Author's anecdotes and impression on the life and musical genius of musicians of Hindustani music style.

‘Kudrat teri rang-birangee! Oh many-splendoured Creation!’ So went the bhajan Ustad Abdul Karim Khan sang before the saint Tajuddin Baba. The holy man, entranced by the song, clapped his hands and danced. Kumar Prasad Mukherji’s elegy to a vanishing age of musical giants comprises many such shared experiences between performer and audience, between recital and applause. It is his salute to a world receding into the shadows of history, peopled by ustads, pandits, the rich and the famous, the sacred and the profane. He traces the origins of their schools, from folk traditions to the courts of ancient emperors to the sound of the ankle -bells of dancing girls. He points to the time when notation crept into classical music, horrifying old masters accustomed to an art form that celebrated spontaneity and improvisation, but resulting in the preservation of ragas that would otherwise have been lost to time. While Mukherji’s beloved ‘Khansahebs’, ‘Panditjis’ and ‘Buwas’ may have been inspired by the divine, his recounting from legends and from personal memory shows us those greats as intensely human creatures. They are driven by appetites not always noble and their intrigues and jealousies are universal. Humour, too, abounds in these pages, as do characters who will remain forever etched in the mind of the reader.

In the middle of the nineteenth century a new family of hereditary musicians emerged in the royal court of Lucknow and subsequently rose to the heights of renown throughout North India. Today this musical lineage, or ghar n, lives on in the music and memories of only a small handful of descendants and players of the family instrument, the sarod. Drawing on six years of ethnographic and archival research, and fifteen years of musical apprenticeship, Max Katz explores the oral history and written record of the Lucknow ghar n ,tracing its displacement, loss of prestige, and erasure from the collective memory. In doing so he illuminates a hidden history of ideological and social struggle in North Indian music culture, intervenes in ongoing debates over the anti-Muslim agenda of Hindustani music's reform movement, and reanimates a lost vision in which Muslim scholar-artists defined the music of the nation. An interdisciplinary, postmodern counter-history, Lineage of Loss offers a new and unsettling narrative of Hindustani music's encounter with modernity.

In 1902 The Gramophone Company in London sent out recording experts on "expeditions" across the world to record voices from different cultures and backgrounds. All over India, it was women who embraced the challenge of overcoming numerous social taboos and aesthetic handicaps that came along with this nascent technology. Women who took the plunge and recorded largely belonged to the courtesan community, called tawaifs and devadasis, in North and South India, respectively. Recording brought with it great fame, brand recognition, freedom from exploitative patrons, and monetary benefits to the women singers. They were to become pioneers of the music industry in the Indian sub-continent. However, despite the pioneering role played by these women, their stories have largely been forgotten. Contemporaneous with the courtesan women adapting to recording technology was the anti-nautch campaign that sought to abolish these women from the performing space and brand them as common prostitutes. A vigorous renaissance and arts revival movement followed, leading to the creation of a new classical paradigm in both North Indian (Hindustani) and South Indian (Carnatic) classical music. This resulted in the standardization, universalization, and institutionalization of Indian classical music. This newly created classical paradigm impacted future recordings of The Gramophone Company in terms of a shift in genres and styles. Vikram Sampath sheds light on the role and impact of The Gramophone Company’s early recording expeditions on Indian classical music by examining the phenomenon through a sociocultural, historical and musical lens. The book features the indefatigable stories of the women and their experiences in adapting to recording technology. The artists from across India featured are: Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta, Janki Bai of Allahabad, Zohra Bai of Agra, Malka Jaan of Agra, Salem Godavari, Bangalore Nagarathnamma, Coimbatore Thayi, Dhanakoti of Kanchipuram, Bai Sundarabai of Pune, and Husna Jaan of Banaras.

This book offers an inclusive lens through which to study the music and dance of South Asia, its diasporas, and the people who produce and use these cultural expressions. Each chapter's central argument ties into a participatory exercise that provides active ways to understand and engage with cultural meaning.

Ways of Voice explores techniques of voice production in North India, from Bollywood to raga music to ghazal to devotional hymns and Sufi song. The voices in play here are not merely given, but achieved. Singers consciously train themselves to cultivate characteristic vocal gaits, sonorities, and poetic attunements; they adopt postures of the vocal apparatus; they build habits of listening, temporality, and social relations. The action in Ways of Voice revolves around several dozen North Indian popular, devotional, classical, and folk singers engaged in projects of vocal striving. Like most singers, they are strategically working on changing, refining, and making their own voices. The book thus highlights the ways in which singers not only "have" voice, but actively acquire, cultivate and contest particular vocal dispositions for particular kinds of listeners. In framing a "Hindustani vocal ecumene" that encompasses a diverse range of classical, popular, and spiritual-devotional musical styles and practices, it offers an expansive look at ways of voice that extend far beyond commonsense boundaries of genre and place. A rich archive of audio and video examples are provided on the online companion site, which can be found at https://www.weslpress.org/readers-companions/.

Indian vocalists trace intricate shapes with their hands while improvising melody. Although every vocalist has an idiosyncratic gestural style, students inherit ways of shaping melodic space from their teachers, and the motion of the hand and voice are always intimately connected. Though observers of Indian classical music have long commented on these gestures, Musicking Bodies is the first extended study of what singers actually do with their hands and voices. Matthew Rahaim draws on years of vocal training, ethnography, and close analysis to demonstrate the ways in which hand gesture is used alongside vocalization to manifest melody as dynamic, three-dimensional shapes. The gestures that are improvised alongside vocal improvisation embody a special kind of melodic knowledge passed down tacitly through lineages of teachers and students who not only sound similar, but who also engage with music kinesthetically according to similar aesthetic and ethical ideals. Musicking Bodies builds on the insights of phenomenology, Indian and Western music theory, and cultural studies to illuminate not only the performance of gesture, but its implications for the transmission of culture, the conception of melody, and the very nature of the musicking body.