In India, Bhakti (devotional Hinduism), unlike more orthodox and exclusionary Brahminical ritual-based practices, emphasizes singing devotional songs and poetry as a primary way of connecting with the divine. There are various Bhakti performative traditions. In this paper, I examine how devotional music in India has entered a new realm: music festivals. These festivals are becoming important venues for devotional singing and have facilitated the expansion of Bhakti into a new social space among the urban elite, who do not necessarily subscribe to the tradition's ritualistic aspects. Beyond being featured in music and cultural festivals, the rise of dedicated devotional music festivals calls for an analysis of how Bhakti music functions within this new context. These festivals showcase a range of musical styles and attract a more elite audience than traditional Bhakti traditions typically reach. Most of these festivals are expensive and affordable only to a few. The paper explores the changing contours of devotional music in this new context, including duration, textual intelligibility, language, and new forms of cross-cultural collaboration. As music festivals grow in popularity among performers, I will analyze the strategies employed by artists and curators to make Bhakti renditions in these festivals distinct from traditional forms. It will also examine how Bhakti music adapts to appeal to this new audience and aims to position itself as an aspirational space for the upwardly mobile social class, which finds these festivals meaningful for refashioning their elite and culturally rooted identities.

Two occasions: a Hindu festival, and International Women’s Day. Two tranquil venues in the midst of the city’s noise: one a temple, another a memorial to an educational activist couple. Two musics; two stories – one traditional and religious, the other anti-caste and feminist. Two strong women at opposite ends of the caste ladder. Yet, I argue that there is great sameness amidst all this difference. Both women are connected by the metaphor of milk (Elbaz 2025) and their “othermothering” (Pasche-Guignard 2020) – key to my research on music’s inseparable intertwining with food, motherhood and caste in Maharashtra, India. Anasūyā, a Brahmin woman, becomes mother to three gods. Aklujkar (2000) terms Anasūyā a “pativratā [i.e., one devoted to her husband,] with panache”. Through Nāradīya kīrtan (Schultz 2012), a music-rich form of religious storytelling, I took a fresh look at her story. Anasūyā exerts her strength while remaining within “brahmanical patriarchy” (Chakravarti 1993) – a system that the second woman, Savitribai Phule (1831-1897), strives to dismantle. An oppressed-caste woman, she birthed a feminist, anti-caste educational revolution. I experienced her through an activist-musician’s live performance of a unique genre-blurring song. Major, minor; sweet, bitter; triumph, struggle – this song is a delectable auditory experience of Savitribai’s power. This song and the kīrtan, while sonically distinct, are unmistakably Maharashtrian in their flavour and tell stories of female power in unforgettable ways. My unique contribution to ethnomusicology is in using this complex interplay of sameness and difference to propose new gastro[ethno-]musicological (Mason 2012, Varli 2024) and multisensory theories.

The sarangi players are identified as Mirāsī in Hindustani (North Indian classical) music. The Mirāsī (from Arabic mīrās: “inheritance,” “heritage”) are an under-represented caste of Muslim musicians, dancers, genealogists, and other kinds of tradition-bearers. They were central to forming a pluralistic set of cultural practices in North India and Pakistan but have been marginalized socially and economically by Indic caste hierarchical ideologies and British colonial policy. Cultural Anthropologist Eva-Maria van Straaten has offered insights into the interplay of space, experiences, and assumptions surrounding Hindustani instrumental music by adopting “a radically open mode of listening to demonstrate how power relations are sonically negotiated” (2015: 86). Building on van Straaten’s research, this paper illustrates how the dynamics of knowledge and hierarchy are constructed through listening to the sarangi within the musical lineages of Mirāsī, known as Gharana.

This socio-musical analysis examines a sarangi trio recorded at All India Radio in 1970, interpreted from my perspective as the grandson of Sabri Khan (1927-2015), one of the featured performers. My methodology includes interviews with musicians involved in the recording, as well as personal anecdotes and narratives collected during a listening session at Sabri Khan’s home in 2000. Additionally, I draw upon the 13^th-century Sanskrit treatise Saṅgīta-ratnākara to explore the concept of “classicism” in the music of sarangi players. This approach enables me to apply an interactive digital transcription method developed by Professor Dard Neuman at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The global rise of right-wing populisms necessitates an understanding of how national sentiment is sustained through cultural expressions such that it becomes a visceral force for members of the nation-community. In India, over the last decade, Hindu nationalism, a religious-territorial ideology envisioning India as a Hindu nation, has gained predominance, partly due to electoral victories. However, scholars such as Anna Schultz highlight the significance of locally rooted music/performances to nationalist mobilization. A case in point is the nationalist appropriation of the powada, a performance tradition in Maharashtra historically stemming from performance cultures of subaltern castes. The powada constitutes ballads on themes ranging from pre-colonial figures such as Shivaji, to anti-colonial leaders and contemporary social issues. As Sharmila Rege writes, it has adapted to various socio-political contexts, from anti-caste and left-wing politics to exclusionary Hindu nationalist movements.

Delving into the powada’s politics, this paper analyzes ways in which the powada, performed across spaces like government-sponsored workshops, ticketed programs, temples, and social media platforms, enables performers to perform the nation, in ways that perpetuate as well as unsettle Hindu nationalism. Performers from diverse caste/class/gender/age backgrounds deploy the powada to lead audiences into emotionally charged experiences of differing visions of the nation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with select performers in Pune in 2024-2025, I will analyze how performers from differing social locations plumb aspects of the powada such as a ‘rustic’ voice that ‘emanates from the navel’, liveness, melodramatic enactment, and thematic content to shape varying sonic imaginations of the nation.