A lecture by Brian Bond, Lecturer: Music of India, Department of Music, UC Berkeley.
Event moderated by Munis D. Faruqui, Director, Institute for South Asia Studies; Sarah Kailath Chair of India Studies; Associate Professor, South & South East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
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Event live streamed on the Institute’s FB page: ISASatUCBerkeley
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ABSTRACT: The petty smuggling of Pakistani cassettes across India’s western border during the 1980s and ’90s profoundly changed Muslim music-making in Kachchh, Gujarat, as musicians adopted the storytelling-infused kāfī style of southern Sindh. In tandem with cross-border Pakistani radio, cassettes of Sufi songs refreshed and sustained Kachchhi Muslims’ historical links with Sindh at a time when legal cross-border travel was becoming increasingly difficult. The changes wrought by the rise of the audio cassette in Kachchh were not limited to the realm of musical style; they reverberated through the region’s broader musical culture and in the process eroded a local musical tradition shared by Hindus and Muslims. This talk traces the rapid decline of the interreligious kacchī rāg genre, exploring its entwinement with media trends, the rise of Hindu nationalism, linguistic change, and the Indian state’s suspicion towards Muslims’ transborder affective attachments. With selected examples from the Kachchhi musical past, I reflect on how Sindhi cassettes from Pakistan afforded new forms of affectively charged Islamic learning among rural Muslims while playing a role in the bifurcation of Kachchhi musical culture along religious lines.
SPEAKER BIO: Brian Bond received his PhD in ethnomusicology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His current ethnographic monograph project Singing Islam: Sindhi Sufi Music, Affect, and Interreligious Relations in the India-Pakistan Borderlands builds on a year and a half of research with performers of Sindhi-language Sufi music in Kachchh, Gujarat between 2014-2018, including vocal study in the kāfī and shāh jo rāg genres. In 2022, he conducted additional research in Sindh, Pakistan, where he also received the Shah Latif Award from the Government of Sindh’s Culture Department. Brian is currently an ACLS fellow and has received research and writing fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the Society for Asian Music.
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If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Puneeta Kala at pkala@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
