Dancing with Devtas: Drums, Power and Possession in the Music of Garhwal, North India

Andrew Alter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351946391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

In the Central Himalayan region of Garhwal, the gods (devtas) enjoy dancing. Musicians - whether ritual specialists or musical specialists - are therefore an indispensable part of most entertainment and religious events. In shamanistic ceremonies, their incantations, songs and drumming 'make' the gods possess their mediums. In other contexts, such as dramatic theatrical renditions of stories of specific deities, actors 'dance' the role of their character having become possessed by the spirit of their character. Through the powerful sounds of their drumming, musicians cause the gods to dance. Music, and more particularly musical sound, is perceived in Garhwal as a powerful force. Andrew Alter examines music and musical practice in Garhwal from an analytical perspective that explores the nexus between musical sounds and performance events. He provides insight into performance practice, vocal techniques, notions of repertoire classification, instruments, ensembles, performance venues, and dance practice. However, music is not viewed simply as a system of organized sounds such as drum strokes, pitch iterations or repertoire items. Rather, in Garhwal, the music is viewed as a system of knowledge and as a system of beliefs in which meaning and spirituality become articulated through potent sound iterations. Alter makes a significant contribution to the discipline of ethnomusicology through a detailed documentation of musical practice in the context of ritual events. The book offers a traditionally thorough historical-ethnographic study of a region with the aim of integrating the local field-based case studies of musical practices within the broader Garhwali context. The work contains invaluable oral data, which has been carefully transliterated as well as translated. Alter blends a carefully detailed analysis of drumming in conjunction with the complex ritual and social contexts of this sophisticated and semantically rich musical practice.

PART 1
Contextualizing the Study

Chapter 1

Sounding the Drum

Power and Meaning in the Context of Performance

Throughout this book, I avoid the phrase ‘Garhwali music’. Such a term is based on the fictional premise that the region of Garhwal, by virtue of being a politically and geographically defined area and having a somewhat homogeneous language, must also maintain a homogeneous musical tradition. Any use of the term ‘Garhwali music’, however, is based on the assumption that it refers to some discrete social reality. It is true that there are musicians in Garhwal. There is musical practice in Garhwal. There are conventions of drumming and terminology shared by many residents of Garhwal. However, to suggest that the description of the musicians, musical practices and the terminology used in this study somehow constitute a Garhwali music tradition would obscure the truth. There are, in fact, many musical practices, a variety of kinds of musicians and a variance of terminology.

In the Garhwali context, musical sacrality is most obviously heard in the strokes and repertoire items of drummers. Their knowledge occupies a unique place in spiritual events throughout the region. The mere fact that people frequently refer to their knowledge as an ocean of drumming (Ḍhol Sāgar) and thereby link their sounds to panHindu notions of sonic power is evidence of the centrality of drumming to the region’s musical culture. Drums communicate with the supernatural and are used to induce dancing and possession. Drums themselves are symbolic of the spiritual power they invoke. Nāda, the ‘pervading causal sound that animates the universe’ (Rowell 1992: 45), is available to them in their drum strokes. Garhwali drummers tap into this ‘primordial sound’ to animate not only the universe, but also the dancers and deities who move into and within the natural world.

Over the last fourteen years, I have studied the ways in which drummers in Garhwal play and describe their music. Actions, venues, instruments, parts of instruments, texts, the natural world, the supernatural worlds and music comprise a series of interconnected domains which include knowledge, actions, thoughts and sounds. For a drummer, music consists of sound symbols that articulate and embody deeply felt concepts of the nature of reality and existence. Consequently, this study focuses on the many contexts that surround music and the ways in which music and these contexts interact. If music has power, however defined, the effects of this power may be observed most clearly in the context of performance. As described in the Introduction, Durbal and Sagar Das proved the power of their knowledge and their drums by articulating the correct symbols such that they then controlled the supernatural deity and the king. Numerous other rituals throughout Garhwal today offer drummers the same opportunities to demonstrate the very real power of their drums.

Contextual inquiry

For the greater part of its history as a discipline, ethnomusicology has been directed towards the study of music and its relationship to the people and culture who make, organize and maintain musical sounds. Music exists as a significant part of a cultural whole and not by itself. Consequently, the discipline provides theoretical models for a more comprehensive perspective on musical meaning as gained through the examination of sound symbols in the context of broader cultural action and thought.

Nketia (1990: 85) advocates the adoption of a ‘technique of contextualization’ that integrates contextual considerations into the analysis. His ‘technique’ incorporates four analytical steps and provides a useful model for the examination of musical events. Firstly, one must identify units of structure and syntax in both the formal and contextual data. For instance, music that initiates or invokes dancing has formal and syntactical elements as does the dancing that occurs contiguously with it. These must be identified and described. Secondly, one must investigate the contextual relations and functions of such units. Which units of dance movements correspond to which units of music? Furthermore, the contextual relations may be less direct, as, for instance, when particular dance movements may symbolize, rather than directly correspond to, particular cultural beliefs. Thirdly, Nketia suggests that the technique of contextualization must examine the connotations or meanings these units have in different contexts of situation. For instance, dancing while possessed may hold considerably different connotations to dancing which is done for entertainment. In other words, similar dance and music expressions may be received and interpreted differently in two different contexts. Finally, having identified units of structure and syntax, investigated contextual relationships and interpreted various meanings within different situations, one must establish correspondences between sounds and the structure of such things as actions, relationships and ideologies.

Musical performances used in forms of worship directed towards transcendent, mystical, or ecstatic experience provide perhaps the most vibrant situations within which contextual analysis is a valuable means of documentation and interpretation. As Qureshi states in relation to ecstatic Sufi experience:

The entire process of developing an understanding of Qawwali rests on the application of a model for analysing music in performance. The model introduces the dimension of performance into the analysis of musical sound, with the specific aim of demonstrating how the context of performance affects the music being performed. (Qureshi 1986: 231)

What Qureshi suggests for Qawwālī performance is also true of other genres of music used in the process of communicating with the spiritual realm. So entwined are music and context in these situations, that response to music becomes the means by which communication (or unity) with the divine is achieved. Spiritual quest becomes a musical performance. Music and ritual shape each other on the path towards transcendence, mysticism or ecstasy.

Nketia (1990: 87) suggests that contextual studies of music in spiritual and ritual events often reveal a special nexus between music and context. Specific sound elements are encoded with syntactic and semantic units used to directly invoke response and enhance the spirituality of the moment. For a Garhwali drummer, correct sounds must be produced for the ritual context to be successful, not simply because they are ‘traditional’ and therefore prescribed but because they interact appropriately with the performance context. Geography, history and spirituality all influence repertoire and as a consequence become critical to performance.

Meaning and power in music: a theoretical framework

Musical power is intimately connected to musical meaning. In this study, I focus on the ways in which musical meaning translates into musical power. It is precisely because musical sound is invisible and communicates little lexical meaning, that it remains ambiguous and is therefore able to communicate powerful things. Seeger’s discussion of musical meaning is an appropriate point of departure for the topic.

It is by the variance of pitch, loudness, speed and duration of musical events – and, above all, the variance of tonal and rhythmic densities – that we produce the homolog of speech meaning that some call ‘music meaning’ or, expressed with less speech bias, ‘music communication’. (Seeger 1970: 182–3)

Thus, Seeger suggests that meaning in music is different to speech meaning, yet somewhat homologous in structure. Both communicate something.

Feld extends Seeger’s discussion to incorporate not just ‘what’ music communicates, but ‘how’ it communicates. He approaches the process of musical communication

… with an emphasis on the listening process rather than the score, composer, or code per se. By doing so I [Feld] wish to subvert the usual assumption that a producer’s intention is closer to some abstract rule determining significance in music than the ordinary feelings that arise from routine engagement on the part of the listener. (Feld 1994: 83)

As this citation illustrates, in their joint publication Keil and Feld (1994: 54–5) warn against a musical analysis which examines musical syntax and semantics as observable in products of musical endeavour such as scores and notation. They advocate instead a processual analysis which equally stresses musical response as much as musical production. Meaning does not simply reside in the ‘form of the content (syntax) nor the stream of its conveyance’ (Feld 1994: 78). Rather, communication is a process in which things become meaningful only through the dynamic interaction of people at musical events. Music must be socially situated in order to communicate. As Herndon and McLeod (1979: 12–13) note, one of ethnomusicology’s contributions to scholarship has been the ‘realization that music is not [original emphasis] a universal language’ and the meaning of music differs radically from one culture to another. Music means different things to different people in different contexts.

I therefore advocate a view of musical meaning that does not directly associate sound elements with specific meanings. I advocate an analysis that is processual in the sense that Keil and Feld define it and that is contextual in the way that Nketia suggests. A processual approach acknowledges the continuous movement of music within a process including performer and audience, while contextualization offers the opportunity to examine specific responses to music by musicians and participants in order to gain a partial understanding of the meaning being communicated.

In the central Himalayas, musical sounds communicate many meanings and are believed to also communicate with the supernatural. Belief systems underscore this potential communication, and thus performers shape and choose their sounds and repertoire to maximize the power of their music. Specific repertoire, performed in the appropriate context, reconfigures natural space and time to communicate with the supernatural.

Music and power

The study of power in music appears to be somewhat open-ended. Terms such as expression, superiority, omnipotence, dominance, influence and control all have something to do with the notion of power in music. Similarly, collocations that identify aspects of musical power are numerous. There are expressive power, kinetic power, salvific power, political power, spiritual power, communicative power, magical power, mystical power, iconic power, creative power, destructive power, healing power and so on. Furthermore, musical events may be seen to empower certain individuals and/or groups while disempowering others. Ethnomusicological research itself may either empower or disempower researchers as well as their subjects. Thus, a discussion of power in the context of music study and research is potentially vast.

As a preliminary postulate, I suggest ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Musical Transcriptions
• List of Audio Examples
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Transliteration of Hindi and Garhwali Texts
• Key to Musical Transcriptions
• Introduction
• Part 1 Contextualizing the Study
• Part 2 Analysis and Description of Musical Events: Musical Power in the Context of Performance
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Glossary of Selected Garhwali and Hindi Terms
• Bibliography
• Discography of Selected Commercially Released Cassettes
• Index