Title: MADLY IN LOVE WITH MUSIC: Hindustani Sangeet in 20th Century Mumbai

Speaker: Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana, Head of Department of Cultural
Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

Date and Time: 16:00 – 18:00 February 25th (Tues.), 2020
Venue: Tonan-tei (Room no. 201) on the second floor of Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Organizer: Prof. Hau Caroline, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Abstract:
Love and madness come together in the metropolis as a condition of
subjective excess, the condition of the musical subject’s simultaneous
psychic and social habitation of modern urban space. This talk focusses
on the manifestations of musicophilia in Mumbai from the late 19th
century to the present. I propose that this phenomenon of music-loving,
and the concept of a lingua musica, help us grasp the workings of the
metropolitan unconscious of a large colonial port-city like Mumbai,
throwing new light on issues of the subjective and the social.

About the speaker:
Tejaswini Niranjana is currently Professor and Head, Department of
Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She is also Visiting
Professor with the School of Arts and Science at Ahmedabad University,
India. She is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and
Society, Bangalore, which offered an innovative inter-disciplinary PhD
programme from 2000-2012. During 2012-16, she headed the Centre for
Indian Languages in Higher Education at the Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Mumbai, and was Indian-language advisor to Wikipedia. She is
the author of Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the
Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), Mobilizing
India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Duke
University Press, 2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai (Duke University
Press and Tulika Books, 2020). Among her edited volumes is Genealogies
of the Asian Present: Situating Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (Delhi,
2015), with Wang Xiaoming.