Virinder Kalra's book Sacred and Secular Musics: A Postcolonial Approach unearths the composite relationship between the sacred and the secular in the Indian subcontinent through excavating the demotic practices of hereditary Punjabi musicians split across the borders between India and Pakistan. Several histories of South Asian music have dwelt on Indian elites’ invention of a sacred classical tradition in collaboration with orientalist scholars and middle class performers through returning to the ancient Aryan Hindu past at the beginning of the 20th century, which necessitated the expulsion of Muslim musicians and the erasure of Islamic history. Kalra focuses on Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan, to argue that the interpolation of colonial modernity and colonial mimicry in the realm of both religion and music resulted in the destruction of the hetero-religious, hetero-linguistic Punjabi religious and musical spaces. Interrogating the classicising of religion and music that emerged out of the cauldron of colonial modernity, Kalra shows how the idea of the European classical came to frame and create musical forms in India that he renames as clessicul. As opposed to the clessicul, he concludes, folk music on the subcontinent constitutes the residue that effectively resisted the project of colonial modernity. Adopting the relatively unexplored lens of postcolonial theory in studies of music, the book makes a major contribution to musicology, religious and postcolonial studies by reconceptualising music, religion and the notion of the classical.
Arguing that the Hegelian epistemograph and the native informant underpin the architecture of South Asian musicological historiography, Kalra borrows Edward Said's notion of orientalism to trace the production of a pure Hindu musical past originating in the Vedic period by both British and German Indologists that was appropriated by nationalist reformers and musicians in the construction of national musics. He calls attention to the continuity of the orientalist project with the nationalist in the construction of clessicul music through following the musical journeys of two of the founding fathers of Indian music, secular middle class Brahmin Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and religious hereditary musician Vishnu Digambar Paluskar. He maintains that, despite the differences between the secular Bhatkhande and religious Paluskar in the definition of clessicul, both agreed on the classical notion of the inherent superiority of ancient music and the need for expelling Muslim musicians for the construction of a fixed, unbroken Hindu musical tradition based on canonical Hindu texts. Kalra demonstrates that these ordered alignments of religion, nation and music could not be applied to Punjabi music through citing the presence of fluid, overlapping musical boundaries in musicians’ practices.
Kalra examines a whole gamut of musical genres, namely the Sikh kirtan, the Muslim qawwali, the folk and the commercial along with their practitioners to uncover the role of colonial modernity in articulating them to particular religious identities. He begins by tracing the process of the transformation of kirtan into Sikh religious music through the banishment of hereditary Muslim rababis who had traditionally performed at Sikh shrines from the gurdwaras through the reformist agendas of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee formed in late colonial Punjab and the subsequent migration of musicians across the border after the partition of 1947. He brilliantly demonstrates that the reformist agenda led to the definition of the space of music from a hetero-religious to a monolithic one and to bringing the Adi Granth into a religion of the book. He reveals this process to be clearly visible in the post 1984 revival of kirtan by a group of musicians and scholars and their attempt to restore musical excellence and purity through adhering to the ragas as prescribed in the Adi Granth. Kalra points out that, in contrast to the construction of a pristine kirtan tradition by revivalists who privileged the Adi Granth as a religion of the book displaying an amnesia to the performative aspects of the Holy Book, the popularity of hetero-religious practitioners of kirtan, including those from lower castes who freely borrowed ragas from a variety of musical genres, resisted the prescriptive standardisation of kirtan and its production as Sikh religious music.
Kalra notes that a similar reinvention of Qawwali as Islamic music through the production of a cult of authenticity and myth of origins centred on certain sacred spaces, figures, languages and musical forms has been visible since the intensification of religious boundaries at the end of the 19th century. He demonstrates that this is refuted by the practices of hereditary musicians who continue to draw on the hetero-religious, hetero-linguistic and hetero-musical sources of pre-partition Punjab while compromising with both the diktats of the Islamic state and material contingencies. Kalra reveals the gradual process through which prescriptions related to the concrete sectarian, caste and gendered identities of performers, instruments, language, texts, predecessors (bujurgs) and spaces by the Waqf legislation and Auwaqf board constructed a fixed category of qawwali attached to Islam. Against the formal construction of qawwali as Islamic religious music by its new patrons in Pakistan drawing its authority from Amir Khusro and the qawwal bacche (descendants of hereditary qawwali performers) in Nizammuddin, Kalra juxtaposes the testimonies and oral histories of musicians that point to the frequency of boundary crossings between Sikh and Muslim, rababi, mirasi and qawwal, Farsi, Punjabi and Urdu, Amir Khusro, Guru Nanak and Kabir, harmonium, tabla and sitar, sacred and secular, art and commercial that confounds the ideology of the pure qawwali.
Kalra convincingly demonstrates that musical idioms in which textual and musical evocation does not lend itself to any bounded religion transcend the boundaries between India and Pakistan and between Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity and Islam, thus producing the dichotomy between classical religious/folk hetero-religious. Although the folk is equally contaminated by colonial modernity, as evident in colonial ethnographic and anthropological classifications of Punjabi genres and performing communities, he shows that folk music becomes the residue that refuses to be religious. He concludes that those who are excluded from the realm of the religious and clessicul retain traces of the hetero-religious and in whom one can hear a resistance to colonial modernity.
Agreeing with Michael Nijhawan that partition led to a redistribution of performative styles and repertoire, he provides evidence of a number of hereditary religious singers such as the rababis and dhadis who, expelled from the sacred space, reinvented themselves as practitioners of folk, and later, of popular and devotional music. The biographies of these musicians testify to the fluid, porous boundaries of pre-partition Punjab which enabled Muslim musicians to perform at Sikh shrines and vice versa and to assume multiple identities. Through tracing the genealogies of Des Raj and Balbir Singh in India and Pakistan's iconic folk singer Tufail Niazi, Kalra reveals that their preference of folk over clessicul enabled an eclectic blending of musical styles, influences and practices that transcend boundaries. Similarly, Muslim musicians who opted for disavowed commercial music, such as Mohammed Siddique and Kuldip Manak turned the popular space into a realm in which the sacred and the secular crossed with ease and not only deformed religion but also impacted caste and gender relations as they related to music. Surprisingly, it is in the domain of devotional music emerging from old and newly mushrooming local shrines in both India and Pakistan that the porous religiosities of pre-partition Punjab become most pronounced. Through citing the examples of Rajab Ali whose sources were split between Hindu, Muslim and Sikh and the performer Sardool Sikandar, Kalra demonstrates the subversion of a frozen religion and music by elite definers through the practices of local performers.
Drawing on the insights of religious studies and musicology, Kalra offers an ingenious deployment of postcolonial theory to the field of music to implicate both the orientalist and nationalist projects in the distortion of the composite cultures of South Asia. The twin tropes of colonial modernity and colonial mimicry that he borrows from postcolonial theory enable him to reveal the process of formalisation and classicisation of religion and music through which the nationalist project became complicit in colonialism's epistemic violence. Through his application of postcolonial theory to the field of music, Kalra breaks new grounds in both religious and musicological studies. He critically engages with a wide range of colonial scholarship in diverse disciplines to call attention to its limitations in understanding Punjabi musics. However, the absence of a similar sustained engagement with postcolonial theorists with the exception of Said and Spivak, particularly of Homi Bhabha, whose idea of colonial mimicry he heavily depends on, detracts from a similar critical perspective with respect to the postcolonial approach.
More than its postcolonial approach, Kalra's study is remarkable for the insight that it provides into the demotic practices of Punjabi musicians through the range and depth of the interviews, which include practically every genre and musician on both sides of Punjab. Legendary musicians from both Punjabs, from the most celebrated to the most marginalised, find their way in Kalra's book along with their mindboggling array of genealogies, genres and instruments. Kalra is able to win the trust of hereditary musicians to the extent that they are willing to share the most intimate details of their personal lives and professional lineage with him. Musicians’ interviews are supplemented with a wealth of links to audio samples that amply support and illustrate the discursive analysis. It is through juxtaposing these heterogeneous biographical narratives, differentiated by region, sect, class, caste and gender against one another that Kalra puts together an alternative musicological history of sacred and secular musics in Punjab that disrupts official narratives of sacred and secular musics in both India and Pakistan. His grounded approach holds the promise of new theorising of local musics that can escape globalising theories of music through a return to praxis. Since the practices of hereditary performers have remained undocumented except in the personal memories of the musicians and their descendants, Kalra's ethnographic research succeeds in creating an invaluable archive of Punjabi music that can serve as the reference point for further theorising on Punjabi and other South Asian musics.
Through moving between both sides of Punjab, Kalra is able to provide a comparative perspective on musical sources, lineage and patronage from musicians whose experiences mirror one another to recover the musical legacy of pre-partiton Punjab. Through demonstrating that Punjabi music in pre-partition Punjab disrupted the alignment of music with religion underpinning the essentialist constitution of Indian and Pakistani musics, it exhibits the sharp differences in the genre, performers, audience and patrons not only between Hindustani and Carnatic music but also within Hindustani music through the particular example of Punjab, and foregrounds the region in theorising national musics. As one of the few books that studies the music of India in relation to that of Pakistan, it foregrounds the limitations of a state-centric approach to the study of music and signals a new direction in the understanding of music that is both regional and transnational.
Through challenging the nationalist constitution of the sacred and the secular through colonial mimicry, Kalra's book provides a new understanding of South Asian music and religion in which the sacred and the secular are inextricably mixed. His revelation of the discursive construction of religious and musical categories in the postcolonial context in conformity with colonial constructs underlines the need for emancipating postcolonial disciplinary formations from the controlling gaze of the West. The marginalised Muslim musicians who constitute the sole repository of pre-partition categories and spaces alone can retrieve music from its indenturement to the West and subvert the orientalising gaze. Through letting his readers accompany him in his intellectual and emotional journey into the world of music and musicians in the Indian subcontinent and UK, Kalra leads them into a new understanding of the articulation between the sacred and the secular in South Asian music.
