Stephanie G. Mathis In response, Pakistani authorities banned all Indian content from being broadcast on its television channels, including Bollywood films.
The cultural war that was sparked by the September Uri attack in Kashmir is not a new phenomenon.
It is indeed a sad reminder from last year when the Indian ultra-regionalist Maharashtrian party Shiv Sena had threatened to disrupt the performance of celebrity singer Ghulamali in Mumbai and forced the concert to be canceled.
What should we make of these episodes, which occur with depressing frequency, are popular on Indian television, and then fade away, only to be remembered when another event replaces them?
There is an explanation, as there are for so many other things, why music and performance practices were appropriated by nationalist projects both in India and Pakistan.
As an historian, I’ve investigated the complex and contested relationship between music in North India and Partition (when India and Pakistan were split in 1947). These music disputes reinforce the artificial boundaries created by nationalism in 1947.
North Indian music combines complex social worlds
Up until 1947, North India’s music, or, more specifically, its classical music, was part of a complex socio-cultural universe. The music was composed and performed by princely establishments and courts, as well as in the public spaces of cities. Both Hindu Vaishnav Temples and Sufi Islamic silicas, social circles formed around teachers and disciples and devoted to mystic ecstasy, used music as a channel for experiencing mystic bliss.
These cultural and social milieus gave rise to Qawwali. This form of devotional spiritual music is popular in South Asia today.
Nusrat Fateh Khan, who died in 1980 (here), was a world-renowned qawwali singer.
The style was a combination of acoustic and multi-lingual elements, combining elements from different sources with the simplicity of Hindu bhakti poetry and Islamic sufi.
The poetry is inspired by devotional movements in Hinduism and Islam of the 15th Century. These devotional movements emphasized personal devotion and a teacher’s value. It was a mixture of genres which moved easily between kotha, a place most commonly known as a brothel but also part of the popular entertainment scene.
North Indian music has also adopted musical instruments from South- and Central Asia to produce new instruments, such as the sitar or the Sarod, and improvise using new concepts of melody and vocalization.
Ravi Shankar made the sitar popular in the West. CC BY
The music of India was nurtured and developed by families of specialists who had access to an extensive repertoire of teachers. It found support in small courts, which continued even after the Great Mutiny of 1857 when the Indian Army revolted.
After the mutiny, musical families lost a lot of power. Still, they found new fans amongst a growing middle-class gentry, whose rise happened in a new context of Western education and colonial occupation.
Modern music
Modernity mediated the increased middle-class appreciation for music, and this inevitably fueled new anxieties regarding inheritance, culture, and heritage, all of which had to be projected as modern, chaste, and spiritual.
Umrao Jaan was a famous courtesan and singer of the 18th Century, immortalized in 1981 by Bollywood actress Rekha.
The music of courtesans and the Ustads (teachers and masters) of the Muslim faith, had to be reconciled to meet the aspirations and needs of a middle-class Hindu culture that was western-educated. This entertainment had to be repurposed to fit a Hindu-accented Indian-ness concept.
These were initiated by nationalists and publicists such as Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Vishnu Digamber Paluskar. nationalists and publicists like Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Vishnu Digamber Paluskar were the ones who initiated these.
These societies were the first expressions of an increasing middle-class interest in music, and their reformers took on responsibility for teaching and transmitting music. The societies also brought established practitioners like Abdul Karim Khan under a new regime that included aesthetic standardisation and institution support.
