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16 chapter one A History of Moving and Singing in India A murmur of conversation rises from the audience between performances at Shantiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s university in West Bengal. A music teacher and I are excitedly discussing the different styles of two classical singers that we admire. We compare their styles of voice production, their divergent approaches to raga development, their preferences for different tempi and metrical cycles. Then I mention their differences in gestural dispositions. The flow of our conversation is interrupted. She sits upright, furrows her brow, and says, “But gesture is a dosha [fault], not a guna [virtue], isn’t it?” As she drops technical terms from authoritative Sanskrit music treatises into her vernacular mix of Hindi and English, the tone of the conversation shifts abruptly. We interrupt our discussion of singers, performances, and musical training in favor of a discussion about authoritative texts, terms, and categories. It is only when the singer interrupts our conversation with a compelling phrase in Rag Jhinjhoti that we turn our attention back to the body on stage. Somehow, it is in discussions of gesture—where the body and the voice work together in the most obvious way—that music scholars insist most emphatically that the body and the voice are, in fact, separate. The body serves as a discursive pivot that modulates from matters of aesthetics (beauty vs. ugliness, grace vs. awkwardness, elegance vs. excess) to matters of ethics (chastity vs. promiscuity, sincerity vs. ostentation, spirituality vs. sensuality). This can be explained in part by the moral burden borne by singers. This burden, a residue of centuries of discourse in Sanskrit and Persian, Hindi and English, continues to shape thought about the role of the body in music. As we will see, music scholars of all kinds, writing in Persian, Sanskrit, Tamil, and English, writing for courtly feudal and urban bourgeois audiences, drawing on the jargon of yoga, sufism, theosophy, History of Moving and Singing in India / 17 and secular romanticism, have found remarkable agreement when it comes to the gestures of vocalists. The consensus is that gesture is bad: uncouth, antispiritual, or at best incidental to real music. The goal here is not to summarily debunk these claims as fanciful “projections onto an empty screen” (Latour 2004: 242)—indeed, the coming chapters will make the case that the movement of singers, in the moment of performance, is anything but empty. I am not urging music connoisseurs to take pleasure in gesture; nor am I urging singers to reject received wisdom and gesture more. Nothing here is evidence that gesture in itself is a sign of good manners, that movement is necessarily and inherently spiritual, or that the hand is more important than the voice. But for those who are interested in the role of the body in music, the processes of melodic improvisation, and the transmission of musical practices, there is much to learn from gesture, posture, and the physicality of vocal production that cannot be learned from sound alone. Readers who are eager to get on with the analysis of gestural performance may wish to skip this chapter for now and move on to chapter 2, which addresses the relationship between vocalization and gesture. First, though, in order to understand why the melodic knowledge embodied in gesture has been largely ignored by music theorists and, eventually, to understand the ethical import of gestural inheritance in teaching lineages, it is helpful to look carefully at these streams of discourse—even where we cannot draw conclusions about the details of gestural practice. Gesture in Ancient and Medieval Indian Music Literature The earliest lengthy discussion of performance conventions in the extant Sanskrit literature is found in the dramaturgical manual Natyasastra (ca. 200 ce). Here movement is mostly treated in connection to drama and dance. In its discussion of drama, for example, the Natyasastra suggests three ways in which gestural dispositions can indicate a character’s social standing. First, gestures made higher on the body indicate high rank; second , frequent gestures indicate low rank; third, while characters of high social rank move according to canonical rules, actors playing characters of low social rank merely emulate the spontaneous gestures of daily life (Bharatamuni 1998: 9:61–66, 191). Thus begins a long tradition of placing spontaneous gesture in opposition to prestige and nobility. The notion that gesturing according to prescribed rules is suitable for high-status performance helps to explain why conventional, systematized systems of gesture—such as the conventional patterns...

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