Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond (review)

Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond is an edited volume of ethnographic case studies that makes significant contributions to South Asian studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology. A collection of “comparative microstudies” (6), the volume highlights local and translocal phenomena in “South Asia and Beyond.” With its broad range of ethnographic inquiry and theoretical analysis, Theorizing the Local is potentially “significant for a larger South Asian understanding of music, practice, and experience” (26), and presents alternatives to the conventional ways of theorizing South Asia based on religion, politics, language, ethnicity, and nationality.

The book is divided into four sections, each dealing with a different conception of locality. Susan A. Reed, Amanda Weidman, and Martin Clayton contribute chapters to part I, “Bodies and Instruments.” Reed writes how women’s performance of Kandyan dance in Sri Lanka “simultaneously sustains, challenges, and expands notions of respectability and of Sinhala Buddhist womanhood” (29), as women performers create a niche in what was originally an all-male art form. Weidman writes about the ways in which Karnatak violin accompaniment has influenced Karnatak vocal style, and what this implies for those who consider Karnatak vocal music a purely Indian expression “unaltered by the colonial encounter” (61). Clayton explores guitar music in India as a local phenomenon, and describes its popularity among Christian Anglo-Indians in urban centers throughout India.

In part II, “Spaces and Itineraries,” Gregory D. Booth, Shubha Chaudhuri, and Gert-Matthias Wegner work with musical phenomena that are especially linked to the places where they occur. Booth describes the extensive geographic and social networks that itinerant brass band musicians follow in search of seasonal work across huge swaths of north India. Chaudhuri describes musical, religious, and social activity at three shrines of Rāni Bhaṭiyāṇi in western Rajasthan, and shows how hereditary temple musicians and mediums are affected by the revisionist policies of the religious trusts that control the temples. Wegner likens the processional route of Newar Buddhist musicians through Bhaktapur, Nepal, to “an elaborate maṇḍala that represents their ritual townscape” (115). He describes how the prescribed musical activity at key sites “actualizes the divine energy of the locality” (138) while “the location in which pieces are performed serve as keys to musical meaning” (113).

In part III, Rolf Groesbeck, Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, and David Henderson deal with issues surrounding “Learning and Transmission.” Groesbeck describes the pedagogical system for Kathakali drumming at a major performing arts institution in Kerala. He contrasts the rote memorization of fixed exercises that beginners learn from their teachers in drumming class with the fluid and improvisatory style that more advanced students learn by observing their peers while practicing with the full ensemble. He explains that the incorporation of both vertical and horizontal learning “trains the student to be a student and the guru to be a guru” (145). Qureshi describes musical transmission among hereditary sārangī players in north India, arguing that one of the key theoretical features of Hindustani music is the affective, familial bond between the master and disciple (177). She suggests that we rethink locality in “oral and relational” (166) terms, and that we might accordingly retheorize the way that art music is transmitted in the West (183). Henderson combines phenomenological and ethnographic approaches as he writes about his experience studying tabla and Newar barrel drums with two different teachers in Nepal. He describes the ways in which tactile and emotional memory are linked, and foregrounds the importance of the teacher’s verbal input and feedback as the student strives to internalize musical knowledge, aesthetics, and technique. Of all the chapters in Theorizing the Local, Henderson’s stands out as particularly insightful and well written.

In Part IV...