Cultural History in a Minor Key: Music Ephemera and Social Life of Western Music in
Colonial India
Introduction: The Archives and the Nation-State
For the discipline of History, a discipline organically linked to the elaboration of modernity and
its most resilient political legacy—the nation-state form, the archives are hallowed grounds.
They are sites where collective memory of the body politic is externalized in documentary form,
categorically ordered,1 and preserved such that the story of national becoming is never forgotten.
But the archives do not merely serve a historical or historicizing function. As physical entities,
they stand as monuments of the secular-modern state, not unlike its big dams and steel towns.
Archival documents enjoy legal indemnity as public property. Their access is regulated by public
records acts passed in the legislature; defilement and pilferage constitute criminal offence against
the state and its citizens, punishable in differential degrees of severity. Indeed, as one is well
aware, when preceded by a definite article and left further unqualified, the term ‘archives’ only
signifies those institutions that the state deems as such.
In the era of the nation-state, then, its archives exert a centripetal force on someone
training to be a historian. They constitute the field of the historians’ techne, sites where their
craft is often first operationalized. It is there that the apprentice historian with a mental map of an
incipient project confronts the state’s labyrinthine and mutating classificatory logic, and learns to
harness this dense repository of “unprocessed historical records”2 into a thematic economy, to reorganize the documentary plethora into manageable evidentiary ‘sources.’ And the truth-value
imputed to such sources often supersedes that of other documents that do not have the power and
Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration,” in Information is Alive, eds. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, 14-25
(Rotterdam: V2/NAI, 2003), 15-17.
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2
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1973), 5.
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agency of the state structurally encoded within. Even when challenged historiographically, their
general authority is nevertheless reproduced as a methodological imperative for the discipline of
History as it mediates the relationship of a nation-state and its citizenry to the archives. This,
despite the fact that for countries like India, born out of twentieth century anti-colonial liberation
struggles, much of the archival documents accessible to the researching historian have been
scripted and categorically ordered by the erstwhile European colonizers. From the taxonomies to
the buildings, the archives are a colonial inheritance almost in toto for nation-states of the socalled ‘second wave.’ There is, then, an already reified mystique to the archives that has its basis
in the (Hegelian) idea of the modern state—be that colonial or post-colonial—as the paramount
moral authority, the embodiment of the rule of reason. No wonder then, as Jacques Derrida
points out, that arkhe, the etymological root of this key signifier, simultaneously signals both
“commencement” and “commandment.”3
The Archives, Social History, and the History of Music in India
In the specific case of a historian of music in colonial India, however, the encounter with the
state archives, whose fetishized thrall she too cannot escape in the first instance, is largely a
demystifying experience. Notwithstanding the sensory exhilaration of mining archival records, of
touching, smelling, dusting papers of different hues and textures, often few hundred years old, it
soon becomes apparent that music has, at best, been a peripheral concern for the state. The
“graphic trace”4 of matters musical is a rather faint one in the archives, and the documentary
trail, quite thin. What the music historian learns through this sobering encounter, which is
significant in and of itself, is that the modern Indian state—again, both colonial and post3
4
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1.
Appadurai, “Archive,” 15.
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colonial—except for certain exceptional instances when it has been reluctantly drawn into
intervening in the musical domain, has remained adamant throughout that musical issues are
outside its purview and needed to be addressed in civil society. Hence, with the state archives
turning out mostly fallow, the historian of music in India is forced to look elsewhere, at other
documentary repositories, which, by default, locates her in the terrain of social history.
As we know, since around the mid-twentieth century, various schools of social history, in
methodological and theoretical conversation with other academic disciplines and critical
tendencies, have mounted a serious challenge on the unrivalled primacy accorded to the state’s
archives in historical research. By reading the archives against the grain through different critical
hermeneutic frameworks, and by focusing on forms subjectivity, temporality and collectivity that
are often marginal to the historical calculus of the modern state—hence put under erasure in its
records—social historians have redefined the very nature and scope of the archive itself.
Understood in its most basic sense, this redefinition has come to mean that rather than being
always already present, for the social historian an archive has to be actively constructed. In the
specific case of India, the archive of social history has come to be culled from the astounding
volume and variety of print-matter that began proliferating from around the mid-nineteenth
century onwards with the progressive socialization of print technology, both in the English but
especially through the vernacular presses. And, of course, ephemera—independent ones, such as
almanacs, calendars, pamphlets, etc., or engrafted ones, like advertisements and classifieds in
newspapers and magazines—constituted a significant part of print production and circulation.
Not surprisingly, the social histories of music in India that have emerged in the last decade have
relied heavily on this material and used it to make certain critical arguments about musical
culture and politics in colonial India.
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There is a popular perception in India that even though two hundred years of colonial rule
impinged upon nearly every facet of society, culture, and economy in the subcontinent, music
somehow remained untouched by it.5 Indeed, ‘Indian music’—a category that, unless further
qualified as ‘folk,’ usually signifies the two great ‘classical’ musical traditions of the
subcontinent, Hindustani and Carnatic—is often cited an example par excellence of cultural
resilience in the face of alien rule, a living connection between the modern Indian nation-state as
a cultural entity and an ancient, glorious civilizational past, of which it is supposedly a natural
historical outcome.
Recent musico-historical scholarship has, however, persuasively challenged this notion
and the ideology on which it subsists. Influenced in various degrees by critical historiographical
and theoretical interventions pioneered in India by Subaltern Studies, Marxian social history, and
historical anthropology, scholars like Janaki Bakhle, Lakshmi Subramanian, and Amanda
Weidman have stressed the modernity of Indian musical traditions.6 They have shown how,
during the late-nineteenth/twentieth century nationalist moment, Hindustani and Carnatic musics
came to be discursively produced as ‘classical’ via eminently modern means, such as the
institution of new social spaces of performance, creation of associational bodies and a nationalmusical public, devising a notation system for the music, incorporating it within the discursive
folds of History, and so on. Still others, like Gerry Farrell and David Lelyveld, have explored the
constitutive impact of technologies of music reproduction (gramophone, tapes) and mediation
5
Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 3.
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For details, see Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music; Lakshmi Subramanian, From the Tanjore Court to the Madras
Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Amanda
Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006)
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(radio, film) on the social experience of music in India.7 In my own work on the harmonium, I
have enquired into how this aerophonic keyboard instrument, invented in Paris during the 1840s
and marketed as a cheaper substitute for pianofortes, mutated into the box-harmonium in India
by the 1880s to ultimately become by far the most popular instrument accompanying everyday
musical practice in the subcontinent, cutting across social classes. Thus, addressing the
identifiably modern refiguration of India’s musical traditions during colonialism, and the
contradictions entailed in this dialectic, the main thrust of the aforementioned scholarship has
been to critique the notion of sui generis authenticity and cultural-nationalist exceptionalism that
continue to permeate mainstream music discourse in post-colonial India.
History of a ‘Minor’ Music: Western Music in India
There is, however, another constitutive aspect of India’s musical modernity, western music, that
is generally overlooked in extant scholarship, owing perhaps to the reason that it opens up a
potentially intractable parallax between the category, ‘Indian music,’ and music in India. Indeed,
western music in India presents a curious problem in narrating the nation in musical terms as it
destabilizes the national-musical identity of the citizen-subject that is discursively conceived
along the interweaving axes of classical and folk.
Grafted onto the subcontinental musicscape at the very onset of colonialism, western
music has had a vital but spectral presence therein since. Being the music of the ruling race, it
was an instrument of considerable social power and prestige that permeated the cultural
aspirations of the Indian elite. At the same time, it was also an index of anglicization and
westernization that came to viewed with suspicion, as compromising cultural authenticity, during
For details, see David Lelyveld, “Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All India Radio.” Social Text 39
(Summer 1994): 111-127; Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
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the nationalist movement. This bind persists in the contemporary context as well, even if in
lesser intensity and a more diffuse fashion. It remains that on the one the hand, western music
motivates power at the very top of the social hierarchy; on the other hand, it has little or no
capacity to represent itself in and through the categorical logic and the discursive framework of
imagining and articulating the Indian nation musically. The spectrality of western music in India
obtains, in my view, from this contradiction. Indeed, it is intriguing how thin the documentary
trail on western music in India is: expectedly so in the state archives, but definitely less so in the
transcripts of social life.
A question arises out of this contradiction: how ought a contemporary historian
conceptually and historiographically to approach the social life of western music in India?
Provisionally drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari, I find it theoretically enabling to think of
western music as a ‘minor’ music in the Indian context, in the sense that it fundamentally
disturbs the regime of identity and categorical certainty in and of Indian music discourse, not just
of the brazenly cultural-nationalist kind but even that of the critical social histories which I have
referenced earlier. It is this line of thinking that has contributed to the title of my presentation:
“Cultural History in Minor Key.” And it is for writing the histories of such minor musics that
music ephemera become critical.
Ephemera and the Writing the History of Western Music in Colonial India: The Case of
Bina Addy
This finally brings me to the material that I would like to present before you today: it is a
scrapbook of newspaper clippings and concert program cards put together by the subject of the
clippings herself, Bina Addy—a remarkable Bengali woman who has for all practical purposes
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disappeared from at least two registers of Indian historical discourse to which she is, in my mind,
very important—women’s history and history of music. Addy, a mezzo-contralto vocalist who
trained in Europe with some leading contemporary figures of European art music was, by her
own witness, the first Indian woman to take up a professional career in Western Music. I chanced
upon this fascinating scrapbook, an artifact bearing intimate traces of its crafter, in the early days
of my doctoral fieldwork, when my intention was to study the jazz and rock music scene in the
city of Calcutta in the post- WW II period. I had been put in touch by a family friend with
someone who worked at the All India Radio, where I wanted to look at its youth-targeted music
programming. It was in the course of my conversation with her about my research that Bina
Addy’s name and the existence of this scrapbook came up. The person I had been put in touch
with was Addy niece, Ms. Ratna Sen and she very graciously let me keep it for as long as I
needed to. This meeting with Ms.Sen, and its unintended windfall, perhaps speaks to the notion
of ephemera as ‘accidental archive.’ Arresting as Addy’s text was to me then, other accidents at
various libraries in and around Calcutta ultimately took my work in a very different direction
from the project that I had initially conceived, and Bina Addy’s scrapbook found a new resting
place in my cupboard from Ms. Sen’s. Until the ephemera conference at Rice University again
brought it to life.
To return to the scrapbook itself: though the cards and the clippings are taken from an
eight-year period of intense activity in the singer’s life, between 1929 and 1937, the scrapbook is
primarily comprises material from the last year of this span—from May 2, 1936 to May 6, 1937,
to be precise—when she set sail from Calcutta on a concert tour to the geographical edges of the
British empire approaching its evanescence, i.e. to New Zealand and Australia. We do not know
yet when exactly the scrapbook was put together by Addy; it could have been anytime between
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1938 and 1962, i.e. after her return to India from her tour Down Under and before her death in
1962. The scrapbook format itself presents interesting questions regarding where it belongs in
the continuum of archive and ephemera as sources of writing history, for it is an outcome of an
archival impulse—the impulse to archive the self. Addy’s scrapbook is chronologically
organized; there are paratextual markings on some clippings, furnished to draw of the reader to
the relevant part in the larger informational space, and so on. Yet the contents of the scrapbook is
almost a run-through list of classic music ephemera that in the last decade has been put to greatly
rewarding use by concert historians of Europe and America. A typical list of such ephemera,
drawn up by concert historian, Cristina Bashford, comprise “concert programs…handbills,
posters, tickets, newspaper advertisements and reviews, administrative records, contracts with
performers, and so on—any documentation, in [short], that was associated with the business of
putting live music before audiences.”8 From the ephemera in Addy’s scrapbook, it not only
becomes possible to piece together her biography and musical career up until that point, and
analyze the problematics of cultural capital and (self-)representation, of the agonistic bind
between western cultural forms and nationalist cultural politics, of fetishization of the body of
the colonized other in metropolitan discourses, etc., during a critical passage in Indian colonial
history; the scrapbook also opens up channels of enquiry that I am completely new to at this
point: such as, international women’s solidarity movements and their ideological field, the
European music that was Addy’s specialty, and so on.
But as Moinak Biswas suggested in inaugural opening panel of the conference, it is
ultimately the normalization into coherent narratives and narrative coherence, its disciplining
8
Christina Bashford, Writing (British) Concert History: The Blessing and Curse of Ephemera, Notes, Volume 64,
Number 3, March 2008, pp. 458-473
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into ideologized historiographies, that makes an archive out of ephemera. For today, I will let
Bina Addy’s scrapbook wander in the liberating in-between space that it signifies for itself.
Bina Addy
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