Sep 07 2025 to Sep 07 2025 11 a.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Music has been an important medium through which conditions in society and politics have been articulated, by individuals, groups and formal organisations in India, from the colonial period onwards until the present.

Even though musical forms that respond to society and social life have existed for centuries, colonialism, the struggle for independence and the movements for social transformation have seen the creation of musics that reflect society and politics in very specific ways, reflecting influences from the past, from entrenched local contexts as well as influences from outside national and regional boundaries.

The session will take participants through various kinds of music that were created and performed as part of social movements in India from the late colonial period to the present. Consisting of intensive ‘listening to’ and ‘listening for’ exercises around a playlist that consists of varied forms in several Indian languages and from different systems of music, the listeners will be taken through ways of identifying social and political elements in music.

In collaboration with:

Speaker

Sumangala Damodaran
Academician & Musician
Sumangala Damodaran is an academician and musician, whose experience spans teaching and research in Economics, Development Studies and Popular Music Studies. She has taught in Delhi University and Ambedkar University Delhi over a period of three decades and is presently Director, Gender and Economics with the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs). Most recently, she was Fulbright Scholar-in-residence and Stice Feminist Scholar of Social Justice at the University of Washington, Seattle and has been visiting professor at Ashoka University, the University of Cape Town and the Institute for Human Development, Delhi.

As a development economist, her research and publications fall broadly within the rubric of Industrial and Labour studies and more specifically on Industrial Organisation, Global Value Chains, the Informal Sector, Labour and Migration. Apart from her academic involvements as an economist and social scientist, she is also a singer and composer. Her archiving and documentation of the musical tradition of the Indian People’s Theatre Association from the 1940s and 1950s has resulted in a book titled The Radical Impulse: Music in the Tradition of the IPTA and an album titled Songs of Protest and she has performed from the documented repertoire extensively in different parts of the country and abroad.

She has collaborated with poets and musicians from South Africa as a founder member of the award-winning Insurrections Ensemble, which has produced six music albums and has also directed a multi-institutional project around Music and Migration in Precolonial Afro-Asia from 2016 until the present, which has resulted in two musical productions and a two books.