Gendered Voices and Performative Visions of Transnational North India
Chair(s): Christian Morgan James (Indiana University Bloomington,)
The voice is a powerful metaphor for mobilizing the political imaginary. Yet scholarship in music and sound studies increasingly shows how attention to literal, sounded voices complicates the metaphor’s neat political expediency. This owes, in part, to the ways actual voices are ineluctably gendered. Because of its superlative emphasis on the voice, Indian music is a particularly generative field for understanding the complex interplay of voice, gender, performance, and political consciousness. Three case studies listen for the refractory nature of the gendered voice in performatively enacting transnational politics. The first paper analyzes Hindustani tappa, a genre inspired by folksongs from 18th-century Arab trade routes and sung from a first-person feminine perspective. Contemporary tappa singers navigate competing demands to preserve the genre and appease the rigid conservative nationalism of their patrons. The second paper turns to the Delhi-based festival Jahan-e-Khusrau, another manifestation of the tension between transnational origins and national appeal in Hindustani music. In part through the gendered voice of Abida Parveen, the music festival instrumentalizes Sufi ideals toward a vision of friendship between India and Pakistan. The final paper analyzes the Swara Mountain Arts Festival in Dharamshala. Under the auspices of a global feminist movement, festival organizers consciously supplant the religious communitarianism of both region and nation with a secular-liberal mode of vocal performance. In all three cases, singers operationalize a transnational vision of India in ways that both unsettle and enforce national and global power structures, illuminating the politically contingent potency of voices gendered through song.
Presentations in the Session
Camels, Courts, and Contradictions: Reimagining Gender Performativity in Hindustani Tappa
Ali Hassan
University of Pittsburgh
The Hindustani tappa, a syncretic semi-classical vocal form, emerged in 18th-century Awadh through court musician Mian Ghulam Nabi Shori’s reimagining of Punjabi-Sindhi camel drivers’ folk songs. Shori’s compositions formalized the tappa signature “undulating” melodic patterns, mirroring the rhythmic gait of camels traversing trade routes frequented by Arabic merchants. While scholarship has traced the tappa dissemination from Gwalior to Benares and Bengal, its lyrical content and gendered dimensions remain understudied. The tappa’s verses, sung from a first-person feminine perspective, oscillate ambiguously between spiritual yearning and erotic longing, demanding a critique of its gender performativity. Performers, irrespective of gender, must embody a feminine vocal persona characterized by fluid ornamentation (khatka, zamzama) and emotive vulnerability, reinforcing historical and colonial constructs of femininity as delicate and sensuous. This duality becomes politically fraught in contemporary India, where Hindutva ideologies increasingly police gendered expression while romanticizing “traditional” art forms. I employ historical, lexical, and intersectional analysis to interrogate how the tappa-prescribed femininity shapes the perceptions of performers and listeners. I also examine the genre’s role in perpetuating or subverting patriarchal norms through its codified lyrical and performative frameworks. Ethnographic interviews with tappa vocalists will illuminate how modern artists navigate tensions between tradition and sociopolitical change. By situating the tappa within postcolonial feminist discourse, I intend to reveal the interplay of cultural preservation, gender ideology, and power in India’s evolving artistic landscape.
In the Realm of Ecstasy: Sufi Diplomacy at the “Jahan-e-Khusrau” Music Festival
John Caldwell
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
One of the longest-running transnational Sufi music festivals in South Asia was the annual “Jahan-e Khusrau (The World of Khusrau),” founded in 2001 by Indian impressario Muzafar Ali. Rising tensions between India and Pakistan led to a three-year hiatus from 2014 to 2016, but the festival resumed in 2017, albeit without Pakistani performers. This sudden shift in the festival was surprising because one of its essential goals was to celebrate the ascendance of Sufi values over geopolitics. Until 2013, this objective had been sonically amplified by bringing musicians from India, Pakistan, and other nations to perform together on the same stage at the Humayun Tomb complex in Delhi, just a stone’s throw from the Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya. In this presentation, I examine how the festival instrumentalized Sufi ideals—embodied acoustically by the voice of Abida Parveen—to promote India-Pakistan friendship. I then investigate the circumstances behind the elimination of Pakistani performers. To elucidate this historical moment, I examine the 2017 festival in depth, using evidence from fieldwork, concert promotional materials and recordings, as well as a video in which Muzaffar Ali discusses his vision for reviving the festival. I also analyze the intersections of space, place, community, and ideology at these festivals. Ultimately, I argue that the Indian government’s notion of music as a weapon of nationalism fatally undermined Muzaffar Ali’s sonic construction of an apolitical “realm of ecstasy.”
One Billion Rising on Stage: The Inclusive Festival as Resource for Feminist Mobilization in Himachal Pradesh
Christian Morgan James
Indiana University Bloomington
In May 2022, the non-governmental organization Jagori Rural Charitable Trust (JRCT) welcomed guests from throughout India for the inauguration of its Swara Mountain Arts Festival. The now-annual festival hosts four days of educational arts workshops with nightly open-gate concerts at JRCT’s scenic campus in the Western Himalayan foothills, culminating in a final evening of performances at Dharamshala’s Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts by headliners of national repute. JRCT finances the festival with support from One Billion Rising (OBR), a global campaign to end violence against women, for which JRCT serves as India’s national secretariate. Likewise, JRCT affiliates the festival with OBR’s contemporary feminist vision, billing it as “an inclusive festival celebrating multiple creative expressions” that encourages all, particularly those most marginal to patriarchal structures of power, to join and “rise for freedom.” Drawing on feedback interviews with a dozen of the festival’s organizers, artist-facilitators, and participants, alongside my own experience and audio-visual documentation of the festival’s 2023 edition, this paper investigates the discursive interplay of regional, national, and transnational fields of force in the festival’s bid for emancipatory artistic expression. Following my interlocutors, I interpret JRCT’s turn to festival hospitality in light of its emplacement in the Kangra Valley as well as its roots in the national women’s liberation movement of the mid-1970s. I argue that the Swara Festival completes a transformation in JRCT’s instrumentalization of cultural production toward a secular-liberal conception of the arts, the cultural and historical specificity of which local modes of performance serve to remind.
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