Listening to Garhwali Popular Music in and out of Place
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HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 38 Number 1 Article 15 June 2018 Listening to Garhwali Popular Music in and out of Place Stefan Fiol University of Cincinnati, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Fiol, Stefan. 2018. Listening to Garhwali Popular Music in and out of Place. HIMALAYA 38(1). Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol38/iss1/15 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Listening to Garhwali Popular Music in and out of Place Acknowledgements The author would like to acknowledge Andrew Alter, Noé Dinnerstein, Anna Morcom, Anna Stirr, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of HIMALAYA for refining the ideas in this article. I express my deepest appreciation to Dr. Datta Ram Purohit and Dr. Shekhar Pathak for their unyielding support of my fieldwork in Uttarakhand, as well as financial support from Fulbright-Hays, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. This research article is available in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol38/iss1/15 Listening to Garhwali Popular Music in and out of Place Stefan Fiol Introduction Listening to popular music is a central means by which people construct their place in the world, One day in July 2007, while attending a wedding in a village in Pauri Garhwal, I met three young men relaxing in a both literally and figuratively. For Garhwalis room and singing Garhwali songs while playing a keyboard. living inside and outside of the Himalayas, They invited me to participate and I sang a couple of listening to vernacular popular music has been popular songs that I had learned during my fieldwork. After peppering them with questions about their musical tastes one way in which they imagine themselves to and exchanging personal information, I continued on my be part of a specific place and a larger cultural way to Srinagar, an hour’s drive from the village. When I region. Displacement is a major theme of these stopped to recharge my phone at a local shop in Srinagar, the person behind the counter rather nonchalantly said songs, and practices of listening underline that he recognized me. He took out his phone and showed the mobile and trans-local aspects of life for me a video of my singing, recorded about two hours many Garhwalis. In order to assess the impact previously. The phone vendor and the young men in the village did not know each other, but they had a mutual of popular music consumption on notions of friend who had circulated the video. place, and vice versa, this article provides This anecdote underlines the mundaneness of most ethnographic vignettes of musical consumption media content that is consumed today, especially by in Garhwali villages and small towns, Garhwali young people, and also demonstrates the way that mobile pilgrimage sites, and migrant contexts technology has transformed the nature of fieldwork. I am not an especially good singer of Garhwali songs, and I am outside of Garhwal. I suggest that much of the confident that it was the novelty factor—the juxtaposition emotional salience and enduring popularity of my foreignness and my familiarity with local music— of Garhwali gīt derive from the emotional that made this video worthy of circulation. I was drawn and physical displacement of married women to the young men in the hotel because of a desire to know their relationship to music, but they used their phones to and male migrants. turn the ethnographic gaze back on me. I felt embarrassed while watching this video, partly because of my rough Keywords: listening, displacement, mobility, commercial music, performance, and partly because they did not ask me Garhwal Himalayas. permission to record or circulate the video. There is poetic justice in this happening to an ethnomusicologist. HIMALAYA Volume 38, Number 1 | 113 More obviously, this anecdote reveals the rapidity with This article explores how Garhwali gīt—the commercial which mass-mediated content is circulated between and vernacular songs produced in the Garhwali language consumed in the Himalayan region. The diffusion of mobile spoken in western Uttarakhand—offer listeners multiple telephony has been incredibly rapid in rural India, as in experiences of place, and how places, (and mobility many other parts of the world, and scholars have offered a between places), prefigure certain kinds of listening. At range of perspectives about the effects of this technology first glance, Garhwali gīt would appear to offer listeners a on social life and on conceptions of place. One perspective relatively circumscribed experience of place. Album covers emphasizes the “democratizing” influence of mobile and posters feature a Himalayan mountain backdrop, media which have arguably flattened the experience of and songs and albums are marketed under the label physical and social space, as people from across the social “Garhwali gīt,” making a claim to a specific economic spectrum can, (at least in theory), access the same content and political regional identity. The term “Uttarakhandi on their phones irrespective of location (O’Hara and Brown gīt” is also used to market this music and references the 2006). Some scholars with a postmodernist leaning, such Indian regional state, formed in the year 2000, within as Tomlinson (1999) and Kupfer (2007), take this to the which Garhwal is located. Both of these labels suggest extreme, arguing that an over-reliance on virtual, electronic this music enables people to imagine themselves as part connections undermines our connection to actual physical of a specific ethno-cultural and political collective. This places, threatening to render us forever displaced, adrift raises the stakes for authenticity, as some listeners expect in cyberspace. In his article “The Mobile Effect,” Drew the sounds and images of these productions to resonate Hemment critiques the idea that mobile technologies have with their often idealized conception of the region; they led to an experience of placelessness (2006). Aside from may reject or resist representations that deviate from the fact that all media users are physically situated in a these expectations. location, he observes that most people use mobile telephony Like many other forms of vernacular popular music in precisely to bring attention to that location. Paradoxically, South Asia, Garhwali gīt are mostly produced in cities the expanded possibilities of mobile consumption that are culturally and geographically removed from are accompanied by a desire to locate oneself more the mountainous localities depicted and described in firmly in place. songs and videos. Some aspects of the musical style of The mutual entanglements of music, media and Garhwali gīt resemble the conventions of Hindi film place have received sustained, critical attention from song production, while other aspects are common to ethnomusicologists, music historians, human geographers, a wide range of vernacular music located in the trans- and anthropologists for several decades. Scholars have Himalayan and North Indian regions, including several attended to notions of landscape that permeate musical genres discussed by authors in this volume. For nearly texts (Doyle 2005, Watkins 2011, Gallagher and Prior 2014), a century, the interaction of artists from various parts explored the spaces of commercial music production, of South Asia, many of whom circulated freely between circulation and consumption in local or trans-local scenes Mumbai’s film music industry and smaller vernacular (Solomon 1997, Connell and Gibson 2003, Kolioulis 2015), industries, has resulted in the development of a distilled interpolated musical meaning in diasporic and immigrant “pop-folk” aesthetic that can be heard in some Hindi film communities that are shaped by allegiances to multiple songs as well as vernacular recordings through much of places (Levi and Scheding 2010), or attended to cognitive the sub-continent (Fiol 2017b). Aspects of this generic and broader social ecological factors that impact the aesthetic include the preference for high vocal range, free- process of listening (Clarke 2005, Erlmann 2004). Musical rhythm cadenzas on the bamboo flute (bānsūrī), pentatonic discourse draws upon lexical and non-lexical kinds of modes, rhythmical cycles in six (dādra and khemtā) or signs that mark a variety of identities and place-bound eight (kaherva), binary melodic phrases (asthāī-antarā) experiences. If musical listening is one of the ways in which separated by instrumental breaks, and a predictable core people often express their belongingness to a place, it can instrumentation of dholak, tabla, guitar, mandolin, octopad, also provide the means of articulating a longing for other flute, electronic samples and vocals. places, of feeling “in-between-ness” with regard to multiple Because these sonic characteristics are diffused across places, or of negotiating and transforming hierarchies