Writings that bring together music, practice and history across a range of different regions while also introducing new methodological concerns and conceptual approaches are a rarity. As the editor of the book Sumangala Damodaran points out, this book is a compilation of conference papers presented in the colloquium organized by the India International Centre – International Research Division (IIC-IRD) as a part of an international multi-university project titled ‘Recentering Afro-Asia: Musical and Human Migrations, 700-1500 AD’. Damodaran argues that in the historical interconnections between Africa and Asia, the study and practice of musical modes exhibit the potential to provide a different configuration of cultural history. The book also challenges the dominant approach of a Eurocentric history of Africa and Asia to demonstrate that interactions between Asia and Africa have been prevalent irrespective of the expansion of European empires in these two continents.
The first paper by Mark Aranha follows up on this point as it analyses the musical recordings as well as live performance of Jewish music of Kerala. He points out that the variation in the melody is an important marker of belonging and identity, between Israeli and Moroccan Jews as much as between various congregations in Kerala, owing to a wave of Jewish settlements from West Asia. It is worth noting that the keen attention to melodic divergence present in the music of various synagogues allows for a historio-cultural reading, and so it is imperative to keenly observe sonic practices and their proliferation within and beyond the community.