Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature

Christin Hoene

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317679158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. The analyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock 'n' roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artifact and as a purely aestheticized art form at the same time. As a cultural artifact, music derives meaning from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of reference to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aesthetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transgressive qualities of music render it capable of expressing identities irrespective of origin and politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyze the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contemporary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globalization versus cultural imperialism. It will be a useful research and teaching tool for those interested in postcolonial literature, music studies, cultural studies, contemporary literature and South-Asian literature.

1 Singing the Nation

Perhaps it is because we hear a different drummer. Let us step to the music that we hear, we in India.

—Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy (56)

Vikram Seth’s novel, A Suitable Boy, is not primarily a novel about music, yet music pervades the text as much as it pervades the characters’ lives. It plays a crucial role at festivities and celebrations such as weddings, which open and close the novel, or religious festivals, where music is an intrinsic part of the devotional ceremonial. Moreover, music shapes everyday life: a large number of characters in the vast cast of the novel either play an instrument or sing, whistle or sing along to favorite film tunes, have and share opinions about music, or use fictional and non-fictional artists alike as fixed points of cultural reference and identification, such as the novel’s most prominent classical musician Ustad Majeed Khan and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). As a case in point, Lata Mehra, one of the novel’s central characters for whom her mother Mrs. Rupa Mehra aims to find the titular suitable boy, has taken an interest in Indian classical music from her best friend Malati Trivedi, who in turn studies singing with Ustad Majeed Khan, as does Veena Tandon, the sister to Lata’s brother-in-law. Lata herself plays the tanpura and has the habit of humming rāgas (A Suitable Boy 606, 636), of which Mrs. Rupa Mehra very much approves, because she regards Indian classical music as high culture which will foster her chances of marrying off her daughter. Mrs. Mehra’s opinion of Saeeda Bai, ghazal singer and courtesan to the Raja of Marh, is less laudable due to implications of promiscuity and lower caste that accompany the profession of courtesans (17, 29), as will be outlined in more detail below. Lata’s brother Arun, on the other hand, frowns at Lata’s humming of Raag Todi during breakfast, not because he cannot stand that “awful wailing stuff” that in the Englishman Jock Mackay’s ears “Indian singers make” (435), but because Indian classical music is too Indian for Arun, who, as soon as Lata stops humming, starts whistling “Three Coins in the Fountain” from the soundtrack to Jean Negulesco’s 1954 film of the same name, composed by the British-born songwriter Jule Styne.¹ In short, music is an intrinsic part of the characters‘ everyday lives and culture. Music thereby performs a crucial role in the formation of cultural identity and national consciousness, which are main topical concerns in Seth‘s post-independence, postpartition, and postcolonial epic of India as a nation in 1951–1952. In the BBC’s World Book Club from November 2005, Seth speaks of this time as “a very quiet place to begin”; despite this, he wrote what Sarah Johnson on Literature Online credits to be “the longest single volume novel ever to have been written in English” (n. pag.). In the course of its 1,474 pages the author offers a richly detailed portrayal of India shortly after independence and partition, taking into account the country’s recent history, colonial legacies, national and domestic politics, as well as India’s religions and culture. The novel presents music as an intrinsic part of that culture.

In the course of this chapter, I will analyze how different kinds of music are employed in the novel to imagine postcolonial India as a nation that is unified in diversity, to paraphrase both Benedict Anderson and Jawaharlal Nehru, both of whom I will return to as the chapter progresses. It will become apparent that Seth uses particularly North Indian classical music as a cultural heritage that long predates the British Raj to imagine an independent and seemingly self-determined cultural identity untarnished by colonial influences. In reference to classical music, both Indian and Western, Rabindranath Tagore’s folk songs, ghazal love songs, religious tunes, and Bollywood songs, all of which are featured in the text, I will analyze how music both fulfills and complicates the novel’s mission of writing the nation. Music is not easily appropriated to one creed of meaning or the other, because it constantly transgresses contextual meaning, as I have explained in the Introduction with reference to Said’s notion of musical transgression, and because the physical presence of the musician, even if mediated by text, forestalls the semantic meaning of language, as my discussion of Barthes has shown. In other words, music tends to escape the meaning of the very novel it is written into.

This chapter is in two parts (as, indeed, are all of the main chapters, save for the Introduction and Conclusion). I begin the first part of this chapter with a discussion of the different musical traditions that are part of the novel, which can broadly be classified into three groups: North Indian classical, Western classical, and Indian non-classical music. These three categories then can be subdivided into six different kinds of music, all of which have a distinct purpose in the narrative and in demonstrating the role of music culture in the transition of national identity from colony to independent state. All musical forms are represented or embodied by fictional and non-fictional figureheads. First, there is North Indian classical music, also known as Hindustani music, as embodied by the fictional character Ustad Majeed Khan, who is praised in the text as “one of the finest singers in north India” (25). Second, there is Western classical music, exemplified in the text by Schubert. The courtesan Saeeda Bai stands for the third tradition, which is ghazal poetry and music. The fourth field is that of music and religion. This includes devotional music (in the novel also sung by Saeeda Bai), and the role of drummers during religious processions. It also includes the Ustad’s stance towards Hindustani music, which derives from Hindu scripts, but which is mostly performed by Muslims (such as the Ustad). Tagore’s folk songs mark the fifth kind of music featured in A Suitable Boy, and I will analyze Tagore’s importance as a figurehead of the incipient nationalism around the turn of the nineteenth century. A brief discussion of how Bollywood tunes transcend social class and caste in the novel will conclude the first part of this chapter. In the second part of this chapter, I will outline why particularly North Indian classical music is so suitable for the novel’s agenda of re-imagining the postcolonial nation, seeing how it has resisted cultural imperialism and colonial appropriation during the British Raj. As Gerry Farrell argues in his widely influential study Indian Music and the West, the characteristics of Hindustani music rendered it an ideal site of resistance against cultural imperialism: the oral tradition resisted Western staff notation as much as the melodic principles of rāga composition defied the Western harmonic tradition. Thereby, the promulgated aesthetic universalism of Hindustani music became political at the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century when it was appropriated by the incipient Hindu nationalism for the cause of the anti-colonial movement. This exemplifies a politicization of the aesthetic and shows how music can be used to imagine the nation, an argument that I will discuss with reference to both Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee.

“UNITY IN DIVERSITY”

Amongst the different kinds of music mentioned in the novel, there is an implied hierarchy whereby classical music ranks highest and is considered a pure and absolute art, whereas the ghazal and folk traditions are of less aesthetic merit, seeing that they are depicted as serving programmatic purposes. These programmatic agendas, which imbue music with extra-musical meaning and functions, express identities more clearly than the highly aestheticized art form of classical music does. Yet, all of these different kinds of music, including Hindustani music, stand for traditions that have shaped the cultural life and history of India and its people for centuries (in the case of classical and ghazal music), that have particularly influenced a growing nationalist consciousness and identity in the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century (in the case of Tagore), and that have since shaped contemporary Indian culture (as exemplified by Bollywood). Thereby, the different kinds of music assemble to create a portrait of a cultural identity that is heterogeneous as well as self-determined and thus mirrors Nehru’s historiography of India as a country that finds unity in diversity. Moreover, music fulfills the Spivakean agenda of speaking—or in this case, singing—with one’s own voice. Seth uses music in its various kinds and functions to provide a multifaceted cultural portrait of independent India from an insider’s perspective, which defies homogenizing accounts from the West and (re-)writes the nation from within the nation. What unites all the different kinds of music is music’s ability to at the same time acquire meaning and thus serve as an identity marker for a particular group of people, and to transcend political agendas, religious creeds, and social circumstances by its aesthetic value of being first and foremost an art form. In the context of an Indian postcolonial identity, still very much in flux in the years 1951–1952, this quality is crucial, because it renders music a means of identification that is as flexible as the identity it represents. Together, the six musical forms portray India in its cultural variety and diversity.

THE CLASSICAL TRADITIONS

Of the six different musical traditions that are directly mentioned in the novel, the most prominent is Hindustani music, embodied and represented by the fictional musician Ustad Majeed Khan, “one of the finest singers in north India” (25).² He is also a music teacher at the Haridas College of Music, where he teaches Malati Trivedi and Veena Tandon Indian classical music. The Ustad practices what Regula Qureshi et al. in an extensive entry on Indian music and music tradition in Grove Music Online describe as “art music,” which needs to fulfill two criteria: an “[a]uthoritative theoretical doctrine and a disciplined oral tradition of performance extending back over several generations” (n. pag.). In terms of music theory and practice, melodic configurations in Indian classical music by definition need to adhere to the mode of a rāga. In musical lessons and performances alike, Ustad Majeed Khan always teaches and sings tunes based on rāgas, which marks him as a classical musician in the first sense of the definition above. Moreover, the Ustad is lauded throughout the novel for his outstanding skills as a musician, which earn him great respect amongst his students, who “immediately they saw it was him, got up respectfully to greet him” (313), amongst his audiences, and amongst his fellow musicians, who respect him so much that “no one presumed to sit near him” in the crowded canteen of All India Radio Brahmpur (320). The novel establishes Ustad Majeed Khan as “something better than even an A-grade artist” (320), and this confirms his standing as an artist, which according to Qureshi et al. is “determined by discipulary pedigree, by a reputation for devotion to the art, and by what the artist knows, as well as by his or her skill as a performer” (n. pag.). Through the Ustad’s devotion to music he fulfills the second criterion mentioned by Qureshi et al. in their definition of art music: the “disciplined oral tradition” passed on in a teacher-student relationship.

The teacher-student relationship, or “master-disciple succession (guru-śiṣya paramparā)” (Qureshi et al.), authenticates the pure tradition of art music, which is oral and therefore needs to be passed down with every generation of musicians. The master-disciple tradition is the crucial foundational institution for the oral transmission of Indian classical music. Indian classical music goes back to the vedic scriptures, which comprise the four Vedas that form the foundation for Hinduism, composed probably between 1500 and 700 BCE. The Sama Veda contains a collection of liturgical chants and melodies specifically to be sung, and the Rig Veda, as the oldest and principal of the four Vedas, has been traditionally transmitted by oral recitation. As Kapila Vatsyayan, scholar of Indian classical music and dance, explains in Guru-Shishya Parampara: The Master-Disciple Tradition, the Vedas, though written down, are śruti (Sanskrit for “that which is heard,” see The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions), because they are believed not to be of human agency but instead direct revelation: “[t]he Vedās were primary, they were śruti” (Vatsyayan 1). “That which is heard” is therefore of a higher order than smriti (“that which is remembered”), which refers to other scriptures than the vedas, as well as to religious teachings and commentaries. It is crucial to note that the oral tradition is here not a precursor to the written tradition to which it is subsequently subordinated. To the contrary, Vatsyayan emphasizes that both traditions developed parallel to each other: “[t]he written and the oral traditions went hand in hand and the latter was not a pre-literate stage of civilization giving place to the literate and the recorded” (3).³ The original purpose of the master-disciple tradition has therefore been the preservation of the scriptures through oral transmission. As Vatsyayan explains it, “[b]ehind it all lay the avowed faith that the articulated word transmitted from master to disciple was the sacred covenant which could be sustained through a chain system” (3). This requires a very deep personal and spiritual relationship between teacher and student; where possible, the student is to live in the teacher‘s house “and serve him devotedly, as though a member of the guru’s household,” to quote Qureshi et al. (n. pag.).⁴

In A Suitable Boy it is mentioned that one of the great regrets in the life of Ustad Majeed Khan is that he has never had a student, because “he had never found a disciple whom he considered worthy of his art,” and that therefore, “his music would end with himself” (322–323). This is to change when Ishaq Khan, a sarangi player, comes to the Ustad requesting his help in finding employment. Ishaq has had problems with his hands while playing, and he fears that he will soon be out of work due to his illness. Also, Ishaq recently reproached the Ustad in public, because the latter had insulted the memory of Ishaq’s father, a sarangi player like Ishaq, whose profession, according to the Ustad, is not as worthy as that of a soloist. Ishaq is enraged, also because he knows that Ustad Majeed Khan used to be a sarangi player himself, who managed with talent alone to defy the social hierarchy amongst musicians, according to which soloists enjoy a higher status than string players such as sarangi players. According to that same hierarchy it is, however, unforgivable to insult a senior musician, and Ishaq has had to bear the consequences of his outrage ever since. Most notably, All India Radio has not hired him once to perform since that day (392). The Ustad at first is impassive, and neither Ishaq’s apologies nor his existential worries move him to empathy. But then Ishaq recounts how he had been listening to a radio broadcast of the Ustad performing Raag Todi, how he was “entranced” and how he “felt that the great Tansen himself would have listened to that rendering of his raag” (393). The Ustad is not so much flattered by the compliment, but senses that he may have found a kindred spirit in Ishaq, who appreciates music for the same reasons that he does, for its devotional as well as artistic qualities, and mostly for its own sake as art. He asks Ishaq to accompany him home and join him in his practice of Raag Todi, and for Ishaq it is “as if heaven had fallen into his hands” (393). Listening to the Ustad, Ishaq forgets his surroundings, then himself, and when the Ustad tells him to strum the tanpura in accompaniment, Ishaq forgets the pain in his wrists. At the end of the rehearsal, Ustad Majeed Khan decides to take on Ishaq as his disciple and thus pass on his art, and towards the end of the novel it is mentioned that the Ustad treats Ishaq with respect and even “indulgence” and that “they performed with a sense of complementarity that was wonderful to see” (1463). What unites teacher and student is a total devotion to their art, and it strikes the Ustad that:

he may have found in Ishaq that disciple whom he had looked for now for years—someone to whom he could pass on his art, someone who, unlike his own frog-voiced son, loved music with a passion, who had a grounding in performance, whose voice was not displeasing, whose sense of pitch and ornament was exceptional, and who had that additional element of indefinable expressivity. (396)

Crucially, both the Ustad and Ishaq manage to defy their social class circumstances because of their talent and dedication to music. Seth thereby suggests that music can transcend social boundaries, a view supported by Vatsyayan, who writes that “[t]he initiator [i.e. the master] and the initiated [i.e. the disciple] are in a human bond of communication which transcends all other considerations of caste, class, religion or sect” (3). Yet, in an article on “Confronting the Social: Mode of Production and the Sublime for (Indian) Art Music,” Qureshi describes how social inequalities based on a rigid class structure, particularly amongst musicians of Hindustani music, underlie the practice of art music and of many master-disciple relationships: “The endogamous, hereditary bearers of Hindustani music have occupied one of the lowest social and economic positions in that highly stratified society” (16). However, in writing about her teacher, Qureshi also states that, “[o]nce his teaching began, such dissonance was submerged in the discourse, both verbal and sonic, of music, always a shared musical experience. Inequality between us was now reversed. He commanded my deference as he inducted me into his orbit of the sublime, into the rules of sonic beauty and order which he personified” (16). Here Qureshi suggests that the sublime in music can transcend and even reverse social hierarchies. However, the aesthetic realm cannot be separated from the social realm, as “art music is itself social [and] cannot be separated from processes of production” (17), meaning that whenever music is performed, the act of performance constitutes a web of relationships between creators, performers and listeners. Qureshi also argues that the discourse of art music—and she makes the very interesting and convincing equation between Western and Indian classical music in this particular regard, one that I will more fully analyze later in this chapter—has traditionally focused on the aesthetic properties of music, which implies “abstraction from functional...