Indian Music and the English Language Fifty years later

Abstract

It has been almost 50 years since Harold Powers published his important article on Indian music in the English language. Since that time there has been a vastly increased number of scholarly books and articles in English on various aspects of Indian music and its socio-cultural traditions, including more recently, many studies on non-classical forms. In this paper I begin with the issue of ethnomusicology in India, and following this with an overview of some of the important works published in North America and Europe. I organize these studies in terms of their major themes of history, ethnography, gender, regional and popular music traditions and some of the theoretical streams that now characterize them.