether the intervals are taken correctly is not a matter of taste but a question of fact.75
C. B. Clarke did not perhaps anticipate the vehemence with which Sourindramohan
Tagore would take up his charges, both musical and extra-musical. There was no prevarication,
no suspension of judgments, in the latter’s emphatic response when it appeared in public. It was an assured, point by point refutation of the arguments put forth by Clarke. And while it is not possible within the scope of this chapter to detail Sourindramohan’s dismantling of Clarke’s discursive edifice, couple of critical moves in his riposte are worth taking note of here.
First is his critical strategy to appropriate the authority of European music scholarship and turn this back against his European interlocutor. Wherever applicable, it is to them
Sourindramohan first turned to in order to contradict Clarke. Having presented counterviews from European sources, only then did he furnish positive evidence from Sanskrit music treatises to further underscore his point. Nowhere is this strategy of talking back to the European using
European musical knowledge more evident than in one of the major lines of criticism he pursues against Clarke—the latter’s preponderant use of mathematical reasoning.
75 Ibid. 254.
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Recall from earlier in this dissertation that one of the reasons adduced by William Jones for justifying his decision to discourse on Indian music in aesthetic and not scientific terms was that scientific and mathematically validated knowledge of music is neither necessary not sufficient for excelling at it practically. Sourindramohan’s opening salvo in “Hindu Music” resonates deeply with Jones’ position.
We are sorry to perceive that [Mr. Clarke] still persists in his original misconception of the real character of Hindu Music; that he supports his errors by committing fresh errors; and that the more he proceeds, the more he involves himself in a maze of hopeless delusions. His mathematicism has proved a snare for himself in his attempt to unweave the web of Hindu Music…. At first sight it would seem as if Mr. Clarke’s chief object in writing the essay was to mystify the subject by enveloping it in a cloud of mathematicism. But no one is better aware than himself that mathematics is no more indispensable for one to be a musician than it is indispensable for him to be a painter or statuary. In learning music the student requires, above all things, an educated ear capable of detecting and feeling the sense of all tonal combinations. The susceptibility of an art being examined by mathematical tests is something different from mathematics being indispensable to its comprehension or acquisition. Principles of music, embodied into scientific theories, may be based on mathematics, but it does not necessarily follow that one must know mathematics in order to understand those principles.76
Sourindramohan, however, did not name William Jones in support of his critique, despite clear affinities between his line of argument and that of the pioneering Orientalist’s. This was perhaps a strategic decision in a climate of Anglicist predominance in colonialist discourse and the concomitant marginalization of late-eighteenth century European Orientalism in the post-
Macaulay period. Consequently, the authority that Sourindramohan leaned on more extensively to dispute Clarke’s mathematism was that of nineteenth century European music theorists.
Underscoring this point, wrote Sourindramohan: “Mr. Clarke, we hope, will permit us to produce the testimony of eminent European professors of music to prove that mathematics, instead of contributing to the exposition and development of music, does much to mystify and obscure it.”77 Proceeding in this, Sourindramohan copiously quoted, in particular, the opinion of two
76 Sourindro Mohun Tagore, “Hindu Music,” in Hindu Music From Various Authors, 339-340.
77 Ibid., 340.
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Germans “professors” whose coincidental surname-sakes would have a profound impact on
twentieth century thought: (Adolph Bernhard) Marx and (Gottfried) Weber.
The second noteworthy strand of critique advanced by Sourindramohan to challenge
Clarke was his reasoned insistence on the mutual intranslatability between two different musical
and language systems. This point would find even greater traction in the former’s critique of
Clarke owing to the latter’s admitted lack of familiarity with the two languages in which the music under his review was discursively expressed—Bengali, which he knew only rudimentarily, and Sanskrit, which he did not know at all. It was this unfamiliarity, argued
Sourindramohan, which led the European to commit elementary mistakes and consistently misunderstand the basic precepts of “Hindu” music. For example, Clarke, perpetuating an error made by William Jones in his 1792 essay, had mistakenly translated ‘raga’ as ‘mode’ in English, despite another European scholar, N. Augustus Willard, having flagged this error in 1834.78
Further, Clarke in his article had berated Bengali music scholars for shying away from defining the Sanskritic or vernacular musical concepts they worked with. “My Bengali critics assert,” he had written, “that I do not understand what shrooti is in Bengali music. How can I if the shrooti are not defined?”79
Sourindramohan’s response was scathing. It is worth quoting him here at length, for not
only does the following extract exemplify his critical rhetorical strategy of deploying European music scholarship against Clarke, it also shows how he brought his native felicity in the relevant
78 This indicates the selective nature of the Bhadralok’s appropriation of European discourse. The reason why Clarke’s perpetuation of the error in calling the raga ‘mode’ was chastised by Sourindramohan and not William Jones’ commitment of the error in the first place is perhaps because the latter’s agenda, unlike Clarke’s, was no different from that of the Bhadralok musical modernizers: to posit shastriya sangit as a marker of ancient Hindu civilizational achievement.
79 Clarke, “Bengali Music,” 258.
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languages to bear on the argument that it was impossible to render Indian musical concepts in
English with all its nuances:
We admire Mr. Clarke's boldness in venturing upon a discussion on the merits of Hindu Music with, as it appears, scarcely any knowledge of its elementary principles. He has no knowledge of Sanskrit, and is but very imperfectly acquainted with Bengali. He had recourse to a native guide, who seems to be equally ignorant of the Sanskrit language as of the musical literature of his country. And the result is that the critic is made to betray his ignorance of the simplest things in our musical system, such as the term Raga and the number of Ragas in use, of the construction of the Sitara and its capacity, though it is the simplest and the most popular of Hindu musical instruments. He attacks the Srooties which he does not evidently understand, though they form the very base-work of the musical system of the Hindus. That we are not wrong in our estimate of the critic's knowledge of the subject of his criticism will be perceived as we examine his theories one by one. First as regards his views of Raga in Hindu Music. In saying “there are 36 modes in use amongst the Hindus,” he evidently supposes that Raga and Mode are synonymous. … Let us see how Danneley defines the term “mode.” “A mode,” he says, “or a scale is called major, when its third diatonic note is composed of four chromatic degrees; or is the fifth diatonic-chromatic note of the scale, called also the major third; as, C-natural, E-natural, C-sharp, E-sharp &c. A mode or scale is said to be minor when the third note, called the minor third, is composed of but three chromatic degrees; as C E-flat D F-natural; in opposition to major, the third note of which is composed of four chromatic degrees.” Let us again see what view Captain Willard takes of Raga in Hindu Music: “Mode in the language of the musicians of this country (India) is, in my opinion, termed That and not Raga or Raginee.” “The word mode,” he continues, “may be taken in two different significations—the one implying manner of style, and the other of key; and, strictly speaking, this latter is the sense in which it is usually understood in music.”… … The truth is the English language has not a corresponding term for the Raga. To express it by the term mode would be nearly as accurate as to express the idea of quinine by the word chiretta in Bengali. How could chiretta be translated into English or quinine into Bengali when there is no term for chiretta in English and no term for quinine in Bengali? In the same way there is no equivalent term for Raga in English, nor one for mode in Bengali. The idea which the word Raga conveys has not it counterpart in English. 80
Tagore continues in the same vein over the rest of his article, impugning nearly every
opinion that C. B. Clarke had presented. Indeed, the evident polemical ferocity of piece as well
as its analytical acuity is perhaps the reason why the debate that had begun more than a year
prior with Clarke’s official letter to the Director of Public Instruction effectively ended with the
publication of Sourindramohan’s essay.
80 Tagore, “Hindu Music,” 343-345. “Chiretta” or Chirata is a medicinal herb indigenous to the eastern part of the subcontinent. It is/was believed to have a range of therapeutic uses and is/was consumed to tackle a variety of somatic imbalances, including malaria, by Bengalis.
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An important counterintuitive detail needs to be emphasized at this point. Clarke’s
tenuous criticism of “Bengali music” notwithstanding, his article did, unwittingly, participate in
furthering an aspect of the agenda pursued by the likes of Sourindramohan and other vanguards
of musical modernization in Bengal. By referring to north Indian raga music as “Bengali” music
throughout in his work,81 and by using it interchangeably with “Hindu” music, Clarke added ballast to the categorical equivalence that his Bhadralok critics were deeply invested in drawing discursively: that between the regional (Bengal), national (Indian), and civilizational (Hindu).
This unwitting overlap of intentions between the opposing camps in the debate over music allows us to segue into an argument I made earlier in this section but had left hanging: not
every aspect of European colonial discourse on Indian music was rejected. Indeed, as we have
already seen in Sourindramohan’s riposte to C. B. Clarke, elements of prior Orientalist music
scholarship was strategically used by the former to dispute his interlocutor’s contentions. In what
follows, I now turn to another strand of colonial opinion that played a constitutive role in the
formation of Bhadralok music discourse and subject. Again, the Clarke-Tagore exchange serves
as a fine illustrative example for the purpose.
The Bhadralok Musical Subject and Its Others: The Colonialist Roots of Bhadralok Musical Politics Otherizing the Popular:
Let us recall for a moment the array of ethnographic vignettes recorded by Europeans that I
began this section with. Apropos of them, I had pointed out how even within the general derision
of Indian musics by Europeans—particularly of the music existing in popular domains, extrinsic
to the court-patronage of raga-based shastriya sangit—the music of the Bengali peoples was
81 This most likely because the books he used as his sources are all in Bengali, as are the bulk of the songs notated therein.
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posited to be of a particularly inferior quality, correlated ostensibly to their origins low in the
extant social hierarchy.
C. B. Clarke’s article occupies an anomalous and exceptional place in this body of
European discourse. It bucks the trend on two counts: first, unlike the general tenor of European scholarly discourse on canonical Indian music, particularly that of prior Orientalists, Clarke is overtly critical of his subject matter. His critique is explicitly directed at the music of the books—i. e., shastriya sangit—specifically, (as this was addressed in) the contemporary Bengali ones under his review. In his own words: “[W]hen I speak of Hindoo melodies or Bengali tunes,
I include only the class of music contained in the books cited at the head of the article.”82
Second, if, as the ethnographic snippets cited earlier suggest, European discourse was largely
dismissive of non-canonical music on the colonial ground, particularly in Bengal, Clarke in his
essay submits an entirely contrarian view. He expresses unqualified appreciation for music in the
popular domain, specifically, for what he calls the “boatmen’s songs.”83 Thus, in the only
ethnographic foray in his tract, he writes, quoting himself from his earlier letter to the Director of
Public Instruction:
[W]hile all Hindoo musicians speak with contempt and almost abhorrence of the boatmen’s songs…[their] chants are the only music in Bengal that can properly be called music. I may add that the boatmen often sing very nicely in tune though their voices may be rough and their style uncultured, so that whatever the value of their melodies may be' they gain much in the performance as compared with the performance of Bengali professional singers.84
My point in citing Clarke’s anomalous viewpoint is not to ascertain the validity of its judgment. Rather, it is to analyze the reaction that it provoked from Sourindramohan. And this
82 Clarke, “Bengali Music,” 263.
83 For details, see, Ibid., 263-264.
84 Ibid., 264. See the same for details of his appraisal of “boatmen’s songs.”
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reaction, I argue, is symptomatic of two related ideological operations: one, the Bhadralok’s
internalization of the Europeans’ contempt for contemporary popular music in Bengal, whose
producers were typically from the lower castes/classes; and, relatedly, socio-musical otherization central to the Bhadralok’s program of producing the modern musical subject.
As with all other arguments/opinions adduced by Clarke in his essay, Sourindramohan did not let Clarke’s apotheosis of “boatmen’s songs” as the finest example of Bengali music pass lightly by. He veritably tore into Clarke on the issue in his riposte in the Hindu Patriot.
Sourindramohan, of course, had a much better demographic understanding of the boatmen community in Bengal and the variations in their music by region, dialect, and religion—an understanding that was clearly lacking in Clarke.85 Capitalizing on this weakness in Clarke, thundered Sourindramohan:
May we ask how many Europeans understand the language of the boat-man’s song or its so-called musical cadence? All native boatmen do not sing in the same strain and in the same language. In the Eastern districts [of Bengal] there are classes of boatmen who may be marked out by broad distinguishing characteristics. … The boatmen of Noakhally are not like the boatmen of Dacca, and the boatmen of Chittagong are quite unlike the boatmen of Dacca and Noakhally. Again, by far the greater portion of these boatmen are Mahomedans, who sing songs in Mahomedanized Bengali if we may so express ourselves. Can Mr. Clarke distinguish a native boatman as to his nativity by his song and its language? Besides the three large classes of boatmen we have named there are others in East Bengal who are also distinguished by some peculiarities—the boatmen of Sylhet, Backergunge and Furreedpore for example. Again, the boatmen of West Bengal who navigate the Ganges and its tributaries are quite a distinct class of boatmen from any of the Eastern districts. They sing much better than our critic's friends of East Bengal. 86
Here, we catch the first glimpse of Sourindramohan’s musico-ideological constitution in the
form of an articulate (sub-)regionalism. Not only he does draw attention to the various
inflections of the boatmen’s songs within East Bengal—the region where Clarke, admittedly, had
come across the music—he also draws a qualitative difference between the music of the same
85 Certain claims made by Clarke, such as his claim the boatmen he encountered during his sojourns in the eastern parts of Bengal sang their songs in Sanskrit, were very obviously indefensible. See, Ibid.
86 Tagore, “Hindu Music,” 362-363.
329 community in the eastern and the western parts of Bengal, contending that the latter’s is “much better.” It is in the reason which he then furnishes to explain why this is the case that the class/caste component of his musical ideology becomes apparent.
Sourindramohan asserts that the reason why the boatmen’s music in West Bengal is better than their eastern counterpart is because
They usually come in contact with a larger number of educated and polished gentlemen than any boatmen of East Bengal can ever hope to do, and it may be said the former move in better society. They are therefore expected to be better educated and more civilized than their fellow-laborers in the eastern districts and yet their songs indicate no tunes of musical merit.87
This quote is an epigrammatic snapshot of the cultural politics undergirding the modern musical apparatus that the Calcutta-based Bengali Bhadralok’s sought to put in place during the 1870s, and the musical subject this apparatus was supposed to produce.
First, it is indicative of the centripetal force that Calcutta—the political, economic, and educational nerve-center of colonial Bengal, and the preeminent site of Hindu Bhadralok concentration—had come to exert over cultural life in the region. One can also discern in the quote the hegemonic will to power that the Bhadralok class had by this time come to arrogate to itself, particularly in the cultural field. Indeed, the evident implication of Sourindramohan’s statement is that mere physical proximity of the West Bengali boatmen to the Calcutta-centric, educated Bhadralok was reason enough for them to be more “civilized,” and their music to be of a superior quality, than the boatmen of the eastern parts who, putatively, did not possess such a cultural geographic advantage. Second, and more importantly, the quote reveals that
Sourindramohan had no doubt that despite the boatmen’s music in western Bengal being better that in the east, as a whole it was of no “musical merit” whatsoever. In this we find
Sourindramohan’s disposition to be no different than that of the most ethnocentric of European
87 Ibid.
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observers who, as we have seen earlier in this section, too were plainly dismissive of the lower
caste/class music-makers of Bengal and their music. It is this vital aspect of colonial(ist) discourse on (Bengali) music that the Bhadralok had come to internalize by the time
Sourindramohan penned his response to Clarke in 1874. In fact, what irked Sourindramohan the most, I would argue, was not the very elementary errors C. B. Clarke made in demographically and linguistically placing the boatmen’s music. Rather, his ire was stoked by the fact that Clarke chose to posit the music of the ‘uncivilized’ boatmen as the most felicitous form of music in
Bengal, not the music of the books that the ‘civilized’ Bhadralok was invested in cultivating and propagating as its own. Sourindramohan’s response was, thus, symptomatic of the latter’s class- anxiety over its constitutive musical lack, something that Clarke’s essay, wittingly or otherwise, drove at the heart of.
What this suggests in no uncertain terms is that the late-nineteenth century Bhadralok music project, the apparatus this social class put in place, was to inculcate a musical selfhood that was constitutively based on the otherization of music and musicians in the non-elite, popular domain—the domain that, as mentioned earlier, later-nationalist (music) discourse of the twentieth century would identify as ‘folk.’88 In other words, we see a Bhadralok like
Sourindramohan, when addressing music in/of the popular, appropriate the same ethnographic
authorial voice as that of European/colonialist ethnographers, steeped, by the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, in an evolutionist understanding of society and culture.
Importantly, this folk-other of Bhadralok music and musical subject was not cast by
Sourindramohan in a relation of absolute antagonism. Rather, it was merely made subjacent on a
vertiginous scale—a less evolved, rudimentary artifact of the supposedly civilizationally
88 For example, ‘folk’ would find categorical use in the works of Dineshchandra Sen in the early twentienth century. See, Dineshchandra Sen, The Folk-Literature of Bengal (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1920); ______, East Bengal Ballads: Mymensingha (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1923).
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superior, ‘shastrically’ mandated raga-based music that the Bhadralok had isolated as the kernel of its musical identity, which also overlapped with caste, class, and spatial—urban—privilege.
Thus, the folk/music cannot be seen as the Hindu Bhadralok’s absolute Other; this eminence, they would bestow on a community that had been pivotal in keeping alive raga music culture in northern India—the Muslim Ustad. As we shall now see, the modern Bhadralok musical subject could not be willed into being if its idea was not posited in contradistinction to the figure of the
Ustad who, despite possessing high musical competence, was not only musically illiterate but ethico-morally suspect as well; indeed, he was the absolute Other of the new musical subject being forged in late-nineteenth century Bengal.
The Absolute Other of the Bhadralok Musical Subject: The Case of the Ustad
In 1896, Sourindramohan Tagore, needing to formulate an organizing principle for his magnum opus, A Universal History of Music,89 offered the following definition of ‘national music’: it is
“the faithful [musical] expression of national feelings…best manifested under circumstances that are not controlled by extraneous influences.”90 In defining ‘national music’ thus,
Sourindramohan implied that for a nation like India, ‘Indian’ music was not that which existed
on the colonized ground. It was not even the music that resonated in the immediate pre-colonial past. In order to access authentic Indian music, one had to effect a return to the pre-Muslim,
‘Hindu’ India and delve into its high-Sanskritic, Vedic tradition of music theory and pedagogy.
Successive Muslim ‘invasions’ and the general permeation of Islamic culture in the subcontinent
89 As the title of book suggests, in it Tagore attempts a sweeping study of the musics of “various nations, civilized or uncivilized, on the face of the habitable globe”: from Assyria to the Tonga or Friendly Islands. [Sourindro Mohun Tagore, A Universal History of Music Compiled From Diverse Source (1896; repr. Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, 1963), Preface]
90 Tagore, A Universal History, 11.
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had immeasurably distorted Indian music as it had originally existed. If the Indian nation had to
be accurately and honorably represented in the universal history of music then Indian music
needed to be cleansed of this accumulated dross, such that its ‘true’ essence could be cast in the
sharpest relief in musical terms. It is not surprising, therefore, that not just Sourindramohan but a
whole generation of Bhadralok music scholars very seldom used the category ‘Indian music’ to
refer to the subject matter of their scholarship. Instead, their signifier of choice, when writing in
English, was ‘Hindu music’. And when writing in Bengali, the direct translation of this term,
‘Hindu sangit’ is used interchangeably with ‘Arya sangit.’
The perception of Indian history on which Sourindramohan’s understanding of national
music in the Indian case was based was, of course, the discursive fabrication of colonial forms of
knowledge. Indeed, it was with late-eighteenth century Orientalism that the understanding of the
past as a “tripartite schema”—ancient, medieval, and modern—was transposed on India.91 As is well-known, the ‘ancient’ was posited as a period when the so-called Hindu civilization had reached its acme, followed by the corruptive influence of Muslim rule during the medieval period, and its recovery/rejuvenation during modern epoch of British colonialism. By the late- nineteenth century, this temporal logic had been grafted on the historical consciousness of the
Bengali Bhadralok through the colonial education system. In Sourindramohan’s case, the application of this tripartite schema is clear in Universal History of Music’s section on India.
Thus we see that colonial discourse provided the epistemological and conceptual framework on which modern scholarship by Indians was founded. In the field of music, nothing is more indicative of this than the very category ‘Hindu music’—the signifying rubric for India’s
91 This tripartite schema, as Sumit Sarkar point out, was first devised in “post-Renaissance Europe” to periodize and understand European history. For details, see, Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 16-17.
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national music, according to Sourindramohan. As we know rather well by now, this category was
originally confected and bequeathed by none other the pioneering Orientalist, William Jones.
Yet, with specific regard to music, the historical meta-narrative of glory, decline, recovery/rejuvenation posed a problem. The overwhelming evidence of thriving cultivation of raga-based music under royal-patronage during the medieval period, with Muslim musicians at the forefront, could not be simply brushed under the carpet of an ideologically motivated story of decline. But, at the same time, it was no less ideological how Bhadralok music scholars like
Sourindramohan dealt with this issue. Following earlier Orientalist scholarship, a specious separation between theoretical discourse and practical performance was effected discursively to make the history of music map on to the history of medieval decline.92 Ancient Sanskrit treatises, or shastras, were deemed to be the repositories of authentic Hindu music theory that fell into subsequent disuse under Muslim rule. As Sourindramohan flatly put it in 1886:
In the course of the general change which followed the transfer of Hindusthan [sic] from the hands of the Hindus to those of the Mahomedans, the Sastras of the Hindus, including that of Music, sank into oblivion. The Mahomedan rulers encouraged the practice of Hindu music and converted it into an instrument of sensual enjoyment. They did not at all care for the essential principles of Music which, to them, appeared uninviting and inaccessible. 93
One does not need to look beyond prior European scholarship for the source of the argument
Sourindramohan makes above. Some fifty-odd years before, in 1834, N. Augustus Willard had similarly written: “During the earlier ages of Hindoostan, music was cultivated by philosophers and men eminent for polite literature[.]” But with the conquest of Indian by “illiberal
Mahomedan princes[,]”
92 I say specious because unlike in the West where mathematics and acoustic physics—modes of persuasion quite separate from performance—also laid claim on musical knowledge, the same was not the case in India, where musical knowledge, as we have elsewhere in this dissertation, was largely unconcerned with the science of music in the European sense.
93 Sourindro Mohun Tagore, The Twenty-Two Musical Srutis of the Hindus )Calcutta: Bengal Acedemy of Music, 1886), 34.
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from the theory of music, a defection took place of its practice, and [Hindu] men of learning confined themselves exclusively to the former, while the latter branch was abandoned entirely to the illiterate, all attempts to elucidate music from rules laid down in books, a science incapable of explanation by mere words, became idle.94
Here we see the genealogy of the late-nineteenth century Bhadralok opinion that at best held Muslim rule culpable for cleaving the unity of musical theory and practice that supposedly had existed in the ancient period of Hindu cultural efflorescence, and at worst blamed it entirely for the wholesale impoverishment of music in India. It is between these two positions that the
Bengali musical vanguard oscillated in their efforts to identify a historical causality for the lack of music in the Bhadralok’s social body. Thus, if ethnographic colonial discourse provided the
Bhadralok with a description of this lack then Orientalist discourse provided an identifiable historical reason for it. Moreover, the latter also identified this reason to be extraneous to ‘Hindu civilization.’ In other words, the decline of music among Hindus was not historically self- inflicted; rather, it was due to the unfavorable atmosphere created by Muslim rule for the intellectual cultivation of music, in a theoretically and practically unified fashion—not more for, as Sourindramohan put it, “for sensual enjoyment.” Thus we see the following lines foregrounded in the introductory statement accompanying the debut issue of the first significant
Bengali music journal to appear in print in 1872, the Sourindramohan-edited Sangit Samalochani
(The Music Review):95
94 N. Augustus Willard, “A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan, Comprising a Detail of the Ancient Theory and Modern Practice,” in Tagore, Music From Various Authors, 2-3.
95 In order of appearance, Sangit Samalochani was the second Bengali music journal to appear. The distinction of being the first Bengali music journal goes to Sangit Chittasantosh (Musical Amusements); it first appeared in 1870, edited by Umacharan Sen and Jogendranath Basu. Sangit Samalochani folded after the publication of only five issues. Though definite reason behind its closure is not known, it appears fund shortages could have been the cardinal one. Of particular interest here is the fact that amongst the five volumes of the journal that saw light of the day, a significant portion in three of them was devoted to making modern Dhwanitattwa or Acoustic Science accessible to a general readership. Clearly, for Sourindramohan, the Bhadralok musical subject, over and above being music-literate and aware of his canon, needed to be at least functionally familiar with the science that made music possible.
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It is our firm belief that amongst all the national musics of the world, Hindu music had once achieved a higher degree of refinement than all the rest. Despite the present precarious situation of Hindu music, the signs of excellence that still inheres in it cannot be found in other national musics. In future, it will be our endeavor to demonstrably prove this. Since the Muslims’ (yavanas’) conquest of India (bharatbhumi), that excellence has started to decay. Immediately upon conquering the kingdom of the Hindus, the Muslims burnt down their invaluable books. Along with many texts of philosophy and literature, the music-treatises authored by the like Brahma and Narada have also been destroyed. If the invaders had been satisfied with simply looting and plundering the land and wealth of our ancestors, if they had not obliterated the priceless texts that were the fruits of aeons of labor then perhaps, instead of detesting them as depraved, we would have blessed them. Within this royal lineage of invaders there have been born one or two knowledge-loving emperors who, understanding the exquisiteness of Hindu music, contributed their enthusiasm towards its advancement. But, be it through chicanery or might, they started converting exponents of Hindu music to their own religion. We think this is the outstanding reason why cultivation of music among is so rare among Hindus, and it is due to this that one sees more music-exponents among the Muslims. Though some khayal music and a few raginis were created after the appropriation of Hindu music by the Muslims in this manner, the original beauty and authenticity of Hindu Music has become nearly extinct. What is a matter of even greater sorrow is that the Muslim [musicians] are not easily inclined to teach music to the Hindus. Even if they are favorably inclined, they are ignorant regarding how to teach in a simple way. Therefore, learning music from Muslims is not easily forthcoming. 96
I do not think there is any other statement in contemporary Bengali letters that articulates the anti-Muslim ideology at the heart of the Hindu Bhadralok musical program in such sharp stridency as the afore-cited quote. Indeed, not only is this one of the earliest but it is also one of the most compact declarations of the fictional sense of historical wrong that spurred the Hindu
(musical) nationalist sentiment behind the Bhadralok project of musical modernization. What is noteworthy is that at this stage of proto-nationalist articulations in the 1870s—the conjuncture that Partha Chatterjee has evocatively named the “moment of departure” for anti-colonial nationalism97—the target is evidently not the European colonizer but the Indian Muslim; though, as Ashis Nandy suggests, reality of colonial subjection might have been motive behind the
96 Sangit Samalochani 1, no. 1 (1872): 2-3; translation mine.
97 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 54.
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Hindus’ displacement of the resultant anomie resulting on to the Muslim.98 But what I would like
to draw attention to now is the cathectation of this ideologized sense of musico-historical wrong
harbored by the Bhadralok on the singular figure of the Muslim music exponent/teacher, or the
Ustad—the absolute Other of Bhadralok musical subject, in total contradistinction to whom the
latter’s selfhood was substantiated. And, as we have consistently seen in chapter so far, the construction of the Muslim Ustad as the Other, too, was significantly mediated by Orientalist music discourse, particularly, by Willard’s Treatise and the normative musical ethics/morals suggested therein.
Quite interestingly, Willard charts the “decline” of music in “Hindoostan” and the
“[c]auses of its depravity”99 on, specifically, a moral economy of musical labor. He argues that it
was only during Muslim rule in India that the category of the professional musician arose and the
performance of music became a “distinct trade.”100 Prior to this “in Hindoostan, where both
[poetry and music] are subservient to religion,…the ablest performers of music were Munies and
Jogees, a set of men reputed for sanctity,…whose devout aspirations…continually poured forth in measured numbers and varied tone.”101
98 For details, see, Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 26, especially, fn. 35. While Nandy’s argument is provocative, the problem with it as a general theory is that it cannot explain why this mode of displacement of majoritarian Hindu anomie on to the Muslim still exists in post-colonial India, as evident in the consistent stratum of Hindu cultural nationalism in its political fabric. If it was the specificity of colonial subjection that caused this displacement then it should have disappeared with the end of colonial rule. Clearly, as events in Indian political history over the past twenty-years show, this has not been the case. It also bears mentioning here that Charles Capwell too has used Nandy theory in reading in passing the articulate anti-Muslim stance of Sourindramohan’s circle. For details, see, Capwell, “Marginality and Musicology,” 238.
99 Willard, “Treatise,” Contents.
100 Ibid., 27.
101 Ibid., 8.
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Willard here is projecting his contemporary Orientalist romanticism on a fictional notion
of an ancient Hindu past where art was cultivated for art’s sake—an ideology grounding the
aesthetic practice of European Romantics in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century. As a
subject of this ideology he betrays a strong suspicion of music’s marketization. Thus he writes:
art “flourishes best under steady and peaceful governments, which encourage them by their
patronage.”102 Such a government in “Hindoostan” existed before the advent of Muslim rule
when the
greatest poets used to retire to their favorite romantic and wildly beautiful spots, the most attracting parts of which they copied from nature, and adopted as the foundation of their enchanting scenes. ...[T]he genius of music likewise inhabits them, and in a special manner 103 patronises her votaries there.
From this romantic notion critiquing the emergence of music as trade and the rise of the professional musician during Muslim rule, Willard then moves to make a moral critique of the
“illiterate” Ustad—the Muslim professional musician—“who prostituted [his] abilities for a mere trifle.”104
Keeping with this allegorical register on which he places the Ustad and the kind of
reprobate morality that the labor of the ‘prostitute’ imprecates, Willard elaborates his critique of
the Muslim music performer/pedagogue/‘professional’ on the grounds of the latter’s sexually
licentious proclivities and slavish attachment to liquor—attributes abhorrent to Willard’s
Christian values. It is best to convey his withering assessment in his own words:
By a rule of the Mahomedan law, the women of all Cafirs or unbelievers, to which class the Hindoos belong, are to them Hulal, or lawful, without marriage; and since the acquisition of the country to the latter, all manner of excesses and debauchery reached their acme. The vice of drunkenness was, I am persuaded, unknown, at least of the stimulating and inflammatory class. The opium, Bhung, and Dhatoora, (the two latter of which were chiefly used by the Hindoos,) are
102 Ibid., 18.
103 Ibid., 29-30.
104 Ibid., 31.
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rather stupefying and sedative than irritative. There is no term, I believe, in Sungscrit [sic], or tongues derived from it, for a slave or eunuch. A great many of the songs of this country abound with the praises of drunkenness. These are certainly not of Hindoo origin, for the Hindoos never drank wine or spirits; and although the Mahomedan religion prohibits the use of wine, the very touch of which is reckoned polluting, very few of their monarchs and nobles have refrained from indulging themselves freely with this beverage. They know no medium; it was, and now is, drank by such as make use of it to excess. They never dilute their liquor with water, and in times of their prosperity, it was contrived to be made so pure and strong that it could not be drank ; in which case, roast meat was a constant companion to liquor, in which they dipped the bits of roast, as we do in sauce. … The conquest of Hindoostan by the Mahomedan princes forms a most important epoch in the history of its music. From this time we may date the decline of all arts and sciences purely Hindoo, for the Mahomedans were no great patrons to learning, and the more bigotted of them were not only great iconoclasts, but discouragers of the learning of the country.105
Again, my intention in drawing out Willard’s critique of music in India during the
medieval period is not to ascertain the truth of it. Evidently, much of it patently untrue, refracted
through Willard’s Orientalist romanticism, Christian morality, and, as with William Jones to some extent, Europe’s historical baggage with Islam. What I wish to show here is the obvious intertextuality between Willard’s representation of the Ustad and that by the Bengali Bhadralok.
And for this let us turn to a particularly suggestive text authored by Baishnabcharan Basak, who along with Narendranath Datta, later famous as Swami Vivekananda, had penned one the first encyclopedic compilations of Bengali music and musicians in 1887 called, Sangitkalpataru (the
Musical Wish-tree). In 1899, Basak published an enlarged version of the Sangikalpataru under the title, Swachitra Biswasangeet (Illustrated World-Music). In this latter text, which appeared with under his solo authorship, Basak began by diagnosing the Bhadralok musical lack thus:
“We know from having conducted special investigation that the Muslim Ustads were mostly illiterate and were especially parsimonious in imparting their musical knowledge to the Hindus. Moreover, they regularly imbibed ganja and alcohol, and did not desist from indulging in licentious behavior…As a result nobody would brave sending their own children to them for music education” 106
105 Ibid., 119-120.
106 Baishnabcharan Basak, Swachitra Biswasangit, (Calcutta: Basak Press, 1899), 6.
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It appears from this quote that the scope of Basak’s “special investigation” did not extend too far beyond referring to Willard’s Treatise. Indeed, it is virtually a rephrasing of the latter’s pronouncements.
Even Krishnadhan Bandopadhyay, the one-time protégé of Sourindramohan’s who later parted ways with his mentor over serious musical differences,107 and the one Bhadralok music scholar who produced an exceptionally balanced view of Indian music’s advancement during the
Muslim rule108—consciously refraining from the strident anti-Muslim polemics that characterized the writings by those in Sourindramohan’s circle—did not mince words when it came to the Ustad. “There is no way,” wrote Krishnadhan in his best-known monograph,
Gitasutrasar,
that one can learn music besides from the businessmen Ustads. For most accomplished Ustads, their business is invariably ancestral; they are reticent to partake of their ancestral knowledge. Though at times they do give lessons for the sake of survival, but since this is not done with an open mind, the teaching is not of a good standard. That expanding scope of music cultivation should lead to gradual development of musical practice—if one is not favorably disposed to this idea with compassion then music pedagogy can never be good, and teaching methods can never be refined. But none of our Ustads possess an iota of such compassion.109
Thus we see that in the musical ethos prevalent in late-nineteenth century Bengal, the
Muslim Ustad emerged as an absolute Other of the musical subject that the Bhadralok musical apparatus was designed to fashion. He was everything that the latter was supposed to be not: musically illiterate, intellectually unscientific, pedagogically secretive, and of weak ethico-moral character. But his Hindu counterpart, the Pandit, who also was a product of the gharana system that the Bhadralok intellectuals wanted to break out of, still had hope. Thus, the Bishnupur doyens—most prominently, Khestramohan Goswami, but also Radhika Prasad Goswami, Bipin
107 For details, see, Capwell, “Musical Life in Nineteenth Century Calcutta,” 147-150.
108 For details, see, Bandopadhyay, Gitasutrasar, 9-10.
109 Ibid. 6.
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Chakrabarty, et al—could still be accommodated in the new musical configuration if they were
willing to adapt to the new methods. But the recalcitrant Ustad was doomed. He had no place in the musical world that the Bhadralok class was trying to will into being at this conjuncture in history.
***
Thus far in this chapter, I have focused my attention on the discursive-representational
aspect of Bhadralok apparatus of musical subject production. But, as Foucault alerts us,
discursive practices and dispositifs are nothing if not also deeply material and practical.110 In case of the apparatus and the historical moment that we are dealing with here, the harmonium— originally a European musical instrument whose transmuted shape, sound and practice have for long permeated the musical fabric of the subcontinent, provides an exemplary opportunity to track the materiality of late-nineteenth century Bengali music discourse. In this last section of the concluding chapter, I look at how the harmonium—as a physical thing, as a node of discourse with material consequence in the print and music market, and as a site of cultural politics— emerges as an instrument of modern musical govermentality in the era of Sourindramohan. The texts through which this process is traced belong to a class of published matter that is particularly potent in the context of an apparatus—manuals.
Theoretically speaking, the manual is a text imbued with pedagogic charge. It is authored with the expressive intent to pedagogically mediate a particular body of specialized knowledge and its method. A manual either democratizes such knowledge by creating amateur practitioners, or it reproduces professional specialists on the topic. Also, it is a property of the manual-form that it necessarily interpellates the reading subject in an individuated and actional frame—the
110 For details, see, Michel Foucault, “Order of Discourse,” in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, 51-78 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
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knowledge it imparts is one to one, and is explicitly meant to be applied and practiced. In fact,
the Bengali postfixes that signify a text as a manual—such as shiksha, upaay, pawth, pronali,
prodarshak-grontho, shadhona, probeshika, etc.—all, in one way or another, resonate with the triptych of knowledge-method-practice. In this sense, the manual is a particularly potent
distributive capillary of discursive power, a classic apparatus of governmentality, of producing
self-disciplining subjects. It is then not surprising that the latter-nineteenth century which
witnessed a profusion of manuals in the vernacular print world was also a critical historical
conjuncture for modern self-construction in Bengal.111 The Bengali harmonium manuals we will encounter in the following section—at least five appeared between 1874 and 1900, not surprisingly, the most for any musical instrument—need to be read against this theoretical context.
Teaching to Play: Harmonium Manuals in late-Nineteenth Century Bengal
It will perhaps not be an exaggeration to state that the harmonium is by far the most popular instrument accompanying everyday musical practice in India. Indeed, it is an instrument, which, bucking famously strident protestations against it by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal
Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore, has nevertheless permeated the musical capillaries of the modern nation. Today, no one doubts the embeddedness of the harmonium in India’s musicscape, or questions its ‘Indian-ness.’ Yet, the fact is that the harmonium is a relatively recent denizen of the subcontinent, brought over from Europe by missionaries and amateur music
111 Particular mention needs to be made of Judith Walsh’s detailed work on the constructions and contestations of ideas of domesticity and femininity in the late-nineteenth century, which focuses on domestic advice manuals. See, Judith Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). She has counted forty such texts for Hindu women alone printed between 1860- 1900. Similarly Sonia Amin’s recent work, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876-1939 (New York: Brill, 1996), has dealt at length with religious, as well as domestic manuals directed at Muslim women.
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enthusiasts only around the mid-nineteenth century. So, how did the harmonium first take root in
India and vernacularize itself such that in 1936 Nehru would say, not entirely in jest: “I live in
hope that one of the earliest acts of the Swaraj government will be to ban this awful instrument”?
I do not attempt an exhaustive answer to the question raised above. Instead, the narrative here is organized on two registers. On a general register that is common to all subsequent histories of the harmonium in India, I enquire, very briefly, into the early history of the instrument there. Then, on a more particular register, I trace the early socialization of the harmonium among the Bhadralok classes of late-nineteenth century Bengal, through the optic of an immensely popular genre in the vernacular print market of the time: the manual. Specifically,
I scrutinize the first three Bengali harmonium manuals to be published, with particular attention to their prefatory passages, to see what kind of readership they appealed to and analyze their ideological predicates. For it is there that the authorial intention behind the texts, and their projected audience they sought to reach, stand out in clearest relief.
Early Life of the Harmonium in India:
By all accounts, the free reed organ called the harmonium, which appeared on the music markets of Europe in the early 1840s, came as a boon to European missionaries and amateur musicians in the colonies.112 Keyboard music being essential to church services and much desired in secular,
private spaces of European leisure, concerned parties had long fretted over the expensive
proposition of purchasing and transporting a piano or a proper organ from Europe to India. Even
when expenses were not a hindrance, it was virtually impossible to keep a European piano in
tune and shape in the tropics. As Rev. James Long recorded in his essay on the eighteenth
112 Invention of the harmonium is usually attributed to the Frenchman, Alexandre Debain, who was the first to patent his own make of the reed organ under that name.
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century Anglo-Indian society of Calcutta: “Pianos were very dear, 2000 Rupees being frequently
paid for a grand one,…”113 and
…in hot weather with open doors [they] soon cracked and warped; or met the fate of an organ which in 1751, was sent out for the Calcutta Church, but on being opened it fell to pieces, all the woodwork having been eaten up by white ants.114
The harmonium held the promise of working around such problems. And perhaps
nowhere is the case for this instrument more succinctly made than in a letter written by the
Chaplain of Lucknow, Rev. Henry Polehampton, dated April 6, 1857—exactly three months and
a fortnight prior to his death during the siege of the city by mutinous rebels:
We are getting up subscriptions for harmoniums for both churches, and I shall order one for myself. A good harmonium is better in India than a piano. I cannot get a good piano under ninety pounds; a good harmonium will cost me 25 pounds. Pianos always get out of tune in the rains. I don’t think any piano would last, to be worth anything, ten years in India. 115
Harmonium retailers back in England stressed precisely these advantages of the instrument in
their sales pitch in various print media. “The harmonium…is the only instrument of its kind that
remains perfectly in tune, and from the simplicity of its construction, is but slightly affected by any changes of weather”;116 so ran the text of a recurrent advertisement in the Ecclesiastical
Gazette for the year 1855, usually appearing atop another ad peddling “Outfits for India and the
Colonies.” Thus, owing to its ability to hold tuning in tropical climates with the added virtue of
being cheap and relatively portable, the harmonium came to travel the length and breadth of
colonial India with European missionaries over the course of the nineteenth century. It, then,
113 James Long, “Calcutta in the Olden Times—Its People” in Calcutta Review 35, no. 69 (1860): 209.
114 James Long, “A Peep Into the Social Life of Calcutta During the Second-Half of the Eighteenth Century” in British Social Life in Ancient Calcutta, ed. P. T. Nair (Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1983), 13-14.
115 Henry S. Polehampton, A Memoir, Letters, and Diary of the Rev. Henry S. Polehampton (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), 219.
116 The Ecclesiastical Gazette 17, no. 200 (1855): 203.
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should not come as a surprise that the harmonium first found its way into contemporary Bengali
Bhadralok society precisely as an accompaniment for devotionals at the Brahmo Samaj—an institution whose prayer assemblies were modeled in no small measure after church services— dislodging the north Indian string and bow instrument, the sarangi, in the process.117
Around the same time, during the onset of the 1870s, “when this instrument had not yet
become this popular among the people of the land,”118 a famous family address in Calcutta, linked umbilically to the Samaj—the Tagores of Jorasanko—also became proud owners of the harmonium. The intimate connection between Brahmo Samaj and this offshoot of the ancestral, which still casts a long, hegemonic shadow over Bengali/Bhadralok cultural life, is well-known.
The harmonium animates another layer of detail in this narrative.
The initial enthusiast of the instrument at Jorasanko, at whose behest it was apparently bought, was Dwijendranath Tagore119—Dwarkanath’s grandchild, and Debendranath’s120 first- born son. Not surprisingly, it was he who also played the one housed at the Brahmo Samaj, accompanying Brahmo panegyrics, some of which he had composed himself. A Christian
missionary account of the Samaj’s service from 1876 describes this conjunction:
On a small raised and carpeted dais in this centre place, two officiating Brahmans sat cross-legged; before each was a low, marble-topped stool, on which lay prayer-books and hymn-books; opposite those was a sort of desk, in which sat the singer; and behind was a harmonium, at which Mr. Dijendernath Tagore presided…. The service began with the short recitation of a kind of creed, in which all the congregation joined. Prayers were then read by the officiating Brahmans; a short sermon in Bengali was also read…[as were] extracts from sacred Sanscrit books; while all [this]
117 For details, see, Basanta Kumar Chattopadhyay, Jyotirindranather Jibansmriti (Reminiscences of Jyotirindranath) (1920; repr. Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 2002), 33.
118 Ibid.
119 For details, see, Chattopadhyay, Jibansmriti, 33-34.
120 Debendranath Tagore saved the Brahmo movement from the brink of irrelevancy after the death of Rammohan Roy (and subsequently, of his father, Dwarkanath) by launching the Tattwabodhini Patrika and reinstituting the Roy’s earlier Brahmo Sabha as the Samaj in 1843.
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was intermixed with hymns sung and chants, accompanied by the harmonium and a tom-tom or drum. 121
Though his youngest and most illustrious sibling, Rabindranath, would be scathing on the
harmonium, considering it—at times, in a revisionist fashion—an inadequate musical instrument,
two of Dwijendranath’s younger brothers, Satyendranath and Jyotirindranath took to it quite
actively. The first often substituted for him at the Samaj meetings. It was, however, the other brother who turned out to be the most accomplished player among the siblings. In fact, later reminiscing about the harmonium in his musical youth to his biographer, Jyotirindranath recalled with adequate modesty that though would be easily superseded now in felicity, “during those days [the mid-1870s], [he] was quite famous and in demand as a harmoniumist.”122 Thus,
inevitably, the role of the designated accompanist at the Samaj fell on him when his elder
brothers could no longer commit themselves. Making use of the musical space offered at the
Samaj, Jyotirindranath further honed his skills by playing alongside the Samaj’s chief musician,
the dhrupadiya vocalist Bishnuchandra Chakravarty, and the latter’s Bombay-based friend, the
legendary Mowla Bux, a temporary resident of Calcutta at that point.
One important point needs to be underscored here. The harmonium that has been discussed so far is the so-called ‘table’ harmonium—played seated on a stool, with both hands on the keyboard, and foot-pedals to control air-flow. This is not to be confused with the ‘box’ or the
‘hand’ harmonium that is presently ubiquitous in South Asia. In shape and make, the latter’s closest ancestor is not the table harmonium but another much smaller free-reed organ, called the
121 Mrs. Murray Mitchell, In India: Sketches of Indian Life and Travels From Letters and Journals (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1876), 98. The quote is extracted from the diary-entry for April 22, 1868, by Maria Mitchell, the wife of the well-known Scottish missionary John Murray Mitchell, describing an evening service at the Adi Brahmo Samaj.
122 See, Chattopadhyay, Jibansmriti, 33-34.
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harmoniflute—invented in 1852 by the Frenchman Constand Busson. The instrument that is
today referred to as simply the ‘harmonium’ in the subcontinent is the result of a further
modification effected on the model of Busson’s harmoniflute in 1887 by the Bengali instrument maker, Dwarakanath Ghosh, twelve years after he had become the first Indian to found a retail outlet for western musical instruments, under the name Dwarkin and Sons.123
The instant and astounding popularity of Ghosh’s innovation, christened the ‘Dwarkin
Flute’, soon attracted other manufacturers into the burgeoning harmonium market. As relevant
advertisements, particularly in vernacular magazines and journals, reveal, by 1890 there were at
least two other competing brands of hand harmoniums in circulation: Mandal and Company’s
‘Mandal Flute’, and the ‘Harold Flute’ by Harold and Company—the concern where
Dwarakanath had originally honed his skills as a keyboard maker, before striking out on his own.
Indeed, the permeation of the harmonium in Bengali society was so rapid that a contemporary
observer noted in 1894: “In instrumental music the principal change in recent times has been the
introduction of the harmonium…which ha[s] penetrated even into the zenana.”124
The history of the harmonium in the subcontinent can, then, be divided into two epochs:
first is the era of the table harmonium—from around the late 1840s to 1880s—when its chief
patrons were Christian missionaries, the Brahmo Samaj, and elite individuals with not only the
cultural capital of prior familiarity with a keyboard instrument, but also the economic capital to
be able to afford one; the second is the post-1887 mass proliferation of the hand harmonium,
innovated by Dwarakanath Ghosh and soon emulated by others in Bengal and elsewhere. The
temporal frame that I now bring to bear on my paper is the two-decade overlap between the two
123 The company has survived into the present; albeit it now concentrates mostly one the harmonium.
124 Pramatha Nath Bose, History of the Hindu Civilization During British Rule, vol. 2 (Calcutta: W. Newman and Company, 1894), 143-144.
347 aforementioned eras—stretching roughly from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s. This passage in time is particularly interesting in the context of the harmonium in India because it marks an emblematic phase in the life of the instrument there: with the table harmonium on its last legs, and its hand counterpart, triumphantly emergent. This will become apparent from our subsequent discussion of the first three Bengali harmonium manuals, the appearance of which this period straddles.
Harmonium Manuals in Late-Nineteenth Century Bengal:
The first harmonium manual to appear in Bengali was the Harmonium Sutra (Solution to the
Harmonium), in 1874. Not surprisingly, it was authored by Sourindramohan Tagore. But this champion of a Hindu majoritarian impulse in the early framing of a national music for India was also a trained pianist, and was keenly attuned to the musical milieu of the times. It is this latter sensibility that made him fix his gaze on the harmonium. Since the preface to Harmonium Sutra clearly lays out his immediate reasons for writing a manual for the instrument, allow me quote from it at length:
In recent times, many among the music-loving youth of Bengal—their hearts and minds entranced by the euphony of the harmonium—have expressed a great desire to learn the instrument, but they have not been able to succeed in practice. Since the harmonium is a European instrument, quite unlike any of the Indian ones, the professors of Indian music are not at all acquainted with the method of playing it. In order to gain expertise, it is necessary to practice methodically under the supervision of a European master, but for how many can such an advantage materialize? Even if these days a few Bengalis can be seen playing the harmonium, they usually are such novices that it is impossible for a listener to be satisfied by them. How can the true sweetness of the harmonium be expressed when Bengali instrumentalists are most often restricted to employing only two or three fingers of their left hand? Just as we find it difficult to control our laughter upon seeing a European on the sitar repeatedly hammer his index-finger on the instrument, I have no doubt that the Europeans find our harmonium playing even more hilarious… It is for the benefit of the students and teachers of the Bengal Music School that this small tract named Harmonium Sutra is being published in its first part... The idea behind publishing only the first part now is that if this proves to be even a little beneficial to students then I will publish a second part dealing with more difficult topics. 125
125 Translation mine. Sourindramohan Tagore, Harmonium Sutra (Calcutta: Prakrita Press, 1874), prefatorial comments.
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The promised second part never materialized; whether for a lack of demand or for a lack
of desire, it is not known for sure. But what is important to note here is that by the author’s own
admission the Harmonium Sutra was written keeping in mind a table harmonium, which required
the player to use both hands to work the keyboard. In fact, it is the contemporary Bengali
harmonium enthusiasts’ lack of felicity in this regard that comes up for a rap in the above
quote—fault that Tagore’s manual sought to correct. However, within a decade’s time, the
appearance of the hand harmonium that required only one hand on the keyboard as the other
pumped the bellows, would render this concern redundant. And, as we shall see, with its rapid
proliferation, the hand harmonium would, over time, come to displace its table counterpart as the
instrument animating all harmonium manuals. Perhaps this is the reason why Sourindramohan
did not follow up on his promise to publish a second part to his manual. That said, the
Harmonium Sutra would retain its importance on one count; the structure of the text—beginning with a description of the instrument, followed by a discussion of the elementary principles of
Indian music theory; an introduction to the Bengali notation system, exercises in scales and rhythm; and ending with a clutch of notated songs—remained the prototype that nearly all subsequent music manuals, in general, more or less closely followed.
The second Bengali harmonium manual, called Harmonium Shiksha (Harmonium
Learning), appeared in 1888—fourteen years after Sourindramohan’s debut effort, and one year after Dwarakanath Ghosh’s innovation of the hand harmonium. It was authored by
Upendrakishore Roychowdhury—one of the leading lights of the Brahmo Samaj, father to the famous author Sukumar Ray, grandfather to the even more renowned Satyajit Ray, and a polymath in his own right. While the structure of Roychowdhury’s manual is similar to that of the Harmonium Sutra, two significant differences become readily apparent in terms of its
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content. First, though Roychowdhury’s manual provides a detailed description of the table
harmonium, and an image of it adorns the text’s frontispiece, as a publication faithful to the spirit
of its time, it was written “…especially for the [hand harmonium] as they today are so many in
number.”126 There is, in fact, every reason to believe that a direct causality subsisted between the
hand harmonium hitting the market in 1887, and the appearance of this manual in print just a
year later. For not only was Upendrakishore Roychowdhury a personal friend of the instrument’s
inventor, Dwarakanath, Harmonium Shiksha was actually published by the latter’s company,
Dwarkin and Sons. In any case, Roychowdhury’s was the first music manual to focus primarily
on the hand harmonium.
Coming to the second difference between Tagore’s manual and that by Roychowdhury: the latter’s intended audience was quite different from text that preceded it. Tagore, admittedly, did not seek a readership beyond the confines of the Bengal Music School. On the other hand, published by the leading harmonium manufacturer and retailer of the day, Harmonium Shiksha was aimed explicitly at the commercial market. The segment of readership that the author and his publisher wanted to appeal to is made clear in the preface of the book, and is worth quoting at length.
This book provides the elementary principles for playing Indian music on the harmonium, along with illustrative examples to grasp this in practice. Most students can afford only a little leisure, but they desire to extract whatever little knowledge they can and amuse themselves according to their needs. Utmost effort has been taken to make this book especially useful for this particular class of students. It will not suffice for those who seek to musically educate themselves with proper reference to the rules of harmony. This will necessitate access to a good manual in English, supervision by a properly qualified teacher, and undisturbed leisure for five hours daily. 127
From this it becomes clear that Harmonium Shiksha was not aimed at the Bhadralok elite that
could indeed afford the luxury of “supervision by a properly qualified teacher, and undisturbed
126 Upendrakishore Roychowdhury, Harmonium Shiksha (Calcutta: Dwarkin and Sons, 1888), 9; translation mine.
127 Ibid.
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leisure for five hours daily.” Rather, Upendrakishore’s manual targeted that section of the literate
Bengali society, which Sumit Sarkar has called the chakri-jibi middle class, comprising those
employed mostly in alienating, clerical office jobs, with only “little leisure” to spare in the
‘kaliyug’ of latter-nineteenth century colonialism.128 In Roychowdhury’s view, his harmonium
manual offered members of this class an amelioratory space of self-fulfillment through music,
where “they could amuse themselves according to their needs.”
This brings me to the third and the last of the harmonium manuals that I discuss here.
Titled Sahaj Harmonium Shiksha (Easy Harmonium Learning), it was penned and published in
1896 by Baishnabcharan Basak, whom we have encountered earlier. True to the qualifier ‘sahaj’ or ‘easy’ in its title—the rest of which reads exactly the same as the title of the volume it succeeded—Basak’s manual was indeed a simplified rendition of Roychowdhury’s text. In fact, as the preface to Sahaj Harmonium Shiksha suggests, Basak sought to reach an even more general audience than his predecessor.
Though are a couple of books on harmonium learning now available in Bengali language, it can be seen that primary-level students [of the instrument] still suffer from the absence of a simple manual with songs and notated music directed at the masses. Because of the lack of diversity in the songs included in the extant manuals, these manuals have failed to garner the affection of a readership that cuts across classes. Sahaj Harmonium Shiksha is being published to plug this lacuna. Special efforts have been made to include notated songs that meet with the approval of diverse tastes and present it in an easy and accessible method appropriate for primary-level student. Many currently circulating traditional songs have been included along with their notations so that they can be accessed at one place by students.129
What needs to be gleaned from above, particularly in comparison with Roychowdhury’s
prefatorial notes, is that Basak’s impetus to democratize the harmonium even further was not
based on a desire to explore a different social class for the instrument than what Roychowdhury
had already targeted. Indeed, since literacy was the basic prerequisite for accessing a manual, it
128 Sumit Sarkar, “Chakri, Bhakti, Kaliyug” in Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 282- 357.
129 Baishnabcharan Basak, Sahaj Harmonium Shiksha (Calcutta: Basak and Sons, 1896); translation mine.
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meant the textually-mediated harmonium pedagogy had to remain de facto bound with within a particular class framework. But what Basak sought to do with his manual was to appeal to absolute novices and widen the musical palette for this category of would-be readers. Hence, his
stress on diversity of the notated tunes included in his volume. And it appears that Basak’s
strategy succeeded quite well in the market. His book ran into at least three editions, and was still
in print thirty years after it was first published.
Conclusion
I have tried to show in this chapter how musical modernity in colonial Bengal fashioned
into an apparatus of musical subjectification during the epoch of Sourindramohan Tagore. And
as an epochal amalgam of the individual and the institution, Sourindramohan contributed to this
process in his indefatigable capacity of simultaneously being a patron, pedagogue, polarizer, and
publicist. Indeed, he is emblematic of the conjuncture when a whole gamut—to use an
appropriate expression—of musical and musico-discursive technologies came to cohere into an ensemble. And, it is in his own image that he conceived of the Bhadralok musical subject and apparatus to produce it. In its normativity, this subject would be music-literate, i.e., familiar with musical notations, aware of the natural science of musical phenomena, possess a historical consciousness regarding Hindu/Bharatiya/Arya music, and be conscious of its civilizational value.
In this context, I have argued, it is necessary to keep in mind the difference between
Sourindramohan’s era and the earlier moment of Dwarkanath Tagore and Rammohan Roy. Even though certain constitutive elements of Bengali musical modernity, such as a musical double consciousness in the Bhadraok, the desire and demand to self-represent itself musically, creation
352
of new spaces of music for the Bhadralok social class, etc., became visible in this earlier
moment, only during the late-nineteenth century did they become animated into an apparatus of
musical governmentality. The role of the post-Macaulay colonial state’s education policy cannot be over-stressed in this regard. In other words, the coming together of the discursive condition of
possibility for the emergence of a Bhadralok musical apparatus could happen only in the epoch
of Sourindramohan, and his self-conscious program to modernize Bengali music. More than
Sourindramohan’s practical ability to play a Western musical instrument, it was his knowledge
of European music theorists and their discourse which enabled him to engage with Clarke on his
own terms.
Further, I have drawn attention in this chapter to the intriguing history of the harmonium
and the many harmonium manuals that began appearing in the vernacular during the last decades
of the nineteenth century. As I have tried to show, as a rapidly socializing musical instrument in
the late-nineteenth century, the harmonium brings together many facets of Bhadralok musical
modernity—from innovation in physically reshaping a European musical instrument, the
convergence of the music and the print markets that the harmonium manuals signal, the
discourse of the private time-space and individuality that attended the absorption of the educated
Bengali into salaried labor, etc.
However, no process of identity construction is bereft of co-implcated processes of
otherization. In the construction of a Bhadralok musical identity, this, I have indicated, took
place on two levels. On the more ‘internal level,’ the mode of otherization was caste- and class-
based, mediated by the Bhadralok’s ideological appropriation of the civilizational logic that
grounded colonial ethnographic accounts—the perception of music in Bengal therein. This is
most visible in the Bhadralok class’ agenda to reify the distinctions it posited between itself and
353 the lower caste/class music-makers in Bengal, who otherwise occupied the margins of social hierarchy, between its own ‘lack’ of music and the decadence of the music in the popular.
Significantly, this is the musical constituency that would later be recovered as ‘folk.’ The more antagonistic mode of othering that the Bhadralok precipitated occurred with respect, or the lack of it, to the Muslim Ustad. And it is here that the exclusionary cultural politics of Hindu
Bhadralok finds clear expression in musical terms. If it was impossible for the Bhadralok to dismiss the Ustad’s obvious musical competence and, ironically, the knowledge of ‘Hindu music’ in a howsoever supposedly ‘corrupt’ form, then their critique of the Ustad was mounted entirely on a moral ground actuated by the emergence of a nationalistic ideology—in no way anti-colonial yet—conceived entirely in Hindu culturalist terms.
354
Conclusion
This dissertation, as ought to be apparent by now, is bookended by two beginnings:
William Jones and his defining of a modern discursive terrain for the study of Indian music over the 1780s; and Sourindramohan Tagore and the consolidation of a Bhadralok musical apparatus in the 1870s, inaugurating the era of the modern musical subject in the Indian musicscape. There is thus a teleology embedded in the dissertation’s narrative no doubt, but it is not one of closure.
Rather, it shows how the elaboration of musical modernity takes on a specifically colonial character during its new beginning in the late-nineteenth century.
Acting as a bridge between these two framing moments of the dissertation are the mediating figures of Dwarkanath Tagore and Rammohan Roy who intervened significantly in the emergent Bhadralok musical field but without adequate discursive investment in technologies of subject production: the former through his practical involvement with Western music at home and abroad, and the latter through his founding of a new musical space and public through his efforts at the Brahmo Sabha.
If the afore-named figures have animated the historical content of the dissertation, then, in analytical terms, this work has been critically energized by three sets of concerns. The first set pertains to my critical engagement with contemporary scholarship on music and colonialism in
India. Here my analysis indicates that despite the undoubted contribution made by such endeavors in historically analyzing the colonial encounter in musical terms, they often tend towards formally reproducing the aforementioned foundational epistemic violence of
Orientalist/colonialist music discourses owing to their largely uncritical reading of the originary discursive moment via which Indian music were brought within the compass of post-
Enlightenment European knowledge systems. The second set of analytical concerns pertains to
355
my extended reading of William Jones’ “On the Musical Modes of the Hindooos.” Apropos of this, I have first addressed the epistemic violence at the very inception of modern discourse on
Indian music in the late-eighteenth century. This has been followed by an analysis of the epistemological condition of possibility for this discourse to come into being from a European point of view, encompassing the emergence there of Man as an empirical entity, of music as a category of universal civilizational value, and of a particular conjunction in European aesthetic theory that recast music and poetry as ‘sister arts’ at this late-eighteenth century moment. The last set of critical-analytical concerns pursued in the dissertation pertains to the formalization, during Sourindramohan’s era, of the Bhadralok musical dispositif /apparatus. This apparatus, I have shown, was activated by an ensemble of music-historically self-conscious individuals, pedagogic institutions, music notations, musical instruments, music manuals, moral economy, etc., with the programmatic objective of producing Bhadralok Bengalis as modern musical subjects—a process musical self-construction that posited as its Other, the ‘illiterate’ Muslim
Ustad.
To turn our gaze now on Sourindramohan: in a formal sense, his exertions, even if more limited in scope, were not, in effect, unlike that of the figure this dissertation begins with—
William Jones. As Harold Powers point out, Orientalist Jones’ most enduring achievement can be said to have been in opening up new fields of discourse and further possibilities of their development, rather than in being their most felicitous exponent.1 Similarly, Sourindramohan,
too, was first and foremost a pioneer, not just in the context of Bengal but the larger Indian
context. Not only did he see himself in the genealogy of the Orientalist musicological legacy in
India, he was also globally recognized by the 1870s as the preeminent Indian musical mind and
1 Harold S. Powers, “Indian Music and the English Language: A Review Essay,” Ethnomusicology 9, no. 1(1965), 1.
356
mover, a ‘native’ musicologist who was scientific and rational, i.e., modern in its universal sense.
Pace Jones again, Sourindramohan epochal intervention lay in the disciplining of the musical field into a categorical notion of “Hindu/Arya” music, but on a scale much wider than what the
great Orientalist could ever imagine.
However, it needs to be emphasized that by the turn of the twentieth century,
Sourindramohan had been superseded in national musical importance by the likes of Vishnu
Narayan Bhatkhande and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar in the west, and A. M. Chinnaswami
Mudaliar in south. His unquestioned political fealty to the colonial state and the British Empire was rapidly becoming an anachronism in his own lifetime.2 The strident communal-sectarian
rhetoric that abounds in late-nineteenth century Bhadralok music discourse that he was
instrumental in framing was soon tempered by a more liberal majoritarian gloss that gained
prominence with the rise of Rabindranath Tagore on the Bengali cultural horizon. In the new
order of musical things, the obsession with positing Hindu/Arya music as the essence of,
therefore co-terminus with, Indian music gave way to defining Bengali music against Hindustani
music, which was not so much a musical issue in Sourindramohan’s era. Rather than totally
otherizing the Ustad, it was now mutually beneficial to bring this much-reviled figure under the
paternalistic gaze of an enlightened Hindu majority. Against the context of Bengal partition and
the Swadeshi movement, it made more cultural-political sense to posit music in Bengal and
Bengali music as the dominant constituent of the unborn nation’s musical diversity than to
obsess over a potentially divisive musical cause. But that is a history for another occasion.
2 Yet, on some other matters, as we have seen, he was remarkably contemporaneous. Indeed, he was the first one to acknowledge the potential importance of the harmonium in musical life on the ground and write a manual for self- training in the instrument.
357
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VITA
Name of author: Sharmadip Basu
Place of Birth: Calcutta, West Bengal, India
Date of Birth: January 29, 1975
Education: Syracuse University Jawaharlal Nehru University Calcutta University
Degrees: Master of Philosophy in American Studies, 2001, Jawaharlal Nehru University Master of Arts in Economics, 1999, Jawaharlal Nehru University Bachelor of Science in Economics, 1997, Calcutta University
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