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Tejaswini Niranjana is one of the important Indian cultural theorists. In Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious, she examines the emergence of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai, bringing together the notion of sociality and subjectivity to throw light on an important aspect of how publics are formed in the non-western metropolis. The roundtable joined by Professor Niranjana and the other five scholars touches upon issues such as the metropolitan unconscious, musicophilia, and migratory cultures, while also discussing the question of teacher-student relationship, the importance of inter-referencing and the possibility of creating new spaces of discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of deewaanapan or madness (as in being crazy about something) is deployed in this essay to make sense of musicophiliac behaviour in twentieth century Mumbai. I argue that new insights into the formation of 'publics' in the non-western metropolis can be gained through a focus on phenomena that embody 'social subjectivity'. A major phenomenon of this kind is the devotion to Hindustani or North Indian classical music which spread through Mumbai starting from the late nineteenth century. The affective response of musicophiliacs is forged not in solitude but in a space of sociality. This idea also encompasses the actual performance of the khayal genre which became prominent in the twentieth century. The khayal represented a sense of intimacy and interiority which also needs to be understood as 'social' and 'public'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hindustani art music in the metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai played a significant role in the fashioning of both selves and public spaces from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. With the fall of Awadh in northern India in 1857 and the dispersal of the court that had inherited Hindustani music from the Mughal empire, the singers, instrumentalists and dancers began to migrate in search of new patrons. Many of them found a foothold in Bombay, which came to occupy a central position in assembling the new structures and spaces of performance, pedagogy, recording and consumption of Hindustani music. I suggest that the passion for Hindustani music was strongly linked to the linguistic diversity of Bombay, and that it was thelingua musicawhich aided the development of the public domain and its cultural vernacular in the twentieth century. Through their musicophilia, the city’s inhabitants engaged in fashioning a subjectivity that emerged through that which they shared. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]