Technological conversations with the past: Musicians, connoisseurs and the audio archive of Hindustani khayal music

Abstract

This article draws upon ethnographic interviews with musicians and archivists to unpack the symbolic, material and pedagogic modes through which contemporary listeners engage with khayal recordings of the past. Even as khayal thrives as a contemporary field of performance, the genre is associated deeply with notions of tradition and heritage. In this context, practitioners and connoisseurs consider twentieth-century master-musicians as frequent points of reference, and their recordings as authoritative expositions of the genre. Accumulated since the beginning of the twentieth century when sound technologies arrived in India, these recordings constitute the audio archive for the genre of khayal. The last two decades have seen attention towards making it accessible to interested audiences, primarily through the affordances of digital technologies. The article addresses questions such as: in what ways are past recordings translated and absorbed as part of khayal’s present? What are the implications of changes in technologies, sonic expectations and musical trends over the past several decades for such translations? And, more broadly, how do recorded sounds that have traversed technological and musical changes participate in the configuration of tradition as a contemporary phenomenon?