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Abstract
This dissertation undertakes a genealogical study of studio-born Bengali song through archival and multi-sited ethnographic work. Studio-born Bengali song, as the name suggests, is coeval with the emergence of gramophone, radio, and film in Calcutta (renamed Kolkata) and celebrated for its hybrid musical aesthetic. Lying at the cusp of ethnomusicology, cultural history, postcolonial sound studies, and media- and technology studies, my project fundamentally complicates historiographies of studio-born Bengali song that trace its beginnings to the Bengali sung-lyric and (semi)-classical salon traditions of musicking in Bengal, India. Departing from scholarship that treats Bengali song exclusively as a literary artifact and an extension of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century song tradition, this dissertation listens closely to ways in which song-production transitions to radio and film studio from a live performance setting. Theorizing the concept of ‘sonotope’ (reworking the Bakhtinian chronotope), my project attempts to bring out how histories of Bengali song-making adjusted to and happened in conversation with the critical resources ushered in by the studio-economy. Combined with newly emerging market policies and the emergence of music-making as a nascent industry, studio-born Bengali song saw an unmatched transculturation of global musical idioms and sensibilities in Bengali popular music. A sonotope locates music-making within the flows of music technology, eclectic mixes of musical instruments each of which has specific sociocultural associations, the material infrastructures of the studio, and distinct media formats such as gramophone and radio. I take as my starting point the following question: How is the ‘familiar’ aesthetic of nostalgia, desire, and loss that often colors the reception of studio-born song forged by an entanglement of aesthetic factors such as transculturation of the orchestra and political factors such as the 1947 Partition of Bengal? Drawing on the interdisciplinarity of media and technology studies, my work charts narratives of caste, gender, and labor as they are registered through musicking in Bengali song genres. By studying the early decades of musicking in radio and film studios in Calcutta, Dhaka, and Bombay (renamed Mumbai), I hope to show how a certain group of primarily male, mostly upper-caste and middle-class Bengali Hindus spearheaded the emergence of a soundscape that is recognizably ‘Bengali’ and embodies the aspirations and yearnings of a primarily Hindu Bengali middle class. They, however, also creatively collaborated with low-caste instrument makers, Parsi/Anglo-Indian arrangers, and Bengali Muslim vocal artists and musicians in ways hardly visible in other areas of cultural labor in Calcutta at the time. I chart how studio-born Bengali song-making becomes an important site of thinking about a cosmopolitan idea of ‘Bengali’ musicality informed by disparate scenes and communities of musicians operating in Calcutta at the time. Coinciding with the tumultuous decade of the 1940s that saw communal riots and a fragmentation of the Bengali middle class culminating in the 1947 Bengal Partition, studio-born Bengali song (and Calcutta radio in particular), I show, sonically registers the moral anxieties of a section of the Hindu Bengali custodians of music in defining a ‘normative,’ ‘modern’ Bengali sound.