Afterword

Summary

It is clear that Britain's Raj supported the commercial potentials of American music in India and played a vital role in the social, economic, and political processes embedded in the entertainment infrastructures discussed in this book. The British preference for Western music, foods, and other commodities stimulated trade and exchange with much of the Anglophone world. When their political, social, and economic authority eroded during World War II, so did a portion of the demand for Western entertainment. At the beginning of the book, I note that American blackface minstrel performer Dave Carson succeeded in 1865 in part because when the global trade balance broke down after the price of cotton shares crashed in Bombay, he used the event for performance material. Humorous references to the cotton crisis were an effective marketing strategy to appeal to European and British audiences. Yet after the crisis, the British remained in India, people eventually began to make money again, and the music continued. Eighty years later, when the economic and political authority of the Raj was operating on shakier grounds during World War II, enthusiasm diminished for entertainment in India associated with Europeans and British—two of the most visible communities to engage American popular music.

This demise left many musicians and connoisseurs disillusioned. I interviewed Lucknow guitarist James “Jumbo” Perry dozens of times, and I was able to collect a number of personal history narratives attesting that he was strongly distressed about the decline of jazz after the war in Lucknow, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. He asserted that after Independence he found the audience dramatically reduced and the market weakened. He once lamented to me that playing music for people who did not appreciate jazz was challenging: “To play my music is a crime if a person I'm playing it for doesn't understand one thing I'm playing. So I'm a bloody fool for playing it. You follow? I'm playing absolutely modern, and I'm seeing modern. And it's real jazz.” Perry is speaking about the 1950s and 1960s as the jazz scene in Lucknow all but evaporated, and he was especially frustrated by the lack of an audience that appreciated the intricacies of his music.