An outstanding volume that combines exceptional scholarship and range striking a register that will appeal to the expert as much as the general reader. The recognition that music and the performing arts are the lifeblood of social relations in South Asia, ranging across spaces that include the domestic, the sacred, the cinematic, and the contentious politics of performance framed by power and hierarchy, makes this volume singular and unique in its imagination. An intervention that will change forever how we think questions of embodied and sonicaesthetics in relation to the political in South Asia.
Dilip Menon, Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand
This book is a tour de force on South Asian music and dance. Its thirty distinct essays use embodied approaches to examine every day cultural experiences with ethnographic and analytical rigor. They disrupt and unsettle hegemonic hierarchies and aesthetic values of styles, genres, canons, and the artificial boundaries between music and dance. The innovative pedagogically-oriented scholarship is a much-needed addition to the existing world music anthologies.
Pallabi Chakravorty, Stephen Lang Professor of Performing Arts/Dance, Swarthmore College
Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia provides a fantastic sampling of current research on music and dance in South Asia and its diaspora. The thematic organization breaks down old divisions between the folk, popular, and classical that have long organized the study of music and dance in South Asia, and traverse national boundaries to explore the dynamics of how musical form and embodied dance practices encode, express, and enable different projects of identity and sociopolitical contestation. Audiovisual and supplementary materials on the companion website enable readers to directly engage with dance and musical forms, making this a unique and extremely valuable resource for teaching.
Amanda Weidman, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College
This book could therefore be a valuable addition to course material, showing how people use music and dance forms originatingin South Asia to engage with others on cultural meaning and sociocultural issues in their day-to-day lives.
Victoria M. Dalzell, Notes