Tales, tunes, and tassa drums: retention and invention in Indo-Caribbean music

Abstract

Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums: Retention and Invention in Indo-Caribbean Music by Peter Manuel. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 268, preface, notes, glossary, references, index. $60.00 cloth, $16.50 ebook.)At the end of slavery in the British Empire, demands for cheap labor drove development of an indentureship scheme that recruited laborers primarily from the Bhojpuri region of India, roughly coterminous with the present-day states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Between 1838 and 1917, hundreds of thousands of Indians were transported to far-flung territories, many oblivious to what they were in for. West Indian colonies were among the largest benefi-ciaries of the indentureship system. Today, thriving Indian-Caribbean communities are found throughout the region, though those in Guyana, Surinam, and Trinidad and Tobago are the largest.Ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel conducted early fieldwork in North India, and it was in New York City where he first encountered Indian-Caribbean culture by way of the substantial secondary diaspora there. Beginning in the late 1990s, Manuel produced a string of publications on Indian-Caribbean music. In these works, he largely eschews esoteric academic-speak in favor of practical discussions of performance practice, straightforward musical transcriptions, and informed interpretation. Though perhaps regarded as old-fashioned by some, such accessible writing never goes out of style. Manuel's latest book Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums continues in this vein while summarizing his two-decades-long engagement with Indian-Caribbean culture. The book centers upon continuity and creativity, which he frequently frames as retention and invention, these seemingly antipodal forces that animate compelling, complex, and socially significant musical practices.Chapters Two and Three are reworked versions of previously published material on song genres alha, birha, and chowtal and the percussive idiophone dantal. In these chapters, Manuel's careful analysis suggests that Indian-Caribbean musics developed along a unique trajectory, having been cultivated from fragments of North Indian folk but developing beyond mere survivals into rather reified musical practices distinct from their forebears. In Chapter Four, Manuel discusses the effects of importation of Indian popular culture in the post-indentureship period. The diaspora was largely isolated from North Indian folk culture after 1917, yet contact with India continued in the form of Bollywood films, visiting Hindu missionaries, teaching of standard Hindi language in some school curricula, and other non-Bhojpuri imports. Here Manuel suggests a dialectic between a little tradition (rural and Bhojpuri) and a great tradition (urban, popular, and representative of an imagined Indian homeland) that led to a waning of interest in some traditional musics-especially those requiring knowledge of Bhojpuri song texts-yet thoroughly enlivened others. Manuel astutely analyzes this long-term contact in part by critiquing contemporary notions of modernity increasingly disassociated from the glitz of Bollywood in favor of local Indian-Caribbean creativity.The book's central example in this regard and the subject of chapter five is tassa drumming, a vibrant and complex music drawn from North Indian folk models refined into a brilliantly virtuosic performance genre. …