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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the practice of teaching and learning to ‘feel’ through film songs within the shifting political economy of contemporary India. Drawing on ethnographic research in a Mumbai popular music institute, I examine how music teachers use Hindi film songs alongside discourses of ‘feel’ to effect simultaneous shifts in students’ performances and embodied subjectivity. Situating the musical transmission of ‘feel’ within a consumption-oriented affective public culture, I argue that ‘feel’ is a newly desirable commodity that is sought out through product consumption and through artistic training. Bridging recent ethnomusicological work on affective pedagogy and scholarship on the role of affect in late capitalism, this article demonstrates that the cultivation of ‘feel’ through popular song in this music pedagogical context functions as a mode of affective labour that is critically linked to the formation of new expressive subjectivities and consumerist publics in contemporary India.
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to Nicole Reisnour, Brian Bond, Ellen Hebden, Andy McGraw, Roanne Kantor, Kate Mariner, Pavitra Sundar, Monika Mehta and Praseeda Gopinath for offering invaluable feedback on drafts of this article. The Central New York Humanities Corridor and the University of Rochester Humanities Center provided forums in which I could present these ideas. My appreciation also goes to the two anonymous reviewers who read and commented on this article in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Playback singing refers to the singer’s role in the production of Hindi film song-and-dance sequences, which involve an actor dancing and lip-synching to a pre-recorded track by the playback singer. In this article, I also use playback singing to refer to the broader practice of singing Hindi film songs towards an imagined future as professional playback singers. For more on the emergence of the playback system in the 1940s, see Booth Citation2008 and Majumdar Citation2009.
2 In this essay, I build on Francesca Orsini’s observation that contemporary Hinglish ‘expresses the emotional world of contemporary metropolitan youth’ (Citation2015: 211), indexing both cosmopolitan fluency and aspirations for upward mobility. For this reason, I include many of my collaborators’ original Hinglish quotes in order to highlight the specific mixture of languages being deployed at IPA. See also Ring (Citation2006) for an excellent genealogy of English ‘loan words’ as emotion words in South Asia.
3 For several recent exceptions, see also Fox Citation2004, Gill Citation2017, Gray Citation2013.
4 Readers will certainly note resonances between the dynamics I trace in this essay and practices typically associated with neoliberalism (Brown Citation2015, Harvey Citation2005). The use of the term ‘neoliberalism’ to describe the South Asian context has been controversial in academic scholarship (see Ganti Citation2014) with some scholars using the term in passing (Srinivas Citation2018) and others skirting it altogether by developing other, related analytical concepts, such as ‘‘entrepreneurial citizenship’ (Irani Citation2019). Either way, my aim is not to hint at a totalizing ‘neoliberalism’ – which would be ethnographically untenable – or to mark India as embarking on a clearly ‘neoliberal’ economic path following liberalisation (which has not been the case).
5 Liberalisation, in the Indian context, thus refers both to this long historical moment since the 1990s and to the cultural changes enabled by the gradual emergence of a consumer economy. A robust body of work exists on the cultural and economic changes associated with liberalisation, including the rise of the ‘new’ middle classes (Fernandes Citation2006, Dwyer Citation2000), caste, class and religious politics (Menon and Nigam Citation2007, Blom Hansen Citation2001) and changes in youth culture (Lukose Citation2009), amongst other important themes.
6 However, a number of recent Hindi films have centred on small town life, including Luka Chuppi (2019), Dream Girl (2019) and Dum Laga ke Haisha (2015), as a way of appealing to urban and diasporic audiences originally from non-urban areas.
7 While kissing was never formally banned in Hindi cinema, kiss scenes were shunned until Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988) and filmic kissing remains controversial for audiences and stars alike. Sangita Gopal offers an excellent analysis of the inverse relationship between the increased presence of film kisses and the waning of song-and-dance sequences in Hindi film (Citation2011). However, even as films move away from song-and-dance sequences in favor of more integrated soundtracks (see Ganti Citation2012), their songs still communicate the internal experience of romantic and personal desire. A recent example is the 2014 film Queen in which the heroine, Rani, when jilted by her fiancée, decides to take her honeymoon in Europe by herself. While the film primarily frames the songs as either diegetic moments (such as a song playing in a club) or as background soundtrack, the songs’ lyrics emphasise the gradual change in Rani’s subjectivity as she pursues her own desire. In Queen, the conjugal couple does not triumph for, ultimately, Rani rejects her former fiancée when he tries to woo her back.
8 Female performers have long been stigmatized for the ways in which the public nature of their work was in tension with the mores of bourgeois female respectability. See Sundar Citation2008, Majumdar Citation2009 and Weidman Citation2014 as works that investigate gendered respectability specifically in relation to Hindi film song and playback singing.
9 Modal scales that are the basis of Indian classical music.
10 While ‘aum’ (or ‘om’) is increasingly claimed as a generic and non-religious tool in sites of self-help and improvement world-wide (such as yoga classes), the religious-ethnic dynamics of our class were pronounced. Most of the students identified as Hindu, with only two students identifying as Muslim; this aspect of their identity was frequently remarked upon by Sir.
11 In order to protect the identities of my ethnographic collaborators, I have used pseudonyms and changed the name of the school where I studied and conducted fieldwork.
12 Over the last fifteen years, an important body of literature has emerged to offer critical histories of the South Asian ‘classical’ (or classicized) performing arts, with particular attention to the role of the performing arts in anti-colonial nationalist projects marked by casted and gendered ideologies. These nationalist projects utilised musical pedagogy and music schools as sites for codifying, standardizing and producing an exclusionary bourgeois respectability in relation to artistic traditions previously maintained by lower-class and lower-caste practitioners. See Bakhle Citation2005, Katz Citation2017, Soneji and Peterson Citation2008, Subramania Citation2006, and Weidman Citation2005.
13 The importance of classical music for the enactment of patriarchal nationalist ideological agendas in the early-to-mid-twentieth century made music schools a prime space for middle-class women’s respectable participation in national cultural projects. While shifting its pedagogical focus to Hindi film songs, IPA certainly built on this legacy by framing itself as an elite, private space for musical and feelingful practices. For a more thorough exploration of the gendered dynamics at IPA, see Desai-Stephens Citation2017a, Citation2017b.
14 While samjhana is often translated as ‘to explain,’ the musical context here suggests that Sir’s utterance would better be understood as the musical explanation or conveyance of ‘feel,’ which I have glossed as ‘to express.’
15 Recent anthropological work on the voice in Asia has been particularly attentive to the voice’s efficacy in generating forms of political subjectivity (Kunreuther Citation2014, Citation2018, Nakassis Citation2015) and acting as a flexible tool of becoming (Harkness Citation2014, Rahaim Citationforthcoming, Weidman Citation2012), often precisely through its affective qualities.
16 Gill asserts that affect must be understood as a practice, rather than as a quality that inheres in musical sound or individual bodies (Citation2017: 6). However, my focus on Hindi film songs as bearers of ‘feel’ is predicated on an understanding of these songs as circulating condensations of social praxis to which certain affective experiences affix (Ahmed Citation2015), not as autonomous musical objects that carry affective meaning without reference to the social world.
17 Importantly, it is only after the introduction of Indian Idol in 2004 that Indian reality music television shows began including narrative commentary on a contestant’s performance. As part of this shift, they took up the task of explicitly commenting on a singer’s emotional efficacy and of connecting a singer’s life experiences (such as the memory of a ‘first crush’) to their musical-affective output. In this way, reality music television shows are an important part of the Indian apparatus for the transmission of ‘feel,’ both nationally and diasporically (see Mankekar Citation2015: 15).
18 This emphasis on life experience and emotional memory as a crucial source of information for performance is reminiscent of Stanislavski’s Method Acting and of Hochschild’s theorization of affective labour as ‘deep acting’ (Citation1983). Indeed, there is a tension between ‘acting’ and being, or becoming, in the classes at IPA that I do not explore in depth here.
20 My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helping to clarify this point. See McGuire (Citation2011) for more on Personality Enhancement courses.
21 Hochschild’s conceptualisation of emotional labour was formulated before the ‘affective turn.’ Based on her description of the subtle management of feelings performed by airline hostesses through their words, bodily expression and inner sensations, I understand her theory as one of feelingful labour, which encompasses both emotions and affects.
22 This is one of the important interventions offered by affect theory, as exemplified in the work of Sara Ahmed, who argues that affects are not ‘of’ individuals but circulate between and constitute individuals (Ahmed Citation2015).
23 For recent work examining musical practice as affective labour, see Hofman Citation2015b, Tatro Citation2014, and Tochka Citation2017.
24 This line of argumentation is also inspired by Garcia’s drawing together of affectus, affordances and potential for action in their investigation of tactility in electronic dance music (Citation2015).
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Anaar Desai-Stephens
Anaar Desai-Stephens is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. Her current book project focuses on Bollywood songs and the production of aspiration in (neo)liberalising India. For this research, she has received support from Cornell University's Randel Dissertation and Teaching Fellowship and the American Musicological Society's Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship. Other research interests include the emergence of YouTube in India, speculation as a cultural practice and the circulation of musical media in American prisons. Anaar also performs as a violinist and singer across a range of styles.