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

understanding has been structurally founded on a relationship between
interlocutor and ethnographer, a relationship made even more difficult by the fact
the ethnographer’s interlocutor is often his or her music teacher (guru), to whom a
great deal of respect is afforded, this is to a large extent inevitable. What can
sometimes result, however, is insufficiently critical attention to the histories that
musicians and their hagiographers tell (2005:16).
So, while I would like to point out that I disagree with many of Bakhle’s conclusions,
there are important implications contained in the citations above for the present
discussion. To put the matter into more simple terms, Bakhle is arguing that, for a
number of reasons, the performers’ stated ideology of tolerance becomes a sort of
smokescreen which conceals the reality of the situation. This is not to say that, for
Bakhle, religious tolerance is totally absent from the tradition, but in her view the
tolerance modernizing Hindus like Bhatkhande held for Muslim musicians was
ambivalent at best. The corollary to this is that ethnomusicologists have simply repeated
the party line, if you will, of their Gurus. Of course, how this squares with the fact that
many of the musicians that Western musicologists have learned with have been Muslim
is another question. While I myself have studied with music with Gurus both in the
United States and in India and certainly hold these men in high esteem, I have been
careful not to imbibe any of their views uncritically. I would suspect that this is the case
with most Western ethnomusicologists who have learned from Indian Gurus,
notwithstanding the merits of Bakhle’s critique.
To put it in a different way, Bakhle is urging scholars never to take the ideological
claims of any group, classical musicians or otherwise, at face value. This remark would
seem to be especially intended for ethnomusicologists who are “structurally” so
4