Tejaswini Niranjana's book departs from other critical accounts of Hindustani music history and performance practice in its attention to space, intersections between aural and visual aspects of musical expression, and the urban setting of Mumbai as a site of encounter. The diverse religious, linguistic, and class identities of Niranjana's historical and contemporary interlocutors expand the discussion of Hindustani music beyond the great master performers to focus on communities of devoted listeners. Niranjana demonstrates how these listeners played an important role in shaping the course of Hindustani music after the decline of Mughal patronage structures that previously had supported the performing arts. Niranjana opens the book by narrating her own struggle to embody aspects of Hindustani performance that prove elusive to beginners. Her inability to “jump off the precipice” in her practice led her to an analysis of the “excessive subject” of what she calls “musicophilia” (p. 6). We learn about the people Niranjana calls “musicophiliacs” from different perspectives throughout the book. They are largely nonhereditary members of the listening public, but some do pursue musical training, or taleem. Their centrality to new systems of patronage that emerged in early twentieth-century India and their relationships with musicians across class lines ensured that Hindustani music “became an important part of the urban Indian collective experience” (p. 29).

Musicophilia in Mumbai comprises five chapters, opening with an introduction and closing with an afterword. Chapter 1 makes the case for why the nineteenth-century city of Bombay became a gathering place for musicians from different stylistic traditions to perform, teach, and later record their music, thereby fashioning a “distinctive urbanity” connected to the organization of urban spaces and the experiences of musicians in these spaces (p. 15). Here, Niranjana critiques historian Janaki Bakhle's influential discussion of efforts to systematize Hindustani music pedagogy and theory in accordance with emergent nationalist principles.Footnote ¹ Niranjana joins other scholars in pointing out that Bakhle's privileging of communal distinctions based on religion results in the erasure of alliances across these and other identity categories.Footnote ² Niranjana adds that the formation of Hindustani music over the course of three to four hundred years “cannot simply be reduced to a key element in the Hindu nationalist discourse that interpellates a new Hindu subject in the early twentieth century” (p. 27). She instead proposes that we consider the urban spaces of Bombay to be constitutive of “intimate relationships across religion and social class” that signify “how musicophiliacs strived to create the conditions that would allow them to perform modernity in the context of colonial society” (p. 29). While Niranjana acknowledges the aspects of social reform embedded in the pedagogical approaches of the early twentieth century, she argues that “to dwell on this is to de-emphasize the affective reasons that drew people to music, leaving us with a reductive understanding of the rapid growth of musicophilia in Mumbai” (p. 36).

Chapter 2 takes the form of a photo essay, with visuals situated alongside excerpts from interviews with Niranjana's musicophiliacs that follow a kind of walking tour through the former native town of Girgaum, which is mapped out early in the chapter. She describes what it might have looked, sounded, and felt like to inhabit these spaces as a musicophiliac during the twentieth century. Peppered with imaginative questions and anecdotes, this chapter weaves in descriptive historical accounts of performances in these spaces.

Chapter 3 introduces the musicophiliac in greatest detail. “The avid listener, the collector, the event organizer, the student, and the teacher—all of these figures came into Hindustani music as nontraditional musical subjects” (p. 86). These music lovers are “deewane” (crazy or mad about music), which Niranjana describes as a “condition of subjective excess, the condition of the musical subject's simultaneous psychic and social habitation of modern urban space” (p. 87). The intensely personal and simultaneously shared nature of these listening experiences are of utmost importance to Niranjana's definition of musicophilia.

The final two chapters focus specifically on Hindustani music pedagogy, both historically and in present times. Chapter 4 explores the guru-shishya pedagogical model, moving away from the sociality of institutionalized group learning to home in on the musical interiority cultivated through taleem. Niranjana incorporates excerpts from her interviews with Hindustani musicians in Mumbai belonging to various gharanas, or stylistic lineages, many of them musicophiliacs who ended up pursuing taleem. The richness of their stories presents a dynamic narrative of Hindustani music pedagogy, including tensions surrounding reliance on notation and varying perspectives on improvisation.

Chapter 5 ventures into more contentious territory: the incorporation of various forms of mediation into Hindustani music pedagogy and their impact on the teacher-student relationship. The role of gramophone recordings and radio broadcasts in standing in for the guru is explored through the experiences of musicophiliacs-turned-musicians who learned in this manner. On the most recent end of the mediated pedagogy spectrum falls cyber teaching and learning, which Niranjana explores through presenting excerpts from interviews with gurus whose students learn from disparate locations connected through Skype and other online platforms.

Musicophilia in Mumbai will likely be most interesting to scholars in the fields of South Asian studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. It will also be useful to those seeking to understand how the organization of urban space impacts social relations through musical performance. While musical performance and pedagogical techniques are described in detail, I was not able to locate any audio recordings of performances discussed in the book. The film project designed to accompany the book is still under development, and it promises to make an aural experience possible for the reader, but currently, the fascinating blog posts on Niranjana's page “Making Music Making Space” feature only photographs.Footnote ³ Full video interviews with some of the musicophiliacs featured in the book are hosted on the site pad.ma, but none of these contained examples of performance, as far as I could discern.Footnote ⁴ Grounded in historical and ethnographic research, Niranjana's book is a multilayered resource connecting the past and present of this dynamic art form.