Hindustani Music and the Politics of Creativity

This talk discusses music and the politics of creativity in the context of South Asia more broadly and Hindustani music more specifically (what is today called “Indian classical music”). Neuman traces how elite Muslim (sharif) culture became radically disrupted after British rule was formalized in 1857, and court musicians were dispersed throughout India, with many lineages and traditions quickly fading to obscurity, while a new class of hereditary musicians emerged. These new musicians came from predominantly low-class Muslim bardic communities, and their socio-musical innovations can be better understood in relation to their forceful critiques of feudal hierarchies and caste exclusions. Through oral histories, family genealogies and analysis of music performance, Neuman traces how musicians from “outsider” lineages integrated aesthetic and ideological knowledge systems to forge a fundamentally new socio-musical aesthetic, one that broke from established traditions to widen access to non-elite lineages, but did so in ways determined by heterodox and populist Sufi/Bhakti ideologies and socio-musical translations of classical sources.