“Play it again, Saraswathi: Gramophone and Hindu devotional music in colonial south India” by Stephen Hughes (History and Media Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies)

Abstract

This paper considers the relationship between Hinduism and the history of the gramophone in south India. The introduction and commercial success of the gramophone during the interwar period was predicated upon a religious address which sought to imbed the new media and its public within a spiritual devotion to music. In particular the Hindu goddess of music, Saraswati became a key trope for representing both the recording technology and commercial institutions of the rapidly growing gramophone industry in south India. Yet the material inscription and commercial circulation of Hindu devotional records also helped reorganize both public and private access and availability of religious music performance. I argue that the gramophone not only built upon and extended the vernacular experience of Hinduism, but it also enabled a new set of constraints and possibilities for addressing a new media public.

About the Author

Stephen P. Hughes is a Lecturer in History and Media Studies in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he is the Director of Studies for the MA programme in the Anthropology of Media. Having lived and worked in Tamil speaking south India on and off over the course of the last twenty years, he has conducted research on various topics related to the history of media, religion and politics.  His recent publications include “Music in the age of mechanical reproduction: Drama, gramophone and the beginnings of Tamil cinema,” Journal of Asian Studies (2006) and “Urban mobility and early cinema in Chennai” in A. R. Venkatachalapathy, ed., Chennai, Not Madras.  Mumbai: Marg Publications (a division of the National Centre for the Performing Arts), 57: 4 (2006).

Contact and Further Links

Contact Information:  sphughes37@hotmail.com

Links: http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staffinfo.cfm?contactid=91