Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia

by Sherinian, Zoe C.; Morelli, Sarah L.

• ISBN13: 9780197791974
• ISBN10: 0197791972
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197566244
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2024-12-10
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia offers an inclusive lens through which to study the music, dance, and allied arts of South Asia, its diasporas, and the people who produce and use these cultural expressions. The authors in this collection--ethnomusicologists, dance scholars, anthropologists, and practitioners--understand music and dance as everyday lived experience. "The everyday" comprises practices of South Asians in multiple countries, whose identities include numerous castes, classes, tribes, genders, sexualities, religions, nationalities, more than twenty languages, and other affiliations. With the goal to de-emphasize an approach that fetishizes analysis of classical form and its technical virtuosity, this book instead contextualizes the understanding of aesthetic meaning within six themes: place and community; style, genre, and function; intersectional identities of caste, class, and tribe; gender and sexuality; technology, media, and transmission; and diaspora and globalization.

The thirty chapters in this collection demonstrate how the arts are meaningful expressions of human identities and relationships for ordinary people as well as virtuosic performers. Each author ties their thesis to hands-on, participatory exercises that provide multiple entryways to understand and engage with cultural meaning. In so doing, they empower classroom dialogue that treats embodied experience as a vital mode of enquiry, supplementing critical textual analysis to cultivate attentive, responsive, and ethical dispositions toward the music and dance practices of other humans and their life experiences.

Author Biography

Sarah L. Morelli is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Denver. Active as a scholar and performer, her work draws on training with sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan, kathak master Pandit Chitresh Das, and select disciples, and study in several regions of India and the US diaspora. Her book, A Guru's Journey: Pandit Chitresh Das and Indian Classical Dance in Diaspora (2019), details the development of the "California gharana" of kathak. Sarah is a co-founder and soloist with the Leela Dance Collective and Artistic Director of Leela Institute of Kathak, Denver.

Zoe C. Sherinian is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Oklahoma, a scholar-filmmaker, and percussionist. She is the author of Tamil Folk Music as Dalit Liberation Theology (2014) and has released two documentary films on the Dalit drummers of India. Her research has been supported by the University of Oklahoma and by Fulbright fellowships, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Asian Arts Council. Her current book project is titled Drumming Our Liberation: The Community, Cultural, and Sonic Power of the Parai Drum.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Sarah L. Morelli and Zoe C. Sherinian

Section One: Identity in Place and Community
Introduction by Peter Kvetko and Sarah L. Morelli

1. A Sense of the City: Embodied Practice and Popular Music in Mumbai
Peter Kvetko

2. A Melody of Lucknow: Hearing History in North Indian Music
Max Katz

3. Sufi Devotional Performances in Multan, Pakistan, a "City of Saints"
Karim Gillani

4. Hale da Divan: Trance, Historical Consciousness, and the Ecstasy of Separation in Namdhari Sikh Services
Janice Protopapas

5. "Small Voices Sing Big Songs": Music as Development in the Thar Desert
Shalini R. Ayyagari

Section Two: Performance Dynamics: Style, Genre, Coding, and Function
Introduction by Zoe C. Sherinian

6. Changing Musical Style and Social Identity in Tamil Christian Kirttanai
Zoe C. Sherinian

7. Professional Weeping: Music, Affect, and Hierarchy in a South Indian Folk Performance Art
Paul D. Greene

8. Sindhi Kafi and Vernacular Islam in Western India
Brian E. Bond

9. Music, Religious Experience, and Nationalism in Marathi Rashtriya Kirtan
Anna Schultz

10. Prestige, Status, and the History of Instrumental Music in North India
George E. Ruckert

Section Three: Intersectional Dynamics: Caste, Class, and Tribe
Introduction by Zoe C. Sherinian

11. Mundari Performance After the Revolution: Did Dance Save the Tribe?
Carol M. Babiracki

12. Systematic and Embodied Music Theory of Tamil Parai Drummers
Zoe C. Sherinian

13. Caste, Class, Aesthetics, and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam Dance
Hari Krishnan and Davesh Soneji with a contribution by Nrithya Pillai

14. Sacred Song, Food, and the Affective Embodied Experience of Non-Othering in the Sikh Tradition
Inderjit N. Kaur

15. Following in the Footsteps of Muria Music and Dance
Roderic Knight

Section Four: Identity in Gender and Sexuality
Introduction by Zoe C. Sherinian

16. Bhangra Brotherhood: Gender, Music, and Nationalism in Rang De Basanti
Pavitra Sundar

17. Disrupted Divas: Conflicting Pathways of India's Socially Marginalized Female Entertainers
Amelia Maciszewski

18. "All the Parts of Who I Am": Multi-Gendered Performance in Kathak Dance
Sarah L. Morelli

19. Music and the Trans-thirunangai Everyday at Koovagam, Tamil Nadu
Jeff Roy

20. Performing Youthful Desires: Bihu Festival Music and Dance in Assam, India
Rehanna Kheshgi

Section Five: Technology, Media, and Transmission
Introduction by Sarah L. Morelli

21. "We Know What Our Folk Culture Is from Cassettes and Videos": Rethinking the Popular-Folk Dynamic in the Indian Himalayas
Stefan Fiol

22. The Female Voice in Hindi Cinema: Agency, Representation, and Change
Natalie Sarrazin

23. Love Politics, and Life Between Village and City in Nepali Lok Dohori: One Album, Three Titles
Anna Marie Stirr

24. Pedagogy and Embodiment in the Transmission of Kerala Temple Drumming
Rolf Groesbeck

25. Sonic Gift-Giving in Sri Lankan Buddhism
Jim Sykes

Section Six: Diaspora and Globalization
Introduction by Nilanjana Bhattacharjya and Sarah L. Morelli

26. Contemporizing Kandyan Dance
Susan A. Reed

27. Desi Dance Music: A Transnational Phenomenon
Nilanjana Bhattacharjya and Rekha Malhotra

28. Dance in The Round: Embodying Inclusivity and Interdependence through Garba
Parijat Desai

29. Tamil Rap and Social Status in Malaysia
Aaron Paige

30. Beyond the Silver Screen: Filmi Aesthetics in Bollywood Fitness Classes
Ameera Nimjee

Index