IEA

Fellowship from April to June 2011

Reseach project: History of the Voice

Background:
This new research interest comes out of my work on the Caribbean, Mobilizing India: Women, Migration and Music between India and Trinidad, Duke University Press, 2006. See http://mobilizing-india.cscsarchive.org.

The central focus of the book is "the woman question" as it emerges through the mobilisation of "Indianness" and other related notions of region, ethnic group or race. The intertwining of gender issues with the formation and assertion of different kinds of identities in Trinidad and India is explored. The analysis has a historical component and a more contemporary one, the latter being routed through popular music in Trinidad.

The chapters dealing with the music analyse the invocation of the ‘Indian’ in Trinidadian popular song in the context of debates about sexuality and cultural identity. The music ranges from what has come to be generically called "chutney" (including folk-derived Bhojpuri lyrics and rhythms at the one end, Trini English and Afro-Caribbean beats at the other) to calypso to soca. East Indian women, whether as performers or narrativised characters, are central to this music, with their centrality being commented upon, criticized or celebrated by the various interlocutors in the discussion. Deriving from North Indian folk wedding songs, chutney - originally in Bhojpuri/Hindi - began to be sung with added English lyrics early on by Indian migrants. From being a segregated dance form, chutney by the 1980s became a public event. Instead of being a performance watched by an audience, like the older forms of "Indian dance", chutney turned dancing into a public participatory form for both men and women. I focus on the key exponents of chutney-soca, in particular the flamboyant and controversial Drupatee Ramgoonai. In a section called "The Body in the Voice", I try to account for the specific anxieties chutney-soca seems to invoke.

The current project:
My interest is in the early 20th century introduction of (North Indian derived) Hindustani music into the northern districts of what came to be called Karnataka State in post-Independence India, and in the "voice" of contemporary Hindustani singer Gangubai Hangal. Gangubai claims a musical lineage going back to a school founded by the legendary Kirana Gharana singer Abdul Karim Khan in Dharwad. Her mother was a Carnatic singer, and belonged to the devadasi (women dedicated to the gods) tradition. I would like to investigate the trajectories of social aspiration in the period when Gangubai started learning music which propelled her in the direction of a different musical style than her mother’s. Central to the research will be the question of how a North Indian musical form took such deep root in a South Indian society, with no apparent pre-history of interaction with such music.

The linguistic environment of the region - with people speaking Kannada, Marathi and Konkani, and singing in Bhojpuri-Hindustani - clearly had no parallel in other southern Indian areas. Music in the region in the early twentieth century seems to have been a realm of high social investment. Even the Lingayat mutts (the "monasteries" of the Saivite sect founded in the 12th century) invited Muslim singers to live on their premises and teach Hindustani music. What are the signifying structures carried by the voice, and how did singers like Gangubai and many other women like her become visible in performance? Did their becoming visible entail a challenge to notions of regional identity (Kannada-ness) that were taking shape around the same time and in the same Bombay Karnataka region? How does their music engage with emerging ideas about cultural and linguistic identity, and what implications does an understanding of the voice’s history have for present-day musical/cultural negotiations? How would such an investigation contribute to the contemporary theorizing of nation, nationalism and regional identity?

These are some of the questions I am presently exploring through fieldwork, archival work and interviews with musicians. If selected for the fellowship at the Wissenchaftskolleg zu Berlin, I would like to use my time there to think through the material and prepare a tentative outline of my proposed monograph on the topic.

Biographical elements: 

Tejaswini Niranjana is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India. She has an MA in English and Aesthetics (1981) from the University of Bombay, an MPhil in Linguistics (1982) from the University of Pune, and a PhD (1988) from the University of California at Los Angeles. She taught for ten years in the English Department of the University of Hyderabad before moving to Bangalore to help set up the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) in 1998. CSCS offers an innovative PhD in Cultural Studies, the first of its kind in India, assembled and taught by Tejaswini Niranjana and her colleagues. For her research work, Tejaswini has been awarded the Homi Bhabha Fellowship, the Sephis Fellowship, the Prince Claus Fund award (twice), the Rockefeller Fellowship, and the Sawyer Fellowship. She has spent three months as a Visiting Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2007). Her publications include the recent Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, 2006) and Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992). She has co-edited Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Kolkata, 1993). In addition to her academic work, Tejaswini heads the Higher Education Cell at CSCS, with the mandate of creating, fundraising for, and implementing programmes for the positive transformation of the higher education sector in India.

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