Research Overview
Like my musical practice and pedagogy, my research interests are inherently transcultural. I aim to bridge Euro-American and South Asian music cultures and explore their intersections in the spaces of South Asian America as well as the metropolitan centers of contemporary North India. My first publication (2021), an essay entitled “Alan Watts, Ali Akbar Khan, and Hindustani Music in the Psychedelic Sixties” detailed the friendship of sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan and philosopher Alan Watts, who helped Khan establish a college of Indian music in Berkeley, CA (it soon moved to San Rafael) at the height of the Bay Area sixties. The essay considers resonances and ruptures in the unexpected pairing of Hindustani court music and 1960s psychedelic counterculture.
The two research projects I am working on at present, while divergent in their topical particularities, also intersect in productive ways. Taken together, they articulate complementary methodological frameworks and theoretical orientations. My dissertation ties the musical lives of early-twentieth-century South Asian migrants to sweeping cultural and political projects that continue to shape our contemporary social and economic landscape. My ongoing (ethno)musicological research, by contrast, engages with present-day performance practices, practitioners, and repertoires while considering both their embeddedness in North Indian communities and their transnational proliferation through the cultural flows of the South Asian diaspora.
Where the dissertation focuses on cultural and political trajectories of entire groups and nation-states, the research on rhythmic accompaniment investigates micro-level interactions among individuals and contextualizes them within the contemporary cultural landscape of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Both of these projects interrogate class and caste hierarchies, notions of cultural purity and racial/religious essentialism, and the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways in which aesthetics and performing arts become imbued with the semiotics of power and privilege.
Dissertation Research
The archival research that spawned my dissertation, “From Calcutta to the Bengal Tiger: Indian Musicians, American Orientalism, and Cosmopolitan Modernism Pre-1947,” began with an inquiry into the earliest documentation of South Asian musical practice in North America and examples of South Asian American musical syncretism. I found that prevailing narratives tended to trace South Asian musical influence in the United States to eminent post-Independence (post-1947) Indian emissaries, notably Hindustani instrumentalists Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar. Several scholarly accounts mentioned early-twentieth-century cultural ambassadors as well, but musical life in migrant communities and the involvement of first-generation South Asian immigrant musicians in American cultural formations prior to Indian Independence proved altogether absent from the histories of musical practice in the United States.
Beginning with one such first-generation immigrant, Sarat Lahiri, my dissertation centers the activities of early-twentieth-century immigrant musicians from colonial India and invites readers into a unique cultural landscape shaped by the confluence of avant-garde modernism and consumer orientalism in interwar New York. The project tracks these individuals, their ideas, and their performance practices across continents and highlights the proliferation of Indian nationalism and global anticolonial political movements during this era. By considering these movements across national and cultural borders, I question the racial and linguistic inclusions and exclusions that constitute “American music” and discuss the active role of immigration legislation in shaping definitions of Americanness and Otherness—in this case Indianness.
When I applied for a Fulbright research grant in October 2019, I initially envisioned this archival research as a worthwhile, if somewhat tangential, detour en route to a writing a more overtly ethnomusicological dissertation on rhythmic accompaniment practices for North Indian kathak dance. Then the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which became official two days after I received notice of the Fulbright award, indefinitely suspended any plans to travel abroad for ethnographic research. Fortunately, I had folders full of primary sources and access to digital archives that enabled me to develop that research project throughout the two years that elapsed before I finally departed for New Delhi in February 2022. During the interim, the archival project assumed the contours of a full dissertation.
Rhythmic Accompaniment Research
By the time I arrived in New Delhi in 2022, my ethnographic research on rhythmic accompaniment for kathak dance had splintered into a separate project. The ethnomusicological literature on Hindustani musical culture is extensive, but rhythmic accompaniment is a vital and under-researched aspect of this music. Most monographs dedicated to North Indian drumming (primarily tabla) tend to privilege analysis of solo repertoires and the pedagogical lineages from which they emerge. Live rhythmic accompaniment provided by the tabla and pakhawaj plays a foundational role in kathak dance, yet extended discussions of dance repertoires and this specialized form of accompaniment are scant. The ethnographic research I began in Delhi, on the other hand, highlights the complex relationships enacted between dancers and their accompanists, emphasizing negotiations of formal aesthetic structures, normative performance practices, social hierarchies, and spontaneous creativity.
Regarded as a classical dance from North India, kathak has more recently come to serve as a potent symbol of Indian culture throughout the South Asian diaspora. And yet, like most North Indian performing arts, its history is profoundly syncretic—a hybrid of Indo-Muslim performance practices rooted in a multiplicity of regional and folk forms. Kathak as we know it today emerged from the courtesan practices of the Indo-Muslim courts and subsequently experienced a period of intense revival aimed at reformulating the dance as a respectable pursuit for middle-class Hindu women. The dance form has a complex social history, as courtesans and their accompanists have been marginalized even as their artistic practices are revived as emblems of national cultural. Furthermore, systematic efforts to downplay the contributions of Muslim practitioners and hereditary courtesan performers are tied to the broader revivalist ethos and political ascendency of the Hindu right.
By emphasizing the rich syncretic history of this art form and attending to the works of artists who embrace egalitarian values over religious revivalism, I hope my research on kathak will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the cultivated music and dance practices of the subcontinent and their place in the cultural and political lives of the global South Asian diaspora.