Ethnographical studies in the region remain an inescapable methodology due to the subcontinent’s knowledge systems embedded in oral traditions. There is also an institutional lack of a proper archival system. For most scholars in the past, ethnography had led them to innovative revelations, unlike the archives which have revealed partial information with politics of power inclined towards the educated elites of the society.
To the perceptive reader, Nund Rishi: Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir is a sombre book. This impression starts to build right from the rather symbolic jacket, which bears a photograph of a gloomy Charar-e Sharif mausoleum on an overcast winter day. This monument, belonging to that solitary strand of Kashmiri Sufism which once drew…
Mohandas Gandhi was no musician. Subramanian herself acknowledges (p. 188) he was ‘neither a patron nor a connoisseur of music’, and that he was attracted to it solely for its ‘power as a medium of affect’. His engagement with music was correspondingly restricted to employing its powers of affect for his larger political and social…
These essays serve an important purpose in setting the stage for the next section, ‘New Musical Publics and the Formation of Taste’ which deals with the unfolding of the complex question of aesthetic pleasure and the creation of different public spheres around the problem of taste. Although the players and the narratives within which they operate are different, these two essays offer a key turning point in the book where we encounter the ‘surpluses’ of publicness in all its complexity.
Damodaran, much to the relief of the reader immediately reduces scope. And what is lost in ambition is gained in clarity. She talks of Jatts becoming Zotts in Iran and how they would influence the Luri. She talks of the Haul, Qual and Maqam systems.
Kumar’s commentary on Pandit Kumar Gandharva is particularly noteworthy. He observes that while reinventing Kabir, Kumarji was simultaneously reinventing himself, envisioning an artist, a thinker, and a rebel within. Kuldeep Kumar highlights Kumarji’s departure from blind adherence to gharanas, quoting Pandit BR Deodhar, Kumarji’s guru