The public consumption of Western music in colonial India: From imperialist exclusivity to global receptivity

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Notes

¹ The label ‘Anglo-Indian’ is commonly used to describe mixed-race communities in India, but the designation itself is something of a misnomer because virtually every European nationality enters into the genealogy of that group, not just those of British or British/Indian decent. I have chosen the designation ‘Eurasian’ to avoid any confusion that may arise in using the more popular term ‘Anglo-Indian’, which the British used to describe themselves throughout colonial rule. The term ‘Eurasian’ is more suitable for this article to avoid potential confusion that might arise in the references I cite that use ‘Anglo-Indian’ to describe the British in India.

² For a discussion of elitism and social clubs in colonial India, see Mrinalini Sinha, ‘British, Clubbability and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India’, in The Journal of British Studies, Vol.40, no.4 (Oct. 2001), pp.489–521.

³ Benjamin Easterbrook Angwin, ‘Music in the Himalayan Foothills’, in The Musical Times, Vol.77, no.1117 (March 1936), p.226.

⁴ Ibid., p.227.

⁵ Dr. Creser, ‘A Musical Examiner's Experiences in India. A Talk with Dr. Creser’, in The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol.40, no.682 (Dec. 1899), p.817.

⁶ Ibid., pp.817–8.

⁷ For another example of the satisfaction derived from defeating such harsh conditions, see A.S.C., ‘Calcutta Cathedral and its New Organ’, in Musical Times, Vol.56, no.872 (Oct. 1915), pp.600–3.

⁸ See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

⁹ Ian Woodfield, Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

¹⁰ Ibid., p.145.

¹¹ Ibid. pp.145–6.

¹² Raymond Head, ‘Corelli in Calcutta: Colonial Music-Making in India during the 17th and 18th Centuries’, in Early Music, Vol.13, no.4 (Nov. 1985), pp.548–53.

¹³ Ibid., p.551.

¹⁴ See Woodfield, Music of the Raj.

¹⁵ S.M. Everett and E.F. Horner, ‘Trinity College Examinations in India’, in The Musical Times, Vol.63, no.953 (July 1922), p.508.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Trevor Herbert and Margaret Sarkissian, ‘Victorian Bands and their Dissemination in the Colonies’, in Popular Music, Vol.16, no.2 (May 1997), p.169.

¹⁸ For an interesting exploration of the history of the Grenadier Guards Band and the importance of military music, see Anon., ‘The Grenadier Guards Band,’ in The Musical Times, Vol.48, no.769 (March 1907), pp.149–55.

¹⁹ I owe the idea of boredom among the British in India to Jeffery Auerbach, ‘Imperial Boredom’, in Common Knowledge, Vol.11, no.2 (2005), pp.283–305.

²⁰ Herbert and Sarkissian, ‘Victorian Bands and their Dissemination in the Colonies’, p.168.

²¹ Anon., ‘Regimental Bands: Their History and Role of Usefulness’, in The Musical Times, Vol. 48, no.839 (Jan 1913), p.29.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ For an interesting discussion of bands sponsored by Indian states, see Gregory Booth, ‘The Madras Corporations Band: A Story of Social Change and Indigenization,’ in Asian Music, Vol.28, no.1 (Autumn 1996–Winter 1997), pp.61–86. For a discussion of Indian wedding bands, see Gregory Booth, ‘Brass Bands: Tradition, Change and Mass Media in Indian Wedding Music,’ in Ethnomusicology, Vol.34, no.2 (Spring–Summer 1990), pp.245–62.

²⁵ Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere’, hints at a change in the decades leading up to Independence, especially during World War II, when more people of diverse backgrounds arrived who were not interested in associating themselves with the traditional social clubs. She claims that ‘the particular dramatization of “whiteness” in the clubland was already being rendered obsolete. So for many of the Europeans arriving in India during the Second World War, a great number of whom were quite diverse in their backgrounds and their political orientations, the “stuffy clubs” of Anglo-India [i.e. the British in India] held less and less attraction’ (p.517).

²⁶ I view modernity in this chapter as a cognitive phenomenon, and I am mainly concerned with questions of the way people became conscious of the global and the modern, and how this impacted upon action and identity.

²⁷ See Bradley Shope, ‘They Treat Us White Folks Fine: African American Musicians and the Popular Music Terrain in Late-Colonial India’, in Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, Vol.5 no.2 (Nov. 2007), pp.97–116.

²⁸ Much of the material on Roy Butler is from his personal archives now held at the Roy Butler Collection, Music Information Center, Chicago Public Library.

²⁹ For a discussion of the life of Roy Butler, see Peter Darke and Ralph Gulliver, ‘Roy Butler's Story’, in Storyville, Vol.71 (June-July 1977), pp.178–90. For a discussion of the work of Teddy Weatherford, see Peter Darke and Ralph Gulliver, ‘Teddy Weatherford’, in Storyville, Vol.65 (June 1976), pp.175–90.

³⁰ Dempsey Travis, ‘Chicago's Jazz Trail, 1893–1950’, in Black Music Research Journal, Vol.10, no.1 (Spring 1990), p.83.

³¹ Ibid.

³² At various times they were also called the ‘Deep South Boys’ and the ‘Taj Quartet’. The latter name derived from their employment at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay.

³³ The Bombay edition of the Times of India and the Calcutta edition of The Statesman advertised their performances frequently in the late 1930s through the early 1940s. Program brochures from the Taj Hotel highlighted their performances and often used photos of the band in costume.

³⁴ Roy Butler, personal correspondence with Amanda Wylie (1933), Roy Butler Collection, Music Information Center, Chicago Public Library.

³⁵ H.J. Collett, ‘Thirty Years of Jazz in India: Our Top Bands Can Swing it with the Best’, in The Illustrated Weekly of India (22 Aug. 1948). For another discussion of jazz in India, see Warren R. Pinckney, ‘Jazz in India: Perspectives on Historical Development and Musical Acculteration’, in Asian Music, Vol.21, no.1 (Autumn 1989–Winter 1990), pp.35–77. Naresh Fernandez addresses the history of Goan involvement in jazz in Mumbai in his ‘Remembering Anthony Gonsalves’ (2004) [www.indiaseminar.com., accessed Sept. 2006].

³⁶ Tan Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), p.51.

³⁷ See Collett, ‘Thirty Years of Jazz in India’; Butler, personal archives; and Darke and Gulliver, ‘Roy Butler's Story’, pp.178–90.

³⁸ See Alison Arnold, ‘Popular Film Song in India: A Case of Mass Market Musical Eclecticism’, in Popular Music, Vol.7, no.2 (1988), pp.177–88, for a discussion of the development of popular film music. The early growth of the gramophone industry in India is addressed by Gerry Farrell, ‘The Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India: Historical, Social and Musical Perspectives’, in British Journal of Ethnomusicology, Vol.2 (1993), pp.31–53; and Gerry Farrell, Indian Music and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). An emerging music industry and its influence on the consumption of music is covered by Stephen P. Hughes, ‘The “Music Boom” in Tamil South India: Gramophone, Radio and the Making of Mass Culture’, in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol.22, no.4 (Oct. 2002), pp.445–73; Peter Manuel, ‘Popular Music in India: 1901–1986’, in Popular Music, Vol.7, no.2 (May 1988), pp.157–76; and Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, ‘His Master's Voice? Exploring Qawwali and “Gramophone Culture” in South Asia’, in Popular Music, Vol.18, no.1 (Jan. 1999), pp.63–98, and Amanda Weidman, ‘Guru and Gramophones: Fantasies of Fidelities and Modern Technology of the Real’, in Public Culture, Vol.5, no.13 (2003), pp.453–76, both address the influence of gramophone technology on recorded Indian music.

³⁹ For detailed discussions of broadcasting in India, see G.C. Awasthy, Broadcasting in India (Bombay: Allied Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1965); U.C. Baruah, This is All India Radio: A Handbook of Radio Broadcasting in India (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1983); Partha Sarati Gupta, Radio and the Raj: 1921–47 (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co., 1995); and David Lelyveld, ‘Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All-India Radio’, in Social Text, No.39 (Summer 1994), pp.111–27. For a comprehensive look at the history of the production of Indian films, see Erik Barnouw and Subrahmanyam Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

⁴⁰ See Awasthy, Broadcasting in India; and Baruah, This is All India Radio.

⁴¹ Baruah, This is All India Radio, p.6.

⁴² Collett, ‘Thirty Years of Jazz in India’.

⁴³ From personal interviews with Mrs. D‘Costa and Mr. and Mrs. McFarland, Lucknow, 2001.

⁴⁴ The Pioneer, Lucknow edition (18 Jan. 1934).

⁴⁵ This information has been gathered from Lucknow editions of the English-language Pioneer. See for example the 8 Oct. 1934 edition.

⁴⁶ The film 42nd Street was shown in 1933 in the East Indian Railway Institute in Lucknow, but there was no indication that it necessarily influenced the consumption of music or dance in Lucknow. The Carioca, as a dance for couples, met a more enthusiastic reception in the media.

⁴⁷ Other orchestras may have been playing at this time that are not documented in local newspapers or elsewhere. I was unable to find any elderly individuals in Lucknow who could comment on jazz performances in the mid 1930s.

⁴⁸ Interview with James Perry, Lucknow, 2001. See also Bradley Shope, ’Anglo-Indian Identity, Knowledge and Power: Western Ballroom Music in Colonial Lucknow‘, in The Theater and Drama Review, Vol.48, no.4 (Winter 2004), pp.167–82.

⁴⁹ Lucknow's cultural history is often defined in contemporary everyday discourse in terms of loss or degradation, whereby an artistic high-ground established in the mid nineteenth century has slowly declined. Much of the degeneration of traditional Indian cosmopolitanism is often attributed to growing British dominance in the region of Awadh after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, when the British initiated a policy of tighter control over North India. Such discourse typically references the period of the reign of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, who ruled until 1856, and the subsequent years, as the end of this highly-regarded period. Abdul Halim Sharar in his Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.139, asserts that a high level of musical literacy in the general population made Lucknow unique, and that people ‘understand it, recognize tunes … and after listening to one or two notes, they can judge the standard of a vocalist’. For Sharar, anyone in Lucknow during this period could, whether educated or not, understand the music. He even goes so far as to claim that in Lucknow a ‘feeling for rhythm is ingrained in everyone, including children’, and even ‘bazaar boys have been heard singing … ragas with such excellence that those who heard them were entranced and the greatest singers envied them’. See also Veena Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984).

⁵⁰ See William H. Tunner, Over the Hump (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1964), for a discussion of some of the entertainment available to the United States’ military in India during World War II.

⁵¹ From personal interviews with Ram Advani, Mr. and Mrs. McFarland, and James Perry, Lucknow, 2001.

⁵² Ann Baker Cottrell, ‘Today's Asian-Western Couples are Not Anglo-Indians’, in Phylon, Vol.40, no.4 (4th Qtr. 1979), p.354.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Paul Fredrick Cressey, ‘Anglo-Indians: A Disorganized Marginal Group’, in Social Forces, Vol.14, no.2 (1935), p.264.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p.266.

⁵⁶ Lionel Caplan, ‘Iconographies of Anglo-Indian Women: Gender Constructs and Contrasts in a Changing Society’, in Modern Asia Studies, Vol.34, no.4 (2000), p.869. See also John Masters, Bhowani Junction (New York: Viking Press, 1954).

⁵⁷ Interview with Ram Advani, Lucknow, 2001.

⁵⁸ Performances did continue through the 1960s in Lucknow in Eurasian clubs such as the Lucknow Club and the East Indian Railway Institute.

⁵⁹ Interview with James Perry, Lucknow, 2001.