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This book offers the first social history of music in undivided Punjab (1800-1947), unearthing new evidence to argue for the power of female performers and the primacy of classical music for a region conventionally understood as a centre of folk music alone.
This book charts the transoceanic history of South Asian women in California through their speech and songs across the twentieth century. Nicole Ranganath reimagines the history of the South Asian diaspora through an examination of gender and the dynamic interplay of water and land in the cultural history of Sikhs, a faith and cultural community that emerged in the Punjab region of north South Asia over 550 years ago. It shows how the history and music of transoceanic communities, in this case Sikhs, spilled beyond the boundaries of regions, empires and nation-states. It emphasizes the heterogeneity of the South Asia diaspora by uncovering the distinct history of women’s migration experien...
This volume highlights the historical complexities bound up in Hindu-Muslim relations in South Asia and challenges over-simplistic understandings of these relations by demonstrating that they are, and have always been, complex and contingent.
An empathetic and eye-opening portrait of Muslim migrants in England that debunks many misperceptions about their music and poetry. In Journeys of Love, ethnomusicologist Thomas Hodgson offers a sensitive corrective to harmful portrayals of immigrants—specifically, Pakistanis living in England—as a self-segregating group prohibited from making music, a stereotype that has often resulted in violent Islamophobia. He argues that, in practice, these migrants—many of whom come from the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir—occupy rich musical worlds, full of poetic metaphors, that are central to surviving migration and its attendant losses. Hodgson shows how Mirpuris in England, as well as those wh...
Conceived at the unique, intersecting moment of commemoration of 1947 Partition of British India, 1971 Bangladesh independence, and 1972 exodus from Uganda, this book focuses on the entangled memories of Partition and its associated events in the diaspora. The chapters in this book explore the cultural and social significance of diasporic memorialisation done in reference to Partition, as it overlaps with the commemoration of key historical moments of change for the South Asian diaspora. Bringing together scholars based in Bangladesh, India, and the UK and working within memory studies, history, ethnomusicology, sound studies, literature, film studies, postcolonial studies and media and comm...
This edited collection attends to the locations of memory along and about the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh borders and the complex ways in which such memories are both allowed for and erased in the present. The collection is situated at the intersection of narratives connected to memory and commemoration in order to ask how memories have been formed and perpetuated across the imposition of these borders. It explores how national boundaries both silence memories and can be subverted in important ways, through consideration of physical sites and cultural practices on both sides of the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh borders that gesture towards that which has been lost – that is, the cultural...
Passion and politics intertwine in Char Adhyay (1934), Rabindranath Tagore's last and perhaps most controversial novel, set in the context of the freedom struggle in pre-Independent India. Ela, a young working woman, comes under the spell of Indranath, a charismatic political activist who advocates the path of terror. She joins his band of underground rebels, vowing never to marry, and to devote her life to the nation's cause. But through her relationship with Atindra, a poet and romantic who grows disenchanted after joining the group, Ela realizes the hollowness of Indranath's machinations. The lovers now face a terrible choice. This new translation of Char Adhyay brings Tagore's text to life in contemporary idiom, while evoking the charged atmosphere of the story's historical setting.
An unprecedented portrait of Sikh devotional music demonstrating how musical traditions shift to meet changing needs. Kirtan—the sung expression of sacred verses—spans the Indian subcontinent, but it plays a unique role in the Sikh faith. In Sikh Kirtan and ItsJourneys, musicologist Gurminder Kaur Bhogal introduces the devotional tradition of kirtan, examining it alongside the writings of holy figures, the Sikh Gurus and Bhagats, and its practice among musicians. The long-established tradition of kirtan originated in a canon of instruments and songs, each of which produces a singular spiritual and worldly effect when kirtan is sung. However, the realities of colonization and migration ha...
This book is the first to explore the interconnections between ecology and performance in South Asia. Aiming to ‘green’ studies of music and performance, this book explores intersections between ethnography, history, eco- and ethnomusicology, and film and performance studies by paying particular attention to the ecological turn more broadly visible in South Asian studies. The essays in the volume take inspiration from these different methodological strains in recent scholarship connecting the environment with South Asian music and performance traditions. The contributors address varied ecological settings of South Asian music and performance—from riverscapes to coastal communities, and...
Part of the Towards Freedom series, this collection brings together archival documents from the period 1 January 1947 to 2 June 1947. Together they discuss areas like Constituent Assembly, interim government, the civil disobedience movements organized by Muslim League, communalism, partition besides refugees and minority groups.