About the Book: Music, Modernity, and Publicness in India
With the onset of modernity in twentieth-century India, new social arrangements
gave rise to new forms of music-making. The musicians were no longer performing
exclusively in the princely courts or in the private homes of the wealthy. Not
only did the act of listening to and appreciating music change, it became an
important feature of public life, thus influencing how modernity shaped itself.
This volume attempts to study the connections between music and the creation of
new ideas of publicness during the early twentieth century. How was music
labelled as folk or classical? How did music