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Title: Tropics of Music: Musical Knowledge Formations in Colonial India

Where & When:  February 19, 2008
                           341 Eggers Hall
                           12.30 pm

Type of Activity: Speaker

Speaking: Sharmadip Basu, Doctoral Candidate, Social Science, Syracuse University

Summary: In 1792, William Jones, the pioneering Orientalist, published his seminal tract, “On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos,” in the Asiatic Researches. Widely known as the first scholarly engagement by a European with Indian musical systems, unambiguously referred to by Jones as ‘Hindoo’ music, his efforts marked an epistemological rupture in the way Indian music developed as a ‘category’ of knowledge, as an object of modern scholarship. In this paper I focus on two things: first, I trace the production process of Jones’ article from 1784 until its publication eight years later to explore the contingencies and anxieties organic to the early colonial social formation that constantly undercut Jones’ claim to  musical knowledge in the published article. Second, I schematically map out the dominant discursive tropes employed by Jones in the same article to establish the conditions of possibility for the truth-claims on Indian music made by him

Sponsorship: The South Asia Center

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