SAST1117 - Sounds of Power, Pleasure, and Resistance: Music, Media, and Performance in Modern South Asia

This undergraduate seminar will explore the interplay between music, media, and performance in the making of modern South Asia (c. 1750 to the present). We will study primary source materials including manuscripts, printed texts, sound recordings, films, and video-clips. What can the emergence of print and recorded sound on the subcontinent teach us about modernity? How did authors, entrepreneurs, politicians, and performers across time and space make use of new media and technologies? How did colonial rule and anti-colonial nationalism affect traditional methods of knowledge transmission and communities of hereditary performers? The class is organized along thematic fields that provide exposure to the content, history, and effects of various media and performance practices. Beginning with the function of music and dance at royal courts, we will familiarize ourselves with the transformation of North Indian Hindustani and South Indian Karnatak music under colonialism. We will pay particular attention to the multiple ways in which print, performance, and sound recording and transmission media played a role in the development of colonial institutions, nationalist mass movements, and cultural identities on the subcontinent. We will look at the realm of commerce and technology to explore the impact of lithographic print, the gramophone, the radio, and film on the development of knowledge and the shaping of colonial power and anti-colonial resistance. Finally, we will reflect on new modes of media consumption in the post-colonial nation states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, and what they tell us about contemporary narratives of South Asian history.