Mohindar Brar Sambhi Lecture Series on Indian Music

Lecture by Anna Schultz, “Performing Translation: Indian Jewish Devotional Song and Minority Identity on the Move.”

Abstract: The webs of translation through which nineteenth century Marathi-speaking Bene Israel in Bombay articulated relationships to global Judaism and to Maharashtrian Hindus were complex and fragile. After centuries of maintaining a Bene Israel identity with just a few Jewish practices and without clergy or texts, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought the Bene Israel into contact with groups eager to teach them Jewish scriptures and ritual. Armed with this new knowledge, late 19^th century Bene Israel scholars adopted a Hindu temple genre called kirtan to spread knowledge of Bible stories. Bene Israel kirtan performers were selective in their choice of songs, words, stories, and ceremonial clothes, but many aspects of Maharashtrian Hindu culture remained untranslated in Jewish kirtan without censure. Through a layering of the translated and untranslated, Jewish performers found a wholeness that united the dynamic, future-oriented aspects of identity with memories of past emotions and commitments. Performing at the height of Indian cultural nationalism, kirtankars were eloquent architects of an Indian Jewish minority space within the incipient Indian nation.

Anna Schultz is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Stanford University, having received the Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Illinois in 2004. Her book Singing a Hindu Nation will be published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Schultz’s other publications are on the regional performance of Hindu nationalism, style and patronage in Marathi kirtan, the aesthetics of suffering in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, mobile recording technology and ethnomusicological research, and musical narratives of race and ethnicity in American country music.

1-3pm – Room 1344, Schoenberg Music Building

Open to the public and free of charge
Parking in Lot 2 — $11 (Hilgard and Westholme)
Information: (310) 825-5947

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The Mohindar Brar Sambhi Lecture Series on Indian Music presents a variety of lectures focusing on research and other issues important in the fields of ethnomusicology and Indian music.