Paper short abstract:

How did Punjabi musicians view the 1947 borders through time, and how have they worked to negotiate these boundaries? I re-situate musicians as historical agents, functioning in diverse contexts; critiquing their romanticisation as carriers of a “syncretic” phenomenon.

Paper long abstract:

Music is often invoked as the 'glue' that unites people like little else, perennial symbol of a composite culture disrupted by the rupture of Partition. Such a simplistic perspective, however, rides roughshod over the complex trajectories musicians' lives took post-1947. This paper examines two questions.

First, how have musicians viewed this division through time? I explore the views of a handful of musicians like Pt. Ramakant Sharma (Jalandhar), and the late Md. Hafeez Khan Talwandiwale (Lahore), based on ethnographies conducted in Pakistani and Indian Punjab (Basra 1996, Lybarger 2003, Kapuria 2012). While casteist views (with a longer genealogy going back to the nineteenth century) on the mirasis (Punjab's hereditary caste of musician-genealogist bards), ironically serve to unite musicians across the border, other, communally hostile inflections reveal Partition's divisive impact.

Second, how have musicians relentlessly traversed one of the most militarized borders in the world? Through a case study of some prominent Punjabi musicians, e.g. Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Iqbal Bano, among others, I demonstrate how processes of musical tutelage and pedagogy, as well as the more mundane reasons of kinship, have worked to consistently subvert, since at least the 1950s, the "hard borders" engendered by Partition.

These two foci, then, help us re-situate musicians and patrons as historical agents functioning within complex and diverse historical contexts (Orsini and Schofield, 2015). In the process, I critique their commonplace romanticisation as "affective" carriers of a "syncretic" cultural phenomenon that defies analysis.