Recasting Folk in the Himalayas

The clash of music and the modern world in an emerging Indian state

 

Colonialist, nationalist, and regionalist ideologies have profoundly influenced folk music and related musical practices among the Garhwali and Kumaoni of Uttarakhand. Stefan Fiol blends historical and ethnographic approaches to unlock these influences and explore a paradox: how the “folk designation can alternately identify a universal stage of humanity, or denote alterity and subordination.

 

Fiol explores the lives and work of Gahrwali artists who produce folk music. These musicians create art as both a discursive idea and a set of expressive practices across strikingly different historical and cultural settings. Juxtaposing performance contexts in Himalayan villages with Delhi recording studios, Fiol shows how the practices have emerged within and between sites of contrasting values and expectations. Throughout, he presents the varying perspectives and complex lives of the upper-caste, upper-class, male performers spearheading the processes of folklorization. But he also charts their resonance with, and collision against, the perspectives of the women and hereditary musicians most affected by the processes.

 

Expertly observed, Recasting Folk in the Himalayas offers an engaging immersion in a little-studied musical milieu.

 

Publication of this book is supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.