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

and my brief experience interviewing such musicians certainly bore out the truth of this
view. In terms of the issue of religious community, I should make it clear that I neither
avoided interviewing non-Hindu musicians, nor do I discount their importance in terms
of the history of the tradition or in the current period. However, it also should be noted
that there are very, very few native (i.e. ethnic) Bengalis or Maharashtrians who are both
Muslim and a practicing musician. To the extent that such musicians are present in the
cities I visited, however, I will apologize now for inadvertently overlooking them and/or
their views.
The other aspect of my interviews that I should note here is the actual questions
that I asked. These tended to revolve around four or five broad topics: family and
musical background; the importance of gharana for modern Hindustani music; regional
semi-classical genres and their influence on classical music; how audiences differed in
the major cities in each region; and, more generally, how region or regional culture has
impacted classical music. In terms of the last of these, I often would directly ask my
interlocutors if they felt that there was anything distinctly Maharashtrian or Bengali about
the style of music as practiced by performers in those two regions. However, as many of
my interlocutors, as noted, were resistant to talking about region and classical music in
such general terms (although for several of my interviewees, this broad question was
enough of a starting point), I would point out the relative disparity of instrumentalists
versus vocalists in Bengal as compared to Maharashtra and vice-versa as a starting point
for our dialogue. Eventually, again due to the frequent skepticism I encountered when
explaining my research topic to potential interview subjects, I began using this
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