Musical nationalism refers to the use of musical ideas or motifs that are identified with a specific country, region, culture or ethnicity, such as folk tunes and melodies, rhythms, and harmonies inspired by them (Russel 2012). Since India’s freedom struggle, Hindustani classical music has been considered integral to Indian and Pakistani culture, defined in Hindu and Islamic terms in the respective countries. Although believed to have Hindu origins, Indian classical music has extensively interacted with folk and regional music at different periods, and the musical traditions brought to South-Asia by successive Islam dominated regimes (Rahut 2012). Cut to modern day, at the end of September 2016, I sat shell-shocked in front of my television, as the Indian motion picture producer’s association, India’s largest organisation related to entertainment, announced a ban on all Pakistani artists. In retaliation, Pakistan authorities imposed a complete ban on airing Indian content on all its TV channels, including Bollywood movies. This cultural war, triggered by the September Uri attacks in Kashmir, is far from new. Indeed it is a sad reminder of the instance, when the Indian Maharashtra-based party Shiv Sena threatened to disrupt a performance by celebrity singer Ghulam Ali in Mumbai, forcing the concert to be canceled.
What do I, as an individual informed of the extreme similarities in the two countries’ popular and classical music, make of these episodes that occur now with depressing regularity. They enjoy prime-time popularity on Indian television and then die down, only to be recalled when yet another event takes its place? I will in my essay try to show how a divisive sense of communalism in today’s Hindustan, masked by a false sense of nationalism, is making a baseless attempt at creating two separate musical entities(purely defined by the community they represent), where in-fact there is just one.
As with so many things, there is a historical explanation for the appropriation of music and performance practices as part of the nationalist project in both India and Pakistan. Until 1947, music, or more specifically classical music, in North India belonged to a complex hegemonic structure. It was written and performed in princely establishments, courts and bourgeois public spheres in cities. It was present in both Hindu Vaishnav temples and Sufi Islamic silsilas – social circles that formed around specific teachers and followers, where music was an integral channel for experiencing mystic ecstasy (Krishna 2016).
From these cultural and social milieus sprung qawwali, a form of spiritual devotional music popular to this day across South Asia.
North Indian music flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries, in virtually all of Mughal North India, which extended from Gujarat in the west to Jaunpur and Benaras in the east (the current state of Uttar Pradesh); from the Punjab to the Mughal Deccan. The style incorporated acoustic elements from diverse sources and rested on a multi-lingual repertoire, conveying the simplicity of both Hindu bhakti and Islamic Sufi poetry. This poetry was inspired by popular devotional movements associated with Hinduism and Islam in the 15th century, which emphasized personal devotion and the value of a teacher. It commanded diverse genres that moved reasonably effortlessly between court and kotha: a space most commonly understood today as a brothel, but which was also part of the popular entertainment scene back in the day (Subramanium 2013).
Following the mutiny, musical families were much reduced in power and stature but found new enthusiasts among a growing middle-class gentry whose rise occurred in a new context of western education and colonial employment. The heightened middle-class appreciation of music was mediated through the experience of modernity, which inevitably fed new anxieties about inheritance, culture and heritage that had to be projected in a way that was appropriately modern, chaste and spiritual.
Music, practiced by courtesans and Muslim Ustads (teachers and masters), had to be reconciled with the new aspirations of a western-educated, middle-class Hindu society. They needed to repurpose this entertainment to suit a Hindu-accented concept of Indian-ness. The resolution that unfolded was a series of experiments in the late 19th and early 20th century, including publishing primers on music and setting up music appreciation societies (Bakhle 2005).
The societies that I mention here were early expressions of a growing middle-class interest in music and its reformers who ended up assuming responsibility for music’s teaching and transmission. They also brought existing practitioners such as Abdul Karim Khan into a new regime of aesthetic standardization and institutional support.
Ustads were persuaded to turn over their repertoire to be standardised and printed, while courtesans were marginalised in subtle and sometimes violent ways. Women were forced to give up their profession or move into new spaces afforded by the cinema, refashioning themselves in an appropriate manner as Jaddan Bai, the mother of legendary and pioneer Bollywood artist Nargis, did (Mono 2003).
Raag Desh, or the raag of the nation was instrumental in the freedom struggle as the encore-ish nature of it resounded with an angry Indian population, united by the sense of a nation. Eminent composers of both disciplines of classical music used Raag desh to speak to the people of the divisive nature of the Empire. Rabindranath in India, and Noor Jahan in Pakistan are pioneers of Raag Desh and they repeatedly used it as a means to unite all Indians.
After Partition, these hereditary practitioners were asked for the first time to choose the country they would live in. It was only then that the music of the region began to bear the scars of a violent disruption and division. What was to happen even to the naming of this practice – was it to be Hindustani classical music or ilm e mausiqi Pakistani? This was a question that cut right to the heart of the problem; a question that musicians on both sides of the divide agonised over even as they struggled to maintain claims to lineage and authenticity. Artists moved across borders, confused by the way events transpired. Some found it easy to settle down and make a niche for themselves, such as singer Noor Jehan, who settled in Pakistan. Others found it difficult to juggle offers in India with stays in Pakistan. Following Partition, Bade Ghulam Ali (1902-1968), the legendary singer from the Punjab and a doyen of the Patiala musical style, came back to India and was helped to acquire Indian citizenship by Morarji Desai, the chief Minister of Bombay in 1957 (Gulani 2005). There was no doubt that the violence of displacement and the zeal of the new states to prove their fidelity to national identities represented a loss for performers. Listeners too were ultimately losers, even if the politics of representation and consumption numbed them to the fractures that music and performance practice had sustained.
The debate is not framed in the same way today, but it was certainly a pressing one when Pakistan opted for a different set of musical forms and cultural symbols to define its distinct heritage. But to curb these prejudices, to this day, artists from Pakistan who sing classical music find receptive listeners in India and share the general feeling that politics has very little understanding of a deeper and shared aesthetic experience.
This is certainly not to argue that both India and Pakistan did not nurture new creative artists or experiment fruitfully with genres such as the ghazal in Pakistan’s case, a poetic form that consists of rhyming couplets and that has enjoyed an immense resurgence.
So I feel before we start unconsciously being a part of the permanent division of India and Pakistan’s once-strong musical amalgamation, we need to understand the shared nature of the subcontinent’s traditions, music perhaps being the most deeply felt. Today, we live in a world that is saturated with sights and sounds that leak across borders, despite prohibitions and state posturings. In the digital age, bans make even less sense than older versions of censorship. It appears mindless when governments speak of patriotism as some extreme form of clan loyalty, before which all sensibilities have to wither away. Equally disquieting is that we, as consumers of infotainment, almost never seriously interrogate the banal but sinister intentions of government propaganda