Stefan Fiol's Recasting Folk in the Himalayas: Indian Music, Media, and Social Mobility is a significant contribution to the field of contemporary South Asian ethnomusicology, which until recent decades largely ignored music considered outside the classical canon. Fiol examines the genealogy of the term “folk” as it has been used by scholars and ordinary people alike to describe various musics. Through multiple ethnographic case studies, he successfully integrates micro-analytical perspectives (for example, indigenous knowledge systems and the routines of daily musical practice) and macro-analytical structures (such as capitalism, the state, and the music industry) in order to “recast” the idea of folk in multiple contexts. The reader comes away with a deep understanding of Uttarakhandi regional music through the stories of a fascinating cast(e) of characters and musical tales.
Fiol first provides a stellar introductory chapter in which he clearly defines the book's key terms, examines the history of caste, and briefly touches on his own positionality. Drawing on a diverse body of literature to analyze scholarship concerning the term “folk,” he builds an inimitable case for applying the process of folklorization to the South Asian context, a signal contribution to the field that to my knowledge has not adequately been done previously.
In chapter 1, Fiol discusses late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial attitudes of race and caste toward Shilpkar performers (low-caste hereditary communities). He traces the term “folk” to this period, where it was shaped by political and military motivations. Reference to local written and oral indigenous histories might have helped Fiol to more clearly discuss regional versus national musical identity formation as well as the historical context for separatist movements in Garhwal and Kumaon.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 comprise musician case studies that each broach the concept of folk in contemporary contexts. In chapter 2, Fiol examines the artist Mohan Upreti as a primary beneficiary of state-funded cultural performances and recordings. The strength of this chapter lies in Fiol's attention to the institutionalization of regional music through various government and nongovernment entities, including the Gramophone Company of India, All India Radio, the Sangeet Natak Akademi, and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. He seamlessly connects Upreti's personal story with India's postcolonial Nehruvian history, but a more in-depth discussion of regionalism and nationalism would have helped to cement the connections laid out by Fiol between individuals and institutions. In chapter 3, he examines the usage of new sound technologies to investigate changes in socioeconomic and political contexts for musicians. He explores the concept of folk through sound by describing how musicians and audiences conceptualize what constitutes particular folk musical elements. At the end of the chapter, however, I was left wondering how the chapter's featured musician, Narendra Singh Negi, has been able to reconcile his outwardly communist political ideology with his position as a democratic government employee. I was also curious how Negi's many experiences performing at festivals, political rallies, and concerts in India and internationally have changed him as a person, performer, and activist. In chapter 4, Fiol uses the concept of rhizophonia—the dislocation, relocation, and co-location in contemporary sound reproduction—to ask how Shilpkar musicians grapple with the uneven power relations of marginalization and degradation that often result from collaborations with higher-caste producers. Fiol cleverly refers to this process as “the folk sound without the folk body” (p. 106).
I commend Fiol for his attention to women's music in chapter 5, in which he sets out to counterbalance the narrative of “women's music” being equated to “folk culture” (p. 131). Fiol portrays his women interlocutors as modern and dynamic through two case studies, that of Bachan Dei and Meena Rana. Dei was a singer and dancer from a precolonial customary patronage tradition called Baddi in Garhwal. Fiol briefly recounts postcolonial changes and the eventual decline in patronage and dance in the Baddi tradition. He contrasts Dei with Meena Rana, considered to be the “songbird of the studio” (p. 149). For Rana, the concept of folk means something very different, since she is not from a hereditary musician family: “folk usually signifies as a set of genres or stylistic conventions that may be selectively added to a performance” (p. 156). Each of these case studies brings up fascinating issues, and I only wish Fiol had dedicated a chapter each to Dei and Rana.
Chapter 6 delves into the world of female goddesses and jagar, or possession rituals. I especially enjoyed Fiol's discussion of the reimagining and normalization of jagar in contemporary performance contexts and the ways that producers retain certain “folk” elements in studio jagar recordings.
As Fiol's work attests, the task of understanding the concept of folk in the South Asian musical sense is more challenging than one might first assume. He demonstrates that indeed folk means many things to different people through his in-depth case studies, which give the reader a feeling of “being there.” We get to know his interlocutors through lengthy quotes from his interviews; he describes musical sound in terms of instrumentation, form, and feeling; and he includes a number of photographs of his interlocutors on album covers, in performance contexts, and posing with the author himself. And yet, I was left wanting more in terms of Fiol's own positionality: how did he portray himself in the field? What were the pros and cons of this positionality with regard to his fieldwork and the final product of the research? Fiol briefly mentions his experiences and challenges in teaching this music in a North American conservatory context, and in one sentence he implicates himself in the same folklorization processes he discusses in the South Asian context (pp. 15–16). But positionality deserves greater attention, perhaps an entire chapter. Nonetheless, Fiol should be praised for the effort and diligence he puts forth to tell his interlocutors’ stories in an articulate and detailed manner.
Fiol's deep ethnographic accounts and contemporary demonstrations of what the term “folk” means to living, music-making Indian citizens is illuminating. Recasting Folk in the Himalayas is a pleasurable read, and the case studies are so engaging and robust that they could easily be used on their own as single readings in both undergraduate and graduate classrooms. The results of Fiol's years of ethnographic research have paid off and are of value to South Asianists interested in culture outside of the classical realm, as well as to both academic and nonacademic audiences.
