Copyright by Jeffrey Michael Grimes 2008 - The University of Texas ...

task.
To return to the scholarly side of the equation, their (our) analyses tend to be
much more nuanced and careful, which is not at all surprising, considering that this is
stock and trade of the profession. For musicians, on the other hand, this kind of
discussion is at best a hobby or intellectual sideline. As many musicians have pointed out
to me, their job is to sing or play, not to write or speak. However, scholars of Hindustani
music have often been guilty of their own type of reductionism. Most, as I have said,
focus on the economic base of the tradition, but beyond this, the only other factors seen to
be worth discussing are religion (i.e. the Hindu-Muslim communal divide), and, much
less often, gender. 2 It is one of these neglected factors, the regional origins of today’s
musicians, that I will take as the focus of this dissertation. In placing region and regional
culture in the foreground, my intention is not to disregard the other aforementioned
factors, or even to claim a particularly privileged place for region over the others. Rather,
I intend to prove that region is important in its own right, and, perhaps more importantly,
that it interacts with other economic and social factors as it has helped and continues to
help shape the Hindustani classical music tradition.
To begin to justify why region and regionalism are important for the study
Hindustani music, I briefly to turn the work of Janaki Bakhle whose recent book Two
Men and Music is perhaps the most thorough and lengthy examination of the issue
Hindu-Muslim communalism in the context of Hindustani classical music. While
2 see Masciszewski (1998)
2