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“A Christy Minstrel, a Harlequin, or an Ancient Persian”?: Opera, Hindustani Classical Music, and the Origins of the Popular South Asian “Musical”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2020
Extract
The story of South Asian colonial modernity and music offers up a multidirectional and polymorphous conceptual terrain featuring, among many agents, Hindustani royalty, touring minstrel and burlesque troupes, Jesuit missionaries and orientalists, and not least, social reformists. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of Hindustani music consistently traces its development through classicization against the rise of Hindu nationalism while overlooking other palpable clues in the colonial past. This article argues for a substantial reevaluation of colonial South Asian music by positing an alternative and hitherto invisible auditory stimulus in colonial Asia's aural landscape: opera. Janaki Bakhle contends that “as a musical form, opera put down even fewer roots than did orchestral, instrumental Western classical music,” even though she subsequently states that “Western orchestration did become part of modern ceremonial activities, and it moved into film music even as it was played by ersatz marching bands.” Bakhle further argues that Hindustani music underwent processes of sanitization and systematization within a Hindu nation-making project, a view that has been complicated by historians such as Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana describes how scholarship that focuses exclusively on the codification or nationalization of Hindustani music through the interpellation of a Hindu public neglects “sedimented forms of musical persistence.” Not dissimilarly, Richard David Williams highlights how the singular emphasis on the movement of Hindustani music reform risks reducing the heterogeneous and complex musicological traditions in the colonial period to the output of a single, monolithic, middle-class “new elite.” Previous scholarship, he argues, concentrates on “one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.” Following these calls for more textured perspectives on South Asian musical cultures, I suggest a somewhat heretical thesis: that opera functioned as a common mediating stimulus for both the colonial reinscription of Hindustani music as classical as well as the emergence of popular pan-Asian musical genres such as “Bollywood” music.
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Footnotes
This article was written during an HKU–Hughes Hall Fellowship (2018–19) at the University of Cambridge. I am especially indebted toward my host at Cambridge, Benjamin Walton; the two anonymous reviewers; the Editor of Theatre Survey, Marlis Schweitzer; Michael Kyung Hyun Ju and Michael Gnat for their helpful suggestions. All translations from Gujarati are my own. I have followed the ALA–LC transliteration system and have replaced Pha with Fa in keeping with the Parsi model of transliterating names.
References
Notes
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18 “Gāeṇ,” Rāst Goftār, 4 July 1869, 417–18; “Mīujīk,” Rāst Goftār, 26 September 1875, 654.
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23 “Ek Anītī . . . ,” Rāst Goftār, 14 November 1858, 570.
24 “Oratnu gāeṇ—Rāṇḍonā̃ nāc,” Rāst Goftār, 25 October 1863, 540–1.
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30 Ibid.
31 Music was first taught to girls in 1856 by schools established by the Student's Scientific and Literary Society (SLSS), an organization founded by social reformists such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji Furdunji, Sorabji Shapurji Bengali, and Bhau Daji. Bakhle, 62–3.
32 “Āpṇī Pārsī Chokrīonī Nīśāḷomā̃,” Rāst Goftār, 5 April 1868, 216. The ā̃friṅgān is a ritual of blessing.
33 “Jartośtī chokrīonī Nīśāḷomā̃ Apātī Keḷavṇī ūpar thaylā Homlāno Javāb,” Rāst Goftār, 12 April 1868, 227–8; “Chokrīonī Nīśālo ane Yajdā̃parast,” Rāst Goftār, 19 April 1868, 247–8; “Chokrīonī Keḷavṇī ūpar Yajdā̃ Parast no Navo Homlo,” Rāst Goftār, 3 May 1868, 276.
34 “Deśī Chokrīonī Iṅgrejī Keḷavṇī,” Rāst Goftār, 5 June 1870, 362–3.
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42 “Dnān Prasārak Maṇḍaḷī,” Rāst Goftār, 17 December 1876, 859–60; “Dnān Prasārak Maṇḍaḷī,” Rāst Goftār, 26 May 1878, 345–6; “Dnān Prasārak Maṇḍaḷī,” Rāst Goftār, 2 June 1878, 363–4.
43 Hindu Music and the Gayan Samaj (Bombay: Bombay Gazette Steam Press, 1887), 34.
44 “Gāyaṇ Śīkhavvānī Deśī Nīśāl,” Rāst Goftār, 6 August 1871, 502; “Saṅgīt Vīdyālay,” Rāst Goftār, 22 June 1873, 394. Williams notes that Tagore was a complex figure, as his work spoke to both Hindu revivalism as well as British colonialism. Tagore's extensive research on Bengali and Sanskrit music literature nevertheless constituted a cornerstone for the development of a nationalist Hindu historiography of Indian music. Williams, “Music, Lyrics, and the Bengali Book.”
45 “Dnān Prasārak Maṇḍaḷī,” Rāst Goftār, 10 January 1886, 39–40; “A Discourse on Indian Music,” Rāst Goftār, 17 January 1886, 60–1; Times of India, 26 May 1885, 3; “Dnān Prasārak Maṇḍaḷī,” Rāst Goftār, 28 November 1886, 1309–11; “Dnān Prasārak Maṇḍaḷī,” Rāst Goftār, 5 December 1886, 1337–8.
46 “Jāher Khabar,” Rāst Goftār, 29 January 1860, 60.
47 “Vīkṭorīā Naṭak Maṇḍaḷī,” Rāst Goftār, 3 May 1868, 284; Rāst Goftār, 24 May 1868, 336.
48 “Deśī Strīone Māṭe Nāṭak—Strī Keḷavṇīno Ek Ūpay,” Rāst Goftār, 19 January 1868, 34–5.
49 Rāst Goftār, 23 October 1870, 701; Rāst Goftār, 30 October 1870, 717; Rāst Goftār, 6 November 1870, 733; Dhanjībhāi Na. Paṭel, Pārsī Nāṭak Takhtānī Tavārīkh (Bombay [Mumbai]: “Kaysare-Hind” Paper Printing Press, 1931), 59.
50 Paṭel, 59; “Parsee Opera, Concert, &c.,” Bombay Gazette, 3 December 1870, 2. Āpakhatyār and Kābrājī were competitors in the fields of music, theatre, and journalism as Kābrājī was not only editor of the rival Rāst Goftār but also had usurped Āpakhatyār's position as director of the Victoria.
51 Paṭel, 59.
52 “Parsee Opera, Concert, &c.,” Bombay Gazette, 7 November 1870, 3. Here “Ethiopian ballet” refers to a performance in blackface. Parsi troupes were heavily influenced by companies such as the Christy and San Francisco Minstrels.
53 Paṭel, 50, 60.
54 Jahāṅgīr Pestanjī Khambātā, Ek Jāṇītā Pārsī Ekṭarno Ardhī said Uparno Nāṭakī Anubhav (Bombay [Mumbai]: n.d., 1913), 3–4.
55 “Parsee Opera, Concert, &c.,” Bombay Gazette, 7 November 1870, 3. “Parsee Opera, Concert, &c.,” Bombay Gazette, 14 November 1870, 3. See also “Native Opera, Concert, &c.,” Bombay Gazette, 12 November 1870, 2; Bombay Gazette, 31 October 1870, 1; Bombay Gazette, 6 April 1871, 1.
56 “Pārsī Kānsarṭ ane Āperā!” Rāst Goftār, 13 November 1870, 741.
57 “Parsee Opera, Concert, &c.,” Bombay Gazette, 5 December 1870, 3.
58 P. M. M., “The Parsee ‘Opera,’” Bombay Gazette, 16 December 1870, 3.
59 J. P. K., “Parsee Opera,” Bombay Gazette, 19 December 1870, 3. Additionally, Āpakhatyār sent off a letter to the Rāst Goftār that was distributed in handbills and published in other Parsi newspapers, “challenging” Kābrājī. Kābrājī was quick to respond, “Āpakhatyār fails to understand the word opera just as he does not seem to understand the word challenge. . . . If a performance is good the public will patronize it, but the theatre was empty for this ‘opera's’ second performance.” “Mī. Nasarvānjī Dorābjī Āpakhetīār,” Rāst Goftār, 27 November 1870, 773–4.
60 Chatterjee, 127.
61 Niranjana, “Musicophilia and the Lingua Musica,” 271.
62 Ibid.
63 P. M. M., “Parsee ‘Opera.’”
64 The actor-manager Dādābhāi Sorābjī Paṭel is to be distinguished from Dādābhāi Paṭel the theatre historian.
65 Rāst Goftār, 1 June 1873, 355; “Hedrābādmā Nāṭakśāḷā,” Rāst Goftār, 2 February 1873, 72.
66 Rāst Goftār, 5 October 1873, 658. See also Paṭel, 180, 284.
67 Khambātā, 31.
68 “Science and System of Indian Music”; “Dnyān Prasārak Maṇḍaḷī,” Rāst Goftār, 7 May 1876, 320–1.
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