Cyclic_Time_in_Indian_Art_Music_and_Crea.pdf

Editors:
Wim van der Meer
Suvarnalata Rao
Wouter Capitain
VOLUME 41 • 2011-2012 • MUMBAI INDIA
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Wim van der Meer (chief editor)
Suvarnalata Rao (assistant editor)
Wouter Capitain (layout)
VOLUME 41 • 2011-2012 • MUMBAI INDIA

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ii

Preface
This issue is the combined 2011-2012 edition of the Journal of the Indian
Musicological Society.
We dedicate this volume to the memory of Dr.Ashok Da Ranade (b. 1937),
an eminent ethnomusicologist, who passed away on July 30, 2011 in Mumbai.
His path-breaking thoughts and volume of works in the area of not only
music but also theatre & film are indeed overwhelming. Dr. Ranade has also
been one of the Founding members of the Indian Musicological Society,We
feel the great void created by his demise and miss his scholarly presence,
guidance, support and advice. This volume is our humble offering to the
memory of this great son of India.
We would also like to share with our readers that this is the last issue edited
by the present team of editors. In 2006, we took the baton from the
Founding Editor, Prof. R. C. Mehta and brought out five volumes (36-41).The
journey has been richly rewarding and personally gratifying. In some measure
we have been able to improve the standard of contributions and also the
level of general presentation, lay out etc. Given the amount of interest and
level of scholarship in Indian music worldwide, we tried to expand the canvas
and give it an international color, both from the perspective of contributions
and readers.We take this opportunity to thank all the friends who supported
us in this endeavor, and hope that they will continue to support with equal
enthusiasm the future activities of the Society, including the Journal.
Volume 41 offers scholarly articles, essays, talks and panel discussions on
various topics covering a large ground from cross-cultural musical
interactions & influences, philosophical issues to organizational aspects.
As usual, respecting the choice of the authors, we have done only light
editing. Though we try to maintain uniformity on the level of language and
formatting, we have left many choices to the authors.
The first three papers highlight the aspect of interculturalism with respect to
music. Durga Bor provides an interesting account of contributions made by
several non-Indians towards popularizing the dance form of odissi. She
juxtaposes this with the changes she has personally experienced as a
practitioner of the dance form over three decades.
Notwithstanding the Indian origin of tabla, today, it is played by drummers
from various cultural, ethnic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds.
Denise Nuttall takes a look at the globally changing ethnoscape of the
iii

Hindustani tabla communities and its emergence along with the Hindustani
music as part of a larger movement or category of world music.
Based on a case study of a musical form, nottuswara sahithya, composed by
the legendary composer Muthuswami Dikshitar in the early 19th century, S A
K Durga convincingly argues that the concept of interculturalism is found in
all musics of the world and Indian music is no exception.
The next two papers study the relations between music, culture and the
society which surrounds it. They observe that music is only a part of the
cultural change and cannot be kept in isolation and preserved as it was; the
people involved are reinventing themselves. While Simonne Bailey looks at
the changes from a perspective of a shawm player in Bhaktapur, Nepal,Wim
van der Meer examines the classical music of North India. Whereas Bailey
outlines changes in terms of “development” and “deterioration”, van der
Meer points to the significance of such changes in keeping the music alive
and not “frozen” as in in some other traditions of the world.
Subroto Roy engages in a philosophical enquiry with a hypothesis; Avartan is
both the physical and phenomenal property of North Indian art music and
therefore, we can say that it considerably contributes to creativity in khayal, a
popular North Indian vocal music genre.
Huib Schippers’ article offers details of “Sustainable futures for music
cultures – Toward an ecology of musical diversity”, which is a long-term
collaborative project between six universities and three NGOs, funded by
the Australia Research Council to develop an instrument to empower
communities to forge musical futures on their own terms. Primarily directed
at traditions in acute danger, it also looks at successful traditions (like
Hindustani music) to find mechanisms that support a vibrant music culture.
Interrelations between India and Central Asia is an area which is extremely
significant, and yet, we find not much research work happening perhaps due
to the languages and other cultural factors involved. Dilorom Karomat
observes that music had a pivotal role to play in the inter-relations between
these two civilisations, and interestingly the cultural exchanges date back to
the time before Islam’s entry in to India. She argues that such exchanges
continued at least until the 20th century.
We are privileged to present to our readers one of the last expose by the
Late Dr. Ashok Ranade. This paper was meant to set the pitch for the
seminar on “Approaches to Melody, Rhythm and Language”, which was also
iv

organized by the ITC-SRA (w) in Jan 2011. Ranade maintains that these
fundamental concepts are common to all the music traditions across
different cultures, although perception of the same may vary depending upon
the cultural group involved, genres & their usage and employment.
The next paper by Amelia Cuni presents a practitioner’s attempt at
recreating a musical work. Inspired by John Cage’s SOLO for VOICE 58, she
discusses the salient aspects of her engagement with the Cagean ragas and
describes the practical realisation of its intricate modalities and remarkable
challenges.
Indian music is regarded as a very traditional art. Several values and tenets
have been evolved over the centuries, which have been followed scrupulously
by practitioners of Indian music. In recent times, various intellectuals and
practicing musicians have thought it essential and useful to review such
prescriptions as it was felt that many of the disciplines meticulously evolved
are occasionally not followed in actual music performances. With this
background, in January 2010, ITC-SRA (w) organised a seminar on the
subject of “New Trends in Indian Music since Independence”. The seminar
brought together prominent vocalists, instrumentalists and musicologists
from both the north and the south Indian traditions as well as from
overseas. Great maestros like Shivkumar Sharma and Zakir Hussain
contributed actively to the discussions. We have included only a selection
from the proceedings; the full text can be obtained by sending a mail to the
publisher of the JIMS (see p. ii). Dr. Ranade led the panel on vocal music in
the session on “Changing Aesthetic Norms”. The panelists were three
vocalists: Shubha Mudgal, Aruna Sairam and Uday Bhawalkar, representing
Hindustani (khayal), Carnatic and Hindustani (dhrupad) traditions respectively.
The discussions centered round the role and characteristics of Indian voices,
possibility of classifying them, and the assessment of any change in the use of
voice.
A similar session followed with respect to instrumental music. Arvind Parikh
moderated the panel comprising of santoor maestro Shivkumar Sharma,
chitravina expert N. Ravikiran, tabla exponent Aneesh Pradhan and Prof. Joep
Bor, a historian and expert on the subject of sarangi. Primarily, two areas
were covered: changes made to the physical structure of instruments and
those related to the stylistic aspect. The panel also took cognisance of the
emerging technology and its effect on music at large, and the current trend
of cross-cultural musical collaborations. Interestingly, the musicians
v

welcomed the idea of North-South exchange and possibility of learning from
each other’s system. Some part of the discussion was specifically devoted to
the tabla: its vocabulary and tonal quality, art of playing solo vis-à-vis
accompaniment and percussion ensembles.
Organisation of music events and cultural institutions/organisations engaged
in this activity form a core of music life in any culture. K. Ganesh Kumar
conducted a panel having representatives of various prominent cultural
organisations, mainly in Mumbai but also in Chennai. The deliberations
centered round the facilities provided by the organisations and issues related
to government, audiences and many more. It was clear that although there
are areas in which these organizations could aspire to achieve higher levels,
there is no doubt that they are rendering relentless service to the cultural
life of the respective cities.
Audiences surely constitute the most important component of any musical
activity, either live or virtual. Keshav Paranjpe engaged three panelists
representing a cross-section of audiences in to a debate.The objective was
to understand their views about the influence of media coverage, corporate
sponsorship, marketing strategies, stage-craftsmanship etc in today’s music
scene.There was also some discussion about the dwindling audiences for the
classical music events.
While on one hand musicians and audiences lament about the “decline” of
classical music, there seems to be growing interest amongst both
practitioners and audiences, especially the younger generation of artistes and
audiences, to experiment with timbres, rhythms, voices and instruments that
are hitherto unexplored. The panel on Fusion music moderated by Dr.
Aneesh Pradhan aroused a lively discussion from the eminent panelists
including Zakir Hussain, Louiz Banks, Ranjit Barot, Arvind Parikh and Aruna
Sairam. Most panelists have had a first hand experience with cross-over
music and could provide a glimpse in to their personal journey. It was
interesting to hear that they consider this genre as “still evolving” and hence
having a lot of scope for further experimenting.
Wim van der Meer &
Suvarnalata Rao
vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS
vii
Tribute to Dr. Ashok Da Ranade
Suvarnalata Rao 1
Transformations of Indian Dance – An Odissi Odyssey
Durga Bor 3
Tracking the Intercultural Borders, Fusions, Traditions and the Global Art of Tabla
Denise Nuttall 16
Western Influence on Indian Music – Nottuswara Sahithya of Muthuswami Dikshitar:
An Intercultural Musical Form
S.A.K. Durga 31
Music and Change – Shawm Playing in Bhaktapur Nepal
Simonne Bailey 36
Cultural Evolution – A Case Study of Indian Music
Wim van der Meer 53
Cyclic Time in Indian Art Music & Creativity
Subroto Roy 72
Towards an Ecology of Hindustani Music
Huib Schippers 95
Some Aspects of Musical Interrelations Between India and Central Asia
Dilorom Karomat 100
Melody, Rhythm and Text
Ashok Ranade 122
Chance Generated Ragas in Solo for Voice 58:
A Dhrupad Singer Performs John Cage
Amelia Cuni 127
Selected Panels from the SRA Conference
January 2010, Mumbai
Changing Aesthetic Norms : Vocal Music – Role of Voice 155
Changing Aesthetic Norms : Instrumental Music – Role of Instruments 173
Changes in Organizational Aspects Cultural Institutions/Organizations 194

viii
Audience Response 216
Fusion Music 237
Contributors 256

Tribute to Dr. Ashok Da Ranade
(October 25, 1937 - July 30, 2011)
Suvarnalata Rao
“Indian music is not classical music.”
“All Indian culture is governed by its response to the three cycles of birth-
death, day-night and the seasons.”
The genius who offered such profound—and, at times even radical—
formulations is no more. Dr. Ashok Da Ranade, the voice that spoke about
music, theatre and literature with equal authority and conviction is silent
forever.
How do we come to terms with the untimely departure of a multifaceted
and immensely passionate individual who almost single-handedly led the
academic scene of Indian music and theatre for over four decades, and gave
it a direction that it deserved in independent India? Where do researchers
look for critique and guidance now, be it in the areas of literature,
musicology, theatre or films?
Dr. Ranade’s journey began with music—with a firm determination to study
it, yet never to pursue it as a profession to earn a livelihood, lest he
compromises on his principles. Trained with several stalwarts of different
styles including Prahlad Ganu, Gajananrao Joshi, Laxmanrao Bodas and Prof.
B. R. Deodhar, unlike his mentors, he had an exceptionally eclectic approach
to music and to life itself.
With a deep interest and expertise in subjects as wide-ranging as literature,
sociology, economics, law, psychology, history and religion, Dr. Ranade
believed in a holistic approach to study music. His pioneering contribution in
the areas of art, folk and film music, theatre documentation and voice
production is indeed stupendous. His writings in English as well as in Marathi
on various topics were significant in bringing together the performing and
scholastic streams, which otherwise tend to assume isolated positions in the
domain of Indian performing arts. No wonder, he consistently maintained
that performers themselves must strive to articulate concepts they theorise
instead of leaving the task to theoreticians.
As a champion of ethnomusicology, Dr. Ranade redefined Indian music with
his thought-provoking categorisation of the huge palette of performing
traditions available in India. It was his lifelong mission to break down the
1

preconceived hierarchies and barriers that exist within musical categories
and genres.With the unbiased mind of a scientist and the curiosity of a child,
he was a firm believer in the tradition of change and change in tradition.
His publications include 20 books dealing with subjects as varied as esthetics,
musicology, folk music, stage and popular music, and a number of articles that
he regularly penned through newspaper columns and thematic musical
presentations on various topics.At the organisational level, he initiated many
pioneering projects including the degree course in music at the Mumbai
University; research on regional music traditions at the American Institute of
Indian Studies; and the Theatre Development Centre at the NCPA for
documentation of not only Marathi but also other language theatre
traditions. Dr. Ranade will be long remembered for some of the important
initiatives in connection with this project. These include the bulletin Facts
and News, and scores of workshops conducted at the NCPA on theatre-
related topics such as voice culture, music and background score, set design
& light arrangements, costume & make-up and many more. Thanks to his
vision, today we can access a huge repository of reference material—rare
documents, scripts, interviews, photographs and many more, at a single loca-
tion.
At the NCPA, Dr. Ranade innovatively applied his research to curate several
musical productions on interesting themes like Radha, Devgani, Sangeet Rang
and Sawan, to name a few. Most recently, he revived Baithakichi Lavani, which
the NCPA was privileged to present at the Tata Theatre on April 9, 2011.This
was perhaps the last public appearance of the master composer whose life-
long endeavour was to bring an amazing depth and unparalleled richness of
connections, while giving perfect structure to every subject he handled...
from his life to his work.
A communicator par excellence, his discourses were a sheer delight. With
equal command over several languages including Russian, Dr. Ranade could
keep audiences spellbound with his erudition, eloquence and confidence
peppered with wry wit, which made even dreary subjects come alive and
sound musical! One sensed the peace he felt within himself in the way he
signed off his communications—“baki anand, Ashok”. But now that he has
“finally signed off”, we can only seek solace by following the course set by
this great scholar, academician, administrator, researcher and, above all, a
human being of unparalleled depth and honesty.
Adieu Ranade Sir!
2

Transformations of Indian Dance
An Odissi Odyssey
Durga Bor
For more than seven centuries European travelers have been fascinated with
the female temple dancers of India, and have reported about them in their
narratives. But, as far as I know, it was not until the 20th century that
Westerners have had an active role in learning, performing and researching
the many genres of Indian dance. In the first part of this paper I’ll focus on
what has become known as Odissi, and how several non-Indians helped to
popularize it. In the second part I’ll pay attention to the different
interpretations of the masters, and the changes I have personally
experienced since I began studying Odissi over 30 years ago.
I.
As is well known, present-day Odissi dance is a re-creation or
reconstruction for the modern Indian stage after dancing ceased to exist in
the temples of Orissa, more specifically, the famous Jagannath temple of Puri.
It was in 1957 that we see the inception of the Jayantika, which was the
coming together of dance scholars, gurus and performers in the Raghunath
Mandir, Cuttack (the former capital city of Orissa), to codify Odissi dance by
deciding on a repertoire, and creating a standard for its technique. Members
of this alliance drew from what had been performed by the few remaining
dancers of the Puri temples, known as maharis (who were marginalized and
not a part of this alliance due their low social status), the young male
acrobatic dancers dressed as females referred to as gotipua, temple
sculptures which helped to set the form, and dance treatises such as the
Natyashastra, Abhinaya Darpana, and Abhinaya Chandrika. Gurus and dancers
were also employed by the Anapurna Theatre in Cuttack during the 1940s to
create dances to be integrated into dramas, and some of these, particularly
Das Avatara by Guru Pankaj Charan Das, had an impact on the repertoire as
well.
But even before the Jayantika took place, a Jewish refugee from Budapest, the
archeologist, dance critic and journalist Dr. Charles Fabri, was promoting the
young Odissi dancer Priyambada Mohanty, after seeing her perform at the
Inter University Youth Festival, New Delhi, in 1954 where she took third
prize. This was the first time Odissi was recognized outside Orissa. Almost
two decades earlier, in South India, Rukmini Devi had popularized Bharat
3

Natyam by reformatting it to meet the public’s approval. What Priyambada
had in common with Rukmini was that she too was an “upper caste”
Brahmin, but according to her, young girls had started learning Odissi and
were already competing on a state level by the late 1940s (Mohanty Hejmadi
and Hejmadi Patnaik 2007: 56). Oriyan dance scholar Dhirendranath Patnaik
also performed Odissi at this competition, dancing a version of Das Avatara.
Of Mohanty’s performance, Fabri writes in The Satesman, “there was a
strikingly original Odissi dance by Kumari Priyambada Mohanty, obviously a
born dancer ...” (ibid.: 59). Again in 1956, she participated in the same festival
winning ﬁrst prize, and the dance was referred to as “Classical Dance
(Oriya)” on Priyambada’s prize certiﬁcate, even though the term Orissi or
Odissi had already been coined. (ibid.: 120) Earlier, the temple dance of
Orissa was simply referred to as natch or mahari dance.
While Dinanath Pathy claims that the late Kavichandra Kalicharan Patnaik
introduced the name Orissi in 1948 (Pathy 2007: 25), in a 1990 interview
Pankaj Charan Das explained to me that when he was choreographing for
the Anapurna Theatre, someone asked him what the name of this dance form
was. Embarrassed by the stigma surrounding the maharis at the time, he
came up with the name Orissi, obviously based on the name of the state of
Orissa. (It is interesting to note that the pronunciation of “Odeshi” is a
current practice, keeping truer to the transliteration from the Oriya script,
by “un-Anglicizing” it.)
It was under the patronage and interest of Charles Fabri that Priyambada
Mohanty gave full evening performances at Sapru House in New Delhi on
October 14 and 15, 1961. She had been initially trained by the doyen of
Odissi music and dance, Singari Shyam Sundar Kar. He belonged to the singari
caste, the men of which were appointed to dress the wooden statue of Lord
Jagannath in the Puri temple in the evening ritual known as Bada Singhara
Vesha, at which time a mahari would sing and dance. Shyam Sundar Kar had
been teaching her music, when he came to know that she was learning a
dance style developed by Rabindranath Tagore. He thought she should be
learning the dance of Orissa, and thus began teaching her Odissi dance,
which eventually led to her success (1990 interview with Priyambada
Mohanty).
There is no doubt that Odissi would continue to grow and prosper, but it is
fair to say that an European helped to put Odissi on the Indian dance map. In
the March 1960 issue of Marg he had written an article defending the style,
Durga Bor
4

referring to a paper he had published seven years earlier, where he ventured
to call it one of “the most perfect classical systems of Indian dancing
surviving”. In this article, he also claims to have been the first person to have
written the name “Orissi dance” (Fabri 1960: 4). As an introduction to
Pryambada’s 1961 performance, he described it as “a purer and older edition
of Bharat Natya, less codified, less punditic and that it preserves a tradition
certainly identical with that depicted on the ancient temple walls of Orissa
...” (Mohanty Hejmadi and Hejmadi Patnaik 2007: 63).
By this time the repertoire that we are now familiar with consisted of a
mangalacharan, Batu or sthai, pallevi, abhinaya (which drew from traditional
Oriyan poems as well as the Gita Govinda), and ended with Mokshya (ibid.:
61). But in the youth competitions a few years earlier, Pryambada had
performed one continuous item, having elements from all of the above
pieces. Her 1954 performance took only six to eight minutes, while her 1956
performance was about ten minutes longer. Fabri also helped to style the
present-day costume, being critical of the exaggerated make-up and the
heavy jewelry, which often fell off while dancing. His suggestions lent to the
simplification of the dress, which still takes up to two or three hours to don
including hair and make-up, and perhaps could further be simplified without
compromising the effect.
It was also Fabri who convinced Bharat Natyam dancer Indrani Rehman in
1957 to study in Orissa after her mother had told her about this newly
discovered form (ibid.: 60). She was among the earliest, if not the first non-
Oriyan, to learn this form. Her search for a master led her to Deba Prasad
Das, then based in Puri. Indrani’s role was major in that she was the first
modern-day Odissi dancer to perform outside India. She was half Western,
her mother being American, which created quite a stir in India when Indrani
won the very first Miss India competition in 1952. Not only was she half
American, she was also married and a mother, which certainly put her out of
the “Miss” category. It is interesting to note that the Miss India contest was
promoted by the manufacturer of Afghan Snow Beauty Aids (Afghan Snow
being a face crème which whitens the skin), and two American companies,
Pan American Airways and Catalina swimwear.After being spotted by scouts,
who were sent to her house to convince her to compete first in the Miss
Calcutta pageant and later in the Miss India competition, she initially declined
(Rehman 2001: 77).
Transformations of Indian Dance:
5

Indrani’s mother, born Esther Luella Sherman, used many different aliases
throughout her dance career, but settled on the name Ragini Devi. Gaining
some notoriety in the United States, she danced in Vaudeville, often in the
“orientalist” style, and was said to have turned down an offer by Ruth St.
Dennis to join her troupe. Esther Sherman was among the earliest Western
pioneers heading for India in search of dance, arriving in 1930. While St.
Dennis never studied Indian dance, she preceded Sherman when she toured
India in 1926-1927, having been well-received by colonial audiences with her
interpretation of the Nautch. (This was parallel to the anti-nautch movement
that was gaining great momentum). Just prior to that, in the early 1920s, the
famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova performed in India (ibid.: 24-25).As is
known, Pavlova also collaborated with dancer Uday Shankar.
Ragini Devi wrote Dances of India (1928) which she claimed to be the first
book on Indian dance to be written in English (ibid.: 88).Though she never
learned Odissi, as her daughter did, she did help to bring it to the public’s
attention in a 1958 article published in The IllustratedWeekly of India, featuring
Guru Deba Prasad Das, with photographs of her master taken by her son-in-
law, Habib Rehman. She also devoted a chapter to Odissi in her volume
Dance Dialects of India, published in 1972.
Ragini Devi began learning Bharat Natyam, and eventually studied
Mohiniattam and Kathakali. She was the first non-Indian to learn Kathakali,
and the first woman to study it at the famous Kalamandalam in Kerela. She
toured throughout India with a troupe of musicians and dancers in a type of
variety show, performing both traditional and non-traditional pieces in
different styles. After leaving India, she returned in the late 1940s and again
tried to take to the stage, but saw the change that had taken place was not
conducive to the variety shows that were earlier in vogue in the 1920s and
1930s. Well-trained solo dancers became the norm, presenting their
traditional styles with fixed repertoires. Her daughter followed suit.
It was the Odissi dancer Sanjucta Panigrahi who allowed a deeper definition
of the form by her involvement with the Italian-born dramatist and theatre
anthropologist Eugenio Barba. Barba is known for his cross-cultural research
at the School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) (Watson 2002: 1). He first met
the Indian dancer in Holstebro, Denmark, in 1977. Sanjucta was arguably
Odissi’s most extensively-toured exponent. She and Barba began
collaborating in 1980 at the first ISTA meeting in Bonn, Germany. In an
interview with Ian Watson, Panigrahi describes her time with Barba as mind-
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6

opening to the way other dance forms execute movement and use of space.
She was able to apply that knowledge, making her aware of certain aspects of
Odissi.As she explained, she learned by mimicking her guru without thinking
or questioning the underlying use of tension and body mechanics. (Those
who have studied dance in India know that the teaching is done through
imitation, which is referred to as anukarana, with little or no explanation in
regards to body principles.) But even with her newly-found knowledge of the
moving body, Sanjucta claims her time with Barba did not affect her
performance of Odissi in the least, as it was so imbedded into her from an
early age. It did, however, affect the way she taught, using ISTA’s way to define
and analyze the body (ibid.: 68-75).
Barba also learned much from Odissi and other dance forms such as
Balinese and Noh. According to Watson, “one of his basic pre-expressive
principles lies in the manipulation of balance and one’s center of gravity”
(ibid.: 7). Drawing from these styles, Barba observed the alteration of the
normal center of gravity and the way the body weight is distributed, first at
the feet, then the way the legs are bent, followed by the manipulation of the
spine, as in the basic Odissi pose tribhangi (ibid.: 7).The stances of Odissi and
other non-Western forms are fundamentally different from the daily use of
the body. These stances take much more energy to execute and infuse a
greater presence emanated by the dancer. When the basic principles of
stance and weight distribution, so obvious in Odissi, are applied to a
character in a Western play for instance, without any attempt at imitating the
form, Barba points out that the actor’s character is thus enhanced. Though
not a new theory to Western theatre, eastern forms helped Barba to make
his point.
Sanjucta continued to collaborate with Barba, attending ISTA meetings all
over the world until her death in 1997. It can, therefore, be said that she was
not only a collaborator, but his student as well as his teacher.
II.
Now that we have seen something of the influence the West has had on
Odissi, and visa versa, I would like to discuss the impact Odissi has had on
me, a second-generation American. I will share my observations of its
transformation from the first time I became aware of it in 1975 to the
present day.
7

It was not until I attended Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in
Boulder, Colorado, as a dance and philosophy major that my quest for a
dance form got stimulated and satisfied. I had already taken lessons in Bharat
Natyam and was a fan of Indian classical music, having lived in close proximity
to the Ali Akbar School of Music in northern California during the India
craze of the 1970s. Knowing nothing of this remote style, as Bharat Natyam
and Kathak had already gained some popularity in the States, I began to
study with Guru Surendranath Jena at Naropa and learned intensely with
him in 1975 and 1976. Group classes were taught for three hours per class,
three days a week.
At the end of 1976 I found my way to India, and enrolled at Triveni Kala
Sangam, a school for music, dance and the visual arts in New Delhi, where I
was able to eventually earn a five-year diploma.When I was taught by Guru
Jena, I had no idea that his style was quite unique and further removed from
what came out of the Jayantika than some of the other prominent guru’s
styles. Surendranath Jena had come from a jatra, or street theatre tradition,
before becoming a student of Odissi. When I first started, he had not yet
developed his own basic steps, but did teach some of the basic kundis and
arasas that were used by other gurus (kundis being short combinations of
steps, the arasas are a little longer combinations in specific talas). Later he
had developed his own kundis and arasas based on his own particular style,
which I did eventually learn.
The style of Surendranath Jena has been criticized as being deshi, or of the
village, which neither he nor his successors, his three daughters and son,
dispute. He spent little time on fundamental training before delving into the
dance pieces, and felt that the student’s body would eventually fall into his
style without a rigorous basic training. In my last year in Delhi, not feeling
satisfied with my progress while still a pupil of Guru Jena, I had taken lessons
with Aloka Panikar, Guru Mayadhar Raut’s leading exponent at that time.
Aloka gave me a greater definition of basic training, paying attention to the
dance theory (bini-yoga) of the Natyashastra.
I left Guru Jena in the mid 1980s, and it is only now that I have come to
really appreciate the depth of his style after recently seeing his daughter
Pratibha perform. He was a great choreographer, and perhaps his main
hindrance in producing professional dancers, aside from his children, was that
he paid too little attention to fundamental training. In addition, his students
came from upper middle class or upper class families, whose time devoted to
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8

dance was often limited, and who were, with few exceptions, hobbyists. He
received no government support, and had to depend solely on the tuition of
his students at Triveni Kala Sangam to support his family. After I left him, he
did develop a systematic training, as I learned from watching a video made by
Alessandra Lopez y Royo, who wrote about Surendranath Jena’s style and
videoed Pratibha teaching these basic steps to students.
After ﬁve years with Guru Jena, and many dance items later, I was fortunate
to have been invited to attend an intensive training workshop at the National
Centre for the Performing Arts, Bombay, in 1986, taught by the renowned
Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra, who was affectionately referred to as Kelubabu.
I was very familiar with his style, having attended performances in New Delhi
and Orissa of many of his disciples, including Sanjucta’s performance when
she received the National Sangeet Natak Academy Award in 1976. But I had
never before, not in any style of dance, experienced such a rigorous basic
training. I could apply the fundamentals of what Kelubabu taught to Guru
Jena’s items, putting more attention to grace in the general body movements
and the mudras.
I also began to notice subtle differences in the styles of the well-known
masters, even when dancing the same ukuta or theka. The lucid chest
movements unique to Odissi (dakshyachala and bamachala) were executed
differently in all three styles that I studied. Guru Jena pushes the chest out
and up, while the thrust in Kelubabu’s chest movement is downward. Jenaji
uses rasas such as bibhatsa and raudra (disgust and anger) in his abhinaya,
drawing on themes from Tantric traditions and every-day moods and actions,
particularly of women. Kelubabu’s dances more often highlight sringara and
bhakti (romance and devotion). Jena’s choreographies are characterized by
rapid changes in both rhythm (tala), song and movement. Kelubabu’s pieces
more often follow the development and ﬂow of a raga – as in alap, jod and
jala. With an emphasis on grace and beauty and a mastery of rhythm, Keluji is
best known for his pallevis (non-literal dances which express the melody)
and ashtapadis.
Guru Jena prided himself with being different from the other gurus. While I
was with him, he more or less stuck with the above-mentioned standard
repertoire, often substituting Mokshya with his own rendition of Das Avatara.
By that time he had composed his own mangalacharan, called Matru Pranam,
which depicts the goddess in all her manifestations. While the other gurus
were expanding on the “traditional” mangalacharan dedicated to Lord
9

Ganesha, referred to as Namami, by adding Sanskrit verses (slokas) known as
vandanas dedicated to different gods and goddesses, they still kept the
opening and closing steps more or less the same. The standard
mangalacharan begins with bhumi pranam, or respectful greetings to Mother
Earth. (The Jagannatha sloka was added later at the beginning.) This is
followed by the Istadeva Vandana, and the dance ends with sabapranam
trikundi (respectful greetings to the god, guru and public). Guru Jena kept
these elements in his mangalacharan, though he executed them with
completely different steps and movements. He never added the Jagannath
sloka to his mangalacharan, but rather at the beginning of a dance he first
called Archana Pallevi, but later changed the name to Archana Puri. It should
also be mentioned that earlier pallevis, such as Basant and Kalyani, had an
element of nritya, opening with verses describing the raga and using abhinaya
which often personified the raga. But later this practice was dropped.
As noted, Guru Mohapatra is famous for his ashtapadis, and Guru Jena,
though having choreographed many ashtapadis, leans towards dances
depicting Shiva and his consorts, which the late Debuprasad Das also favored
in his choreographies.While I never had the opportunity to study with Guru
Das, he should not go unmentioned when talking about the revival of Odissi,
nor should Guru Pankaj Charan Das, Mayadhar Raut or Mahadev Raut, all
seemingly present at the Jayantika (Pathy 2007: 25). Mayadhar Raut’s style is
very similar to Kelucharan’s, but with obvious differences. Having been
groomed in Bharat Natyam and Kathakali at Rukmini Devi’s Kalakshetra in
his younger years, his Odissi reflects a more rigid execution of movement,
and is less lucid than some of the other styles. Of the senior gurus, only
Mayadhar Raut is still alive.
Guru Pankaj Charan Das was the only master who came directly from the
mahari tradition. In his early choreographies there is an element of hip
movement which is not present in the other styles. Though Odissi dancers
switch effortlessly from a right to a left tribhangi, which changes the position
of the hip, this is done by shifting the weight through the feet (keeping with
the ideas mentioned by Barba) and not by moving the hip itself. Pankaj
Charan Das worked as a choreographer in the Anapurna theatre, and
between sets both he and Debuprasad Das were employed as stand-up
comedians, in a type of Abbot and Costello or Laurel and Hardy role, Debu
being short and a bit stocky, while Pankaj was tall and slim.According to my
1990 interview with him, Pankaj Das stated that he was paid for his comedic
Durga Bor
10

role, but not for his choreographies. While in his later years, to some he
appeared to be curmudgeonly, during my interview he had a keen sense of
humor and had me laughing heartily. I found nothing unpleasant about this
man, on the contrary.
My current master, Guru Gangadhar Pradhan, spent the most time grooming
me in the fundamentals of Odissi.A student of all of the above masters with
the exception of Guru Jena, he chooses to follow Kelubabu’s style of
movement more closely. He is adept at creating dance dramas, and is a scout
for talent, having brought young men in their early teens from villages to his
school, the Orissa Dance Academy, training them rigorously to go on to be
both performers and teachers. Most of the males performing Odissi come
from humble backgrounds, while the women are, by and large, from middle
or upper middle class families. The boys are trained in the guru-shishya
tradition, often living under the same roof as the guru and seeing to his
needs.The girls, on the other hand, are brought to the school for their dance
classes by family members.
Guru Pradhan started his traing as a gotipua, having been dedicated to the
temple of a neighboring village.The newborn Gangadhar did not respond like
a healthy baby for the first three to four hours of his life. His eyes remained
closed and he was listless. His grandmother placed him on a banana leaf, and
she and his parents performed a puja, making a deal with the gods that if he
survived, he would be given to the gotipua troupe belonging to the Shiva
temple in the village of Dimiresena for five years. Before he was old enough
for temple service, he fell off a bullock cart, which rendered him unconscious
and bleeding profusely. Again his father prayed, promising to give his son to
the Balunkeshwara Mandir for an additional five years if he would survive.A
year-and-a-half later (it was in the early 1950s, though Guru Pradhan cannot
pin down the dates exactly, not even of his birth), he was given to gotipua
master Banchhanidhi Pradhan for training. But he considers his first true
guru to be Chandrashekar Patnaik, who was the keeper of the temple. For a
time he trained with them simultaneously.At his dedication ceremony to the
temple there was a small puja and he received a sari, but in our 1990
interview he told me he forgotten most of the details, though he remembers
being wrapped in a sari in mahari fashion. He was no longer considered a
part of his family as he belonged to the temple. In spite of this, his parents
would regularly visit him. Guru Pradhan showed not only a talent as a dancer,
but also for the mardal, the cylindrical drum used to accompany Odissi. He
11

continued on to study with the best gotipua gurus and eventually Odissi
masters (often one in the same) as well as with the above-mentioned Singari
Shyam Sundar Kar.
During the period Gangadhar was training with Chandrashekar Patnaik,
Dhirendranath Patnaik was researching the gotipua tradition, and Gangadhar
remembers him coming to the village to consult with Chandrashekar
Patnaink. As is known, D.N. Patnaik has played a major role in the
reconstruction and popularization of Odissi, both as a dancer and as a
scholar. In an interview with him in 1990, he told me that during the period
of the Jayantika, on a quiet night while he was visiting the Jangannath Temple
in Puri, he noticed that the arms of the deity, in their 90 degree angular bend
at the “elbow”, would add a classical touch on par with the outstretched
arms of Bharat Natyam.Thus, he takes credit for adding the chouk or squared
position of the arms, which represents the first mudra of the Natyashastra’s
verse for pataka hasta, natyarambhe, which means,“the beginning of a dance”.
Earlier, he had been confronted by Rukmini Devi at an annual function at
Kala Vikash Kendra, who thought that Odissi was a poor imitation of Bharat
Natyam, and suggested codifying it to meet classical standards. He wrote the
first book on Odissi, called Odissi Dance, which was first published in Oriyan
in 1958, and later (in 1971) in English by the Orissa Sangeet Natak Academy.
Gangadhar now runs the Konark Natya Mandap, an impressive dance village
in the town of Konarak where the great Surya Temple or “Black Pagoda”
resides. His annual dance and music festival at Konark has become
internationally famous. I am very grateful to him for the time he spent with
me. I had returned to India in 1989 on a fellowship from the American
Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) to study with Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra
in Orissa.After my time with him in Bombay in 1986, I was keen to continue
where I had left off. Unfortunately, by the time I arrived in Bhubaneswar, he
had taken ill. During that period he was employed by the Odissi Research
Centre where he spent his time grooming senior students. His illness
eventually led me to seek out an alternative. Dhirendranath Patnaik and
Illeana Citaristi both assured me that Gangadhar Pradhan was following in
Kelubabu's footsteps as a guru.
How lucky I was, as Gangadhar was not yet as busy and known as he is
today. He took the time to teach me for two solid hours, six and sometimes
seven days a week. Simultaneously I was learning new dances from his cousin
at the Orissa Dance Academy, Manoranjan Pradhan, now a guru in his own
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12

right. Gangaji’s basic exercises are gotipua based, and very athletic, which
strengthened my body considerably.The floors of the Orissa Dance Academy
were cement. I had been spoiled with the wooden floors of Triveni Kala
Sangam, and in my studio in Amsterdam, where I settled in 1981. At one
point both my feet felt broken, but I continued on, mentally blocking out the
pain while I danced and limping around after dancing, but they eventually
toughened to the cement. After learning a reasonable amount of material
from both Gangadhar and Manoranjan, I was able to join the senior group
class in the evenings which lasted as long as three to four hours.The group
classes lent themselves to my most profound dance experience during that
period in India.What a time that was! The musicians also had more time on
their hands, and would drop into class, lending their talent. Sometimes we
had a full Odissi orchestra in class, with vocal, flute, violin and Guru
Gangadhar on mardal. These were some of the best accompanist in the
business, like vocalist Ganeshyamo Panda, and Ramesh Misra dropping in to
play violin. Today it is almost impossible to engage a live orchestra, as the
tour schedules of the musicians get filled up fast and it is becoming common
place for professional dancers to use recorded music, even in Orissa.
When I first visited Orissa in 1978 there were few accomplished dancers
and even fewer dance schools, the prominent ones being Kala Vikash Kendra
in Cuttack and Sangeeta Mahavidyalaya in Bhubaneswar. Odissi dancers of the
new generation, such as Sanjucta Panigrahi, Kumkum Mohanty, Kumkum Lal
and Dr. Minatri Misra were known in Orissa, but it took time for this dance
form to lose its stigma and to be accepted as a “classical” art. Now Odissi
has become Orissa’s pride and joy, and good dancers and dance gurus are
multiplying.When I was there again in 2005, I was amazed by the number of
children studying dance, the amount of dance troupes performing at
professional levels, and the innovations in the deliverance, as seen by troupes
like Nrityagram who have taken this art to another level of performance.
Nrityagram was established by fashion model and Odissi dancer Protima
Bedi (1948–1998), and is based outside Bangalore, not in Orissa.
Choreographers are taking on new themes expressing social issues.
Feminism, the Devi, and powerful females throughout history have become in
vogue, not just in Odissi but in other Indian dance forms as well.
The music, which is a topic unto itself both historically and theoretically, has
taken on new dimensions with some non-Indian influences, such as the use
of vibraphones as in Hindi film songs. I was amused to see that Guru
13

Gangadhar Pradhan had once engaged a synthesizer to emulate the sound of
a conch at the beginning of a dance drama. Surely, any one of the musicians
could blow a clean sound from a conch, which are readily found in the
markets by the coastal areas, and it would have been less costly, but because
this modern “convenience” was available, it was more intriguing to be used
than an actual conch.
While there are scores of aspiring young Odissi dancers from around the
globe who swarm to India to learn in institutes throughout India, there are
those who learn it in their native countries. Some are able to study with
non-Indians who have spent considerable time in India, while others train
with Indians who have settled abroad. Since the 1970s, it is common for
gurus and dancers to be invited to teach outside India, giving workshops at
universities and other institutions.
Thanks to the pioneers and the gurus, it is fair to conclude that Odissi is
becoming increasingly popular outside India both as an academic and
practical study and a performing art. More than ever, expatriots and
non-Indians are learning Odissi, and established dancers are borrowing ideas
and movements from outside of India. Non-Indians are also receiving
recognition from the Indian government, such as the Italian Odissi dancer
Ileana Citaristi, who received the title Padma Shree in 2006 for her
contribution to Odissi.With these recent developments, Odissi will continue
to ﬂourish both on the Indian subcontinent and beyond, and has entered the
global mainstream of dance.
In this paper I have made a ﬁrst effort of documenting taped interviews I
made in Orissa from October 1989 through November 1990. With the
culmination of personal experience, having lived in India exclusively for the
study of dance for over seven years, coupled with the accumulation of
resource material, it is the beginning of a larger project in book form. I am
indebted to those who were so cooperative, sharing their time and lives with
me in order to understand the art form I chose as my path.
References
1. Fabri, Charles 1960.“Introduction to Orissi Dance,” in Marg 13/2: 4-5.
2. Lopez y Royo,Allesandra.“Odissi, temple rituals and temple sculptures,”
http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/117/868.
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3. Mohanty Hejmadi and Hejmadi Patnaik 2007. Odissi: An Indian Classical
Dance Form. New Delhi:Aryan Books International.
4. Pathy, Dhinath 2007. Rethinking Odissi. New Delhi: Harman Publishing
House.
5. Rehman, Sukanya 2001. Dancing in the Family. New Delhi: Harper Collins.
6. Watson, Ian 2002. Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio Barba and the Intercultural
Debate. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
15

Tracking the Intercultural Borders, Fusions, Traditions
and the Global Art of Tabla
Denise Nuttall
Global and Local Articulations
While ethnomusicologists have been concerned with the historical routes
and melodic crossings of Hindustani classical and South Asian popular musics
stemming outward from India to Western or European cultures (Farrell
2005: 1997) for some time, little attention has been given to the variety of
rhythmic reformulations which constitute, in part, the rise of tabla as a global
art form. This paper is based on past fieldwork as well as recent
observations of Hindustani tabla communities around the globe.1 When I
began my fieldwork with tabla players in Vancouver (1994) I found a teacher,
Satwant Singh, who had direct ties to one of the most celebrated tabla
players of the latter twentieth century, Ustad Alla Raka Khan of the Punjab
gharana (school).2 I was fortunate enough to be sent to Alla Rakha as a
student and learn from him in the winter seasons from 1994 until 2000
when he passed away. During this time I got to know and study with his son,
Ustad Zakir Hussain (hereafter referred to as Zakir).
Zakir is undoubtedly one of the most prolific and innovative musicians of
our time who pivots back and forth between Hindustani classical music and
numerous other musical styles. Like his father and other learned masters
before him, Zakir has played a leading role in the development of tabla and
Hindustani music as global art forms. As musical and cultural borders are
constantly crossed by percussion and tabla players my anthropological and
ethnomusicological “fields” are necessarily multi-local ones. In this paper I
16
1 This paper is based on my doctoral research and dissertation Embodying Culture: Gurus,
Disciples and Tabla Players” (1998). An earlier version of this paper was presented as
“Interculturalism and Performance:The Traveling Traditions of Tabla in the Global Village” for
the Department of Sociology Seminar Series at the National University of Singapore in 2006.
My research would not have been possible without the financial support of the Shastri Indo-
Canadian Institute (Doctoral and Post-Doctoral research grants) and the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council (Junior Scholar Grant).
2 Gharana, a Hindi word literally translates as “household”.The usage in Hindustani music or
tabla circles often refers to both consanguineal and fictive kin.As a member of a gharana, tabla
players are considered to be of the same house or family of musicians. In the case of
performing arts in general the term is often used to refer to a style or school. Ustad or
“master”. Ustad is often used as a form of address for Muslim teachers.

seek to track partial connections between tabla musicians, their communities
and the music they make based on work completed in Mumbai, Toronto,
Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco and Bremen, Germany.
Increasingly tabla is becoming an international phenomenon. Although its
origins are in Indian and diaspora cultures tabla is played by drummers from
various cultural, ethnic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. Today a
tabla player could just as easily be German, Italian, Australian, Canadian,
American, Japanese, South African or Indian (not to mention the possible
multiplicity of hyphenated identities arising from those localities). And
although some students develop into full time musicians I have met others,
from India, North America and Europe, who are also chefs, sales clerks,
doctors, lawyers, businessmen and women, computer analysts, architects,
school teachers and house painters.
Tabla players are actively involved in creating musical and cultural
communities around the globe.They are building networks of alliances with
other tabla players, other percussionists as well as with other musicians both
inside and outside of the Hindustani and Karnatic classical music traditions.3 In
creating and maintaining their communities’ tabla players are incorporating
both local and global elements.These moments of networking or community
building ﬂow back and forth between cultural borders, between cultural
music systems.
The communities that I have spent time with in Toronto, Ontario, the Bay
Area of California, and Seattle, Washington account for only a few of the
many emerging organizations, schools or groups of tabla artists in the North
American context.At the same time these tabla communities are connected
to larger groups (gharanas) in India. In the North American context alone the
continuous movement of masters and disciples is overwhelming. While I
attended Zakir’s classes in Berkeley, other students arrived from such places
as Edmonton Alberta, Vancouver British Columbia, Los Angeles California,
Bremen Germany, Ghent Belgium, and Detroit Michigan. In-between giving
classes and co-running a record label Zakir ﬂew off to Switzerland and India
and then returned to California all within a week and a half. Contemporary
tabla players are on the move. However, it is important to note that other
tabla players can and do lead more of a localized existence. Although a
Tracking the Intercultural
17
3 Hindustani refers to the North Indian system of classical music in India whereas Karnatic
refers to the Southern system.

limited number of tabla players are increasingly traveling and performing
outside of India many do not. And while some such as Aditya Kalyanpur, a
rising star in the world of tabla and Hindustani music, who represents a
younger generation of the Punjab gharana, seek to perform and teach in
America or elsewhere in the world, others choose to construct their
musical identities back home performing classical, fusion and other styles to
audiences in South Asia.Those with more extensive socio-cultural networks
(Latour 1987) are heard more loudly on the global stage.
In the creation of a musical ethnography or an anthropological analysis of
“lived experience” it is necessary to account for both local and global links
between individuals and communities wherever they may be.These cultural
flows are complex, multiple, and tied to an ever increasing number of other
musical cultures. Musicologists, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists alike
need to develop new ways of talking about musical communities, their
complexities, and the connecting webs of musical styles, forms, and players
which constitute them. In doing so, it is essential to challenge and re-
conceptualize the global/local and dominant/minority dualisms which are
characteristic of past studies of ethnicity and deterritorialzed peoples.
Recent diaspora and intercultural studies have shown that anthropological
encounters are increasingly based in multiple locations (Marcus 1986;
Clifford 1997; 1993).The tabla players and other musicians I met in various
locales such as Toronto, Vancouver, Mumbai, Seattle and the Bay Area of
California, were in turn connected to other players throughout the world. It
seems that developing multi-local ethnographies will be crucial for a
contemporary anthropology and ethnomusicology. Creating the necessary
tools for a successful multi-local ethnography requires that the analyst attend
to the phenomenon of subjects living their lives as simultaneously here
(local) and there (global).
Arjun Appadurai (1991) provides such an avenue in his theory of
“ethnoscapes”. Appadurai uses the idea of ethnoscapes in an attempt to
capture the dynamic flow of people (immigrants, tourists, guest workers and
many more.) and things as they move around the globe. Appadurai suggests
that ethnographers replace older conceptions of communities, villages and
and localities (1991: 209) with the more ambiguous term scapes (these
include ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finascapes and ideoscapes).
“The landscapes of group identity—the ethnoscapes—around the world are
no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer
Denise Nuttall
18

tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious or
culturally homogeneous” (Appadurai 1991: 191).
Re-conceptualizing cultural movement in this way, as scapes or networks of
interactions and the exchange of commodities, allows the analyst to envision
groups/individuals as both here (local) and elsewhere at the same time. How,
then, are we to understand locality in an ethno-exploding, fast moving,
transcultural, transnational world? Appadurai suggests that “the task of
ethnography now becomes the unraveling of a conundrum: what is the
nature of locality, as a lived experience, in a globalized, deterritorialized
world? (Appadurai 1991: 196).
Crucial to the development of a multi-local (global) ethnography and the
study of cosmopolitan cultural forms is the task of rendering locality or
subjectivity without resorting to or presupposing “either the authority of the
Western experience or the models derived from that experience”
(Appadurai 1991: 92). Appadurai (1997) takes this idea further in a recent
discussion on contemporary art in Asia. He asks how are we to study
globalization as processes which promote the idea of Asia as both active and
critical in these processes? The constant in all these cultural ﬂows or
movements is the body. Cultural bodies are envisioned as the site of the
local. Global processes, Appadurai notes, are localized upon and into bodies
in the most extreme forms (Appadurai 1997). Theorizing a multi-local
ethnography will also depend upon developing sophisticated concepts of
transcultural and traveling bodies.
Sites of Crossing: Studying the Intercultural and the
Transcultural
Tablascapes or tablacultures provide a good way to think about the cultural
processes at work in tabla communities around the world.4 Like traveling
bodies tablascapes are constantly moving back and forth between borders,
diasporas, and other ethnoscapes or localities. It is essential to note,
19
4 It is important to note that although tablascapes emerge from and are dependent upon the
South Asian diaspora (economically, socially, and politically) they also extend beyond it. In a
sense tabla communities enjoy a certain amount of autonomy from the established Hindustani
musical circles in diaspora contexts because the players that constitute these communities are
also European,African, and other percussionists as well as South Asian.The global art of tabla,
although embedded within Hindustani music circles, continuously branches outwards into
other musical communities creating bridges between South Asian and other cultural or
musical styles and traditions.

however, that cultural flows such as the ones tabla players are involved in are
not uni-directional. As Clifford points out in his article Sites of Crossing:
Borders and Diasporas in the Late 20th Century (1993) “cultural flows…are not
linear but involved complex branches and feedback loops” (Clifford 1993:
3).5 These complex cultural flows which branch out and feedback into each
other form the basis for a study of the intercultural. According to Clifford
“border and diaspora cultures are produced through intercultural
experiences of crossing” (Clifford 1993: 3). Studying the intercultural
necessitates that researchers account for many kinds of crossings. That
people are moving between cultures of origin and the newly formed or on-
going diaspora cultures are one such type of crossing. However, in the case
of tabla players there are multiple crossings taking place between musical and
cultural contexts. Players of non-Indian origin are also crossing borders into
diaspora and Indian musical cultures in increasingly larger numbers than ever
before.
Although the presence of non-Indian players, in some ways, re-configures
tabla music as something other than classical or Hindustani I have also found
that many players of South Asian origin are also re-inventing and
transforming the sounds of the tabla into other styles and types of music.
The hybridization, mixing or fusion of tabla sounds and rhythms with jazz,
pop, lounge, electronica, hip-hop, bluegrass or other musical styles has
formed the basis for a vibrant, ever-expanding category of world music.
Players, such as Zakir who collaborated with other Indian percussionists and
John McLaughlin to form Shakti, the North American based Rhythm
Experience and Diga Rhythm Bands alongside others, such as Trilok Gurtu, who
also merged tabla with John McLaughlin’s jazz fusion style, have been
instrumental in promoting the kind of musical atmosphere necessary for the
development and proliferation of tabla as a transglobal phenomenon. More
recently transcultural crossings have given rise to collaborations between
older and younger generations of tabla players mixing electronica, Hindustani
sarangi and tabla rhythms such as that produced in Tabla Beat Science with
Zakir, Sultan Khan,Talvin Singh and Karsh Kale. In North and South America
popular music artists such as Shakira have incorporated Latin American
melodies and rhythms with tabla player Rajesh Bhandari. Gurpreet Chana
(“The Tabla Guy”) has collaborated with Nellie Furtado and Wyclif Jean
Denise Nuttall
20
5 See also Clifford (1997) Routes:Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, for more
about the relation between diaspora and border cultures and transcultural processes.

fusing hip-hop, tabla rhythms and other styles. In NewYork, Suphala Patankar,
who has studied with Zakir and Alla Rakha, collaborated with Timbaland on a
recent release. As the movement of tabla and Hindustani music spreads out
from South Asian diasporic contexts to other cultural landscapes, we see
that the newer generation of artists is actively crossing musical borders from
rock, to hip-hop, to American and other folk styles. The current
hybridizations fusing tabla and Hindustani music with other musical styles
seem endless.
The emergence of tabla as a celebrated artistic form and as part of world
music, however, must be seen as stemming from the movements and labors
of the tabla masters in India who were active in re-creating tabla as both a
solo and accompaniment instrument.6 Hindustani music, its players and the
instruments which constitute it were originally connected to the Mogul
courts in the North of India.7
The re-invention/reformation of tabla outside of court patronage in the early
parts of the twentieth century was indeed a crucial element for the
continuance and development of tabla and Hindustani classical music in India.
Zakir attributes the success of this movement to the contributions of tabla
masters such as his father, Ustad Alla Rakha Khan, and others such as Pandit
Kishen Maharaj and Pandit Shanta Prasad. Unlike today where consumers are
saturated instantaneously with media accounts of tabla solos, concerts and
the whereabouts of performers, Zakir reminds us that the images of tabla
masters were passed on from person to person by oral accounts throughout
India.According to Zakir:
….it was at the time when there was very little media coverage available,
conservatism was at its peak, tabla was still a second class instrument and
the tabla player was still a lowly being on the ladder of Indian classical music.
So to have taken that and worked with that and then developed it up to a
point where these people became household names and were in demand as
such …that audiences demanded to see them with certain musicians—to
21
6 Kippen (1991) has written about the changing social status of tabla players over the last 100
years. His article provides a preliminary sketch of the various images of tabla players in Indian
cultures. Where once public perceptions associated with tabla players were of a “brothel”
(courts and salons) existence (Kippen 1991: 17) today tabla artists are out in the public
domain performing at conferences, music schools and colleges (Kippen 1991: 21).
7 Ethnomusicologist John Erdman outlines how the patronage of tabla music changed from the
court system to a more public one in Rajasthan (Erdman 1985).

have achieved that level of acceptance and popularity with such little media
attention and support and coverage is pretty amazing. (Hussain 1995)
Along with other tabla masters such as Pandit Kishen Maharaj of Benares,
and Ustad Ahmedjan Thirakwa of Delhi, Ustad Alla Rakha Khan’s
achievements in the world of Hindustani classical music have been far
reaching. His association with Ravi Shankar (sitarist) in the 1960s and 70s
brought tabla and Hindustani classical music to millions of people. (Nuttall
2007: 327). This literally opened the door for the study of tabla in North
America and Europe.The phenomenon of tabla playing and its development
in Canada and the States can be seen as stemming from Alla Rakha’s
involvement with percussionists in America and elsewhere. For example Alla
Rakha developed relationships with percussionists Mickey Hart, Buddy Rich
and others. Between 1968-69 Ustad Alla Rakha also began to teach tabla in
various cities in the United States. In 1970 Zakir immigrated to America and
started teaching as well. Zakir continues to pass on his father’s traditions
today although adopting a different teaching style from his father by
combining elements of North American and indigenous Indian ways of
teaching musically. (Nuttall 2007).8
The types of crossings (both musical and cultural) for tabla masters such as
Ustad Alla Rakha were located within the South Asian Diaspora cultures as
well as within the emerging rock cultures in North America and Europe. I
should also note here that others have played signiﬁcant roles in re-
establishing tabla either within or beyond classical musical circles such as
Chattur Lal, Kumar Bose, MahaParush Mishra, Samta Prasad, Shankar Ghosh,
Anindo Chatterjee, Kishen Maharaj, and Swapan Chaudhuri as well as many
others.
The diffusion of the Punjab gharana as a major style of tabla continues today
in America and around the globe with the next generation of disciples,
performers and composers taught by both Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain.
Students such as Aditya Kalyanpur, Yogesh Samsi, Prafulle Athalye, and
Anuradha Pal play alongside other instrumentalists in classical concerts both
inside and outside the sub-continent.Yogesh Samsi, for example, has become
Denise Nuttall
22
8 In Ustad Alla Rakha’s school compositions were passed on orally either by reciting
compositions or by imitation of the master’s playing. In Zakir’s classes we often wrote down
the compositions, notating them either on a blackboard in front of the classroom to visually
refer to during class or were encouraged to write down the compositions immediately after
class.

a much sought after accompanist and soloist representing the Punjab school
around the globe. Percussion students who have studied with Zakir in
California for many years, such as Dana Pandey, Michael Lewis, Emam, Ty
Burhoe, Salar Nadar, and Suphala Patankar, are also actively performing,
producing, innovating and representing the Punjab style from a mainly
American base.9
Mediascapes
In the past within the South Asian Diaspora classical music lovers could
attend public concerts, workshops or perhaps home gatherings (mehfils).
Today tabla moves quickly from one locale to another through various
mediums such as video, DVD,TV (particularly MTV and “ethnic” specific or
“multicultural” channels) cassettes, CDs, CD ROMs, and through the internet
(on-line tabla classes, you-tube concert shorts, tabla discussion networks,
facebook and other virtual communities, or information/web pages) as well
as through public concert events. Media technology has not only influenced
the types of venues used for classical Hindustani music it has also helped to
promote and diffuse various images of tabla players as well as the many
soundscapes of tabla around the world. Basic internet searches using google
increasingly yield a wider variety of tabla images, sounds, and concert clips
(both old and new) of the masters as they perform and tour. One can also
find web pages or myspace pages of older masters who have passed such as
Ustad Alla Rakha Khan and Ustad A. Thirakwa alongside current day
performers.The images and soundscapes of the elders are, no doubt, created
by devoted fans or disciples suggesting that their presence and importance in
the repertoire and performance of tabla is still strong today.
The developments of mediascapes such as the ones outlined above have also
changed, to some extent, how and when tabla players communicate with
each other and/or collaborate together as artists. With the advent of
internet communication students everywhere are increasingly connected on
a daily basis discussing compositions, exchanging ideas, passing on stories of
their masters and other celebrated artists as well as forming ties with other
23
9 While many of these students are based in the United States they are actively performing
both classically and in the areas of world music or world fusion in various parts of the globe.
Often students based in the United States travel to India in the winter months to continue
instruction, further network with other musicians and/or perform. For example, Emam while
primarily based in San Rafael, California also lives, works and performs in Wroclaw, Poland as
well as in India.

artists in various tabla communities outside of their own. As tabla students
travel from North America to India in the winters for the classical music
season they connect with others back home instantaneously.
Computer technology is yet another way in which players circulate stories
about other musicians or the masters and exchange valuable composition
based resources. It is also a space of learning about traditions and styles that
until recently were not easily accessible except through cassettes or the odd
DVD/VCD circulating through government agencies (Indian) or home
collections. Interesting to note here is also the emergence of ‘compositions
for sale’ on the internet.This is quite a controversial topic for many disciples
and masters whose compositions are literally “up for sale” elsewhere in the
global music market. As compositions are traditionally family owned or
gharana specific, the idea and practice of purchasing such compositions
suggests a new type of commodification of Hindustani music resulting, in part,
from its entrance into world music or its formation as a global art. Being able
to purchase compositions on-line can be seen as either positive or negative
by tabla players depending on your position within tabla and Hindustani
networks. On the positive side this suggests a greater accessibility to
material for practice and performance, however the downside to this aspect
of global tabla seeks to undo formerly established musical traditions where
the student receives compositions orally from a master. It becomes difficult
to imitate one’s teacher without his presence in the moments of learning.
However, I have heard of accounts of some performers teaching on-line
using skype connections which allow for orally based instruction and
therefore it becomes possible to check the position of the student’s hands
and listen for aesthetic improvement.
Other Tabla Crossings of the Cultural and Musical Kind
The crossing over of non-South Asian players into tabla communities has
changed how musicians communicate with each other but it has also
changed tabla music stylistically. Zakir attributes some stylistic change to the
presence of non-South Asians in the learning and performance of tabla. I
asked him if his teaching and performance of tabla outside of India was
changing tabla traditions.
I don’t think I’m changing it, what is happening is whoever is embracing it is
expressing it in his or her own fashion. Now the people who are taking this
tradition on are not just Indians anymore, they are Africans or Australians or
Denise Nuttall
24

Germans and so their approach to it is their [own] and therefore it is
different. It technically changes [and] it creatively changes…because they
have their own approach. They have their own way of looking at music, at
rhythm, at patterns, at accents. They have heard jazz, they have heard
Western classical music….so they have their own approach. It is not Indian
any more so therefore it is different. And I think that my contribution can
only be that I have helped it to be globally available.And people all over the
globe who are embracing it are actually changing the way it looks because it
is becoming part of their vocabulary and therefore it is becoming a tradition
with a language that is more universal. It’s making more sense to people in
South Africa at the same time to people in Argentina at the same time to
people in Tokyo. (Hussain 1995)
Tabla is indeed becoming a “language which is more universal”. For many
South Asians who play tabla in Canada or America tabla can just as easily
symbolize Indian tradition and culture while at the same time it can be used
to represent Canadian or transglobal experiences. Stylistically, tabla
performances outside of the classical genre are often seen as a collaboration
of musical peoples, styles and forms. These types of musical groups are
involved in fusing together often diverse rhythmic structures, patterns, and
traditions such as Japanese taiko, African darbuka and Indian tabla. Even if
percussionists are not trained classically in the art of tabla, the voicings of
tabla bols, various compositions or partial compositions, are used around the
globe in multiple music making communities.
In San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto and other cities around the
world, tabla players area also actively re-forming tabla patterns and rhythms
with other percussive influences into their performances. For musicians such
as Peter Altenberg10 who lives in San Francisco and Bremen and Leen Min-
ton11 who lives in Ghent playing outside of the Hindustani musical tradition is
seen as the only path to take economically and artistically. And while they
25
10 Peter Altenberg has studied tabla with Ustad Alla Rakha and Ustad Zakir Hussain. He is
currently studying sarangi (upward bowed fiddle) with Ustad Sultan Khan in Mumbai. Peter has
recently been fusing tabla rhythms with various musical styles in his band WarmWires which is
based out of San Francisco.The band mixes acoustic and electric guitar with Indian sarangi and
tabla.
11 Leen Minton, a student of Ustad Zakir Hussain, actively collaborates with various musicians
in Europe. In our interviews Leen mentioned that she hopes to bring together diverse
influences such as differing styles of flamenco dance and music with tabla patterns/sounds into
her recorded and live performances.

love to play classically it is important for them to have their own “voices”
heard and create their own musical niche. Often in Toronto I heard various
students declare “tabla is something no one can take away from me”.Tabla,
then, becomes a significant element in identity construction whether that
identity is “musician”, “percussionist”, “Indian”, “Canadian”, “American” and
many more. The global art of tabla continues to shift ground reformulating
stylistically as artists dissect and/or build upon their classical training or
participation in workshops. And as such the art of tabla takes on new
meanings, new forms separate from its “Indian” origins for both the artists
using tabla as a resource in music making and for audiences worldwide
whether they are connoisseurs of Hindustani music or whether they simply
like the sounds and voicings of Hindustani rhythms within other styles.
The routes that tabla players travel today suggest that tabla music will
continue to be re-invented or transformed in various ways. These re-
inventions, fusions, or mixings are felt and heard in India as well as in the
Diaspora cultures. Fazal Qureshi’s (son of Ustad Alla Rakha Khan)
collaborative efforts with the Swedish group Mynta is an interesting case in
point. In November of 1987 Fazal toured Europe with his own Indian fusion
band Divya.After playing a concert in Stockholm, which had been arranged by
Mynta, he was asked to record with the Swedish musicians. Over the years
Fazal has toured with the group in Europe and in India.Today Mynta plays to
full houses in Mumbai, Bangalore as well as in other Indian cities. In their
performances and recordings they have brought together diverse musical
elements such as Swedish folk, Indian classical and American rap. Although
Fazal’s involvement with world musicians has been constant his role as a
tabla player/composer in classical circles has not altered.
Recently I witnessed a concert directed and organized by Fazal in Mumbai
(2009) where he presented a tabla ensemble consisting of students from the
Alla Rakha School alongside Rajasthani folk musicians, a Kathak (North
Indian) dancer, instrumentalists from both the Hindustani and Karnatic
traditions and keyboard accompaniment.This spectacular concert and recital
is indicative of recent tabla ensembles emerging around the globe which
integrate various music and dance styles and cultures together. Taufiq
Qureshi’s (Zakir’s and Fazal’s younger brother) contribution to percussive
movements both inside and outside of India is also of importance to note
here. Taufiq has long been praised as a creative, innovative composer and
percussionist with such musical productions as Rhydhun. With his expert
Denise Nuttall
26

knowledge in Indian classical percussion and African and world fusion
percussion Taufiq has developed a system to transpose tabla bols (sounds)
and rhythms onto African and other world percussion instruments.
Transcultural Tabla
Mapping transcultural experiences through sites of crossing can lead us to a
multi-layered set of lived experiences and meanings. Although I have
explored some of the connections between various tabla players,
communities and locales these are partial ones. Crossing sites involves on-
going moments of network building, communication and include the passing
on of tabla knowledge, technique, and ways of being. Central to the study of
intercultural experiences (and therefore the global art of tabla), is this
continuous movement of people and things branching out and looping back.
The traveling nature of people and sound, of players and their music,
demands that researchers focus on the emerging ethnoscapes of group and
individual identities which make up these cultural flows between diasporas
and other contexts.These cultural flows are fuelled, in part, by the circulation
and consumption of classical Hindustani tabla as well as by the various
reformations and re-inventions of tabla into “world” and “other” music
categories. It is difficult to make a living as a classical tabla player in Indian
and diaspora contexts. Classical Indian music enjoys a limited but faithful
audience world wide.As such tabla players (South Asian and others) actively
search out alternative musical contexts. It is these newly formed alternative
spaces where tabla is being re-invented as a “tradition with a language which
is more universal”.
Over the past few years I have met and befriended many tabla players who in
the process of becoming tabla disciples and performers have, in various ways,
dedicated their lives to playing and learning about classical tabla. For those
who lead a double professional life as both doctors, computer analysts,
businessmen and businesswomen etc. and as tabla players learning tabla also
becomes a devotion, an act of worship. Learning tabla as an apprentice
drummer has changed my life significantly. The more I learn the more I
realize how much more there is to learn. I too have developed a deep love
and passion for tabla as an instrument and for Hindustani classical music as a
sophisticated cultural/musical system. I am in awe of those who attempt to
take up tabla as a way of life both in India and in diaspora cultures. For many,
learning tabla means entering into a life of struggle which includes training in
the body and the embodied mind to adapt to Indian ways of knowing, feeling
27

and being. And for those who do not also work within other professions
becoming a tabla player can also mean a life of financial struggle.
Further research into the relation between Indian and diaspora musical
systems and communities could focus on the efforts of instrumental and
vocal masters such as Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Pandit
Jasraj as well as the tabla masters who accompanied them to establish
Hindustani musical institutions in California and other locales in North
America and Europe over the past fifty years. Equally significant for the
creation of a global ethnography of tabla would be the collection of life
histories of tabla masters such as Ustad Alla Rakha Khan, Pandit Kishen
Maharaj, Ustad Amir Hussain Khan, Pandit Nikel Ghosh and others which
document the transition of tabla from an accompaniment instrument of the
court system to its more modern adaptations as a transglobal rhythmic
source and art form. Tracking these earlier ethnoscapes will be crucial in
unraveling the many musical and cultural networks formed and reformed by
the masters allowing for the virtual explosion of tabla rhythms and
Hindustani classical music in the globe today.
Global Tabla and the Question of World Music
In this paper I have discussed the emergence of tabla and Hindustani music as
part of a larger movement or category of “world music”.World music, often
difficult to describe and analyze, is a hotly contested concept among
scholars, artists and consumers alike. Bor (2008) has recently provided a
necessary corrective to older concepts of world music stating that the
historical roots of world music and dance must be seen as exiting prior to
the late 1980s and 1990s unlike where transnational corporations, music
industry types, and academic institutions seem to locate it. Rather, the
globalization of artistic forms and indeed world music itself has a much
longer, more complex history. No matter which definition of the concept we
subscribe to, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, music makers and music
listeners are actively involved in the changing the ethnoscapes of tabla and
the many musical crossings taking place today.
While noting the significant possibilities for musicians in crossing physical and
aesthetic boundaries in the music industry, ethnomusicologist Steven Feld
(2001) warns of the many pitfalls globalization presents in the reproduction
of world music. Over the years Hindustani music, Bollywood or filmi music,
tabla and world fusion incorporating tabla ultimately are bought and sold
Denise Nuttall
28

under the umbrella category of world music. The distinct genres of Indian
music as classical, popular and folk give way to a culturally de-contextualized
space of global or world music. However, in a competing view offered by
Stokes (2003) the question of world music, he suggests, cannot be reduced
to one of cultural imperialism alone. He goes on to state that “the
transnationals have not been entirely successful in controlling the market of
the music…” (Stokes 2003: 301).As Stokes notes globalization theories tend
to focus on the circulation of commodities and capital (Stokes 2001: 302)
and what is often left out are people, their lives, histories and cultures.
Perhaps Appadurai’s model of globalization (1996; 1991; 2001) best describes
what we are witnessing in the globalization of tabla music. He states, “The
various ﬂows we see-of objects, persons, images and discourses-are not
coeval, convergent, isomorphic or spatially consistent. They are…”relations
of disjuncture.”(Appadurai 2001: 5). Attention to the local in the larger
framework of the global translates into following the scapes, networks, and
localities of musicians and their music.
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18. Nuttall, Denise 1998. Embodying Culture: Gurus Disciples and Tabla Players.
Ph.D. Dissertation (Anthropology).The University of British Columbia.
19. Stokes, Martin 2003.“Globalization and the Politics of World Music,” in
The Cultural Study of Music, edited by Martin Clayton, Herbert Trevor &
Richard Middleton. London & NewYork: Routledge: 297-308.
Denise Nuttall
30

Western Influence on Indian Music –
Nottuswara Sahithya of Muthuswami Dikshitar:
An Intercultural Musical Form
S.A.K. Durga
The Nottuswara Sahithya of Muthuswami Dikshitar is a fine example of
intercultural musical form in the realm of Carnatic music. Muthuswami
Dikshitar, one of the greatest composers of Carnatic music, composed forty
compositions known as Nottuswara Sahithya in Sanskrit and Telugu, which are
prescribed for abhyasagana or technical compositions in the place of gitam
for beginners to practise.
Intercultural compositions were sometimes created by South Indian
composers during the late 18th and 19th centuries as that was a time of
mutual fascination on the part of Europe and the Orient. These Nottuswara
Sahithya pieces are set to English tunes and the text is the form of a poem in
Sanskrit or in Telugu. Among the forty compositions, eleven have an exact
replica of the English songs’ melodies.
Muthuswami Dikshitar (1775-1835) lived during the British period in Indian
history and had the opportunity to listen to the Western tunes played by a
military band of the British East India Company.
Ramaswami Dikshitar, the father of Muthuswami Dikshitar, was also a great
musician and Sanskrit scholar. He brought his three sons to a place called
Manali near Madras, to a music patron’s house.The latter was the zamindar
of Manali and he requested Ramaswami Dikshitar to be his court musician.
Therefore he and his three sons settled in Manali for some years. The
zamindar was closely connected to the East India Company and he used to
take Muthuswami Dikshitar and his brothers to Fort St. George, which was
the British Government Secretariat. It was there that they listened to
Western music played by the British band. Muthuswami Dikshitar’s brother
Baluswami Dikshitar was very much fascinated by the fiddle, played by
Irishmen in the British band. When he expressed his desire to learn the
fiddle, the music patron arranged for an Irish fiddler to teach him the
instrument. Baluswami Dikshitar mastered the technique of playing fiddle and
adapted it perfectly to play Carnatic music on the European instrument. He
was the first to play Carnatic Music on the violin, which has now become an
indispensable accompaniment for a Carnatic music concert.
31

It is said that Muthuswami Dikshitar was requested by the Collector of
Madras, Mr Brown, to compose text for famous European airs. Dikshitar
accepted his request and composed eleven compositions with Sanskrit text
for the European melodies.They are the following compositions:
1. Santatam Pahimam – to the British National Anthem “God save the King/
Queen”
2. Vande Meenakshi – to the famous Irish melody “Limerick”
3. Varasikhivahanam – to the tune of “Castilian Maid” by Thomas Moore
4. Peetavarnam Bhaje – to the tune of “Taa-za-Taza”
5. Jagadeesa Guruguha – to the tune of “Lord McDonald’s Reel”
6. Subramanyam Surasevyam – to the tune of “British Grenadier”.The tune
is the regimental march of the Grenadier Guards [and other regiments],
a senior foot guard regiment of the British Army
7. Kancheesam Ekambaram – to the tune of “Country dance”
8. Ramachandram Rajeevaksham – to the tune of the English song “Let us
lead a life of Pleasure”
9. Sakalasuravinutha – to the tune of “Quick March”
10. Sakthi Sahitha Ganapathim – to the tune of the song “Voulez-vous
danser”
11. SowriVidhinute – to the tune of the famous English song “Oh Whistle, and
I will come to you, my lad”
The titles of the European airs for the lyrics are mentioned in the ﬁrst Telugu
manuscript (1833).Thus these eleven compositions have a Sanskrit text for
the European popular tunes. Muthuswami Dikshitar’s other Nottuswara
Sahithya which are twenty nine songs, were composed in the Western scale
of C Major and sometimes accidentals are introduced in the C Major scale.
The tala-s Tisra Ekam (three units) and Chaturasra Ekam (four units), which
are the 3/4 and 4/4 timings of Western music, are set for these forty
compositions.
Though Muthuswami Dikshitar composed forty compositions of Nottuswara
Sahitya, the notation is only available for thirty-six of them. The texts or
sahithya for these compositions are in Sanskrit and Telugu and they are in the
S.A.K. Durga
32

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