MADLY IN LOVE WITH MUSIC: Hindustani Sangeet in 20th Century Mumbai
Lecture by Tejaswini Niranjana
Love and madness come together in the metropolis as a condition of subjective excess, the condition of the musical subject’s simultaneous psychic and social habitation of modern urban space. This talk focuses on the manifestations of musicophilia in Mumbai from the late 19th century to the present. Niranjana proposes that this phenomenon of music-loving, and the concept of a lingua musica, help us grasp the workings of the metropolitan unconscious of a large colonial port-city like Mumbai, throwing new light on issues of the subjective and the social.
Tejaswini Niranjana is currently Professor and Head, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She is also Visiting Professor with the School of Arts and Science at Ahmedabad University, India. She is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, which offered an innovative inter-disciplinary PhD programme from 2000-2012. During 2012-16, she headed the Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and was Indian-language advisor to Wikipedia. She is the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992), Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai (forthcoming in 2019). Among her edited volumes is Genealogies of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Delhi, 2015), with Wang Xiaoming.
Reception follows in the Archive Courtyard.
Presented by The Mohindar Brar Sambhi Endowed Chair in Indian Music and The UCLA Center for India and South Asia (CISA)