Singing Gandhi's India - Music and Sonic Nationalism

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FirstName (Middle name/initial not required) Subramanian

• Publisher: Roli Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788194295983
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica della musica

Here is the first ever and only detailed account of Gandhi and music in India. How politics and music interspersed with each other has been paid scanty, if not any, attention, let alone Gandhi's role in it. Looking at prayer as politics, singing Gandhi's India traces Gandhi's relationship with music and nationalism. Uncovering his writings on music, ashram Bhajan practice, the Vande Mataram debate, Subramanian makes a case for a closer scrutiny of Gandhian oeuvre to map sonic politics in twentieth century India.

SINGING GANDHI’S INDIA

Here is the first ever and only detailed account of Gandhi and music in India. How politics and music intersperse with each other has been paid scanty, if not any, attention, let alone Gandhi’s role in it. Looking at prayer as politics, Singing Gandhi’s India traces Gandhi’s relationship with music and nationalism. Uncovering his writings on music, ashram bhajan practice, the Vande Mataram debate, Subramanian makes a case for a closer scrutiny of Gandhi’s oeuvre to map sonic politics in twentieth-century India.

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FORTHCOMING TITLE

Brij Mohan Bhalla

Kasturba Gandhi: A Biography

ROLI BOOKS

This digital edition published in 2020

First published in 2020 by

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Copyright © Lakshmi Subramanian, 2020

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eISBN: 978-81-942959-8-3

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface

1. Decoding the Nation’s Soundscape: A History of Sound in Modern India

2. Crafting a Community: Prayer as Politics

3 Amplifying Politics and Spinning the Wheel: Private and Public Sounds

4 Spinning in Silence, Praying in Public: The Last Years

Epilogue

Notes

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book took concrete shape between January and May 2019, when I had the opportunity to reflect more critically on the task I had embarked upon and felt greater confidence in the project. It was in August 2018 that I was asked to consider writing a book on Gandhi and music by Chirag Thakkar and my initial reaction was a resounding ‘no’. I had never considered Gandhi to be either a music connoisseur or a practitioner. I was convinced that he would have had very little to say on the subject of the performing arts, classical or otherwise. Even the anecdotal information one encountered about Gandhi, especially relating to the songs he liked, seemed almost anodyne and tailor-made for a constructed persona of Gandhi, the solitary satyagrahi on the march. The famous patriotic song of poet, musician and artist Rabindranath Tagore ‘Ekla cholo re’ (Walk alone if you will) was an instance in point.

It was only later and partly due to the insistence of Chirag, Commissioning Editor at Roli Books, and to my own curiosity about Gandhi, that I decided to undertake the project. I told myself this was one occasion when I could scrutinize the writings of Gandhi and make sense of the conundrums that seemed to bedevil his life and politics. The conviction grew apace when I began reading Gandhi’s writings, ironically during the period of my recovery from a cataract operation, and I was soon reassured that I had a story to tell. From January to March 2019, when I was at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nantes, I was able to work on my arguments more fully and present a basic and preliminary version of my research before the resident fellows at the regular Monday seminar. The feedback that I received was immensely helpful. The Institute has been my second intellectual home for some time now and I wish to put on record the immense gratitude I have for its fellows, who have been co-voyagers in my intellectual journey. I wish to put on record my deepest appreciation to Alain Supiot and Samuel Jube whose intellectual companionship has been invaluable over the years. It is to the Institute and its fellows that I dedicate this book.

In writing this book, I have thus incurred several debts, most of all to Gandhi himself whose writings I read with much greater attention than I ever did. For a historian, Gandhi is a delight as he wrote obsessively, randomly and inconsistently, giving admirers and detractors an unending archive to mine. I was not disappointed either for I came across an unexpected set of reflections that helped me think afresh about sound as a symbol, the sonic as political and the listener as an agent of action. Gandhi’s writings have been made accessible thanks to the Gandhi heritage portal that is an excellent resource for scholars to use. I wish, therefore, to record my deepest appreciation to the managers of this resource. Tridip Suhrud, inarguably the most profound scholar of Gandhi, was open and ready with suggestions and pointed me to several sources, some of which I could access. I also wish to mention the digital archive of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, whose Bengali periodicals carried occasional references to the Sabarmati ashram experiments and more importantly, to the formation of a regional musical public that was so important in nationalist politics.

I would be remiss if I were not to thank my students, Santanu, Sagnik and Sutapa Chatterjee-Sarkar, and my friends G. Arunima and Pradip Datta, who took time off to read sections and offer suggestions. Finally, a big thank you to my family, especially Jon and Indu, who in their eccentric ways continue to repose confidence in my efforts by severely critiquing them.

PREFACE

Why another book on Gandhi? This is a question that readers are bound to ask. It is a question that kept cropping up as I tried to compile his random reflections on music and singing, on national songs and slogans, to contextualize his understanding of music and sound as part of traditional practice within the context of religion and its public performance. I was expecting very little by way of what he wrote and was fully prepared for inconsistencies and gaps in his correspondence. I was hoping to get stock impressions of his favourite bhajans, his favourite singers and of their role in the congregational services that he arranged in the Sabarmati ashram and in public prayer meetings elsewhere. I was not especially hopeful of accessing insights, however eccentric, in Gandhi’s expositions on music as an artistic activity or as a very specific resource in building a sonic community.

And yet I persisted in working on the project, my enthusiasm partly driven by the understanding that sonic affinities in India as part of an emerging nationalist consciousness, have not merited the attention that they deserve and partly by the circumstances of political and public life in today’s India. Living as we do amidst fake news, hate speeches and rampant noise in the political landscape, some louder than others in stifling debates and differences, the surging of creative expression in song, stand-up satires and films, I plunged into the project to try and find a story that connected Gandhi with the public history of sound and music in twentieth-century India.

The idea behind this book is largely to take a closer look at Gandhi’s ideas about music and his impressions of it as a practice and form of public expression as well as at the longer history of aural participation in nationalist politics. Both these issues have remained understudied. Paradoxically, music and sonic communication were crucial both to the forming of an ashram community for Gandhi as well as equally important in defining a public sphere in twentieth-century India. Studying these processes in tandem will help us locate the constitution of a very specific mode of aural political communication in India that was expressed through a range of religious and patriotic songs. ...

Table of contents

• Singing Gandhi’s India