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9780195166118

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Using classical music as a case study, the author offers a provocative account of how the emergence of an Indian cultural tradition reflected exclusionary colonial practices. Bookshelf Using classical music as a case study, the author offers a provocative account of how the emergence of an Indian cultural tradition reflected exclusionary colonial practices. Bookshelf

A brilliantly researched book that adds a new dimension to the invention of tradition. Two Men and Music is required reading not only for historians of South Asian modernity, but for all interested in the sociology of the politics of identity. --Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason<br> Janaki Bakhle makes a major, pioneering contribution to the history of Indian classical music. Classical music in India is generally viewed as an expression of successful cultural resistance to colonialism. Bakhle demonstrates in this telling critique that, to the contrary, the world of classical music advanced the exclusionary tendencies of the colonialist and nationalist projects. There is simply no history quite like this. --Gyan Prakash, author of Another Reason<br> Two Men and Music stands out in describing a specifically Indian modernity and the place of indigenous musical traditions in it. Joining insightful historical research to dexterous cultural theory, Bakhle reminds us that modernity, like music itself, needs ever to be thought of in the plural. She offers an Indian case-in-point of the broader lesson that classical musics the world over have taken shape from the refracting of earlier traditions through multiple modernities. --Gary Tomlinson, author of Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera<br> Janaki Bakhle's book opens up a completely new area of research in modern South Asian history. This pioneering history of the making of modern North Indian classical music is exemplary for the very fine sense of balance with which it holds together both respect and criticism for the past it so brilliantly restores. --Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Habitationsof Modernity<br>

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Janaki Bakhle is Assistant Professor History at Columbia University.

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