How Does Music mean? Embodied Memories and the Politics of Affect in the Indian Sarangi

how does music mean? embodied memoriesand the politics of affect in the Indian sarangi

REGULA QURESHIUniversity of Alberta

In this article, I bring the multidimensional sensory medium of music into theanthropological conversation on meaning and embodiment Based on astudy of the sarangi that is frankly experiential as well as broadly referenced(India, Pakistan, North America), I explore how an instrument can become anicon of intense affect and performance contexts privileged sites for enactingand contesting cultural memories in the face of hegemonic resign ificationacross India's political transformation from feudal-colonial to urban-bour-geois dominance, [meaning, embodiment, affect, memory, performance, eth-nography, ethnomusicology, India, Pakistan, sarangi, music, instrument, nautch]

How does music mean? This article takes off from the interplay of the bodily in-volvement and interpretive moves that are involved in the ethnographic study of mu-sical practice. Although it is widely practiced as a route to gaining performance com-petence, studying a musical instrument can also become a conduit into the unchartedrealms of affective participation that challenge ethnographic boundaries as well asnotions of cultural knowledge. My long-term study of Hindustani (or North Indian)"art music" (Powers 1980a) through its only bowed instrument, the sarangi, graduallyenmeshed me in a web of meanings emanating from the sounds I learned to make andfrom the instrument that makes them. An expanding sense of experience, context, andreference for both the sounds and the instruments inevitably confronted me with is-sues of musical meaning, embodiment, and memory, but also of politics—the politicsof interpretive control over meaning and its affective sites, both sonic and visual.

At the core of this complex of issues was an instrument and the music it made,speaking powerfully and nonverbally in performance encounters that took a numberof forms—mediated, recontextualized on film, and above all remembered. Producedby highly skilled but poorly regarded performers, sarangi music found emotional echoin patrons who listened and even those who disdained to listen. Their vivid memoriesand actions shaped, for me, a vastly referenced complexity of meanings that could besavored as well as contested, investing the sarangi with "feelingful" ambiguity (Feld1996:97) and a deeply embodied ambivalence. How this ambivalence played outwent beyond games of audience jouissance to games of politics and to the game ofsurvival for the sarangi's musicians themselves.

Along with the sitar and the tabla, the sarangi has been central to the practice ofHindustani or North Indian (and Pakistani) classical (klassiki) music in the hands ofhereditary (mostly Muslim) specialists. The instrument is played upright (like a cello)with a heavy, arched bow while the fingernails of the left hand slide along the sides ofstrings made of gut. Its sound resembles the human voice, enhanced by the shimmeringresonance of numerous sympathetic wire strings. "Sarangi technique is expressive,

American Ethnologist 27(4):805-838. Copyright © 2000, American Anthropological Association.

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nuanced, and highly versatile; it lends itself to imitation of the voice, especially awoman's voice" (Goswami 1961:304). The instrument's major role has been to pro-vide singers with melodic accompaniment (along with the rhythmic accompanimentof the tabla). Sarangi players are best known for their association with the famoussalons of courtesan-singers and dancers whom they taught as well as accompanied.As a result, both instrument and player have been stigmatized by the urban (mostlyHindu) middle class that dominated the expansion of classical music after Inde-pendence in 1947, superseding the (Muslim-dominated) cultural milieu of princelycourts and salons. Little patronized except by radio and film, the sarangi has beenslow to conquer the modern concert stage as a solo instrument, while most accompa-niment has been taken over by the harmonium. In a smaller version, the sarangi isalso a folk instrument played by professional minstrels who sing devotional songs andepics across Northern India and Pakistan. All kinds of sarangi playing have beenclosely linked with singing and poetry, and they continue to affect the sarangi's con-temporary musical identity, even as the instrument is gaining a place on the interna-tional stage.

At the start, it was the sarangi's bowed technique that engaged my search for mu-sical affinities among cultural others in India. My sonic lessons in meaning began inthe safe realm of learning how to play but were quickly complicated by social mes-sages that brought into question the legitimacy of both teacher and instrument. On thestreet, I heard fiddling mendicant singers undermine the sarangi's classical identity,coloring it with a special estrangement. Increasingly, recorded sounds of mediatedsarangi embodied and resignified live performances, expanding the sarangi's affectivehorizons, while raising issues of control and manipulation.

My persistent musical enculturation into both the aesthetic and political sensi-bilities relevant to the sarangi has raised new questions about music as a sensory me-dium that is far more multidimensional than the conventional Western notion of mu-sic as a "language of feeling." In order to address this multidimensionality, I bringmusic into focus within an anthropological conversation that addresses the poeticsand politics of emotion with reference to embodiment and a nonverbal sensorium.

But how to get affective, multisensory experience across within such a conversa-tion? Rather than explicitly linking presentational style to ethnographic content, Ihave decided to write about sarangi music in terms of my own experience. I realizethat this has produced writing that presses language and may strike readers as un-usual; the intent is to prompt other than ethnographic kinds of questioning about howmeanings become known and how experience of music changes kinds of knowing.

In the recent debate over meaning, embodiment, and the politics of the senses,physically, culturally, discursively, and politically oriented positions have combinedto create a wide-ranging consideration in the anthropology of emotions and the body(Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990; Jackson 1983; Leavitt 1996; Lock 1992; Lutz and White1986; Seremetakis 1994). Across this literature, sound has figured marginally at best,despite its acknowledged presence in the cultural production of meaning and socialaction. Often, within this debate, the significance of musical sound has been ethnog-raphically asserted but interpretively ignored, effectively placing sound outside thepurview of anthropology.1 Examples abound even in writings on embodiment andemotions; Paul Stoller's Songhay violin, whose cries enter the bodies of mediums andspectators in spirit possession, stands out (1994:641), as do Lila Abu-Lughod's affec-tively compelling Bedouin songs (1986, 1990). More directly focused on sonic per-formance is Don Brenneis's discourse-based approach to emotions, which locatesFijian songs within a "social aesthetic" (1990). This useful concept has yet to be fully

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applied to music, however, since the verbal (rather than sonic) focus of socio-linguisticwork on emotions rarely encompasses the music by which songs are identified in thefirst place.2

Within the field of ethnomusicology, some studies focus on conceptual and aes-thetic domains (Rice 1994; Sakata 1983), but the autonomous development of thefield and its professional identification with music studies have led to prioritizing con-cerns of musical structure and performance procedures. It is in the quintessential^anthropological domain of small-scale societies that ground-breaking ethnomusi-cological work by Anthony Seeger (1987), Ellen Basso (1985), Marina Roseman(1991), and above all Steven Feld (1990) has called attention to the sensory, emo-tional, and social significance of culturally patterned sound.3 In arguing the centralityof sonic performance to what he calls "discursive knowing," Feld (1996) in particularintroduces an acoustic focus into the anthropological conversation on emotions. Col-lectively, these works explore musical sound and its aesthetic in relation to affectivedomains of myth and ritual, space and environment, and kinship and gender.

In contrast, professionalized music patronized by elites in stratified societies (artmusic) has claimed specialized scholarly attention mainly for its formal complexity aswell as its verbally articulated schemes of signification.4 This scholarship of art musicis focused on decoding musical utterances and on generating them in performance bymeans of discipleship (Kippen 1988; Sorrell and Narayan 1980). In this process oflearning musical insidership, both scholar and scholarship tend to become cooptedinto what Appadurai calls "a community of sentiment" (1990) whose ties of aestheti-cizing privilege leave little room for reflexivity, let alone a defamiliarizing holism.

Working with insider musical sensibilities leads to a semiotic as well as a discur-sive concern with music, a concern with locating meaning in the ensemble of sonicinformation and redundancies that musicologist Leonard Meyer calls style or "a uni-verse of discourse where meaning arises" (1967:7; see also 1956). Charles Keil moreexplicitly locates meaning making in the way pattern and discrepancy coalesce insonic experience as "participatory discrepancies" (1987). In Sufi music, I found thatmeaning was created sonically between performers and listeners (Qureshi 1995), aprocess also explored by Don Brenneis in Fiji (1990). Here, as in Feld's Kaluli exege-sis (1990), song texts provide pivotal references to affect, grounding the sonic experi-ence in shared horizons of memory and metaphor.

If anthropologists and folklorists have rarely extended the study of poetic texts tothe sonic matter of their oral performance, the musicological tradition of privilegingabsolute music has retarded the study of extramusical reference; in their own way bothconstituencies practice the Western analytic separation of sensory categories. Eth-nomusicologists, who explicitly situate music culturally and socially, still face the chal-lenge of de-reifying elite or "art" music (whether in the West, in India, or elsewhere) inthe face of entrenched conceptual hurdles placed in the way of recontextualizing dif-ferent elite musics as synesthetic and multisensory encounters in performance.

Literally embodying this challenge are musical encounters involving musical in-struments where visual and auditory sensations converge with material culture andsymbolic meaning. Anthropologists have dealt with instruments largely in the contextof ritual where instruments emerge as articulators of social dynamics: of power forWest African kings (for example, drums in West Africa; see Nketia 1962), of genderfor Pygmies (for example, flutes among Pygmies; see Murphy and Murphy 1985;Turnbull 1961), and of affective and social life (Feld 1986). This perspective stands incontrast to ethnomusicological ethnographies of instrumental music production inwhich a materially grounded approach to embodiment articulates individual musical

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subjectivity (Kippen 1988; Nuttall 1998). Another representational perspective ap-proaches instruments sociologically as complexly aestheticized objects that are usediconically as repositories for shared subjectivities within the purview of bourgeoiselites (Bourdieu 1984; Leppert 1993).

For reasons that I explore elsewhere (Qureshi 2000), the political dimension islargely absent from studies addressing emotion and embodiment in music. The an-thropological debate on the politics of emotion, on the other hand, has been takingplace largely on the terrain of discourse (Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990; Serementakis1994). To insert music into this debate requires a more broadly based and widely ref-erenced notion of music and its production. It calls for a willingness to expand musicstudies from their cocoon of conventionalized aesthetic and sonic jouissance in orderto allow political and historical implications to surface and thus to hear when music(and its instruments) speak to social struggle and to the politics of dominance and ex-clusion. Recent work in the area of popular music and culture approaches music fromjust this starting point, though its scope is ethnographically limited by being embed-ded in media culture and global technology (Krims 2000).

encountering the sarangi

Learning music is participatory and inevitably involves the body in ways beyondtechnical competence. My first sarangi lessons became lessons in applied aestheticslong before I learned how the sarangi is uniquely endowed with meaning. I caught myfirst glimpse of such a meaning in the entreating expression of Mirza Maqsud AM, ateacher at Lucknow's Bhatkhande Music College, as he taught me how to shape myfirst tune with "beauty" (khubsurti). As I learned to slide my finger along the strings, Iphysically entered a distinctive sound world ranging from the ethereal to the down-to-earth, a sound world that is intimately connected to the sound-making body of the in-strument itself.

My preoccupation with the sarangi and its aesthetic gradually took me from theperformer, as the musical executor of this aesthetic, to the patrons and listeners ofsarangi music who have the elite accoutrements of cultivated sensibilities and theirdiscursive representations, along with the financial resources to create and shapethose interactions between players and listeners that are the key elements of tradi-tional Indian performances. It was in the homes of affluent sarangi connoisseurs, dur-ing field research in Lucknow and Karachi in 1968-69, that I first experienced musiccharged with an unforgettable intensity and intimacy of shared affect, created by a fu-sion of highly unequal partners. In the process, I also learned of the contempt and ex-ploitation between the patrons and producers of sarangi music. On my return to Delhiand Lucknow in 1984, I studied the sarangi as both a disciple and an ethnographer.As a musician and affluent foreigner, moving between the antagonistic social worldsof hereditary musicians and their patrons brought home to me in a personal way thecontradiction between musical and class affinities. In 1992,1 finally undertook to gaina more vivid and nuanced sense of the sarangi's performance at the side of courtesansingers. In India and Pakistan, and even in Canada, it was former patrons' immenselyenriching personal remembrances of courtesan performances and interactions, espe-cially the remembrances of poets, that brought into relief for me a dynamic that linksmemory, affect, and sarangi music.

What struck me when exploring those links was the social and cultural subordi-nation of the musicians, despite their agency over the music. Meaning making waslocated among culture makers, cultural elites, and patrons: listeners rather thanperformers. My subsequent inquiry into the social relations of musical production


(Qureshi 2000) points directly to the terrain of meaning where sarangi music exer-cises its power and where contests of power over the music take place. Perhapsuniquely, the sarangi medium and instrument embody meanings and memories thatare diversely anchored and articulated within North Indian society and history. And,perhaps uniquely, the sarangi's changing milieus have offered points of entry to theways musical meaning is practiced not only aesthetically but socially and politically—points of entry to exploring how sarangi music means.

Ethnographically and historically, the sarangi is the only classical instrument inIndia that essentially remains in the hands of hereditary professional musicians, evenin the period since Independence. Excluded from the massive middle-class embraceof contemporary classical music, the instrument has also largely escaped the homoge-nizing impact of bourgeoisification. The sarangi is missing from the myriad of institu-tions of amateur learning (schools, music schools, and colleges), from the grid of syl-labi and examinations, and from the lineage of books and manuals, including thelatest "Learn to Play" series directed to a global market (Vir 1977, 1984, n.d.). Sarangiplayers can participate only as accompanists in the state-run academies that spurn thenow commonly used harmonium. The players' most prominent place of institutionalemployment, in both India and Pakistan, has been the state-run Radio (and later TV)where as staff artists they accompany singers and also perform solo. Their widespreadprofessional community, however, remains associated with the instrument's pre-modern musical functions and contexts.

Over the past decades, patronage has shrunk considerably, with the result thatmost sarangi players have decided to stop teaching the instrument to their children. Atthe same time, middle-class amateurs continue to avoid the instrument—apart from afew Westerners, myself included, whose elite music culture privileges bowed strings.While the sarangi's sounds are still evocatively present within the Indian musicalsoundscape, sarangi playing is today threatened with extinction. The information thatthe sarangi is an endangered instrument has reached the Internet through the efforts ofthe dynamic Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music among Children andYouth (SPICMACAY) in the form of an appeal to save the sarangi (http://www.rpi.edu/dept/union/indian/spicmacay/public_htm/sarangi.html, accessed July 15,1997).

More pertinent, remarkable initiatives have recently been undertaken in India toprovide support for the practice of sarangi playing and promote its acceptance amongplayers and patrons of classical concert music. In 1989, a Sarangi Mela (literally, aSarangi fair or assembly) was convened in Bhopal under the auspices of BharatBhavan, the cultural academy of the Government of Madhya Pradesh, which assem-bled sarangi players from all over India and published a manifesto to institutionalizesarangi teaching (Bharat Bhavan 1989). Five years later, in 1994, the Bombay SangitResearch Academy organized a Seminar on the Sarangi, addressing the threatenedsurvival of the instrument and ways to support the instrument and its players (Parikh1994; Shahani 1989). Their central concern was pragmatic: the marginalization of thesarangi on the classical music stage and the subordinate position accorded to its per-formers in the face of the unquestioned value accorded to the instrument and its mu-sic. In his keynote address to the Sarangi Seminar, Joep Bor, the foremost historian ofthe sarangi (see Bor 1986-87), spoke bluntly—the sarangi is "an anachronism":

Why should we try to preserve an instrument, a tradition when concert organizers andmusic writers continue ignoring it, when music producers only use it when they wantto express more meaning or the hidden sensuality of the ill-famed courtesans andwhen most sarangi players themselves don't care to teach their students? [1994:22,emphasis added]

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Bor puts his finger on the sarangi's special voice in the Indian soundscape: its uniquepurpose is to express more meaning. What meaning? And why does Bor consider thisa negative quality for the instrument? Is hidden sensuality the issue or is it the instru-ment's association with women? Or do people feel that meaning embodied in an in-strument gets in the way of the music it speaks? Bor's statement juxtaposes a set ofcontradictions that resonated throughout the Sarangi Conference and have echoedwidely across the constituency of music makers and listeners.5 My aim is to addressthe contradictions of the present from a perspective that is located primarily within theconstituency of listeners but also among makers of sarangi music. My questions aboutthe sarangi center on musical meaning as affect, embodiment, and memory in relationto musical discourse and on the politics of their contestation. In addressing these is-sues, I draw on a discussion that ranges both in and outside of music and to which, Ibelieve, the story of the sarangi makes a salient contribution.

musical instruments as sites of meaning

Instruments mean. They have meaning through cultural knowledge permeatedwith physicality and affect: embodied knowledge. To one enculturated in Westernmusic, the sound of a trombone may send shivers of awe of divine power, a hornsound may evoke the coolness and mystery of forests or a harp the erotic, feminizedglitter of high society. More concretely situated, an alphorn may cause tears of nostal-gia for simplicity and home, at least to someone who is Swiss. An individual accultur-ated in India may feel a bond with Lord Krishna embodied in the sight and sound of atransverse flute (murli) being played, while the plucked sitar-like vina may conveywisdom and spirituality, and the oboe-like double-reed tone of the shahnai proclaimswedding festivities and stirs exhilaration. Musical sound most immediately evokes asituated experience or what Martin Stokes calls the construction of place; it does so"by organizing collective memories, and present experiences of place, with an inten-sity, power and simplicity unmatched by any other social activity" (1994:7). Goingfurther, Stephen Feld proposes an acoustemology of place to explore sonic sensibili-ties in which sound is central to making sense, to knowing, to experiential truth (1996).

By grounding in personal experience the way an instrument makes meaning, Iemphasize the emergent and highly situated quality of both my argument and ethnog-raphy. For me, both originated in what I consider my own sentimental education forhearing Hindustani music—its content a synthesis of meanings learned through dis-course—and in what John Leavitt has aptly (if clinically) called "meaning-feelingexperiences" (1996:530). In other words, I am replicating and circulating culturallearning as well as sensory, emotional engagement with the goal of conveying notonly words, but their embodiment in voice and in what Stephen Feld calls "theresounding place of discourse as fully feelingful habits" (1996:99). Authorship is thusmultiply challenged: my words must acknowledge self while respecting others; theymust represent the affective nexus of multisensory perception and most of all theacoustic connotations in which musical meanings are situated and shared betweenself and other. The physical sensation of sound not only activates feeling, it also acti-vates links with others who feel. In an instant, the sound of music can create bonds ofshared responses that are as deep and intimate as they are broad and universal. Theephemeral bond of a sonic event does not commit to physical contact—though it mayelicit it. Experiencing music together leaves the personal, individual, andnnterior do-main unviolated. At the same time, the experience becomes public, shared, and exte-rior. Such a reification of feeling and sensation, in turn, endows musical sound with asocial existence coded as identity ("our" music) and with shared associations and


connotations coded as aesthetics (art), a theme that has been discussed in both West-ern and Indian philosophy and literature (e.g., Menon 1973; Schutz 1977).

The social nature of musical experience is thus intertwined in a highly significantway with its personal, individual character. And if musical sound has the potential to"speak" socially as well as individually, then its sounds may turn out to be potenticons of social practice as well as of personal experience. Music becomes as much apolitical tool as it is a language of feelings. Feelingful habits, then, are more than indi-vidual "structures of feeling" (Williams 1977); as performative, embodied practicesthey key cultural memories here through the medium of sound or, in this case, music(Stoller 1994:636, 637, 639).6

Affective cultural memories, however, diverge between social constituenciesand even between generations in accordance with the different pasts to which theyare able to connect the present. Controlling this diversity has been a major concernfor national movements and nation-states (Anderson 1983) where collective memo-ries are institutionalized by educational systems and by cultural institutions to be in-scribed as history. But when a nation's past becomes hegemonically and discursivelydefined, it also involves a politically required suppression of oppositional or minoritypasts. Will such organized forgetting erase other cultural memories?7 There is an in-herent conservatism in affective memories, fed by habitual practice (Connerton 1989)and embodied in what Richard Terdiman calls "materials memory"—a useful con-cept to signal the conservatism of things that literally embody the past in the present(1985:20). A musical instrument offers a special kind of materials memory in its dualcapacity as both a physical body and its embodied acoustic identity. Doubly mean-ingful as a cultural product and as a tool to articulate cultural meaning through sound,an instrument can become a privileged site for retaining cultural as well as socialmemory in the face of newly hegemonic resignifications.

Musical instruments occupy a special place as icons of music in the bourgeoiselite project of a national culture, both in India and in the West; one need only con-sider the plucked Ukrainian bandura and, in post-Yugoslavian politics, the Serbianbowed gusle—each instrument serves to accompany its country's heroic epics andhas come to stand for the nation itself. Discursively and historically defined within thehighly circumscribed domain of art music, instruments play a role of "distinction"(Bourdieu 1984) that is at once socially overt and aesthetically veiled by the prioritygiven to their music-related features. A social and art-historical discourse of meaninginvests instruments as objects with explicit historicity so that they become materialrepositories of past meanings, and their visual representations serve to define sonoritythrough historically situated social practices and aesthetic codes (Leppert 1993;Winternitz 1967). In Western art music discourse, the historicized relationship betweenan instrument's affective, embodied, and social meanings and the discursive repre-sentations of such meanings is what endows an instrument with a standard musicalidentity. Once trombone, horn, and harp have their embodied meanings widely cir-culated—their multisensory memories framed or abstracted in aesthetic dis-course—this discourse itself becomes a tool of control, shaped and disseminated by adominant class. At the same time, it also becomes a doorway to a sentimental educa-tion for outsiders to the experiential circle of those embodiments. This dual processtoward establishing a dominant but intertextual, intersubjective musicality has been ahallmark of bourgeois cultural cosmopolitanism. Incorporation and expansion arepart of the process by which local, subaltern, or subcultural musical practices andinstruments become co-opted and discursively redefined within the parameters of thedominant musical narrative.8


Subaltern groups and their musical responses to hegemony are complex, espe-cially in stratified societies where once-dominant musical milieus and practices areresistant to incorporation or are actively excluded from it. Their relationship is markedwith an ambivalence between resistance and exclusion that masks contestation.Though played out in the arena of sound and instruments, contests over "rules to feelmusic by" are political. The presence of an alternative aesthetic, alternatively con-structed in a different, oral discourse and fully embodied within a situated place offeelingful interaction reinforces resistance; however, what is ultimately contested isnot musical but political—it Is the power to control the agents of this discourse and in-teraction. The issue, as Lila Abu-Lughod puts it, is "how discourses on emotion oremotional discourses are implicated in the play of power and the operation of histori-cally changing systems of social hierarchy" (1990:28).

In other words, musical meaning and affect need to be considered as being his-torically and socially situated. But their flavor, tone, and effects are accessible throughpersonal participation, not only in the practice of making and hearing music but in therelationships that engender the active, oral sharing of a milieu-specific conversationabout and within the experience. As David Henderson observes in his study of Nepalidevotional songs, "discourse is not always textual, not necessarily visually biased"(1996:449). "Rememorizing" these feelings and habits through words is to reinforcetheir effects, since when words are fully heard as sounds they become part of anacoustic memory no less than music, as does their ultimate fusion in song. Experienc-ing textuality suffused with affect is, for an outsider, to encounter a "local 'social aes-thetic' " (Brenneis 1990:116). This is something that I, as a Western music ethnogra-pher, needed to internalize in order to negate a deeply entrenched habit of severingdiscourse from embodiment. Engaging thus with context from the inside, as RichardBauman posits (1992:142), such an "agent-centered" approach listens to local histo-ries as a past of embodied sensations. Only then can one begin to "feel along with" or"sympathize" (Leavitt 1996:530) how these others experience and assert their posi-tionality within as well as outside their musical, personal, and social spheres.

in search of a multiply sited-sensed ethnography

My engagement with the wider musical and social constituency of the sarangiemerges out of participating in and listening to a multiplicity of conversations within apostfeudal milieu of Urdu and Hindi speakers located across Northern India and ori-ented to Muslim-influenced high culture. By postfeudal, I mean people with past orpresent links to a lifestyle based on land ownership, an elite and now largely middle-class group that has been particularly prominent in Lucknow but is widely dispersedacross metropolitan centers of Northern India and Pakistan as well as, today, GreatBritain and North America. Lucknow, my major locus, stands out as a musical andfeudal center of Northern India, at least since the 19th century (Gazetteer 1993; Imam1925, 1959-60). Until recently, music there continued to be richly supported in theestablishments of landed patrons and in the salons of courtesans, which flourisheduntil the 1960s.9 Lucknow's musical preeminence has been further enhanced since1926 by the presence of Bhatkhande College, one of India's oldest colleges of Hin-dustani music.

This article reflects my social and cultural location within that milieu and, arisingfrom it, my active participation in the way its members have related to music essen-tially as connoisseurs and patrons, rarely as amateur performers, but as rasik (one whoknows how to savor) or sahib-e-zauq (gentleman of taste).10 I was fortunate to knowand learn from performers and listeners of courtesan performances in homes and salons


people who savored music (and its intimate connection with poetry) as a cultivationof affect and taste, a feast for the senses and the soul. Language—both Urdu andHindi—has been at the center of my cultural-musical apprenticeship. I have learnedthrough spoken words and verses that teach meaning while their speaking is itselfmeaningful. My connections with sarangi hearers extended from temple to salon and,at the most public level, to the common denominators of public media (broadcast, ra-dio, recordings, and film) and the street. But it was only when my sense of context andreference for the sarangi expanded beyond the ethnomusicological agenda of master-ing musical vocabulary and generative rules that I was able to direct my focus towardthe complex and intensely affective meanings that were shared in wide circles of con-versations around the musical, physical, and metaphorical sites of the sarangi. I faceda rich palette of responses to that single instrument and its sound by women who singfor men and men who play for women: responses such as emotion and poetry, as wellas moral depravity, devotion, feudal domination, and servitude. This drew me towardexploring how people experience the sarangi—how players, listeners, and patronsnegotiate the contradictory, multiply referenced meanings of its music, and how thepower of music serves the interests of power.

As my own sense of context and reference for the sarangi expanded, I found my-self inevitably drawn into perspectives of history or pastness, not as chronicles pro-ceeding forward in time, but as pasts remembered, as stories both detailed and dimthat are encoded in the sound and sight of the sarangi, rendering them iconic. Thesarangi became the site of stories—some scorned or half-forgotten, some reborn andstill in the making. The stories locate meaning: in the instrument's origin (in bothHindu and Muslim mythology), in its function (accompanying bards, jogis [mendi-cants], and courtesans), in its sound (articulating emotional abandon, weeping, andseparation), and in its tunes (timekeeping for drum and dance rhythms). But the storythat dominates the sarangi happens at the side of the courtesan singer and dancer (the"nautch girl"), in the hands of her teacher-accompanist-manager whose sarangi musicsupports her amorous song melody as well as her dazzling footwork. Hence, thesarangi is inexorably linked to the licentious and immoral social space where awoman offers her art and, by implication, herself. The sarangi and its music are alsolinked to music as feudal entertainment, as an artful sonic language used to expressand cultivate emotion (rasa). Finally, a new and only dimly articulated story links thesarangi to the highly regarded Western violin.

What do these stories tell, and who tells them? Above all, who are the agents ofthese stories? Issues of cultural agency and political power are directly implicated inthe construction and sustenance of the dominant musical narrative in 20th-century In-dia—the nationalist definition and institutionalization of classical concert music. Infact, the sarangi has hovered uneasily at the margins of this narrative, playing out cul-tural and political struggles through its music in a shifting retrospective of collectivememories. India's uniquely blended dominant class and its historical mixture of feu-dalism—state control and capitalism—have generated a complex structure of domi-nance that is marked by a shifting constellation of culture- and region-sensitive musi-cal components. Broadly speaking, this constellation encompasses on one handquasi-feudal patronage arrangements between music makers and consumers, inwhich music and instruments are defined according to function and place. On theother hand, there is the urban, government, and industry sponsored concert patron-age of generically classical and what is termed "light classical" music performed bydesignated individual artists. Tying both milieus together through sonic repre-sentation are the sound media: radio, recordings, and, above all, film.


Focusing ethnographically on this multiple musical constituency requires me toidentify specific domains and encounters, while also dialogically acknowledging mymediating role as performance researcher. I begin with my own memories of a 30-year journey from my Western outsider's naive perceptions to the differentiated ver-bal and musical involvement that became my participation in the stories themselves.My journey also enabled me to enter an open-ended and widely spread cosmopolitannetwork of groups and individuals who share in what one might call a North Indian orHindustani music culture, located mainly in its Lucknow-Delhi versions but extend-ing also to Bombay, Lahore, Karachi, and recently, to the major diaspora centers inEngland and across North America. Today, this domain of Hindustani music knowsno social or geographic boundaries but is intimately associated with the urban elitesof these centers and with the people who serve the urban elites musically, most of allprofessional musicians.

In a peculiar way, the stories of this feudally based, traditional Hindustani musiccombine extreme rootedness in local milieus (for instance, feudal Lucknow or thrivingpre-lndependence Lahore) with extreme portability (for instance, Bombay's film world orKarachi's muhajir [migrants from India] elite) as music lovers and music makers havetaken the stories to new centers and different kinds of patronage. What may appear asscattered sonic spaces are then, at the same time, launching pads for riding the channelsor "grooves" that instantly and intimately connect a floating community of listeners andmake them participants in a special sort of cosmopolitan, urban South Asian "public cul-ture of sound" (to expand on Appadurai and Breckenridge 1990).

In the ethnographic sketch that follows, I attempt to convey not only the contentof the sarangi's stories but the flavor and depth of their meanings and associations. Inorder to enrich what is inevitably my translation, I make reference to recorded musi-cal performances and also to pictorial representations, choosing both, of course,through a filter made of my own constructed sense of what culturally significant oth-ers experience (Leavitt 1996:531). My goal is to expand the meaning-feeling sen-sorium from the discursively mediated to the materiality and aurality of music itself.

To provide access to this sensorium is a special challenge of subjectivity and rep-resentation, since nondiscursive experience is inevitably grounded in the intimateconnection between ethnographer and emotive insight, between what is felt and whofeels, and between affective involvement and resistance to discursive distancing. De-parting from earlier analytically motivated work (Qureshi 1987, 2000), I deliberatelydistance myself from any framing concept. The need to segment and define gets in theway of allowing the associational planes of meaning to intersect in order to followmemories through to nostalgia and painting a broad canvas of affective scenarios. Inconcrete terms, I take the reader on a quasi-ethnographic journey through meaningencounters with the sarangi and, in a layered sketch paraphrasing my own experi-ence, I refocus these encounters to provide the reader with ethnographic points of en-try. The encounters begin in the most public spheres of the sarangi's sound, sight, andperformance and its most abstract meanings of loss and devotional longing. By meansof focusing on the body of the instrument, the journey becomes a close-up experienceof the sarangi's most intimate associations with the courtesan's salon along with itspolitics. During the period of musical modernization, after Independence, thesememories become embodied in nostalgic films and recordings. Also, the Creation ofthe concert sarangi gets under way, taking the shape of a struggle for a neutral, yet stillnostalgically embodied classical voice. I conclude by returning my focus to thesarangi players who have taught me, being able now to both celebrate and problematize


their musical agency within the complex and far-flung politics of how their instrumentmeans.

This article, then, represents an ethnographic practice that became as multi-sitedas the imaginary of its author. While my project stands somewhat apart from recent dis-cussions on multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1998), I hope that it might contribute inits own way to loosening the conceptual and local confinement that often marks tradi-tional ethnographies on cultural practices, by inviting the reader to consider the impli-cations of an ethnographic practice ranging widely between musical place and sonictranscendence and between large-scale social dramas and private subjectivities.

sarangi sounds and sonic images

Within the sound world of Indian art music, evocation is mediated through ashared musical vocabulary of "distinctive features" (Qureshi 1987) that are investedwith historically and communally constructed meaning. That the sound of the sarangiis iconic in just this way becomes obvious in India each time a national figure dies.For days after the deaths of Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964, Indira Gandhi in 1986, and ofher son Rajiv Gandhi five years later, All India Radio replaced regular broadcasts witha single sound: the long-drawn, smooth, delicate yet intense, and almost embarrass-ingly human voice of the sarangi played by classical sarangi artists on staff. Throughthese powerful national events, the sarangi's sonic character is endowed with associa-tions of sadness, loss, and mourning.11 My principal teacher, Ustad Sabri Khan, per-formed in all three broadcasts and recounts choosing ragas with a serious or devo-tional flavor and playing them reposefully, avoiding lively, rhythmic elaborations.Other musicians, he told me, did play such inappropriate elaborations since they re-ceived no guidelines other than to maintain the sarangi's sonic presence, thereby des-ignating sonority itself as distinctive to the occasion and conveying it to the generallistener (Ustad Sabri Khan, personal communication, August 24,1984).

But the sound of the sarangi is not funereal. More deeply anchored in the verydifferent public medium of the cinema, the same sarangi sound permeates the richmusical world of Hindi films, surfacing poignantly in brief improvisational interludeswhen lovers are separated and love is lost or, conversely, during romantic momentswhen love is confirmed. In the songs that punctuate traditional films, the instrumental"piece" or interlude (called "piece" in Hindi as well) that follows each stanza of a filmsong both heightens and relieves the intense message that exudes from the heart andlips of the heroine or hero. The instrumental voice of the sarangi reinforces the trans-personal reality of the song, making the emotions the song expresses more accessibleto the listeners. Sound is paramount here too, but so is a particular ornate yet highlyvocal, melodious style.12

Both types of sonic encounters with the sarangi are of recent memory—institutedand perpetuated by the Indian media. It was on the day Jawajarlal Nehru died that AllIndia Radio first decided to replace regular programming with 12 days of "doleful mu-sic" in the form of unaccompanied sarangi improvisation (Awasthy 1965:249-252).Sarangi solo interludes in film date back no further than the 1950s, although romanticfilm songs have included the sarangi since the 1940s. Not accidentally, the twosarangi players who have achieved the greatest international concert success—PanditRam Narayan and, later, Sultan Khan—first honed their tonal development whenworking for film music producers, the priority in film being to touch the listener in-stantly and evocatively through sound alone.

In purely sonic encounters with the sarangi, its sound arises disembodied from itsproduction process as a generalized expressive voice of feeling, loss, and longing.13


Behind this voice, enriching it with meaningful associations, are images of memoriesthat contain far more than sound. These images invest sound with agency and func-tion through the concreteness of place and time. One is the image of a jogi who singshis devotion while playing a small sarangi. Holding the instrument against his chest,the jogi draws a continuous melody with his bow that frames and sustains the phrasesof his voice. With his song, he pulls the listener toward a distant spiritual world of re-lease. He, himself, is a passing figure from a socially distant world, the lowly socialworld of mendicants. It is a sound image without location that moves on the marginsof the domestic world.

The power of the sarangi's sound image is nicely reflected in two large govern-ment tourist posters from India and Pakistan respectively. Each one shows a mendi-cant with his instrument—one in the desert landscape of Rajasthan (representing In-dia), and the other one contrasting with the modern city of Karachi (representingPakistan). Both posters are constructed by urban cosmopolitan culture to representthemselves to themselves and to represent to the world an entire complex of realitieswith cultural, religious, and pre-urban roots. What feeds this generalized image of thesarangi-playing mendicant and makes it potent are concrete memories of local en-counters, of a particular sound and sight, and of a specific flavor of experience. In myown experience, such encounters reach across Northern India and Pakistan, from Bi-har and Eastern Uttar Pradesh to Rajasthan and Sindh, as represented by the two post-ers. Significantly, these encounters also extend across the boundaries of devotionalreligions.

the devotional sarangi

Wandering the towns and villages of Eastern Uttar Pradesh are the gudaria,sarangi playing jogis who sing nirgun bhajans (devotional songs to the unseen God) ofprofound sadness and detachment from the world. Devotees of an unseen God and ofthe Hindu saint Gorakh Baba, whose center of worship is Gorakhpur, the jogis' musicdirectly invokes the futility of the material world and gives eloquent voice to the long-ing for eternal nonbeing.14 Encased in the unceasing strains of sarangi sound, suchsongs punctuated my dusty afternoons in Lucknow or mellowed an evening inBenares. Their sound draws the listener into a spiritual search transcending sectarianboundaries and arising from a deep disillusionment with human attachments. The fa-mous story of Raja Bhartrhari is told and retold in song to illustrate this experience oftransience, the foundation of the gudaria's songs: The raja presented his wife with aspecial fruit, only to receive it back as a present from another woman. The queen hadgiven the fruit to her lover, who regaled his beloved, who in turn offered it to the Raja.The Raja then renounced everything to become a jogi himself (B. K. Shukla, personalcommunication, November 15, 1992; see also Dasgupta 1962:387-392). The tran-scendent image of the sarangi-playing gudaria extends to doctrine. The patron poet ofthe jogis' verses is the saintly poet Kabir, a Muslim from the degraded weaver commu-nity whose poetry is also included in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Scripture of Sikhism.The jogis' songs focus on an unseen God who transcends Hindu-Muslim boundaries;they themselves identify with both the Hindu and Muslim religions and have Hindu aswell as Muslim names (Henry 1988). Jogis or gudaria are renouncers of possessionsand personal ties; according to Ram Singh whose fellow villager did so, the initiatemust first beg alms from his own mother and only then will he be accepted among thegudaria singers (personal communication, 1994).

A different experience of devotional sound lingers across the Western parts of theregion, connecting the sarangi and its sound with bards and epics. From the erstwhile


feudal Langa (bards of Sindh and Rajasthan) to the Pathan and Kashmiri faqir (mendi-cants), these musicians tell of devotion through the universally known epic tales oflover and beloved, of bravery and death, and of separation and the eternal quest forunion. In Sindh, Prince Sassui forsakes the world to seek his beloved Punhun acrossthe desert. In Panjab, Sohni drowns in search of Mahiwal, and Hir sings of the unat-tainable Ranjha. In Pakistan, I recall the intensely affective nostalgia among urban so-phisticates when Sindhi and later Baluchi faqirs from the countryside were first fea-tured on national radio and television, transmitting memories of regional as well asdevotional identification (Baloch 1973; Kothari 1972; Nayyar2000).

In the flavor of these epics and their performance, a special connection exists be-tween the devotional and the heroic, since the search for the Divine Beloved is also astory of human struggle. Tonally, this flavor is embedded in the combination of anambulant singer with a sarangi suspended on his shoulder and a goblet-shaped shoul-der drum, the dhad, played by a second musician. These drum-playing musicians arethe dhadi (or dhadhi, literally dhad players), who in Rajasthan traditionally accompa-nied their Rajput patrons to war; dhadhi seem to be the rural ancestors of the classicalcommunity of sarangi and tabla players that also calls itself mirasi (people with a heri-tage) (Bor 1986-87; Nahata 1961; Neuman 1990). The dhad-sarangi combination isheard most prominently in the dhadi (tadi) ensemble of devotional-martial music ofSikh religious epics in Panjab (Middlebrook 2000; Nayyar 2000). Performances inSikh Gurdwaras (temples) across the globe ensure continued patronage for outstand-ing performers like Bhai Bachittar Singh whose Teja Singh Tufan conveys the compel-ling force of the voice-sarangi combination accompanied by drumming.15

Across this region today, memories of rurally and locally rooted bardic perform-ances (M. A. Sheikh, personal communication, December 1992) are increasingly be-ing overlaid with staged and mediaized versions of their own sound image. These re-corded tunes and the images of their performers endow the affective impact oftraditional culture with an iconicity that conveys a locally focused and yet national oreven international identity to cosmopolitan listeners. This is true especially of thebowed string music of Baluchi and Pathan communities in Pakistan and for Rajasthaniand Sikh sarangi music in India as well as abroad. Also, sarangi players from remoteRajasthani villages have toured the West, representing India. They toured with theFestival of India in 1988. Sikh communities in Britain and across North America hostand record bards touring with sarangi and hourglass drums, whose sound and sightare iconic of a transnational but quintessential^ communal Sikh identity. This iden-tity is reinforced in widely circulated British (and Indian) recordings of dhad-sarangiepics.16

A different and more sedentary sound of devotion fills the Sikh Gurdwara andAmritsar's Golden Temple, where until recently the sarangi of the rababi (literally,"rabab players") accompanied the performance of the Sikh shabad, hymns (literally,"words") from the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh scripture authored by founder GuruNanak. The professional ragi (literally, "raga singers") sing these devotional poems tospecial raga tunes punctuated by a simple drum cycle. For centuries, hereditary Mus-lim rababi have provided melodic support for these traditional Sikh performancegroups—a partnership personified in the rababis' ancestral figure, Bhai Mastana, whowas the Muslim companion and accompanist of Guru Nanak (Sikh Sacred Music1967). This partnership also found expression in the shared poems and associationsamong Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu devotional traditions in Panjab. One need only citethe Sufi poet Bulle Shah, whose simple and striking verses are included in the GuruGranth Sahib. Music is an integral part of this religious poetry; indeed, the Granth


Sahib assigns each shabad poem a specific raga or melodic pattern (hence the singer'sdesignation as ragi).17

Today, recordings of a sarangi-supported shabad are preserving a memory, onethat still lives in the minds of many listeners. The partition of India and Pakistan in1947 effected a virtual separation between Sikhs and Muslims, leading to the whole-sale replacement of the sarangi by the portable harmonium—an occurrence similar towhat happened to the sarangi superseding the rabab in the 19th century. Still, I havefound a unique sense of affinity and fondness for the sarangi lingering among Sikhsand Panjabis, and they stand out among a handful of exceptional indigenous amateurplayers known to me who have themselves chosen to learn the sarangi even thoughthey did not inherit the tradition.

a complex visual icon: sarangi and courtesan singers

A special kind of memory is captured in the many North Indian court paintingsdepicting music-making in the 17th and 18th centuries. Representing both courtlyand divine power, these paintings (more than texts) serve as repository as well as ref-erence for the sarangi as a visual icon of its ephemeral acoustic identity, enriching itspresent with a concrete sense of its past musical life. The main image relating to thedivine depicts a sarangi playing singer, or a sarangi player with a singer, facing a her-mit or religious sage in a forest setting. The main courtly image shows a group of per-formers with diverse instruments facing a princely patron. A sarangi player is rarely in-cluded, but when present he stands inconspicuously in the background or themargins of the painting.18 Both images firmly situate the instrument at a distance fromthe world of domestic life, domestic interactions, and also at a distance from religiousspecificity.

These visual associations are reflected back in the stories of the sarangi's origin.Like other origin stories, these offer not so much organological or chronological evi-dence of an object's history but evidence of cultural meaning in the form of a general-ized validation vis-a-vis loosely conceived Muslim and Hindu cosmologies and theirrespective placements of music. The dominant story tells of a hakim (a Muslim sageand healer of Greco-Arabic learning) who, on his travels, was resting under a tree inthe forest when an enchanting sound awoke him. He discovered the dried skin andguts of a monkey striking against a branch above him, and to replicate the sound, heinvented the sarangi from the same material: gut strings, a skin covered belly, and awooden bow (Maheshwar Dayal, personal communication, January 28, 1993; UstadHamid Husain Khan, personal communication, December 1968; see also Fyzee-Rahamin 1925:55-56). A different and less specific origin story links the sarangi toboth the king of Lanka, Ravan and the Hindu deity, Rama. The sarangi's ancestor iscommonly identified as the ravanhatta (tool of Ravan), a stick-like folk fiddle playedby beggars (Amarnath 1989; Prajnananda 1973). But in Rajasthan, the dharhi—an-cestors of the most widespread sarangi playing community—are said to have de-scended from a Rajput ancestor who provided the music necessary for the birthdaycelebration of Lord Rama (Nahata 1961).

Against these visual and narrative background associations, a foreground imagearises out of the sarangi's sound that is iconic in a very different way. Intensely felt andpalpable, the image is both acknowledged and suppressed, cherished and hated. Thissonically mediated image is situated in the connotational world of art and aestheticexperience. It resides not only in the sarangi's sound but in the hands of its profes-sional performer. What renders the image at once highly attractive and controversialis its intimate association with women who perform for men. These are the tawaif or


bai (literally, "lady"), the courtesan singers of Northern India. The sarangi player's im-age is attached to the courtesan's; the sound of his sarangi is entwined with her song,and both are punctuated by accents of drums and ankle bells as she sings of anddances to the poetry of love.

The sarangi also inexorably evokes a notion of a place, the kotha (salon, or liter-ally, "room"), that is the designated as well as stigmatized domestic location of thesarangi player's and courtesan's performance and the locus of intimate interaction fullof feeling between her and her listeners through shared music. Encased in the imageof the kotha are memories of lived emotion, longing and emotional abandon, and for-bidden pleasures and pains. The image is that of a dwelling place for music of theheart, a chamber of intimacy, and a salon of rivals in contest for and submission to thequeen who reigns there. At the same time, the kotha evokes stories of deception andgreed, disrepute, immorality, and decay, capped by the story of the eventual triumphof middle-class morality—the destruction of a social evil and its secret life of blossom-ing sensuality expressed through music.

The lens of Indian film reflects the entire kotha complex back to the distancedviewer of today, endowing the kotha with nostalgia that glosses the popular image offeudal Indian society. Satyajit Ray's memorable film Jalsaghar (The Music Room1958), based on Tarashankar Banerji's novel, offers this nostalgia in all its aestheticnuances by focusing on the feudal connoisseur who sustains the tawaif's art as a pa-tron and is sustained by it. The classicized singing of Begum Akhtar, one of the lastgreat representatives of the courtesan tradition, lends the message veracity as well asan idealized dignity.

The hugely popular films Zindagi ya Tufan (Abbas 1961), Pakeeza (Amrohvi1971), and several versions of Umraojan Ada (AM 1981; unknown director n.d.) en-hance their tawaif heroines' stories with musical nostalgia even as they portray titillat-ing tales of morality triumphing over immorality. An image of the kotha, establishedby a short story by Khwaja Abbas (Zindagi ya Tufan) and Mirza Hadi Ruswa's great19th-century novel Umrao Jan Ada (1961), is intensified and broadened in each ofthese films. In the center of this kotha image stands the mujra ("salutation," a deferen-tial performance by the courtesan), the tawaif's formalized display of artistic masteryand of herself as an attractive female. The early kotha scene in Zindagi ya Tufanadmirably, if romantically, conveys the visual and musical atmosphere around thisimage.

The mujra offers a visual and musical ensemble that has become an embodimentof everything a kotha performance stands for. The highly adorned tawaif stands or sitsin the center, flanked, highlighted, and supported by at least one sarangi player and,less prominently, a tabla player along with other minor accompanists. This ensembleis represented in several generations of photographs and paintings dating back to theearly 19th century, reflecting British patronage of what the British came to identify asthe "nautch" (dance, denoting a courtesan's ensemble of song, dance, and instru-ments).19

Equally grounded is the identification of the sarangi—and to a lesser extent thetabla—with the tawaif ensemble and with her dance in particular. In the words of asenior tawaif: "The sarangi's story is inseparable from the tawaif" (Naina Devi 1984).A telling 19th-century drawing of musical instruments inscribed in Persian with "toolsfor the dance" illustrates this. The drawing visually depicts the sarangi's preeminencebecause the only melody instruments are two sarangi, marked as "a pair of sarangis,"along with a single tabla and cymbals.20 On the other hand, the general pictorialrecord displays the absence of the sarangi in other kinds of art music ensembles.


The experiences and memories that shape the life behind the sarangi-tawaif-kotha image are manifold. They are highly personal and yet remarkably consistent.For me, the experiences and memories began in Lucknow in 1965 with my own puz-zlement at the incredulity, enigmatic looks, and comments I received in response tomy decision to study the sarangi: "What made you choose this of all instruments?""Why don't you play a nice instrument like the sitar?" Then, more privately: "Decentpeople do not play the sarangi. It is a very disreputable instrument." And, in a loweredvoice: "This instrument belongs to the kotha."

There is a classical visual image of elite music making in India, found in manyvariations among paintings and sculptures and in reproductions of this art (often hang-ing in hotel lobbies) or on Hindu "God Posters." The vina of Sarsvati to the tambura orsitar of court entertainment and ragamala miniatures, this classical image featureslong-necked instruments made of large, fragile gourds and fine-wire strings that areplucked with delicate fingers by women as well as men. Court paintings from the 18thcentury are central to this representational aesthetic because the aesthetic includesscenes explicitly linked to musical modes, as in ragamala paintings.21

Conceptually and no less visually, the sarangi stands out as being starkly differentfrom the classical instrument described above. Always in the hands of a male player,the sarangi occupies a marginal place in court paintings from about 1800 onward,making it a recent arrival into the ranks of court instruments. Visually, with its short,thick body cut from a piece of tree trunk and its skin-covered cavity taking the placeof a gourd resonator, it presents an earthy contrast to the refined classical image. Thesarangi's playing strings are made of goat gut and its bow is a sturdy wooden stickstrung with horse hair. Both visually reinforce a strong association with physical na-ture and organic life, including the impurity of animal parts. They also reinforce thisassociation acoustically, through the intense, gritty, and somewhat nasal sound thatarises from the friction of horsehair and fingernails on thick strings of hand-twistedgut.

The surface of the sarangi, however, is highly adorned with motifs of refinementthat directly articulate the milieu of Indo-Muslim feudal culture. Two architecturalshapes dominate the head of the instrument. A delicately fluted arch and tower-shaped niche together frame what are really two pegboxes for three and a single stringrespectively, like elegant windows that invite the viewer's eye into a courtly interior.That the cultural hue is Muslim is echoed in the terms that designate these parts of thesarangi: mehrab (prayer niche) and minar (minaret). On the instrument's wide neckand fingerboard, the prominent vertical design of a fish in white bone inlay evokes adistinct Lucknow flavor. Machhii (fish), a metaphor for good fortune,22 is a prominentemblem of the Avadh kingdom (of which Lucknow was the capital) and its nobility,and fish are found carved on gates and buildings from palaces to the ruling dynasty'shalls of worship, the Shi'a imambaras (shrines to the Imams). Machhii is also repli-cated in traditional jewelry and in the delicate containers for surma (kohl for lining theeyes). The fish inlay serves as a fingerboard for the sarangi player's left hand, as does alonger inlaid minaret figure next to the fish. Some instruments are further adornedwith a dual fish motif, embossed and guilded on leather along the bottom of the in-strument.

A second royal animal, the elephant, becomes the small string-bearing bridge,with its trunk raised high and its stylized body pierced by holes for the many wirestrings to pass through. Small pegs for the strings repeat the fluted points of the mina-ret, while a running leaf motif along the borders and edges of the instrument further


reinforces the total image of adornment. Even the tuning key that accompanies the in-strument replicates motifs of a fish or a pointed leaf.

How the sarangi is talked about echoes the duality of body and adornment.Decorative motifs have their style- and shape-specific terms, while the structural partsof the instrument are identified as parts of a female human body: the forehead orbrain, the chest, the waist, the belly, the skirt, and even the eyes—the tiny bone ringsthat hold the wire strings in place. "Adorned like a bride" is the expression sarangiplayers affectionately use, and there is more than one story of a noble patron present-ing his musician with a sarangi covered in silver to enhance its beauty (Day 1891).

Acoustically, too, the sarangi conveys a similar duality. Its very sound charactercomes from the mingling of the earthy sound of horsehair on gut with the delicateecho of resonating, finely tuned sympathetic wire strings. The shimmering curtain ofsound produced by their resonance adorns the sarangi's melody like the glitteringborder of a woman's ghunghat (head covering). But while a ghunghat embellishes abride, the sarangi's melody embellishes the song of a courtesan, thus giving rise to thenegative valuation of the instrument as an icon of moral depravity. The sarangi inevi-tably conjures up the sarangi player, a musical mainstay of the courtesan's salon.

sarangi player and salon games remembered

As a hereditary musician, the sarangi player has an identity variously seen as in-ferior in social status, musically subordinate, and morally suspect in the eyes of sharif(respectable) North Indian society. These identifications converge within the largersocial category of the naukar pesha (service professions), consisting of low-class oc-cupational specialists who, by heredity, serve patrons in a relationship of structuraldependence. Musical subordination results from being an accompanist who must dothe bidding of the soloist. This translates into an ascribed social subordination for ac-companists. As members of the farac/r/ (endogamous "brotherhood") of accompanists,sarangi and tabla players have generally lacked any musical pedigree of gharana (sty-listic lineage) by which outstanding performers have been able to actualize artistic re-nown vis-a-vis their patrons.23

Within this identity of musical subordination, the sarangi player is marked with adistinct aura of disrepute insinuating sexual license. Superimposed on the strict ethosof bradri endogamy, female seclusion or pardah (literally, "curtain") practiced amonghereditary musicians is the sarangi player's personal closeness to courtesans, womenwho, by definition, lack both patrilineal identity and distance from unrelated men.The nature of these identities and the relationships they embody are encoded and ar-ticulated in finely nuanced terms of address and reference that serve to communicateshades of derogation.

Traditionally, a tabla player was called tabalchi, a word containing a Turkish-derived suffix attached to providers of personal service, for example, cooks (bavar-chi). Nowadays, the preferred term is tabaliya, which uses the standard neutral suffixapplied to professional instrumentalists such as sitariya or sarodiya. Sarangi players,however, have been marked by a unique term of address that is entirely different andis highly denotative of the special and dubious identity of this particular instrumental-ist. The sarangi player's traditional appellation was ustadji. Ustaddesignates a master,teacher, and transmitter of knowledge. The title confers a high degree of honor, andan ustad commands and retains the highest respect from his students. The suffix // is atraditional honorific attached to titles as well as to names, for example, Panditji orRaviji. But in combination with ustad, the addition ji instantly suggests only one thing:a teacher of a courtesan and involvement in the disreputable enterprise of the kotha. I


first encountered this significant nuance, in the form of a subtle innuendo, when aLucknow gentleman asked my first sarangi teacher, the late Mkza Maqsud Ali Khan:"Would you like to be called ustad or ustadji (with emphasis on y/)?" To the knowingsmiles of the non-musicians present, my teacher firmly declined the honorific ji.

I learned that ustadji connotes sexual impropriety from the specific efforts of myteachers to disassociate themselves from an identity iconic of sexual licence. MirzaMaqsud Ali swore on the Koran that he never taught a tawaif. Later, Hamid HusainKhan swore that he never "sat [playing] behind a woman [singer]." When I becameHamid Husain's properly initiated disciple, my middle-class shagird bhayi (brotherdisciple) taught me to address our teacher as "ustad sahib" (Mr. or Sir teacher), a lin-guistically odd but ostensibly respectable alternative to ustadji. My being a youngwoman (then) added to the delicacy of the situation, although it also protected mefrom the image of being a male sarangi student who aspired to accompany a courte-san. Once in the hands of a sarangi teacher, however, I was cast in a relationship withhim analogous to that of the tawaif. The major difference was that with a husband andsmall children present I was visibly married and identified as respectable in localterms by the social and actual presence of my affinal relatives. But my clear positionin this dialectical opposition of good and bad women also prevented me from experi-encing, beyond an occasional glimpse, the way my sarangi teachers would have re-lated to a socially unattached woman who, as a Westerner, would have brought withher an identification with loose morals.

In contrast to the tuitions delivered at genteel students' homes, professional mu-sic has traditionally been taught in a hallowed, quasi-familial relationship in whichthe teacher, like a father, controls the student's development and enables his profes-sional advancement; in return, the student offers filial devotion and material support.When the sarangi player extends this relationship to a woman performer, he assumesdomestic if not sexual intimacy and facilitates her contact with (male) patrons in re-turn for a share of her earnings. The film Zindagi ya Tufan is perhaps unique in por-traying this relationship as part of a brief musical teaching scene in which, signifi-cantly, sexual implications are deflected by showing the two tawaifs as small childrenrather than young girls (Abbas 1961). The publicly displayed closeness to women iswhat makes the sarangi player an icon of ayashi (sexual debauchery) and dallali(pimping) in the eyes of "decent" middle-class society, although sarangi players them-selves have told me of how natural it was to share love (piyar) and intimacy (taalluq)with the tawaif they taught and accompanied.24

Most of all, the sarangi player reflects back an inverted or even subverted imageof the sharif male consumers' own interaction with the tawaif and her musical art. Asa man, the sarangi player also becomes, in a distorted way, the rival of other men,even though as a musician he is nothing but their despised servant. Thus, the mostgraphic caricatures of an ustadji's behavior while "producing" the tawaif musically aswell as socially have come to me from patrons who spoke of the ustadji's aggressivebow stroke and his intensely vulgar wink—although with a submissively loweredface. And he does it all to "eat a woman's earnings," a crass inversion of patriarchalnorms where men support women—which makes him despicable even to fellow mu-sicians and to himself. Despite the effective demise of the kotha, some older sarangiplayers today still evince toward patrons a mixture of abjectness and imperiousnessthat is perhaps reminiscent of those contradictions.

The negative social image of the sarangi player is symptomatic of the social dis-approval expressed even by those who patronize him, when they are speaking as ach-chhe log (well-situated people) or members of "good society." This, however, is only


part of a story rich in dichotomies. The story unfolds fully inside the kotha, in a salongame called mujra and played by the musicians and patrons.25

Inside the kotha, the sarangi player is a side show compared to the tawaif whoholds the mujra for her patrons. Symbolic of deep submission, the term mujra itself re-calls the deep obeisances that the tawaif executes in an entreating and artful gesturewhen introducing her display of artistic mastery and herself as a desirable female. Avivid sense of event and place is integral to the remembrance of the mujra, togetherwith a sense of flexibility that borders on informality. The mujra is really a heightenedmusical frame for a dialogue between one woman and many men. In this dialogue,however, only the tawaif is privileged to use the language of song. Patrons respond inmultiple forms through gestures, exclamations, and material rewards. Underlying thisunequal discourse is an asymmetry of power tempered with gentility. The patron re-quests and the tawaif complies, while the instrumentalists frame and facilitate hercompliance. A Lucknow patron recalls: "Whatever you made a farmaish (request) foris what was performed. Anything." The improvisational musical structures allow theperformers to respond flexibly to the listeners' preferences, while also pursuing theirown performative goals.

The mujra, then, is a performance put on by the tawaif and her musicians to at-tract and satisfy an audience, to entertain and create an atmosphere (sama bandhna).What the audience has come for, in the words of Lucknow poet and patron Umar An-sari, is ruhanighiza (literally, "soul food"; see also Nun 1991), an essential emotional-spiritual nourishment that is inherent in music.26 The tawaif offers this nourishment tothe audience through poetic words that she renders with melody, mime (bhao),rhythm, and dance.27 To engage the mahfil—the untranslatable term describing anevent that encompasses both congenial gathering and performance—the tawaif be-gins with a dance, her ankle bells (ghungru) marking the tabla's rhythm to thesarangi's repeated melody.

Lucknow patrons recalled how the young Begum Akhtar, then known by the tra-ditional courtesan name Akhtari Bai, "swept them off their feet" with her thrillingopening dance at an unforgettable wedding performance for honored male guests.Courtesans still perform at weddings—traditionally only for male guests who can alsoact as patrons. The entire audience was in a stir during Begum Akhtar's striking evoca-tion of one simple phrase: "papihepiu ki boli na bol" (Song bird, stop calling [piu] thename of my beloved Ipiaj). Vocal and gestural variations during the dance suggestmultiple facets of meaning that are inherent in a single phrase, making it a deep andunforgettable total musical experience. Those who remember Begum Akhtar's per-formance still find it a vivid memory after 60 years.

For both tawaif and musicians, dancing initially entails a standing position that isappropriate when encountering patrons who are, by definition, superior in status. Themujra mahfil is both a darbar (royal court) or ranked assembly where status is vali-dated and a maidan (field of battle) where rivals assemble and compete.28 Just as inthe feudal court assemblies, the tawaif awaits or elicits the permission (ijazat) of hersuperiors, and only then, followed by her musicians, does she sit down to present thesongs that speak to her listeners' special preferences. She begins with a light classicalthumri or dadra, but, above all, she sings ghazal for Urdu speakers with Muslim cul-tural affinities, also adding Hindi songs like Hori, Kajri, and Chaiti, depending on thelisteners' affinities with Muslim or Hindu culture. Now the tawaif transforms herselffrom an entreating wench to the queen of the mahfil; she becomes the candle(shamma') among moths (parvane) and the proud target of the audience members'rivalries. The tawaif is the cupbearer (saqi) of the wine of ecstasy, but she is also the killer


who wields the dagger (khanjar) of cruelty. Aesthetically and affectively, her listeners(the patrons) become her lovers and are ardent, helpless, and silent. But her songsspeak for them as well as to them. She is the voice not only of love ('ishq, muhabbat)but of the lover Cashiq), his suffering and his delights.

Through its rich metaphors, the tawaifs poetry eloquently portrays the entirerealm of this experience while clothing its expression in an idiom of high culturalspecificity. Many ghazals are quintessential^ mujra texts. Their poets speak in an ar-tistic partnership with the tawaif who sings their verses and renders them fully expres-sive. Poet Afzal Iqbal defined the relationship of poet and tawaif as entwined betweenaction and compliance (lazim-malzum) (Afzal Iqbal, personal communication, Janu-ary 12, 1993). To Umar Ansari (personal communication, November 26 and 29,1992), poetry and music are as close and complementary as bodice and sari (choli-daman). But unlike the ustadji who creates the tawaifs music, the poet creating herwords remains a patron. He "makes the kotha his drawing room." More generally,Muslim imperial preference and, later, its British succession29 imbued the productionof Urdu poetic refinement with an aura of elite respectability that survives today inmiddle-class form.

In the kotha, the tawaif sustained a vital and thriving enactment of this high cul-ture, thereby validating and disseminating to her listeners adab, or cultural compe-tence and refined deportment.30 Her listeners, an audience of well-dressed nobles,patricians, courtiers, traders, poets, and their entourages become actors along withher. A gloss of order and cultural propriety, and a nostalgia for both, guild the memoryof these enactments, including their contradictory and subversive essences having todo with money and sex. Ruthlessly cutting across all statuses is the money that buysthe tawaifs favor and ultimately sustains the kotha. This money and the power itbrings privilege those who can spend it, breaks the hearts of those who cannot, and iscapable of releasing even the tawaif from the captivity of her patrons. The impover-ished landlord, the nouveau-riche army contractor, the classless adventurer, and evenproperty-owning ex-tawaif are figures included on the margins of this rememberedscene. But at the center of it all is a woman who undermines her society's fundamen-tal arrangement between the sexes: an arrangement expressed through male domi-nance, female seclusion, and reproductive control through arranged marriages.

As a woman not tied to a man and untrammeled by patrilineal kinship con-straints,31 the tawaif invites male attraction and interacts freely with men; shewelcomes them to act out what society suppresses outside the kotha in the interest ofperpetuating familial well-being. Here is where aesthetic games can become flesh-and-blood experiences, where games with songs and words become life, where theabstract beloved takes on the shape of a real woman, and where the unthinkablebecomes possible. The unthinkable here is an open encounter between a man and awoman, an intimate conversation without kinship ties.32

The encounter is, however, more than an individual experience. It is alsopublic performance in the presence of others who seek and find their own way ofparticipating in it. Some people watch and pine and some assert and conquer; incompeting for the attention and affection of the tawaif, they become each others'rivals. It is a game of a feudal darbar played in a delightfully inverted form, with asocially inferior woman installed on the throne in place of a socially superior man.Most of all, it is an erotic game between the sexes. That these inversions are sa-vored as a situational double entendre comes through in the generous laughterfrom otherwise reserved gentlemen—something I have found to be a frequent partof the nostalgia of kotha reminiscences.


The kotha's multiple games are played and remembered to the sound of thetawaif's music or, rather, to the distilled essence in sound of what is actually felt andexperienced. This creates a heightened sense of a reality that is both physical andtranscendent. It is the sound of the music that suffuses this reality with difference,marking its fundamental separateness from the social world outside the kotha. Thisdifference is inseparably tied to the highly ambivalent assignation of music in theMuslim-influenced culture of urban North India as the harbinger of emotional excessand of music making as bhandela kam, the despised work of bhands (lowly entertain-ers and illusion mongers, as put by a senior connoisseur) (S. B. Khan, personal com-munication, January 12, 1993). For Muslims in particular, this ambivalent status ofmusic can become part of a fundamental dialectic.33

modernity, media, and meanings resignified

Kotha memories and stories have both coexisted and clashed with the modernnarrative of music as national culture for independent India. Established by urban pro-fessional elites in the metropolis (mainly Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay) and histo-ricized by scholarly Brahmans, this powerful initiative resulted in an expansion ofpublic concert life and music education (Aspects of Indian Music 1964; Luthra 1986;Misra 1985; Qureshi 1991). All India radio became the centralized voice for this clas-sical bourgeois music and also its major patron since feudal courts were graduallyabolished after Independence. Musical defeudalization included the closing of kothasand the banishment of tawaif from the radio, thus breaking up the sarangi-tawaif part-nership.34 Sarangi players ended up as generalized accompanists for male singers,thereby loosing the pedagogical pedigree they exercised over the tawaif. Today, thisloss is reflected in an inverted visual arrangement of a vocal ensemble. Now thetabalia—no longer tabalchi—sits to the right of the soloist singer, once the sarangi'spreeminent place, while the sarangia—no longer ustadji—is relegated to the less im-portant spot on the singer's left (once the place of the tabla player or the juniorsarangia) and is considered an unmitigated musical dependent on the singer.

Something very different has happened to the sarangi in the recording studio, amore eclectic source of public musical culture, disseminated by records, radio, andfilms in a symbiotic arrangement (Qureshi 1999). Performed for commodification andmass production, studio music has lifted meaningful musical idioms from their con-texts and given them an extended acoustic presence that is both more public andmore private than that of live performance. Tawaifs were foremost among the profes-sional musicians coopted into the recording industry that was dominated by film mu-sic production and its aesthetic oi evocatively underscoring sentiment and action byeclectically drawing on the associative power of mujra songs (Agnihotri 1992).

In the recording studio, these tawaif singers and their accompanists becamevoices and names only as their bodies disappeared from the listener's presence. On film,the singers were soon removed from the screen and replaced by lip-synchronizingactors and invisible playback artists. The singing voice of the tawaif was thus sani-tized, and it eventually merged with a generalized female singing style of filmi (popu-lar film) songs, epitomized by the legendary film singer Lata Mangeshkar. What re-mains distinctively associated with the ambiance of that voice is the sound of thesarangi. Disembodied from its context, its socially controversial performer hidden bythe film's own images, the recorded sarangi could become the compelling voice of itsown amorous life. But it has become a voice without body: even when films depict anactual mujra, the sarangi player is nearly always kept away from the camera, leavingthe sarangi's sound to speak for itself. In contrast with the more realistic mujra scenes


of the earlier film Zindagi ya Tufan (Abbas 1961), where the sarangi player is seenteaching and accompanying the tawaif, highly acclaimed mujra scenes of Pakeeza(Amrohvi 1971) and of Umrao Jan Ada (AM 1981; unknown director n.d.; bothIndian and Pakistani versions) contain sarangi improvisation that eloquently intro-duces the tawaifs songs, but the instrument remains nearly invisible throughout thescene.

The extensive and widely popular repertoire of film songs provides an eloquentrecord of a more general process of musical incorporation that is enriching and per-haps gradually transforming the traditional sound image of the sarangi. Thus, one canhear the sarangi draw memories of devotional folk music from its strings, connectingthe sarangi's sound with a more spiritual kind of longing and with different regional-cultural associations, thereby investing it with new shades of meaning. Added to thisis the impact of the sonic reality of the recording studio, a Western technologicalcreation that has used Western as well as Indian instruments eclectically. Here, thesarangi's thin but resonant bowed string sound presents a distinct acoustic profile dif-ferent from divergent sounds of Western instruments that are used singly and in quasi-orchestral groups. The great K. L. Saigal's song Jiwan ka sukh from the 1945 filmDhoop Chhaon offers a poignant early example of this juxtaposition between thesarangi's solo piece and the accompanying chorus of Western bowed string instru-ments.35

Finally, as the Saigal song recording illustrates, the sarangi's projection of a deli-cate, intensely expressive sound owes something to the generalized sound image ofthe violin that came to dominate the film music studios from the 1940s onward, alongwith other Western instruments. Gradually, the solo sound of the film sarangi becamethe aestheticized voice of love, separation, and sadness on screen, even taking theform of free-flowing alap (improvisatory) phrases that also use the expressive power ofraga melody.

This same sound has eventually carried the sarangi onto the classical concertstage as a solo instrument. The artist who more or less single-handedly created thistransformation is the outstanding sarangi virtuoso Pandit Ram Narayan, the most fa-mous and most widely recorded sarangi player in India today. For years, he was theforemost sarangi player of Bombay film music, preceding Sultan Khan. Through hissubsequent concert success and his recordings, sound (now a Hindi-Urdu word) hasbecome a prime concept to sarangi players all over India, resignified to denote anacoustically focused special resonance that also includes amplified sound. There is aspreading interest in obtaining the factory-made Western harp strings that Pandit RamNarayan has been using to create a smoother tone and higher pitched tuning for in-creased projection on a concert stage.

Ram Narayan has also pioneered an internationalization of the sarangi's aes-thetic. This is reflected back by European audiences who respond to the specialtone and expressiveness of the sarangi as an extension of these qualities of the violin.36

Ram Narayan's first recording of a Paris concert captured a musical moment that,as he told me, brought tears to the eyes of the listeners before him (Pandit RamNarayan, personal communication, September 1988). The affinity between sarangiand violin has helped to inspire a new expansion of the sarangi's instrumental id-iom. Ram Narayan has introduced expansive single tones that fully display thesarangi's resonant sonority as well as fast legato passages of equally'weighted,cleanly separated tones that run across a wide ambitus,37 contrasting considerablywith the traditional preference for differently shaded, rhythmically diverse, and tonallycircuitous improvisation.


Since Ram Narayan's introductions were made, recordings and international ex-posure for the sarangi have increased, presenting a greater variety of playing stylesand musical personalities to listeners across the world. Even the traditionally ornatesarangi style termed "light classical," that is, courtesan salon music, can now be heardin sanitized concert form. Remarkably, the singing voice is once again in partnershipwith the sarangi—both Sultan Khan and Dhruba Ghosh sing some of the songs theyplay. And, with Zakir Husain, Sultan Khan has reinvented the salon partnership oftabla and sarangi. New contexts and a new sonic surface offer new interpretive fields,even as old sounds reiterate old meanings.

sarangi players as agents of difference?

In his deconstruction of culture and memory, Richard Terdiman asserts that "cul-ture is an accumulation. It achieves relative stability and coherence through rehearsalin individual and social memory" (1985:17). The power of the sarangi's embodiedmeanings is in its capacity to mobilize shared associations that are thoroughly affec-tive. The sarangi offers a special kind of "materials memory" that becomes fully activethrough the visual and above all the sonic experience of the instrument. But what isbeing "rehearsed" in a sarangi performance is more than culture; it is culturally honedbodily sensations and emotions that deeply touch individual and social identities. Fortoday's urban cosmopolitan hearership identities, these identities are marked by dif-ferent pasts; for some, the sarangi is a privileged site for retaining cultural memory,but for others, it becomes a contested site for reconstructing the past—for "living otherpeople's memories" (Lipsitz 1990). A performance becomes a locus in which oldmeanings are tested and new ones are negotiated; where rules are enforced, broken,and rewritten; and where musical meanings are interpreted and felt anew, as memo-ries are fashioned into icons relating to the present moment.

This is cultural-musical work performed by individuals who are differently posi-tioned within a historically changing system of social hierarchy and political domina-tion. Seen from the bourgeois cultural nationalist position, the instrument sarangi hasoften conjured up the specter of feudal Muslim domination and of a culturally sanc-tioned sensuality abhorrent to bourgeois gender norms while the sarangi performerhas often embodied an abject otherness of class, unmitigated by ties of feudal pater-nalism. Religious differences can shape aesthetic and historicizing responses: the in-strument's devotional associations are deeply meaningful to Hindu and Sikh aestheticsensibilities, but rememoration to match the indigenizing-Hinduizing project of a na-tional music history contrasts with embodied memories of external Muslim origins.

Performers are crucial partners within this interplay of meanings; they literallygive it voice. But they inevitably do so from a position of dependence because profes-sionalized music making is subject to patronage and therefore to direct relations ofpower. The sarangi now stands out as the timbral voice of these relations due to thenationalization of feudal relations to musical production; therein lies the sarangi's at-traction as well as its stigma. Vidya Rao speaks eloquently of the painful process ofmarginalization experienced by courtesans and their musicians who are protagonistsof explicitly contingent, audience-sensitive, nonlinear musical repertoires that Raocollectively calls thumri (the primary light classical genre associated with the tawaif)(1996). But the performance of this music can also become a contestation, if only in asubversive way, contradicting or competing with the hegemonic mainstream of clas-sical genres.

Given their fragile position within this mainstream, performers work in diverselyindividual and often subtle ways to assert themselves.38 In this process, individual


sarangi players are mobilizing widely shared associations using both creativity and re-sistance. Ram Narayan has refused to accompany any singers, and he has eliminatedtawaif style grace notes from his music. In doing so, he follows a domesticating musi-cal trend toward sanitized disembodiment—the prerequisite for classical abstractionor "absolute music" that had also been adopted by classical singers of courtesan ori-gin like Kesarbai Kerkar. Ram Narayan, followed by several other Hindu sarangi play-ers after him, also distanced himself from the Muslim cultural identity of the sarangiby explicitly adorning his instrument with a small image of Saraswati, goddess oflearning and music. Among sarangi players from Benares, Ramesh Misra follows thefamous (late) Gopal Misra who cultivated the strong rhythmic articulation charac-teristic of the temple-derived dhrupad genre.

Sabri Khan, on the other hand, maintains that the art of accompaniment is an in-tegral facet of sarangi playing. But he has also developed a comprehensive solo idiomencompassing an expansive alap structure that draws on vocal models for tonalelaboration and on the sitar style for rhythmically controlled improvisation. And heincludes traditional thumri in his solo repertoire. Sultan Khan goes further; he deliber-ately cultivates the feelingful, ornate vocal style of the traditional sarangi idiom andeven sings himself, validating the sarangi's vocal nature and making its music imme-diate and intimately accessible to his listeners. The associational riches of the sarangiclearly offer much for the creative enhancement of Hindustani concert music.

Still, these associations continue to be obstacles in the way of the performers andtheir acceptance on the concert stage, which is today a career necessity for attainingartistic status and public patronage. Sarangi players, therefore, also feel the need to di-vest their instrument of its old embodiments. At the 1994 Sarangi seminar, sarangiplayers collectively demanded that the sarangi no longer be played at occasions ofmourning because they saw this functionally specific association as a genuine obsta-cle to achieving a broad musical scope for the greatly underpatronized sarangi. In thesame vein, more than one sarangi player has told me that he bought the instrumentfrom a wandering jogi because "it hurt me to see the sarangi used for religious beg-ging (bhiksha)" (Jai Narayan Misra, personal communication, 1984; Ram Narayan,personal communication, 1992). In addition, sarangi players have explicitly dissoci-ated themselves from accompanying courtesans, although they acknowledge the mu-sic of that milieu as the very core of the sarangi's musical identity.

conclusion

Does the sarangi mean too much? Do its visceral connotations need sanitizing?For listeners as well as players, the concreteness and complexity of the sarangi's em-bodied memories have been confronted and constrained by the national project ofclassical music with its univocally constructed heroic narrative and its invitation tocultural forgetting, so as to make room for its own affective enculturation that is fo-cused on a more abstract aesthetic. But listeners still hear affect, sadness, longing, andsensuality in the sarangi's music. Feudal nostalgia, in the sense of a cultural nostalgialaced with the delicious taste of past domination, also lingers on, long re-enacted infilm culture and invoked more recently by the bourgeois revival of the ghazal, an ac-cessible and evocative fusion of art music and elite poetry (Manuel 1986; see alsoRosaldo 1989).

Today's ruling terrain of performance is the modern concert stage, the placewhere careers and audiences are made. Is there room on the stage for the "meaning"Joep Bor sees as feelingfully and contestationally embodied in the sarangi? A centuryof Indian nationalism and two generations of political independence have seen national


musical culture entrenched institutionally and aesthetically and expanded to thescope of a world music.39 In this burgeoning world of classical sangit (collectively de-noting vocal and instrumental music and dance), there are signs of a co-optational ret-rospective stance developing toward feudal musical culture as well as signs of femi-nist initiatives to recontextualize courtesan culture and music (Naina Devi 1984).Sarangi conferences can be seen as affirmative action to get the sarangi itself recon-textualized (Bharat Bhavan 1989; Bor 1994).

The real question: recontextualization by whom? In "The Social Life of Things," Ar-jun Appadurai discusses recontextualization as a central dynamic in the social biographyof objects (1986). But if objects can speak as repositories of sensory memories, agencyrests with human constituencies and individuals who, via sensory experience, invest andperceive those objects' meanings. Nadia Seremetakis, referring to Greek modernity, ar-gues that the process of revaluing meaning-endowed objects is ultimately political. Thesanctioned meanings of modernist national public culture overlie sediments of now de-valued regional "nets of sensory receipt," creating a polarity between "public-institutionalmemory and unspeakable memories of cultural alterity" (Seremetakis 1994:135). Thesarangi as object is certainly subject to such polarity. But its musical voice speaks morepolyphonically along a continuum of divergences between the poles, as musicians par-ticipate in an ongoing process of sonic resignification, recontextextualization, and co-op-tation into the musical idiom of a modernist public culture that today extends from the na-tional to the transnational sphere.

It is worth noting that in India the very presence of a concert stage makes such aredeployment possible, whereas in Pakistan a public music culture is near-absent. InPakistan, classical musicians, in the words of an eminent sarangi player, find them-selves superceded altogether and their art (hunar) devalued (Nazim AM Khan, per-sonal communication, March 10,1997).

What does exploring the sarangi bring to musically focused work in an anthro-pology of embodiment and the senses? In the ethnographic context of instrumentstudies, the sarangi stands out as an embodiment of sensory memory. Its reception ismultisensory—comprising at a literal level the visuality of the instrument and itsplayer and the sonority of words and of music. Sounded words are an integral part ofthis sensorium, although Western scholarship finds it easy to exclude them from theacoustic realm in the entrenched spirit of print culture and linguistic metasignification(Tomlinson 1993). Sensing the scope of the sarangi's musical meanings thus involvesa fusion of sensory channels, memories, and perceptions through which meanings aremultiply reinforced, contradicted, expanded, transformed, and above all, felt. It alsoinvolves reference to a symbolic-metaphoric domain of textual signification that isfused with other sensory modalities, in contrast to an inappropriate modernist divisionof the senses.

Finally, sensing musical meanings involves the profoundly social experience of"hearing music together" (Schutz 1977)40 Embedded in the sarangi's sound are layersof locally specific, historically situated, materially perceived musical practices byspecific social actors that both cue nostalgia and sustain identification that is sociallyas well as religiously, culturally, and politically referenced. Addressing the web ofconnections between the sonic sensation, practice, and meaning of this music sug-gests "an acoustemology beyond place" (Feld 1996) that extends to local, cultural, re-ligious, and class constituencies and to the cosmopolitan elites who shape thesarangi's national—and now transnational—musical patronage. The challenge forsuch an acoustemology is ethnographic: to recover subjectivity within a study of col-lective abstractions embodied in an object and its sonic text. The challenge is also


historical: to locate agency in constructions of the past and in the changing politics ofaffect. It is through particular, lived instances of the sarangi's social and situational dy-namic that I have found it possible to explore not only how its embodied meaningslive among communities of sentiment but also how they are reinvented to evoke af-fect in communities of new patrons.

Among ethnomusicologists, such work is individual as well as relational and, es-pecially where the ethnographer is a musical apprentice, it is also deeply personaland elicits mutual commitment between teacher and student. What is most striking ina participatory engagement with hereditary sarangi players is a collective social infe-riority vis-a-vis their patrons that is literally built into the aesthetic structure of elitemusic, starting with exclusively consumption-based criteria of value. In a contrastiveparallel to Feld, Basso, and Seeger, who show how music making processes and aes-thetics are closely fused with egalitarian social relations, I have found the sarangi'smusical processes inseparably linked to an unequal, exploitative feudal and increas-ingly capitalized class structure.

The very existence of sarangi music is class based, for it has been dependent onan asymmetrical partnership of musical producers who, as hereditary professionals,are eminently dependent on serving consuming patrons. The social gulf between thetwo categories of musical participants contrasts strikingly with making deeply mean-ingful the sensory fusion that characterizes the sarangi's traditional aesthetic. Equallystriking is the shift toward an abstracted auditory aesthetic in the classical music of thepublic concert stage, to which sarangi players are striving to conform by divesting thesarangi of its intersensory meanings or, more accurately, by divesting relevant elitepatrons of their deeply anchored memories. But, as the Sarangi Seminar showed, he-reditary sarangi players as yet lack the social power to effect such a change, not tomention the ability of most to survive as musicians. Clearly, there is more than oneway for a musical aesthetic to be social.

This is where ethnomusicologists become advocates not only for their music andits affective power but for those who are their teachers, mentors, colleagues, andfriends. In India, ethnomusicologists are fortunate to be able to join valiant cultural in-terventions on behalf of underpatronized cultural and musical practices. As long asthe sarangi's social aesthetic excludes its players from voice and access, our projectmust move from the study of their music to confronting the social conditions of its pro-duction.

notes

Acknowledgments. I gratefully acknowledge support from the Canadian Social Sciencesand Humanities Council and the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute for field research in India andPakistan during 1968-69,1984, and 1992. Special thanks go to Don Brenneis and to the anony-mous reviewers of American Ethnologist for incisive comments and editorial advice. I am mostgrateful to my sarangi teachers, mentors, consultants, friends, and relatives for generously shar-ing with me their riches of music, knowledge, and affect. Finally, I wish to identify and honorthe sarangi players and women singers whose teaching, performance, and personal associa-tion have directly contributed to the content of this article: Dhruba Ghosh—Bombay, MirzaMaqsud AM (late)—Lucknow, Hamid Husain Khan (late)—Karachi (of Rampur-Murad-abad), Nazim Ali Khan (late)—Lahore, Ram Narayan—Bombay (of Udaipur), RameshMisra—Lucknow (of Benares), Sabri Khan—Delhi (of Muradabad), Sultan Khan—Bombay (ofSikar), and Begum Akhtar (late)—Lucknow, Naina Devi (late)— Delhi (of Calcutta), AfrozBano—Bombay.


1. Clearly, even social scientists have been participating in the mystification of music thatis entrenched within the Western humanist tradition—with scholarly consequences that haveyet to be critically examined.

2. Wadley (1993) and, most systematically, Basso (1985) are notable for initiating the an-thropological incorporation of the sonic dimension into the study of sung texts.

3. Interestingly, all four authors cited here have worked in orally and acoustically orientedcommunities located in tropical forest environments (Amazon, Malaysia, and New Guinea).

4. To name but a few such schemes: Indian ragas as signifiers of time, season, and affect(Jairazbhoy 1971; Powers 1980b), 17th-century European tonalities as subject to the doctrine ofaffections (Lenneberg 1958), motifs signifying personal essence or emotions in the WagnerianLeitmotiv (Deathridge and Dahlhaus 1984), and affections in Javanese court music (Benamou1999).

5. These contradictions have hardly been mentioned in conventional music literature. Theexceptions are two pioneering studies of the sarangi, one an iconographically based historicalreconstruction by Joep Bor (1986-87) and the other a more general survey by Rai (1983).

6. Both Connerton (1989:83-85) and Stoller (1994) point to the political potency of enact-ing cultural memories through performances or rituals, whether subversively counter-hegemonic or as patterns of elite institutional control.

7. Connerton (1989:2-14) and Terdiman (1985:20) both address these issues in the con-text of European political history and the philosophy of history.

8. Dick Hebdidge (1979) has outlined this process for subcultures of popular music, but ithas been little explored in art music. I use the term subaltern here to invoke its well-establishedSouth Asian meaning (see Guha 1985) but apply it more diffusely to encompass any musicalconstituency subordinated to the dominant musical milieu.

9. The Indian government's policy of closing down all such salons was implemented inLucknow in 1966 (Syed Fida Husain, personal communication, November 30,1992).

10. James Kippen (1988) briefly sketches this milieu for Lucknow, while Vikram Seth doesso expansively and vividly in his 1952 canvas of life in a Lucknow-like city (1993:chs. 2,6).

11. In the absence of a recording of that mourning music, Dhruba Ghosh's soulful openingimprovisation of Shriraga can serve as an evocative example (Soulful Sarangi. Dhruba Ghosh,Raga Shree; Vilambit [Magnasound Cassette C4H0073:A1 ]).

12. Lata Mangeshkar with Sultan Khan, Sarangi: "Dard minnat kash-e-dawa na hua," or"My pain is not obligated to any remedies" (Lata Sings Ghalib, EMI:A1). Sultan Khan, one of filmmusic's outstanding musician-composers, plays an eloquent interlude (called "piece" in Hindi)to Lata Mangeshkar who renders an Urdu ghazal by the preeminent poet Ghalib. While this par-ticular song is not a film song, it offers an appealing example of the traditional light song genreand of one of film music's outstanding sarangi players, Ram Narayan.

13. The sarangi is not the only instrument with such a voice. In contrast to it, the shahnai'straditional sound of wedding music signals the joy of union. For a discussion of the shahnai, seeJairazbhoy 1970.

14. A haunting nirgun bhajan that addresses the futility of life is lakri (wood—for cradleand coffin), sung by Jogi Jan Muhammad with the accompaniment of his sarangi for the purposeof eliciting alms (recorded by Edward Henry on Chant the Names of God [Rounder Records5008: A10]).

15. Anakhi Sardar, Parsang: Bhai Bachittar Singh, Dhadhi: Teja Singh Toofan (CitizenVoice of India 1030.B4,1992).

16. Examples are the British LP by Gurmat Sangeet Sabha Khuni Ithas: Dhad-Sarangi andthe video Nabhewalian Bibian: Saka Delhi Darbar (Palco Video, New Delhi). Modernizedvideo versions from India use women singers and a violin instead of a sarangi.

17. A shabad melody is thus specifically evocative and enriching of its text. At the sametime, the melody also conveys the associations of its raga, independent of any textual meaning."Baras Ghana" (rain of blessings), set in malhar, a raga of the rainy season, illustrates this evoca-tive aesthetic interplay of textual and musical meanings in a recorded performance by Daven-dar Singh, accompanied by the sarangi and the tabla (Shri Davendar Singh Shabad, "Baras


Ghana/' The Shabads of Guru Nanak, with sarangi and tabla. Guru Nanak Foundation Quin-centenary Shabad Recordings. Regal EMI ELRZ 39A).

18. Two telling examples are ''Hermit and Singer with Sarangi" (located in theRijksmuseum, Amsterdam and reproduced in Bor [1986-87:56]) and "Raja Balwant Singh ofJammu and Musicians" (see endnote 28).

19. Two paintings of a Nautch Party painted for the East India Company may serve as ref-erence here, one set in a European style house in Delhi ("Nautch Party, Patna, ca. 1850" and"Nautch, European style house, Delhi, 1820" [Victoria and Albert Museum IS 4657 IS and96-1952]).

20. Mujra Instruments: saman-e-raqs, ca. 1820 (India Office Library Add OR 2621,2627).21. "Ladies with vina and tambura" (Victoria and Albert Museum) is a striking example;

see also Waldschmidt 1962.22. Fish is invoked (together with yogurt) when wishing someone a successful journey or

undertaking (Hindi/Urdu: dahi machhli).23. With the increasing popularity of instrumental solos, a few individual tabla and now

sarangi masters are achieving success in creating their own gharanas, sometimes with the helpof foreign supporters (Kippen 1988; Neuman 1990; Shepherd 1984).

24. This dual relationship is astutely mirrored in an early 19th-century drawing of aNautch at Cawnpore by Robert Smith (in his Pictorial Journal of Tavels in Hindustan from1828-33, Folio 30). Vidya Rao, reporting from the perspective of the tawaif, confirms thattawaifs were involved in "long-lasting and very warm personal relationships" with their sarangiaccompanists (1996:280).

25. Use of the present tense in this section is meant to evoke the kotha as a habitus as wellas a vivid personal experience.

26. Sufis use this concept to explain sama' (listening to music for spiritual purposes [seeQureshi1995]).

27. The tawaifs composite art comprises the complete musical offering that is containedin the classical Indian concept of sangit (music) as articulated in the foundational 13th-centurytreatise Sangita Ratnakara and its numerous successors.

28. This is well exemplified by a painting depicting Raja Balwant Singh of Jammu and mu-sicians (dated 1748, Victoria and Albert Museum IS 24-1974). Indeed, paintings as well as de-scriptive accounts of 18th- and 19th-century court performances show how the model of actualcourt performances continued to inform 20th-century kotha etiquette.

29. As late as the early 1940s, the British governor patronized the grand annual Sher-o-Naghma (Verse and Melody) in Lucknow, consisting of three nights of ghazal recitation bypoets and ghazal singing by tawaifs who were invited from all over India (Abdul Qavi Zia, per-sonal communication, 1992).

30. Significantly, adab is also the universal Urdu term for literature, mainly in the sense ofpoetry (see Metcalf 1984).

31. Tawaifs are matrilineal but not necessarily by choice, as is obvious from the manytawaifs who identify themselves in reference to their fathers (for example, Begum Akhtar identi-fies herself in reference to her father on her own LP record). On the other hand, a very differentresponse by anonymous tawaifs to a feminist scholar from the West rejects attachments to par-trilineality and brings the entire issue of tawaif into question (Oldenburg 1990).

32. In 1992, a journalist fondly told me of a village of prostitutes near Lucknow "who offera home-like atmosphere and special dishes cooked at the visitor's request," suggesting that eventoday the desire for such a relationship is real. This desire was movingly expressed two centuriesago in Goethe's poem, "Der Gott und die Bajadere" (Zeydel 1955:111-114).

33. The late Syed Fida Husain, a classically trained and deeply music-loving rais (wealthylandowner) of Lucknow, had, in his youth, banished his accompanists and stopped singing him-self because of his father's religiously based disapproval. But his musical life continued in thekotha, and he later made a tawaif his (second) companion (Syed Fida Husain, personal commu-nication, November 30,1992).

34. In Information Minister Sardar Patel's famous 1946 directive, All India Radio was toldto exclude "anyone whose private life is a public scandal" (see Lelyveld 1988; Mullick 1974:3).


35. K. L Saigal: Jiwan ka sukh aj (The Legendary K. L Saigal, Polydor 2392 071 :A4).36. See for instance the record notes accompanying the French concert recording of

Pandit Ram Narayan (see Ledoux 1984).37. This experience can be re-lived by listening to the recording of Ram Narayan's 1978

Paris concert (Raga Kirwani, Ocora OCR 69 A1).38. Jean Comaroff's and Nicholas Dirks's discussions of rituals of resistance offer a perti-

nent perspective on this process (Comaroff 1985; Dirks 1991).39. This dimension is only beginning to be addressed (see Conference Papers of Indian

Music and the West [Parikh and Bor 1997J).40. Purposely making my phrase alliterative with "Making Music Together/' I invoke the

perceptive and still foundational philosophical essay by Alfred Schutz (1977).

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accepted September 22, 1999final version submitted April 7, 2000

Regula QureshiDepartment of MusicUniversity of Alberta3-53 Fine Arts BuildingEdmonton, AlbertaT6C2C9 [email protected]

How Does Music mean? Embodied Memories and the Politics of Affect in the Indian Sarangi

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