Duke University Press Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious

In Musicophilia in Mumbai Tejaswini Niranjana traces the place of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai throughout the long twentieth century as the city moved from being a seat of British colonial power to a vibrant postcolonial metropolis. Drawing on historical archives, newspapers, oral histories, and interviews with musicians, critics, students, and instrument makers as well as her own personal experiences as a student of Hindustani classical music, Niranjana shows how the widespread love of music throughout the city created a culture of collective listening that brought together people of diverse social and linguistic backgrounds. This culture produced modern subjects Niranjana calls musicophiliacs, whose subjectivity was grounded in a social rather than an individualistic context. By attending concerts, learning instruments, and performing at home and in various urban environments, musicophiliacs embodied forms of modernity that were distinct from those found in the West. In tracing the relationship between musical practices and the formation of the social subject, Niranjana opens up new ways to think about urbanity, subjectivity, culture, and multiple modernities. Review " Musicophilia in Mumbai will likely be most interesting to scholars in the fields of South Asian studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. It will also be useful to those seeking to understand how the organization of urban space impacts social relations through musical performance.... Grounded in historical and ethnographic research, Niranjana's book is a multilayered resource connecting the past and present of this dynamic art form."--Rehanna Kheshgi "Journal of Asian Studies" (5/1/2021 12:00:00 AM) "An important text for anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and historians seeking to understand modernity in urban India. Moreover, Niranjana's careful attention to the ways that actual people construe urban sociality, produce subjectivity, and construct modernity should recommend it to a wider audience interested in global cities."--David Strohl "Ethnic and Racial Studies" (6/18/2020 12:00:00 AM) "For the discerning consumer, the current proliferation of texts on and about Hindustani Classical Music is a munificence worth exploring. Tejaswini Niranjana's Musicophilia in Mumbai ought to occupy a prominent position within this largesse, thanks to its combination of excellent scholarship, accessible language, and sagacious approach."--S.D. Chaudhuri "Telegraph India" (11/13/2020 12:00:00 AM) "A fascinating journey across the city... Musicophilia in Mumbai will, undoubtedly, set the standard for more scholarship on Hindustani music as also India's other gharanas. Even if the study is deeply localized and empirically distinct, similar patterns can be traced elsewhere in South Asia. The book suggests that the relationship between cultural practice and the formation of the social subject can be expressed in many ways and many contexts--especially in the 'non-west.'"--Bhaskar Parichha "KITAAB" (9/2/2020 12:00:00 AM) "In her highly accessible, enjoyable, and immensely informative book, Tejaswini Niranjana--an astute and sympathetic cultural theorist--weaves musical genealogies and musician biographies into rich descriptions of the lives, emotions, and lived spaces of musicians and their audiences. Her centering of enjoyment, pleasure, and love in the study of Hindustani music is refreshing. Beautifully written, Musicophilia in Mumbai will set the standard for new waves of scholarship on Hindustani music and India's other classical traditions."--Anna Morcom, author of "Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion" "Tejaswini Niranjana's beautifully written book gives us a glimpse into the ways in which Hindustani classical music enables distinct performances of modernity in a postcolonial context. She takes us on a fascinating journey across performative spaces while powerfully and subtly portraying the lives and str