National, modern, Hindu? The post-independence trajectory of Jalandhar’s Harballabh music festival

Abstract

This article discusses the post-Independence trajectory of North India’s oldest extant classical music festival. Processes of modernisation and nationalisation transformed the Harballabh festival into a professionally organised concert, with little resemblance to the fair or ‘Rāg Melā’ it used to be. I demonstrate the tension between the ‘modernisation’ begun by Ashwini Kumar post-1948 and a subtle though unmistakable ‘Hinduisation’ championed by other middle-class organisers. Kumar’s attempts during the 1950s and 1960s to shape a new, disciplined audience, schooled in practices of rapt listening, were also in direct contrast to conceptions about ‘restive’ and rustic Punjabi audiences. The article raises larger questions about the cultural politics of music performance in postcolonial India by focusing on the shifting character of middle-class cultural patronage, the tussle between traditional and modern formats of music festival organisation and the complicated division of public space along secular/sacred axes.