Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition

At the end of the nineteenth century, two men with very different visions–V.N. Bhatkhande and V.D. Paluskar–worked to give Indian classical music its distinctive shape and identity. Where previously no particular ideology, religious group, or ethnic identity had dominated, in the hands of Paluskar, a devotionalist nationalist music was to be cleansed of its bawdy associations and put in the service of Hindu proselytizing. Bhatkhande, on the other hand, hoped that through systematic classification and categorization, music would become a modern, national academic art, avoiding religious entanglement.Viewed against the backdrop of colonial modernity, the different projects of these two men exemplify not only the success of a reformist modernization of music, but also the failures, contradictions and compromises that accompanied North Indian classical music’s transformation in relation to gender, caste, religion and the public cultural sphere.