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  • The Production of Aura in the Gramophone Age of the “Live” Performance1
  • Dard Neuman (bio)

This essay examines the impact of mass media on the cultivation, consumption, and connoisseurship of Hindustani music in the 20th century. I propose that the gramophone transformed listening habits as it normalized the repetition of listening. This, paradoxically, impelled a new phenomenon known as the “live” event, which had the novel quality that it could be experienced only as a single, momentary, and evanescent instant. Consequently, for many connoisseurs in the postcolonial public, the “live” performance took on the status of a momentous event; as something that could not be preserved and therefore as something that was uniquely singular and passing. With a music now understood as resistant to capture and preservation, it became embedded with a uniquely modern aura of singularity. In this new environment, the Hindustani musician assumed a new role as a celebrated national emblem, a decided shift from his/her preindependence role as a denigrated feudal anachronism.

In referring to Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I intend only a tangential place in the dialogue that he helped to animate. This essay does not therefore address the very important debate about the emancipatory possibilities of mass media, as articulated by Walter Benjamin, or of their repressive effects, as articulated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.2 Nor do I presume to contribute to the exegesis of what Benjamin meant by his notion of aura, which I take here to mean a premodern ethos attached to an artwork that faded in the modern era of mass reproduction.3 What I would like instead to describe are the unique circumstances of postcolonial India whereby a modern aura could develop, even if a premodern aura withered. This characterization of a contemporary aura would contravene more commonly held views among musicians, musicologists, and connoisseurs concerning the “shattering of tradition” as the central crisis of Hindustani music; a crisis that is set against the assumption of a golden age that existed either in the ancient “classical” or “feudal” past.4 What we will instead see are the rather unique circumstances where the postindependence “present” could come to stand as a high point for this “classical” tradition even against the more commonplace statements of its decline and decay. [End Page 100]

Preindependence Coverage

The most ordinary or common kind of singing, which consists of singing Chijas like the Thumaries or Gazals (pieces of poetry set to music), one so often comes across in ordinary performances . . .

(Pingle 1989 [1898], 90 ).

From the vantage point of the early 21st century, it is difficult to imagine a time when Hindustani music was not celebrated and its musicians not romanticized. Open many newspapers today in most urban Indian centers and one quickly comes across descriptions of musical performances, replete with colorful metaphors, passionate statements, and spiritual claims. All the more surprising, then, to read music journals or books prior to Indian Independence (1947) only to find scant mention of musicians and a scattering of descriptions of their performances.

The ustad (master musician) was indeed a rare species in the published material of early 20th-century writing. He stood as a disparaged backdrop to an emerging discourse, a side note to an elite agenda working to both establish a link to a classical past and to erect a new, respectable figure. In this configuration, musical performances fell into the domain of the “ordinary,” without remark or a sense of derived pleasure.

To take our first example, let us turn to a description from the 1917 Report of the First All-India Music Conference (AIMC) held in Baroda. The conference took place in 1916, lasted 6 days, and comprised 34 musicological lectures as well as a host of “practical demonstrations” and musical performances that brought together musicians from various princely states.5 The report is detailed in its coverage of musicological themes, but when the report comes to musical performances, 58 pages in, the language of description thins. Of performances, the author writes, summarily and in passing,

Then the two daughters of Rao Saheb . . . sang the “Mohan” Raga followed by Vachaspati . . .

This was...

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