18 - Musicians and the politics of dignity in South India

Summary

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in South India, media sources, and secondary literature, this chapter invites thinking cross-culturally beyond sublime qualities of sound to reach for more compelling accounts of musical dignity, or how performers cultivate and defend their sense of self-worth between the work of art and the art of work. It talks about developing a framework via India and other case studies for thinking historically about musical pasts and human inequalities, including those that privilege the very act of historicizing itself. The chapter focuses on the modern Enlightenment categories of labor and dignity, an approach rooted in an earlier call for tactical humanism, or the use of a shared political language to find a place to stand vis-à-vis cultural difference and global disparities. Five interrelated themes in particular figure prominently in the discourse on musical pasts represented in the chapter: mobilities, values, bodies, technologies, and rights.