Music in Colonial Bengal

Abstract This chapter investigates the musical culture in nineteenth-century Bengal in particular, and contemporary India at large, and Tagore’s creative and critical engagement with the culture through his music and musicology. It explores the role of the political and cultural forces set in motion by historical phenomena like Orientalism, colonialism, and nationalism in fundamentally reshaping the various traditions of music practice, Indian and Western, in contemporary Bengal. What kind of transitions did the colonial encounter engender in the cultures of production, performance, and reception—in short, the culture of musical aurality—in this part of the world? The objective of these investigations is to understand the implications of such transitions for Tagore’s music, musicology, and alternative nationalism in particular and for contemporary habitus at large. Examining the shaping influence of some Western musical and political discourses upon the late nineteenth-century middle-class Indian music reform initiatives in an emergent nationalist milieu, the chapter explores Tagore’s equivocal position in Indian musical nationalism.