Constructions of nation and the classicisation of music: Comparative perspectives from Southeast and South Asia

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 187-211

  Moro, Pamela ^a  

^a WILLAMETTE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CLASS; COMPARATIVE STUDY; CULTURAL IDENTITY; CULTURAL TRADITION; EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT; MUSIC; STATE BUILDING; WESTERNIZATION;

ASIA; EURASIA; INDIA; INDONESIA; SOUTH ASIA; SOUTHEAST ASIA; THAILAND;

EID: 33846058666     PISSN: 00224634     EISSN: 14740680     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022463404000116     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. The literature on nationalism, national identity and national culture is voluminous within anthropology and related fields. Useful works, besides those noted in the body of this text, which introduce central issues related to national culture include Mapping the nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996); Nationalist ideologies and the production of national cultures, ed. Richard G. Fox (Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association, 1990); and articles in the special issue of American Ethnologist, 19, 4 (1992). An early forerunner addressing nationalism and folklore is Felix J. Oinas, Folklore, nationalism and politics (Columbus: Slavica, 1978). Related nodes of scholarship include critical responses to the ideas of invented tradition (see the survey in Robert C. Ulin, 'Invention and representation as cultural capital', American Anthropologist, 97, 3 [1995]: 519-27); and authenticity in national culture (for example, Brackette F. Williams, 'Nationalism, traditionalism, and the problem of cultural inauthenticity', in Fox ed., Nationalist ideologies, pp. 112-29). In the field of ethnomusicology, Peter Wade, Music, race, and nation: Música tropical in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) considers some of the key dilemmas in the nationalism literature at large, with particular concern for music.
2. Matthew Harp Allen, 'Tales tunes tell: Deepening the dialogue between "classical" and non-"classical" in the music of India', Yearbook for traditional music, 30 (1998): 22-52; Jennifer Lindsay, 'Klasik, kitsch or contemporary: a study of the Javanese performing arts' (Ph.D. diss., University of Sydney, 1985).
3. Partha Chatterjee, The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 127 (quotation); on the middle class as mediators, see p. 92. Chatterjee's discussion bears comparison to several related theoretical notions: Weber's rationalization (Susan A. Reed, 'Performing respectability: The berava, middle class nationalism, and the classicization of Kandyan dance in Sri Lanka', Cultural Anthropology, 17, 2 [2002]: 250); Srinivas's Sanskritization; and Redfield and Singer's Great Tradition/Little Tradition dichotomy.
4. Harold Powers, 'Classical music, cultural roots, and colonial rule: An Indic musicologist looks at the Muslim World', Asian Music, 12, 1 (1980): 5-39.
5. A number of scholars have addressed the connection between classical music and nationalism in India; key works include Charles Capwell, 'Marginality and musicology in nineteenth-century Calcutta: The case of Sourindro Mohun Tagore', in Comparative musicology and anthropology of music: Essays on the history of ethnomusicology, ed. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 228-43; Capwell, 'Music and nationalism', in Garland encyclopedia of world music, Vol. 5 (South Asia, the Indian subcontinent) ed. Alison Arnold (NY: Garland Publishing, 2000), pp. 431-9; Gerry Farrell, Indian music and the West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 65-76; Jonathan Katz, 'India: History of classical music: Classical music, the state, and the middle class', entry in New Grove dictionary of music and musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2001-2).
6. However, some observers argue that the music was in fact thriving under the nineteenth-century Indian courts. Having lost much of their political power, rulers and nobles turned financial resources towards the arts. 'There was an explosive development of Hindustani classical music and much rivalry and exchange among the many principle musical centres' of the nineteenth century (Powers, 'Classical music', p. 23).
7. On the lack of British interest in South Asian music see Farrell, Indian music, p. 59.
8. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885-1947 (Delhi: Macmillan India, 1983), pp. 67-8. My description of the middle class and its relationship to nationalism in late nineteenth-century India is drawn from pp. 65-100 of Sarkar's discussion. Raymond Williams has discussed the development of class as a social category and economic position in Europe and especially Britain; Keywords:A vocabulary of culture and society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 60-9. The European idea of a middle class rose relatively late, from about the 1840s; the middle class is self-consciously positioned between persons of rank and the working class, and inevitably sees itself in a position of social distinction. Though I have not studied specific documentation of the development of the idea of class in India, one can guess that British usage had a strong impact.
9. Sarkar, Modern India, pp. 70-6; Chatterjee, Nation and its fragments, pp. 76-115; Richard G. Fox, 'Hindu nationalism in the making, or the rise of the Hindian', in Fox ed., Nationalist ideologies, pp. 65-6. Both Sarkar and Chatterjee also point to efforts to classicize an Islamic past in India. It does seem that British efforts to educate a small portion of the Indian populace were directed at particular, Hindu segments of society. These were not strictly upper-caste elites or traditional literati.
10. Allen, 'Tales tunes tell', p. 50.
11. Ibid, pp. 24-5 traces shifts in meaning within the marga and desi dichotomy over its long period of existence; see also Carol Babiracki, 'Tribal music in the study of great and little traditions of Indian music', in Nettl and Bohlman ed., Comparative musicology, pp. 69-90, on various dichotomies with regard to music in India. The legitimacy of Indian music - as classical or art music - in fact rests in part upon validation by ancient, authoritative theoretical scholarship or scriptures, especially the Natya sastra. One of several Hindi terms for this music, besides the English 'classical', is 'sastriya-sangit (music connected to the ancient treatises on the arts). See Regula Qureshi, 'India: Art music: Legitimizing criteria', entry in Sadie ed., New Grove dictionary for discussion of the validation of music, and for additional terms for classical music.
12. Capwell, 'Marginality and musicology' and 'Music and nationalism'; Farrell, Indian music, pp. 65-71; Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy and Cyril de Silva Kulatillake, 'South Asia', in Ethnomusicology: Historical and regional studies, ed. Helen Myers (Hamdmills, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1993), pp. 274-305.
13. Capwell, 'Music and nationalism'; Powers, 'Classical music", pp. 24-5. On Bhatkande see Regula Qureshi, 'Whose music? Sources and contexts in Indic musicology', in Nettl and Bohlman ed., Comparative musicology, p. 160; and Andrew Burton Alter, 'Institutional music education: northern area [India]', in Arnold ed., Garland encyclopedia, p. 444.
14. Jairazbhoy and Kulatillake, 'South Asia', p. 278.
15. From the online version at www.grovemusic.com; see also ibid., p. 276; Powers, 'Classical music', pp. 24-5, discusses the shift in patronage.
16. While Bengal was a centre for much of the revitalization and redefinition of Hindustani music, it is significant that the first meeting of the Indian National Congress in south India (in Madras, 1927-8) - at which the goal of national independence was officially stated for the first time - led to the founding of the Madras Music Academy (Katz, 'India: History of classical music'). The Gayan Samaj was a middle-class organization formed to support music and found music schools for youth, founded in 1874 in Poona and expanding in 1883 to Madras (Farrell, Indian music, pp. 70-4) - locations quite distant from Bengal.
17. Qureshi, 'Whose music?', pp. 161-2 (long quotations) and 164 (short quotation).
18. My account of music in Indonesia is based upon the following sources: Judith Becker, Traditional music in modern Java: Gamelan in a changing society (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1980); Becker, 'Southeast Asia", in Myers ed., Ethnomusicology, pp. 377-91; Lindsay, 'Klasik, kitsch'; Laurie J. Sears, Shadows of empire: Colonial discourse and Javanese tales (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); Sumarsam, Gamelan: Cultural interaction and musical development in Central Java (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Terry E. Miller and Sean Williams, Garland encyclopedia of world music, vol. IV (Southeast Asia) (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997). Indonesian nationalism is documented in a voluminous and still-growing scholarly literature, including numerous unpublished graduate theses. Perceptions of the past in Southeast Asia, ed. Anthony Reid and David Marr (Singapore: Heinemann Educational Books, 1979) is noteworthy in its combination of historiography and intellectual history, emphasizing how images of the past contributed to twentieth-century conceptions of nation in Southeast Asia - a theme integral to the present work.
19. Lindsay, 'Klasik, kitsch', p. 37; issues related to contemporary Indonesian definitions of the traditional arts, including a study of terminology, appear in ch. 2.
20. Quotations from ibid., p. 47.
21. Ibid.
22. Sumarsam, Gamelan, p. 125; on the term karawitan see R. Anderson Sutton, Traditions of gamelan music in Java: Musical pluralism and regional identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 5.
23. Lindsay, 'Klasik, kitsch", p. 45; 'the beautiful sublime' is from Nancy K. Florida, 'Reading the unread in traditional Javanese literature', Indonesia, 44 (1987): 1-15.
24. Ibid., p. 1.
25. Ibid., p. 2.
26. Ruth McVey, 'Taman Siswa and the Indonesian national awakening', Indonesia, 4 (1967): 128-49.
27. See the introduction to the section on 'New nationalisms' in Reid and Marr ed., Perceptions of the past, p. 263.
28. See the discussion in Sumarsam, Gamelan, especially ch. 3. The colonial bias in favour of 'high' culture appears to have dovetailed with a similar bias among highly educated Javanese; Margaret Kartomi, '"Traditional music weeps" and other themes in the discourse on music, dance, and theatre of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 26, 2 (1995): 372.
29. Jaap Kunst, Music in Java: Its history, its theory, and its technique, rev. edn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). The information on Pigeaud is from Clara Brakel (personal communication).
30. Sears, Shadows of empire, p. 23 mentions the perception of Islam as a threatening menace to Dutch colonial rule; see also Karel Steenbrink, Dutch colonialism and Indonesian Islam: Contacts and conflicts, 1596-1950 (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1993).
31. Lindsay, 'Klasik, kitsch', p. 16. A short account of the founding of Budi Utomo is included in Benedict Anderson, 'A time of darkness and a time of light: Transposition in early Indonesian nationalist thought', in Reid and Marr ed., Perceptions of the past, pp. 220-2. The organization was founded in 1908 by teenage Javanese students and drew members from upper-class Java and the culturally similar islands. within close proximity (Bali and Madura). Anderson describes the organization as 'the earliest Indonesian attempt to cope with the colonial condition in Western ("modern") ways' (p. 221).
32. Lindsay, 'Klasik, kitsch", pp. 24 (culture-buffs) and 25 ('national' culture). The Java-Instituut was one of several learned societies that sponsored meetings, publications, lectures and performances, with membership including Dutch-educated elite Javanese and Dutch Javanologists who admired what they deemed traditional culture. Dewantara's life has been well documented in his own writings as well as by scholars; see Lindsay, 'Klasik, kitsch", pp. 20-6; McVey, 'Taman Siswa"; Savitri Prastiti Scherer, 'Harmony and dissonance: Early nationalist thought in Java" (M.A. thesis, Cornell University, 1975), ch. 2; and Sumarsam, Gamelan, ch. 3.
33. Sears, Shadows of empire, pp. 150-1 (quotation from p. 151).
34. Mary S. Zurbuchen, 'Images of culture and national development in Indonesia: The Cockroach Opera', Asian Theatre Journal, 7, 2 (1990): 136 cites a collection of articles from 1935-9 selected from this famous debate, first published in 1948: Achdiat K. Mihardja, Polemik kebudayaan (Jakarta: Pustaka Jaya, 1986 reprint). Some of the issues remain unsettled, and the Jakarta Arts Council held a symposium revisiting the cultural polemic theme in 1986 (Zurbuchen, p. 148).
35. Philip Yampolsky, 'Forces for change in the regional performing arts of Indonesia', Bijdragen tot de Tad-, Land-, en Volkenkunde [henceforth BKI], 151, 2 (1995): 711. Sutton, Traditions of gamelan is a book-length examination of music and regional identity on Java, with a focus upon the diversity of musical traditions in East Java and the implications of government arts policies.
36. Jennifer Lindsay, 'Cultural policy and the performing arts in Southeast Asia', BKI, 152, 2 (1995): 656-71. On tourism see Heidi Dahles, Tourism, heritage and national culture in Java: Dilemmas of a local community (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001); and Tourism, ethnicity, and the state in Asian and Pacific societies, ed. Michel Picard and Robert E. Wood (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), pp. 181-214.
37. See www.culture.go.th
38. Penny Van Esterik, Materializing Thailand (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 125; Benedict Anderson, 'Studies of the Thai state: The state of Thai studies', in The study of Thailand: Analyses of knowledge, approaches, and prospects in anthropology, art history, economics, history, and political science, ed. Eliezer Ayal (Athens, OH: Ohio University Southeast Asia Programme, 1978), p. 227.
39. David Streckfuss, 'The mixed colonial legacy in Siam: Origins of Thai racialist thought, 1890-1910', in Autonomous histories, particular truths: Essays in honor of John R. W. Smail, ed. Laurie J. Sears (University of Wisconsin: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p. 123.
40. Craig J. Reynolds, 'Introduction: National identity and its defenders', in National identity and its defenders: Thailand, 1939-1989, ed. Craig J. Reynolds (Clayton: Monash Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1991), p. 22 (boundary disputes); Thongchai Winichakul, Siam mapped: A history of the geo-body of a nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994.)
41. Streckfuss, 'Mixed colonial legacy'; the quotation is from Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thailand: Economy and politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 233.
42. Ibid., p. 234. Standardization and propagation of Central Thai as a national language were furthered considerably in the 1930s and 1940s; Anthony Diller, 'What makes Central Thai a national language?" in Reynolds ed., National identity, pp. 87-132.
43. Pasuk and Baker, Thailand, pp. 235-9.
44. Deborah Wong, Sounding the centre: History and aesthetics in Thai Buddhist performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 241. Sulak Sivaraksa, 'The crisis of Siamese identity', in Reynolds ed., National identity, p. 44, mentions Vajiravudh's fascination with India. Of the many works on this period, Walter Vella's account of nationalism under King Vajiravudh is considered standard: Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and the development of Thai nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1978). The articles in Reynolds ed., National identity, deal with the period from the Phibun government up through the 1980s.
45. Mattani Rojdara Rutnin, 'Politics of Thai classical dance-drama during the reign of King Rama VI', Ratthasat sat, 8, 2 (1982): 126-55; quoted in Wong, Sounding the centre, p. 239.
46. Charles F. Keyes, Thailand: Buddhist kingdom as modern nation-state (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 61-3.
47. Mattani Mojdara Rutnin, Dance, drama, and theatre in Thailand: The process of development and modernization (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies for Unesco, 1993), p. 189; Wong, Sounding the centre, pp. 204-8.
48. Van Esterik, Materializing Thailand, p. 101; the Phibun era is summarized, with an emphasis on gender, on pp. 100-7. See also Charnvit Kasetsiri, 'The first Phibun government and its involvement in World War II', Journal of the Siam Society, 62, 2 (1974): 25-88.
49. Mattani, Dance, drama, pp. 190-2; Suraphon Virulrak, 'Likay: a popular theatre in Thailand' (Ph.D. diss., University of Hawaii, 1980), pp. 90-7.
50. Wong, Sounding the centre, pp. 189-91.
51. Ibid., pp. 310-11 note 62.
52. Mattani, Dance, drama, p. 250.
53. Panya Roongruang, 'Thai classical music and its movement from oral to written transmission, 1930-1942: Historical context, method, and legacy of the Thai music manuscript project' (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1999), p. 152.
54. European observers did not neglect music in Thailand, however. See Terry E. Miller and Jarernchai Chonpairot, 'A history of Siamese music reconstructed from Western sources, 1505-1932', Crossroads, 8, 2 (1994) (special issue) for discussion of Western sources on Siamese music over four centuries. Vajiravudh's creation and conferral of names on civil servants was a kind of personal hobby; see Pamela Myers-Moro, 'Names and civil service titles of Siamese musicians', Asian Music, 19, 2 (1988): 82-92. 55 Sulak, 'Crisis of Siamese identity', p. 51.
55. Reynolds, 'Introduction', in Reynolds ed., National identity, pp. 14-15; in a related research project, I hope to survey the treatment of music in these publications.
56. Deborah Wong describes how the shift of patronage to the educational system radically alters the relationship between teachers and students of music, especially in terms of the wai khruu rituals enacted by musicians (Sounding the centre, p. 211).
57. Keyes, Thailand: Buddhist kingdom, p. 170. While Western-style college education in Thailand initially prepared graduates to enter the bureaucracy, this had changed by the mid-1980s, when the workforce required training for technical and professional occupations. The rapid expansion of tertiary enrollments provides a clear picture of how the middle class grew. In 1961, there were about 15,000 students enrolled in five state universities, but by 1990 over 360,000 students were enrolled in 30-40 state and private universities. The middle class is particularly concentrated in Bangkok, where by the mid-1990s more than half the city's population was considered middle or higher income; Kevin Hewison, 'Emerging social forces in Thailand: New political and economic roles', in The new rich in Asia: Mobile phones, McDonald's and middle-class revolution, ed. Richard Robison and David S. G. Goodman (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 144-5, 151.
58. Orvar Löfgren, 'The nationalization of culture', Ethnologia Europaea, 19, 5 (1989): 5-24.
59. Van Esterik, Materializing Thailand, pp. 148-50.
60. Anthropology, by comparison, ed. André Gingrich and Richard G. Fox (New York: Routledge, 2002); Laura Nader, 'Comparative consciousness', in Assessing cultural anthropology, ed. Robert Borofsky (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), pp. 84-94.
61. André Gingrich, 'When ethnic minorities are "dethroned": Towards a methodology of self-reflexive, controlled macrocomparison', in Gingrich and Fox ed., Anthropology, by comparison, p. 233.
62. Sue Tuohy, 'The sonic dimensions of nationalism in modern China: Musical representation and transformation', Ethnomusicology, 45, 1 (2001):107-31; Frank Kouwenkouen writes of ancient China's attempts to reinforce social and political cohesion across a vast geographical area: '[M]usical emblems of China and Chineseness were used by the authorities to project an image of cultural and political unity upon the entire nation, even if part of the music was created in interaction with foreign cultures and foreign tongues'; Frank Kouwenkouen, 'Barbarian pipes forever: Some thoughts on Chinese culture and nationalism", Chime, Newsletter of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research, 10-11 (1997): 4.
63. Ricardo D. Trimillos, 'Philippine music as colonial experience and national culture', in The age of discovery: Impact on Philippine culture and society, ed. Belinda A. Aquino and Dean T. Alegado (Manoa: University of Hawaii Centre for Philippine Studies, 1992), pp. 17-24; Trimillos, 'Cultural identity, preservation, and conservation in the Philippines: Research encounters with past colonial and present cultural policy', in 'Lux oriente': Begegnungen der Kulturen in der Musikforschung: Festschrift Robert Günther zum
64. Geburtstag ed. Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller et al. (Kassel: G. Bosse Verlag, 1995), pp. 71-7. See also José Maceda, 'Music in Southeast Asia: Tradition, nationalism, innovation', Cultures (Unesco), 1, 3(1974): 75-94.
65. Regula Qureshi, 'Pakistan: Music, the state, and Islam', in Arnold ed., Garland encyclopedia, pp. 744-50; Qureshi, 'Pakistan: Music and nationality', entry in Sadie ed., New Grove dictionary.
66. Maurizio Peleggi, Lords of things: The fashioning of the Siamese monarchy's modern image (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002).
67. Barbara Hatley, 'Constructions of "tradition" in New Order Indonesian theatre', in Culture and society in New Order Indonesia, ed. Virginia Matheson Hooker (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 48-9; John Pemberton, 'Musical politics in central Java (or how not to listen to a Javanese gamelan)', Indonesia, 44 (1987): 17-29; Zurbuchen, 'Images of culture', p. 137. On the middle class see Richard Robison, 'The middle class and the bourgeoisia in Indonesia', in Robison and Goodman, eds., New rich in Asia, pp. 79-104.
68. Peleggi, Lords of things, p. 166.
69. Cris Shore, 'Introduction: Towards an anthropology of elites', in Elite cultures: Anthropological perspectives, ed. Cris Shore and Stephen Nugent (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 16.
70. The Invention of tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).