Anthropologists are following in media’s and politicians footsteps: They care less about the floods i Pakistan than for the Tsunami in Southeast Asia, the Katrina floods in the USA and the earthquake in Haiti.
A quick search reveals nearly complete silence. While several anthropologists mention the desaster or call for help, they don’t contribute with any analyses.
The only piece by an anthropologist that deals specifically with the floods consists of rather dubious culturalisations: Cultural wisdom in crisis by Kashmali Khan from Oxford University, published in the Pakistani Tribune.
But while I am writing these lines, suddenly an interview about the flood pops up at the great blog Anthropologyworks. Pakistan expert Maggie Ronkin (who’s recently taught on Justice and Peace in Pakistan and Social Development in South Asia at Georgetown University) interviews Fayyaz Baqir, Director of the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center in Islamabad.
Fayyaz Baqir describes the floods as “the worst in the entire world during the past hundred years”. But he is eager to add – and this is the interesting part in my view – that we “are underestimating the resilience, resourcefulness, and capacity of the people to cope with the disaster due to the presence of hundreds of formal and informal institutions and mechanisms that help people on a day-to-day basis.”
This capacity and the will to help is echoed in several stories in Pakistani media.
“In the last 10 days”, Zeresh John writes, in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, “I’ve seen Pakistan come together in ways never seen before.” “It is an overwhelming feeling”, Zeresh John adds, “when people unite for a cause. When in an instant, strangers no longer remain strangers”:
The Pakistani youth has risen and literally stepped out on the streets to help their countrymen affected by the flood. (…) Each day brings a relentless and constant chain of support. Where the monetary contributors stop, there is a group of people ready to take over by running to crowded bazaars everyday to buy food supplies, clean drinking water and medicines. From there yet another massive portion of the population is stepping in to pack those supplies and load them into trucks to deliver them to the affected areas.
(…)
As Pakistani authorities failed to provide the necessary leadership needed and with no proper coordination in the relief efforts, the civilian population of Pakistan has taken it upon themselves to do what they can in the face of this crisis; in the process, developing a conscientious society that we’re all proud to belong to.
But these stories are not told by the media, a reader comments:
“I live overseas and this post was quite educational for me. How is it that none of our TV channels are highlighting this spirit ? All I’ve seen so far are stories about corruption, fake camps and immoral feudals diverting the flow of flood waters to their benefit. Our free media seems to be failing miserably by promoting only the demoralizing but sensational stories.”
My favorite story is written by Shabnam Riaz in The News: The Real Heroes (see also cached version). She is also writing about “a spirit-lifting experience in this whole nightmare”: Pakistan’s youth, young men and poor laborers who help other people:
Small, scattered groups of young boys and men had formed where the rain was the harshest and was threatening to sweep away cars along with their occupants. (…) They worked in unison, all of them had a single purpose and that was to rescue other human beings. (…) They waved at us, hurriedly preparing to help the next hapless driver who was blindly careening into their path. We waved back with euphoric ‘thank you’ but they had already become busy in helping others.
I was touched beyond words. These young men were poor labourers who were most probably hungry as a day full of rain would not have given them a chance to earn their daily wage. I am sure that none of them were owners of a vehicle either. But their dedication to help the other members of society who definitely had more material possessions than they had, without any contempt at all, told me something. It told me that deep inside they were people of substance. Those individuals who had their moral compasses pointing in the right direction.
It also told me something else; that in fact, these were our heroes. Also, these people who slog from sun-up till sun-down for a meagre amount that could hardly put a decent meal on anyone’s table, are our actual role models.
Here another story about how people help themselves (video by Al Jazeera)
Pakistan flood victims build makeshift transport
Save Pakistan from the catastrophe is the title of an earlier article where anthropologist Fazal Amin Baig calls for action. Fazal Amin Baig wrote it earlier this year in the aftermath of a heavy landslide that took the lives of 19 people and displaced more than 1,500 people. “The year 2010 witnessed a natural disaster, which did not indicate a good omen to the people of Pakistan.” Unfortunately, the anthropologist was right.
Anthropologists are following in media's and politicians footsteps: They care less about the floods i Pakistan than for the Tsunami in Southeast Asia, the Katrina floods in the USA and the earthquake in Haiti.
Review: Kidambi, Prashant. 2007. The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890-1920. Ashgate
Tereza Kuldova, Ph.D. student in social anthropology, University of Oslo
At times, when you read about old Bombay, about the ‘lost’ times when ‘Bombay’ was not ‘Mumbai’, you are faced with idealized narratives of a golden era, now long gone and mourned. A picture of Bombay is painted in which people of diverse religions, classes, castes and live harmoniously together; it is a picture of a conflict-free era, where rules and obligations are followed and mutual respect prevails.
It is then only refreshing to read an account of colonial Bombay (1890-1920) that confronts us with a much more realistic picture. A picture of Bombay struck by two global pandemics, as well as by episodes of collective violence. A picture of Bombay, where the ruling elites try to handle the ‘unintended city’ – a result of industrialization and intense immigration – and its issues of sanitation, slums, famine, plague, riots, order and criminality.
Divided by caste, class and religion
Reading Kidambi’s account, it becomes obvious that, as he himself says, the imagined ‘ideal’ Bombay is “essentially an exercise in ‘historical fantasy’ that elides over the extent to which the city has always been divided by caste, class and religion” (236). If one has some knowledge of contemporary Mumbai, reading this book makes one realize how little has changed and how deep footprints have the colonial rule left in today’s Mumbai.
Prashant Kidambi’s inquiry into the urban history of Bombay manages to grasp the dynamics of urban change at the same time as it catches the reader’s attention – and that even though the wealth of historical detail can be overwhelming.
He focuses on three decades in which, in his own words, “the city was restructured in accordance with the dictates of modern urban planning and intrusive modes of governance were deployed in response to the challenges posed by rapid industrialization and massive labor migration” and in which “the city became the site of a vigorous associational culture and ‘modernizing’ social activism that infused its civil society with new dynamism” (p. 9).
Prashant Kidambi argues, that the city was a ‘contested terrain’, shaped as much by acts of resistance as by the operations of power (p. 12). Contrary to the “widely entrenched perception that the norms and practices of civil society were solely internalized by the Anglophone intelligentsia and were more or less alien to the cultural worldview and dispositions of the lower orders” (p. 14), the lower strata of society actually took part in the associational civility, the civil society of the emerging Bombay (pp. 157-202).
An interesting part of the book, particularly for an anthropologist such as me, is the discussion of the urban middle class formation in colonial India in relation to the concepts of ‘social reform’ and ‘social service’ and the way in which middle class became formed by these practices.
The distinction between ‘social reform’ and ‘social service’ is I believe useful in this respect. Kidambi argues that “while ‘social reform’ during the late nineteenth century had largely denoted the internal attempts at ‘self-improvement’ within particular castes and communities, the emergent discourse and practice of ‘social service’ articulated by members of the high-status Anglophone intelligentsia was directed at the destitute, the downtrodden and the disadvantaged” (p. 15).
A leading cosmopolitan commercial center
Kidambi’s account of the colonial Bombay is centered around several topics. Firstly he introduces the reader to the rising city of Bombay, a city that had by 1860 “become, after New York and Liverpool, the largest cotton market in the world” (p. 18) and that “by the last decade of the nineteenth century (…) could justifiably lay claim to being a leading commercial and financial center” (p. 23), where a “highly cosmopolitan culture amongst the business elites” (p. 24) developed. At that time “Bombay was also home to a nascent, but dynamic, English-educated Indian middle class comprising lawyers, doctors, engineers, businessmen, journalists, teachers and clerks employed in mercantile and government offices. This middle class was a product of colonial policies that dated back to the second quarter of the nineteenth century” (p. 26).
The growth of Bombay as a business and industrial center also “attracted a large, predominantly male, proletarian population”, which “found employment in the cotton-textile industry” (p. 29). However, the “city’s modernization had resulted in ‘two Bombays’, the one inhabited by a cosmopolitan elite that nestled in the fashionable enclaves of the city, the other full of chawls, crowded, insanitary, ill-ventilated slums and filthy lanes, stables and godowns” (p. 36). (One wonders here, how little has changed, when in today’s Mumbai 95% of its population lives on 5% of its space and the richest 5% occupies 95% of the land).
Diseases and segregation: Urban poor as threat
Overcrowding, slums, sanitary issues, disease, increased criminality, all these were the issues that increasingly kept the colonial administration preoccupied. And in 1896 this was only to get more intense as the plague epidemic attacked Bombay.
The plague and its handling by the administration becomes another interesting topic. Kidambi argues that “for nearly a decade after the initial outbreak in the city, long-standing assumptions that viewed epidemic diseases as a product of locality-specific conditions of filth and squalor exercised significant influence over the colonial state’s war against plague” (p. 50).
These localist perceptions meant that the policies were aimed at sanitary regeneration of the city, cleaning of the infected areas, their evacuation or eventual demolition. Furthermore a notion that Kidambi labels as “contingent contagionism” has developed, which could be summarized as follows: “If plague was a disease either generated by, or nurtured in, filth and squalor, many officials argued, it followed that Bombay’s poor who resided in ill-ventilated, overcrowded tenements would be more susceptible to its ravages. This, in turn, buttressed the belief that it was the poor, rather than the ‘respectable’ classes, who were the ‘natural’ bearers of contagion” (p. 64). “Consequently, the colonial state’s antiplague offensive was in large measure directed at segregating the urban poor, who were perceived as posing threat to the physical well-being of Bombay’s elites” (p. 70).
The next chapter deals with the Bombay Improvement Trust (1898), which was meant as a solution to the sanitary problems of the city; it dealt with the issues of town-planning, slum clearance, tried to expand the city’s residential area and provide sanitary housing for the poor.
Kidambi concludes that “(b)y the end of the First World War, it was widely acknowledged that the Bombay Improvement Trust failed to redress the civic problems that had led to its creation. On the contrary, most contemporary observers agreed that the Trust’s activities had worsened Bombay’s housing and sanitary problems” (p. 112). However, “notwithstanding the Trust’s failure to carry out the tasks for which it had been established, its policies has profound, albeit unintended, consequences for the development of Bombay’s spatial organization and social geography” (p. 113).
The emerging importance of the ‘street’
Kidambi goes on to discuss colonial policing strategies and control and regulation of the urban spaces and the perceived threats to urban ‘order’, particularly after the experience of two major riots in the 1890s. He presents an interesting discussion of the emerging importance of the ‘street’ and the life of and on the street and in neighborhoods.
“The street was the principal locus of working-class social life and recreational activities ranging from akharas (gymnasia) and tamashas (street theatre) to the liquor shops where many workers congregated after work” (p. 121).
He concludes that in the 1890s “the traditional colonial strategy of ‘indirect’ control began to give way to a more intrusive approach vis-à-vis the urban neighborhoods and the emergent plebeian public sphere. The 1902 Police Act vastly enhanced the discretionary powers of the police over a range of ‘public’ activities and urban spaces that had hitherto been unregulated. Their newly consolidated powers, in turn, increased the scale and dimension of conflict between the colonial police and the populace. Consequently, the relationship between the colonial administration and plebeian society in Bombay grew markedly fractious in the years leading up to the end of the Great War” (p. 155).
Towards the end of the book, Kidambi takes on topics such as the emergence of the civil society in Bombay and the involvement of particularly the English-educated elite and middle class in various educational, scientific, religious and social reform oriented associations.
He concludes that “the rich diversity of associational activity within Indian civil society rendered its public sphere a ‘segmented’ domain in which the fashioning of the ‘autonomous, reason-bearing individual’ was offset by a countervailing process ‘through which community identities were reworked and reaffirmed’. It also invested urban public culture in colonial India with an intrinsic plurality and polyphony that has continued to inflect its post-colonial career” (p. 201).
The last chapter of the book is devoted to the question of social reform and social service and the social activism of Bombay’s intelligentsia directed at the uplifting of the depressed classes. These efforts of the educated middle and upper classes were both integral to the process of nation building and also had the effect of strengthening “the claims to public leadership of the educated middle class during the first two decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War, educated men were able to tout their credentials as the ‘real’ leaders of the citizenry far more confidently than during the late nineteenth century” (p. 231).
Relevance for today?
There are several things that I have been missing in the book (but that may be likewise a general problem with the genre of historical accounts).
The book deals with a period of three decades (1890-1920). Except for a brief note in the conclusion there is no reflection on the effects of these three decades on the later developments. One is simply left to conclude on one’s own. It feels as if relating to present days or even decades following the three decades under thorough investigation, would not be rigorous enough. I would prefer at least some reflections, that would give the reader a sense of continuity and change and put things into a broader context of events that followed and issues that Mumbai is faced with now. This would turn a historical narrative, largely of interest only to specialists, into a reading of relevance for a much broader audience.
Another thing that at times bothered me was what I experienced as a continual struggle of the author to give the account an appearance of factuality, of presenting matters ‘as they were’ and the very little space left to polemics with one’s own material and the works of others. This appearance of an authoritative account is greatly supported by the referencing system that uses footnotes at the bottom of each page (and not references directly in the text) and by the use of single quotes for both quotations from other’s works and archival materials and author’s own expressions in ‘quotes’. This is not very lucky as the reader very often looses track of who says what.
Nevertheless, reading this book was enjoyable and would be definitely a great read also for any urban anthropologist, not only for historians who are the main target group.
“A dysfunctional ethnic and tribal brawl has been the norm in Afghanistan for centuries. Afghanistan is a mess. ” Who said that? A frustrated U.S. military officer? No, a professor of anthropology, Robert L. Moore.
In his article Tribes, Corruption Ail Afghanistan in The Ledger he shares his concerns about the difficulties for “us” (=the U.S. military) to “push this contentious country into the 21st century” and turn it into a “normal, stable country” that will be “governable in the way that most nations are”.
His main point: Afghanistan is an ethnic and religious mess:
Afghanistan is a mess. It is populated by a multitude of ethnic groups, the dominant ones being Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and Turkic. Many of these groups are further subdivided into traditional tribes whose members regard loyalty to their tribe or clan as more vital than loyalty to any nation or government. Alongside these tribal and ethnic divisions are religious differences that separate Shi’a from Sunni Muslims. The upshot of all this is that Afghanistan is not governable in the way that most nations are.
“In this harsh landscape”, he continues, “our efforts to “stabilize” Afghanistan cannot bring about rapid dramatic change”:
There are areas of Afghanistan, mainly non-Pashtun regions, where the Taliban are deeply distrusted and in these areas our troops might be welcomed. But would our fighting on behalf of, say, Tajiks (who, by the way, are ethnic cousins of Iran’s Persians) help solve Afghanistan’s long-standing problem of ethnic conflict? It is more likely to simply add another dimension to the dysfunctional ethnic and tribal brawl that has been the norm in Afghanistan for centuries.
Ethnic mess – apartheid as ideal? U.S-military=”us”. “Anthropology= serve those in power” – Sounds like 19th century colonial anthropology!
Over at Zero Anthropology, Maximilian Forte gives an overview over European press coverage of U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System and its embedding of civilian social scientists in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“A dysfunctional ethnic and tribal brawl has been the norm in Afghanistan for centuries. Afghanistan is a mess. ” Who said that? A frustrated U.S. military officer? No, a professor of anthropology, Robert L. Moore.
“In contrast to the vast majority of studies concerned with communal violence in general and the Hindu-Muslim violence in India in particular, I opt the opposite point of departure, the one of communal peace”, Kuldova writes who is currently PhD fellow at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo and author of several book reviews here at antropologi.info.
The heart of the peaceful nature of Lucknow is according to her “a particular blend of local history and networks of economic dependency which cut across the boundaries of class, caste, religion and locality. These networks are produced by the local embroidery industry, known under the name Chikan. Chikan is a traditional Muslim craft, and traded mostly by Hindu businessmen. In the last two decades there were more and more Muslims among the traders and Hindus among the embroiderers.
The Chikan industry gives employment to about 20 percent of the city’s population. It integrates people of different origins – rural, urban, lower class, middle class, men, women, Hindus, Muslims and creates according to her “an incredible network of mutual dependency, obligations and expectations”.
Religion is often used by political leaders to polarize people. It is rarely the main source of conflicts. These economic networks of interdependency, writes Tereza Kuldova, neutralize the polarizing strategies of the political leaders and lessen the chances of the occurrence of the communal tension. They lead to the “priority of the processes of togethering” as opposed to the “processes of othering”:
The growth of the industry and these networks, especially after 1990s, that is noticeably connected to the emergence and the ideology of the Hindu nationalism, has at the same time prevented the negative effects of this ideology, which have been violently felt in Lucknow’s neighbouring areas. This happened by expanding the cross-cutting networks and by turning a craft, which could have possibly been labelled as a “Muslim” craft, into a “traditionally Indian” craft. Chikan has been turned into embroidery which is worn by both Muslims and Hindus to express their Indianness, sense for tradition and fashion.
Additionally, Lucknow is by its inhabitants imagined as a peaceful and tolerant city, as the city of the Nawabs, rulers who bridged faiths:
Almost all accounts of the oral history that I gathered began like this: “In the times of Nawabs, the arts and architecture flourished, it was the time when a Muslim king danced as Lord Krishna…now where you can see that”. The Nawabs thus became associated with secularism; it is them who made Lucknow a “peaceful, clean and a neat city”
You don’t have to be born in Lucknow to be a Lakhnavi:
This imagination of anything or anyone as “Lakhnavi” goes in result beyond the dichotomy of Muslim vs. Hindu; it is rather about belonging to a particular place, which is populated by “Lakhnavis”, first and foremost.
The most persistent logic of the reasoning of why Lucknow is a peaceful city thus goes (tautologically enough) in the field as follows: “Lucknow is a peaceful city, because it is Lucknow, Lakhnavis do not fight, it has always been like that here and anyone who comes here just has to adopt that culture” (From a conversation with a Hindu businessman, 25.3.08.)
(…)
The discourse of the mythical past seems to work hand in hand with the economic structures and the social and economic networks in the city, creating both economic and discursive basis for the establishment of “relaxed” communal relationships.
As consequence of her findings, Tereza Kuldova encourages anthropologists to think rather and in terms of identifications than identities and in terms of networks than dichotomies:
Through the Chikan industry and through Chikan as a commodity, we can learn something about the fluidity of the social systems, about change and continuity, about the importance of the cross-cutting networks, about the discourses which govern the market and people’s choices and last but not least about the experience of modernity in India.
(…)
We have even seen that what is usually considered as unchangeable identities, particularly in the Indian context, namely the religious identities, are as mutable as any other. They are identifications, that might be at times stronger, at times weaker and at other times they might be replaced by new ones. People play with these identifications in a similar way as the popular Bollywood cinema does. (…) The concept of identification thus, being much richer, gives us more space to acknowledge the discursive shifts, which occur when the identifications are played out. At the same time as it acknowledges the situational and relational character of identity.
(…)
The network approach reminds us of the complexity of the social life and its situations, as well as of the impossibility to divide and classify the flow of social and economic interactions into clear-cut categories. (…)
Anthropology in general and I believe this study in particular, “has the authority and the ability to collapse a number of counterproductive dichotomies: the local and the global, the virtual and the real, the place-bound and the “non-place”, the universal and the particular. In real-life settings such contrasts evaporate” (Eriksen 2003: 15). “The “India”, where the past is inserted into the present and then projected into the future, questions the colonial dichotomies of “India” vs. “West”, “modernity” vs. “tradition”” (Favero 2005:24).
The Rumi Darwaza ("the Turkish Gate") in Lucknow. Foto: Himalayan Trails / Rajesh, flickr
Why are some areas of this world more peaceful than others? In her master’s thesis Networks That Make A Difference, anthropologist Tereza Kuldova explains why…
There are only few studies on popular music in South Asia. Tereza Kuldova (Tereza Kuldova) reviews for us the book Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema by ethnomusicologist Anna Morcom. Her review shows – among other things – the differences and barriers between anthropology and ethnomusicology.
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Review: Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema by Anna Morcom, 2007, Ashgate, ISBN 978-0-7546-5198-7
Tereza Kuldova, Research Fellow, Museum of Cultural History, Department of Ethnography University of Oslo
Main Yahaan Hoon Song | Veer-Zaara | Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta | Madan Mohan, Udit Narayan
Popular music in South Asia equals film music, however, even though its popularity is immense, it has been a very little studied phenomenon. This is even more startling when we realize that film songs “have become the music of public spaces in India, being heard from open windows in peoples’ homes, on buses and in bazaars. They are sung and danced to by millions of people in a range of formal and informal contexts, and have been appropriated in many folk genres” (p. 5) and they are thus literally omnipresent. This book thus must get credit for the choice of its subject matter, in the first place.
This book deals with the relationship between Hindi film songs and Hindi films and analyzes them in their cinematic, narrative and visual contexts. The ongoing agenda of the book seems to be to persuade us that the Hindi film song cannot be separated from the Hindi film, which is however a rather obvious fact to any viewer of Hindi film. The only thing I have to say to this is – there is a reason why it is called a film song and ergo, how could the song ever be truly independent or separated from its film context?
Another concern of the book is the definition of the Hindi film song genre as an independent style. Anyone following the Hindi cinema knows that Hindi film songs are extremely creative and varied, drawing on great diversity of inspiration and adjusting it to the particular needs of concrete scenes, and it thus might not be that easy to define them in terms of any style. Moreover, I wonder, do we really have to categorize these songs in terms of any style? What do we gain by that? Well, the answer may be that we gain statements such as follows:
“Amongst an array of inconsistent or over-general stylistic parameters, the only true constant in Hindi film songs is their ‘inclusion in a Hindi film’” (p. 70).
That was not a very surprising fact, was it? The intense argumentation for the analysis of Hindi film songs in relation to the cinematic context, however commonsense, obvious and at times felt as redundant and repetitive is certainly not so obvious within musicology. Because as Morcom argues ”the cinematic perspective of Hindi film songs has been ignored, with musicological studies largely viewing them as separate entities from their parent films” (p.7). So possibly Morcom might get credit for introducing a notion that is rather and straightforward to any consumer of Hindi film songs to the musicological studies.
The conclusion of the books are thus following:
“Far from being an independent tradition of popular songs, this book has found film songs to be profoundly integrated with Hindi films on many levels. Film songs are conceived as part of a particular film, and the musical style of each song is tailored to the parent film and the song scene.
In commercial terms, although film songs have become a big business since the late 1980s, their profitability is only exploitable in association with the Hindi cinema. Even after their release, the consumption of film songs is largely tied up with the Hindi cinema generally, and to some extent, with the parent film in particular.
However, songs are distinct from their cinematic roles and contexts in certain ways, although the degree of this independence varies with each song. As well as tailoring a song musically to a situation, its ability to sound good as a separate entity, its ‘audio value’, is also considered during its production. At the level of reception, audiences are able to appropriate songs and adapt them to new situations, which in some cases may result in the relationship with the parent film and cinema culture in general becoming obscure, or even disappearing entirely. Hindi films have a narrative style and structure that is designed for songs, and similarly, film songs are able to fit around cinematic scenes (p. 239).”
Now that we have begun paradoxically with the conclusion, let us get through the book chapter for chapter.
In the first chapter (available online here), we are presented with the argument for the study of the Hindi film songs through a multimedia model of analysis, which takes into account the context of the film songs in their parent films, their narrative and visuals as well as their production process. However, there is no attempt to frame this whole analysis in the context of Indian society or its changing historical realities (even though the book discusses the different periods in the evolution of the Indian cinema).
We also get to know that the work draws extensively on fieldwork in India, from 1998-2000 and read that the “fieldwork was ethnographically based” and “aimed to study film music through observing, fitting in with and joining in with its own people and culture” (p. 20). However, when we proceed to the second chapter which is concerned with the production of the Hindi film songs, and which is supposed to draw almost exclusively on fieldwork, what is presented to us are mostly excessive and in terms of content repetitive selections from interview transcripts with producers, music directors, lyricists and others. We do not get to know much about the ethnographic reality as such and any ‘ethnographic’ description in the true sense of the word is missing, except for the practical aspects of the production process, in which the roles of the director, producer, music director, lyricist and others are assessed.
The point of the chapter is again to show that lyrics and music is closely related to what is happening in the film and that it is used to express various emotional states, actions or drama in the scenes.
Let us move on to the third chapter which tries to answer the question of “why are film songs so difficult to categorize in terms of style?” (p. 134). This is clearly a question in musicology, it does not make much sense to the anthropologist writing this review.
The conclusion of this chapter is again not very surprising:
“Film songs seen in one way seem very formulaic and standardized, but seen in another way, they are very eccentric and unpredictable. Film song is required to have a regular enough style and enough musical autonomy to work as popular music, to make sense without the film, and even to advertise film, but at the same time to be specific and idiosyncratic enough to fit around a particular given situation. (…) Film songs need to be seen as multi-media, musico-dramatic entities as well as popular songs in order to make sense of both individual songs and the development of the genre as a whole” (p. 135-6).
For me this last statement equals saying: Hindi film songs need to be seen as what they are.
In the fourth chapter, Morcom addresses the question of the relation between Western music and Hindi films and the role of narrative in Hindi film music style. Supposedly the most striking feature of Hindi film music, as I perceive it (being interested in it intensely in relation to my research and being also its keen consumer), is its eclecticism, namely its ability to borrow and combine different styles and traditions in just one song, and that is what makes it so much fun – and also what makes it possibly so confusing for a musicologist, trying to make sense of it. Morcom poses such questions as “how is this Hollywood music able to communicate apparently successfully to the Indian audience? European and American culture has little to do with Indian music” (p.147) or how is it possible that “various types of non-indigenous music may be conveying narrative meaning to indigenous audiences” (p.157).
She considers “the amount of overlap in musical meaning in Hindi and Hollywood films surprising. Ethnomusicology tends to emphasize the aspects of music that are culture specific” (p. 156). Well, maybe ethnomusicology should consider the option that cultures do not exist in isolation and Morcom should consider India’s colonial history, not to mention its history of thousands of years of cultural contact and exchanges. When what is considered a traditional Muslim floral decorative motif (which can be seen for example on the walls of the Taj) comes originally from the European herbaria, I tend not to really wonder why the ‘indigenous’ population can identify with Western musical elements in Hindi film songs.
Satrangi Re
However, Morcom hits on something interesting when she says that “the direct relationship of many musical signs with feeling, experience and somatic states may be one reason why music has greater potential for mutual understanding than language, whose signs are more highly mediated” (p.157). Sadly, she does not really elaborate on this any further. She concludes saying that:
“(M)any of the ‘Hollywood’ techniques most commonly found in Hindi films conveniently constitute an antithesis of rāg and classical melody, and also of film and folk melody, which are associated to a greater or lesser degree with the sacred, love, romance and celebration. They can therefore be used as powerful means to express distortion, destruction and disturbance of these qualities in a range of dramatic situations (p.178).”
However, they can also be used to express many other different things.
In the fifth chapter, Morcom explores the commercial life of Hindi film songs, in relation to Hindi film, in the context of buying, selling, and marketing. She investigates the technologies of distribution, marketing and profitability of film songs from the first few years of sound film to 2000. This chapter is based on fieldwork; however, that again stands for interviews with people in the industry. The chapter discusses the influence of gramophone, radio, cassettes, dvd, vhs, vcd etc. on the commercial potential of Hindi songs.
Again Morcom struggles with the distinction between marketing Hindi film songs and Hindi films, and we can again and again read sentences such as:
“The marketing of film songs and films are ultimately difficult to distinguish. Trailers using the film songs and visuals from the films are produced by the music company to promote the music, and the music, as it gains ground in the popular culture, promotes the film” (p.195).
Even though this book was published in 2007 it does not really take into account the importance of internet and though she discusses the importance of television and various live shows, it appears to me, that she does not really capture the extent of the industry. Moreover, nowadays there are numerous ‘making of the song/film’ videos available all over the internet, as well as numerous TV-shows featuring the stars, directors, singers, music directors etc. discussing the production and marketing process and many other things. This all is the promotion of the songs. However, though she notes that “these shows add another layer of importance to film songs, but are still parasitic on the cinema” (p.220), she does not really consider them in the analysis any depth.
Emi (Chori Chori Dekhe Mujhko) FULL SONG *HQ*
In the last chapter, Morcom deals with the audience reception of Hindi films and with the life of the film song after its release. She again wonders if the songs are “able to become independent of the context of the parent film or of ‘film culture’ in general” (p.208). She analyzes different charts from several websites, concluding:
“(I)ndividual songs have, to some extent, a life of their own in terms of popularity and may become popular even if the parent film is a flop. However, when it is taken into account that only a minority of films are hits, the songs from hit films can be seen to further dominate the chart” (p.211).
When it comes to appropriation of film songs by the audiences, again a part of the text which is based on fieldwork, we get to know very briefly that people appropriate songs by
singing them,
playing them and singing at various occasions such as weddings, Holi, romancing or using them as devotional songs in the temple,
identifying with them across disparate communities in South Asia and the Diaspora as they refer to shared experience
performing them (from amateurs to professionals).
The conclusion she thus draws is that audiences actively appropriate these songs. However, what is striking when we realize that most of the Hindi film songs are dance songs is the lack of consideration of dance as a form of appropriation. As well as the lack of serious consideration of the movements and gestures in relation to the narrative, lyrics and music as a mode of expression. The embodiment of music and sound is definitely a way of appropriation of music that needs to be considered in any such analysis, and even more so in the analysis of Hindi film songs that rely visually to an extreme degree on bodily movements, gestures and dance scenes.
Reading this book as an anthropologist gave me an insight into on which premises ethnomusicology is established and it certainly thought me to be more sensitive to the various ways in which sound conveys meaning, which is possible the biggest lesson of the book – to give a thought to the various sounds and their interplay with the visual (however I would also include the somatic, emotional and embodied practices) and their ways to express, convey and reproduce meaning. At the same time, I feel that ethnomusicology, as I experienced it though this book, would profit from a more thorough study of anthropology, to get a more nuanced perspective and become more sensitive to the context.
There are only few studies on popular music in South Asia. Tereza Kuldova (Tereza Kuldova) reviews for us the book Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema by ethnomusicologist Anna Morcom. Her review shows - among other things - the differences…
