Mohindar Brar Sambhi Lecture on Indian Music

Lecture by Kaley Mason,“Saraswati's Promise: Music Education and Middle-Class Values in Malabar.”

Abstract: As the patron goddess of wisdom and the arts, Saraswati is among the most beloved deities in the pan-Indian Hindu pantheon and a ubiquitous symbol of creativity and knowledge. In the narrow coastal state of Kerala where centuries of Indian Ocean cosmopolitism cultivated a rich spectrum of performing arts, where education reforms achieved the highest levels of literacy in India, and where there are more women than men—the Goddess’s presence is even more palpable. The transformative power of musical knowledge for performers seeking cultural mobility in India thus begins with Saraswati. Although it has been widely demonstrated that classroom education was instrumental for the social advancement of disadvantaged communities, it is less well known that some low-status performing castes have adapted trade secrets to succeed in modern public and private sites of musical learning as teachers. Mobilizing the affective labor of music, an ex-untouchable musician caste from the northern Malabar region is responding to Hindu, Muslim, and Christian aspirational desire for middle-class musical citizenship.

Kaley Mason is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. He is currently finishing a book, The Labor of Music: South Indian Performers and Cultural Mobility, which examines how a subaltern performer caste merged feudal traditions of ritual servitude with modern practices of work and mobility in Kerala. A chapter based on this research is forthcoming in the Cambridge History of World Music. His second project traces the relationship between radical socialism and song in Malayalam

1pm – 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

---------

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.