Master Musicians of India: Hereditary Sarangi Players Speak (review)

Chief among the challenges of ethnomusicological writing today are questions of representation and voice, the accuracy of scholarly interpretations, and their distance from the lives of living practitioners. One of the solutions in recent decades has been the employment of dialogic processes, through which scholars share research with ‘insiders,’ soliciting opinions and feedback or even producing collaborative final products. In Master Musicians of India: Hereditary Sarangi Players Speak, eminent ethnomusicologist Regula Qureshi takes a unique approach to dialogic presentation and thus contributes to a new paradigm for the publication of field research.

Most recorded interviews and field notes remain in institutional or personal archives, drawn on for scholarly projects, but rarely made public. Qureshi has chosen, with permission and support from the musicians, to publish twenty-three translated and transcribed interviews from her own research. Organized in eleven chapters and enhanced by biographical and contextual information, the interviews offer strikingly intimate glimpses into the lives of ten ‘masters’ of the North Indian bowed instrument, the sarangi. Spanning a period of almost forty years, Qureshi’s interviews document the ongoing process of tradition and change among these artists, their disciples, and communities as her collaborators speak of their training, approaches to teaching, innovations, and a host of other subjects. Qureshi takes a broad approach to the term hereditary at times, including performers whose families have been professional musicians for only a few generations, but this increases the breadth of the data. The speakers range from Qureshi’s own teachers to other renowned artists, and she frames the book by beginning with her second Ustad, Sabri Khan of Delhi, and ending with her first Ustad, the late Hamid Husain of Lahore. This last chapter is a touching selection of excerpts from his memoir, which reach back into the 1800s, connecting globalized present with feudal past. One also learns about Qureshi, who candidly situates herself in the context of both lessons and conversations. In a personal voice that combines fond memories with scholarly reflexivity, she presents her own experiences candidly, frequently emphasizing her language proficiency and musical accomplishments, but also frankly drawing attention to occasional cultural errors she made in spite of her achieved insider status through her Indian husband and his family. Her expertise is clearly situated in the world of hereditary Muslim rather than Hindu performers, however, as a slip in the lineage of a Hindu dance family reveals.

One of Qureshi’s primary aims in creating this work was to present the musicians’ words unmediated by scholarship in order to honour her ‘commitment to the individuals who make interpretation possible in the first place [and] to let them be heard on their own authority.’ Yet words are not always straightforward, and the acts of transcription and translation can easily shape meaning. Language is therefore an essential issue and approached with great insight here. The dialogues, for example, preserve a sense of the syntax of the original Urdu or Hindi nicely without becoming ungrammatical. There are occasional inconsistencies in the italics and parentheses used for contextual or descriptive interjections, but never to the point of causing confusion. I must admit to being distracted by the consistent spelling of all right as alright, but otherwise found metaphoric and linguistic concerns approached with intelligence and sensitivity.

All in all, Master Musicians of India is an immensely interesting and useful book that offers an intriguing framework for the presentation of research. The amount of raw, largely unmediated information is phenomenal, yet the intimate nature of the dialogues makes the book an easy read. The serious scholar will have to create his or her own index, as many gems of information in the text are not included in the index, but this is a feature of the presentation rather than a weakness. One is compelled to delve into and analyze the book as the archive it is, rather than skim through in search of salient quotes. The multiple approaches through which the text can be accessed and the...