Research
I am an ethnomusicologist who specializes in the music of North India, or Hindustani music. I use the term in a broad sense, including in it classical and light-classical North Indian music, devotional music, and regional music, in addition to other non-ritual musics whose structure is recognizably derived from raga and tala, including that used in Indian theatre and film.
My theoretical and ethnographic positioning falls under the following:
- feminist ethnography and feminist oral history as music historiography and voice of socially marginalized musicians (especially the diffuse community of courtesans in India, referred to as tawaifs in the North and devadasis in the South);
- flows of transmission and patronage of persistent musical practices (and their practitioners) from the local to the global;
- reflexive interrogation of the use of performance practice and study as a tool for research and re-presentation (particularly with my own ensemble and solo performance work as well as instruction); and
- ethnographic video as a terrain and tool for action research as well as an alternative text in which the scholarly and the artistic overlap.
In my Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Gendered Stories, Gendered Selves: Contemporary Hindustani Music as Discourse, Attitudes, and Practice, I examined how discourse on gender and gendered ways of being in South Asia intersects with the aesthetics of Hindustani music and musical performance, and how this has been played out in performance practice, musical transmission, hierarchy of genres, musical division of labor, and voices and images in song texts, among other things—and where this all fits in a rapidly globalizing post-colonial India with respect to the status of women. I documented this through literary and historical sources, as well as oral narratives (including oral histories) of some 75 individuals between the ages of 35 and 88 from various socioecoMarch 1, 2007 2:02 PMen.
In my recent work, I have both built upon and extended my research on feminist oral narrative, musical (auto) biography, and socially marginalized musicians, specifically Indian courtesans and their accompanists. This has resulted in several journal publications, two ethnographic videos, and one chapter each in a collection of essays on music and innovation forthcoming in India and in an anthology on courtesans forthcoming in the U.S. In this work, I have begun the project of combining scholarship with advocacy. I address the intersections among ethnography and tourism (regional, national, and global), the “festivalization” and changing meanings of persistent musical traditions/performers, “micro-philanthropists” in South Asia and abroad (e.g., the international network of NGOs working for South Asian women’s development), and North American humanitarian funding organizations.
During my postdoctoral fellowship at University of Alberta (January 2001-December 2002), I built upon and extended my research on feminist oral narrative, musical (auto)biography, and socially marginalized musicians, specifically Indian courtesans and their accompanists. This resulted in several journal publications, a 15-minute ethnographic video entitled “Guriya,” and one chapter each in a collection of essays on music and innovation forthcoming in India and in the anthology The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon, editors, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. This ongoing research addresses the intersections among ethnography and tourism (regional, national, and global), the festivalization and changing meanings of persistent musical traditions/performers, micro-philanthropists in South Asia and abroad (e.g., the international network of NGOs working for South Asian women’s development), and North American humanitarian funding organizations.
In 2003, I began the project of combining scholarship with advocacy, beginning with conducting follow-up fieldwork in India on one particular development organization that serves low-status women musicians-dancers. I presented a version of a paper and ethnographic video in progress based on this research at SEM 2003. In them, I examine the network of crisscrossing discourses regarding the politics of representing North India’s courtesans and their performance as culturally authentic icons of Indian tradition that embody music, memory, and nostalgia, at the same time as social stigma. I am in the final stages of post-production of the video, an update and expansion of the above mentioned “Guriya,” now renamed “Guria, Gossip, and Globalization” (running time 43 minutes).
Additionally, continuing the oral history aspect of my research, I have taken preliminary steps in the delicate project of co-authoring the autobiography of my vocal guru, the eminent female Hindustani vocalist Padmabhusan Girija Devi. I am doing so by writing an article, in process, that deals with my ethnographic involvement in the making of a documentary film sponsored by the Government of India on Girija Devi’s life.
The photographs here, taken in the field, represent work I have been doing with socially marginalized women musicians in India since 1994.