Jan 25 2024 to Jan 25 2024 6:30 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

This talk examines the inaudible yet polyphonic pasts of modern South Indian raga-based music by exploring the complex history of Islamic musical production in Tamil-speaking South India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on an unexplored archive of Tamil songbooks, music manuals, devotional materials, and other print ephemera, it follows the highly flexible genres that populate the Tamil Islamic sonic landscape: the Tamil kirttana, padam, chindu, javali, and the hybrid musical munajattu, and analyzes these in relation to highly localized Tamil Sufi devotional cultures on the one hand, as well as formal, canonical traditions of Tamil Islamic literary production on the other. Most centrally, however, in moving through the dense and labyrinthine archive of Tamil Muslim musical production and dissemination, this work argues for the restoration of Muslim creative and agentive forces into our historical scripts for modern South Indian raga-based music. It is important that we read these instantiations of musical abundance against monolithic narratives about the “cultural insularity” of the arts of South India, and also against narratives about Muslim cultural impoverishment associated with the supposed interdictions around music in modern South Asian Islam.

A Q&A session with the speaker will follow.