8 - Music, history, and the sacred in South Asia

Summary

This chapter investigates the complex interplay between music, history, and the sacred, by examining broad historical constructions of religion and music in South Asia. In the most recent past, nationalism and communalism have been the agents that justify particular histories of religious music. These are the same histories that tend to stabilize Hindu practices into Hinduism and that oversimplify or ignore much of the creative ideological borrowing that has taken place between Hinduism, its relatives and South Asian Islamic and Christian practices. The chapter explores the performance of sacred music which also addresses ideas about history in addition to repertories and genres being drawn into histories. It examines the relationship of sacred music in South Asian history, and history in South Asian sacred music and reveals how this relationship has been mobilized by large-scale narratives and how musical performance provides opportunities to revise the narratives.