Davesh Soneji | Toward a Caste-Critical Historical Acoustemology of Modern South India

Over the past twenty-five years, a number of us have been writing and re-writing histories of music and musicians in modern South India with an eye to centering caste as an analytic. Much academic labor has been put into identifying the bourgeoisie dispensation of the invention of “the classical” as a nationalist, Brahminical project. Some scholars have gestured—although sometimes only very vaguely—to the histories of caste-based extraction and appropriation that produced the socio-aesthetic domain that is called “the classical.” Yet ironically, rarely have we been able to critically center service-caste and Dalit musicians as historical subjects and producers of musical knowledge in modern South India.

This talk draws on a neglected archive of vernacular print material and images about Tamil musicians (who were markedly non-elite and often from communities that performed obligatory musical labor in agrestic contexts) to rethink the caste-inflected boundary making practices around South Indian music. Imagining a sensorium in which the aural, acoustic, and haptic knowledge of non-elite musicians occupy centerstage, this talk moves us across capacious and varied sonicscapes at the turn of the twentieth century, from Tamil musical texts about Dalits toiling on fields and cremation grounds, to musical and theatrical forms performed on plantations as reprieve from indentured agrarian labor in the “Madrasi” diaspora, to the political mobilization of music by “Adi Dravidar” activists in the 1930s. While “historical acoustemology,” as a method framed by anthropologists like Steven Feld, Tom Rice, and James Mansell asks how history itself was constituted by acts of sounding and hearing, in this project, I reorient this idea of “listening to the past” to foreground the inventive agency of service-caste and Dalit musicians as producers and purveyors of sound-as-knowledge.

About the Speaker

Davesh Soneji is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of the award-winning Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India (2012), and the forthcoming Unbounded Tunes: Ecologies of Musical Pluralism in Modern South India. He is also editor of Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India (2008); Bharatanatyam: A Reader (2010); Caste, Community, and the Performing Arts of Modern South India (forthcoming), and the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Indian Music (with Anna Morcom).

This event is hosted by the Caste, Culture, and Aesthetics Global Humanities Research Workshop co-sponsored by Stanford Global Studies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center For South Asia.