Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India

In Cassette Culture: Peter Manuel tells how a new mass medium—the portable cassette player—caused a major transformation to popular culture in India. The spread of cassette technology in the 1980s changed India’s popular music industry from the virtual monopoly of a single multinational I.P. manufacturer to a free- for-all among hundreds of local cassette producers. The result was a revolution in the quantity, quality, and variety of Indian popular music and its patterns of dissemination and consumption. Manuel shows that the cassette revolution, however, has brought new contradictions and problems to Indian culture. While inexpensive cassettes have revitalized local subcultures and community values throughout the subcontinent, they also serve as vehicles for regional and political factionalism, new forms of commercialism, and disturbingly, the most provocative sorts of religious chauvinism. Manuel covers vast ground to explore the varied aspects of popular music in India, from ghazals to devotional music, from tune-borrowing across genres to the use of cassettes in social movements and elections. Cassette Culture is the first scholarly account of Indian popular music and the first case study of the cultural and social consequences of a technological revolution non occurring throughout the world. With a new preface, this book will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in modern India and the tremendous changes in its cultures and subcultures, popular music, and contemporary global culture.