Music in prose: A reading list

Editor’s note: In this fascinating reading list, Amritesh Mukherjee looks at a diverse range of fiction and nonfiction books that, at their core, confront the many realities of Indian music. The books approach this theme from different directions: literary fiction, ethnomusicology, social history, memoir, and cultural studies. Taken together, they move from Bollywood studios and Marathi kirtan to Karnatik concert halls, Punjabi dance floors, Hindustani music rooms, and imagined rock stages. 

Written by: Amritesh Mukherjee

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Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song by Jayson Beaster-Jones

Hindi film music, from classic melodies to the latest viral tracks, is omnipresent in Indian life, especially in North India. But these songs are often treated as visual or narrative texts, and even discussions of singers and composers celebrate the personalities more than the musical sounds they helped create. This gap is what ethnomusicologist Jayson Beaster-Jones tries to fill in Bollywood Sounds.

What makes a film song? How are the choices of style, arrangement, performance, and production made? What are the contexts? What is the cost of those choices? What are the historical, economic, social, and cinematic circumstances shaping those choices? That is what Jayson Beaster-Jones explores through this book. It helps you understand Bollywood music not only as an industry, but also as an independent aesthetic form.

Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism by Anna Schultz

The Marathi performance tradition of rāṣṭrīya kīrtan infuses Hindu philosophical discourse and nationalist storytelling with music. Why should political ideas remain limited to speeches and books? They can be sung and performed to evoke emotions, even to incite hatred, as Kunal Purohit documents in his book, H-Pop.

The tradition Anna Schultz analyses through her book has a history of resisting colonial rule on the one hand and disseminating Hindu nationalist rhetoric on the other. Using regional musical and devotional idioms, these songs make something as abstract as a national identity concrete, physical. The book also illustrates how, like everything else, art is political; music is, too.

A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story by TM Krishna

The sheer scope of this book is staggeringly ambitious. Not only does it attempt to understand Karnatik musical thought and practice, but it also goes beyond that to ask fundamental questions about "art music". While looking at the many associations and discussions around Karnatik music, including its relationships with other Indian music and dance forms, cinema, and its place in the modern technological world, Krishna, a prominent Karnatik vocalist himself, also questions its hierarchies. 

He questions who has the supposed authority to define and perform this tradition, and what constitutes classical music in the first place. Covering techniques, histories, aesthetics, and social criticisms, A Southern Music is a comprehensive study of Karnatik music.

Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond by Anjali Gera Roy

When has any culture or cultural product moved neatly in lines? And yet, stories explaining our world often make it seem so. The same is true of Bhangra, whose simplified popular history is dispelled byAnjali Gera Roy.  Bhangra has undergone many transformations in its long journey from being a part of local Punjabi folk culture to international clubs and studios, amid changing ideas of Punjabi identity and nationhood. 

The dance form has seen extensive experimentation in the West, but does greater visibility erase existing hierarchies, or does it shift this art form from its working-class roots to an elite one? And when Indian music travels from Ludhiana to London, when tradition is marketed, reclaimed, altered, and brought back, what directions does it take?

The Music Room: A Memoir by Namita Devidayal

Much of the allure of Indian classical music, and much of its dilemmas, arise from the secrecy of music teachings, households, and inheritances. The Music Room by Namita Devidayal is the story of one such inheritance. The memoir is the story of entering an ancient tradition while maintaining one foot in contemporary life. It is the story of what music asks of a person, the story of female musicianship and sacrifice in a patriarchal world, the story of Hindustani music itself.

It is also the story of Namita’s guru, Dhondutai Kulkarni, a respected Hindustani classical vocalist of the Jaipur-Atrauli tradition, who trained with musicians such as Bhurji Khan and Kesarbai Kerkar. While the world Devidayal inhabited was filled with discipline and formal rules, the book is anything but. It brims with light and life, brings forth personalities from an older (musical) world, and details gharana history. The book is particularly enlightening for a general reader entering Indian classical music, as, instead of standing outside the music and explaining it, Devidayal lets us sit in the music room, where one learns. 

The Immortals by Amit Chaudhuri

When classical music is treated as something pure, who gets to treat it as such? Who gets to make a spiritual pursuit out of it, and who must treat it as work because they have bills to pay? Can you remain stuck on purity when old structures fade away, and corporate prosperity and mass entertainment are the new order of the world? What of patronage?

These are some of the many questions that Amit Chaudhuri's The Immortals explores, a novel set in the 1970s and 1980s that follows the Sengupta family and their music teacher, Shyamji. In Chaudhuri’s Bombay, a changing musical culture becomes one way of hearing a changing city.

Mandra by SL Bhyrappa

Artistic achievement and the artist’s conduct often occupy uncomfortable territory when placed side by side. The debate has long existed, but has intensified in recent years. The world of musicians and dancers allows Bhyrappa to examine ambition, desire, discipline, reputation and what creative excellence demands. Must great music be preceded by a great human being?

The book follows Pandit Mohanlal, a Hindustani classical singer, who’s also a frequent womaniser, even wooing his students. Rich with intricate and elaborate details of classical music, a world Bhyrappa was deeply familiar with thanks to years of training, the book’s sprawling, intense nature reflects the art form it depicts.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie

A book inspired by music (and music history) inspired a piece of music (and music history)—U2’s song titled The Ground Beneath Her Feet uses lines from Rushdie’s novel! Salman Rushdie’s novel reimagines the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by reimagining the history of rock music itself, with Indian characters as part of a global culture. 

It's a story of love, celebrity, migration, cultural reinvention, and high art, with two gifted musicians at its centre—Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. The latter, an internationally famous singer, disappears in a disastrous earthquake; using the lives of those around her, Rushdie constructs an alternative mythology, with music serving as a metaphor for migration as forms cross borders, find new audiences, and return changed, much as people do.

Subbanna by Masti Venkatesha Iyengar

Written in the early 20th century, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar’s Subbanna is a short bildungsroman novel about a violinist. While his family—father is a respected scholar associated with Mysore’s royal court—expects a certain career path, Subbanna is drawn to music and must navigate familial expectations. 

The novel examines the common friction between artistry and life's obligations. As for many artists, the novel imagines music not just as a part of life, but as a form of life itself, something worth fighting for, something worth going against the path already set in stone. Add to that the fact that music was not considered respectable in that era. 

From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India by Lakshmi Subramanian

How did music travel across time? How did the courtly world of Tanjore make way for the concert halls and institutions of modern Madras? That is the question Laxmi Subramanian explores in this book: how changing patronage under colonial and post-colonial times, shifting elites, and the very definition of classical music shape music, and how it is shaped by the institutions and audiences it serves and is heard by.

It also examines the various reforms and movements, as well as the evolution of classical culture. She analyses the changing habits of listening and how factors such as nationalism, the formation of a middle class, institutional authorities, and patronage reshape the very structure of music and its public identity.

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Amritesh Mukherjee is a reader, writer, and journalist—mostly in that order. Covering literature, cinema, and art through his writings, he’s fascinated by the stories that shape our world.