Paper short abstract:

I examine through time the tension between the stereotype of the rustic Punjabi, and the ironic ‘popularity’ of classical music in Punjab, as symbolised by Harballabh. The gendered space and historically changing character of performance are connected to wider socio-political currents.

Paper long abstract:

From a 'mela' of the late 19th century, to a proto-'sammelan' in the first half of the 20th and finally the metamorphosis into the full fledged 'sammelan' from the 1950s onwards, the Harballabh "Musicians' Fair" has held different connotations as a festival of Hindustani music though its long history. Here, I primarily examine transitions in the performer-audience relationships fostered at this festival over broadly a century. Mining oral testimonies, newspaper reports, accounts of colonial ethnographers, hagiographies of the festival, personal memoirs (cf. Sheila Dhar's), souvenirs and notices of the festival, etc., I delve into the shifting connotations the Harballabh has held for a diversity of groups of patrons, performers and audiences through time. Beginning with the mystic-cum-bucolic origins of the festival in the late nineteenth century and its primarily peasant attendees, I move to efforts of Jallandhar notables (partly as a result of Pt. V.D. Paluskar's visits) in the 1920s to 'modernise' the festival on the lines of Lahore concerts, examine the post-Independence disciplined professionalization of the festival under Ashwini Kumar, and finally analyse the 'moment of arrival' of the festival in the 1970s, with the showcasing of talent (famously, Pt. Ravi Shankar) which was now internationally renowned. The paper investigates the persistently gendered contours of the space of performance at the festival. It ends with an attempt to historicize the dominant stereotype of the 'rustic Punjabi', while analysing its recurrence in popular associations with the festival through a theoretical use of what Edoardo Grendi calls the 'exceptional normal.'(Ginzburg 1993:33)