‘Budding ethno-musicologists, step this way. If you ever wanted a bit of everything on a record, this is it,’ wrote a reviewer in the Melody Maker for 18 April 1981. The record that covered ‘a baffling amount of ground’ was Revenge of the Mozabites by the Suns of Arqa on Rocksteady Records MICKLO1. Other reviewers were as puzzled, and in some cases, stimulated by the issue. To Johnny Black writing in London Trax they

sound as if they lost their front door key back in 1969 and have been trapped in the living room of 8 Higher Road, Urmston ever since, with only albums by the Incredible String Band, the Bauls of Bengal and Hapshash for company. From time to time they hear the John Peel prog, and have thus gleaned a passable understanding of dub. Towards the end of 1980 they were set free, had a shave and a haircut and trundled their acoustic guitars, castanets, tablas, fiddles and harmoniums to a portable recording studio in the back of a Morris 1000 Traveller where they recorded this album.

About a thousand years ago in northeastern India a group of spiritual adepts known as siddhācāryas sang poems about the discipline required of the individual who seeks ultimate release. These carýāpadas, as the poems are called, were eventually compiled and recorded in a manuscript found about a century ago in the Nepali Court Library by a Bengali scholar (Sastri), since when concordances have been recognised in the Tibetan scriptures and numerous articles have been written about them by a variety of learned scholars. The carýāpadas have aroused considerable interest, among other reasons, because of their language, which is considered the earliest record of the Bengali tongue (Chatterji 1970, pp. 90–116), and because of their religious precepts, which are based upon tantra (Bagchi 1933, 1956A, B). Tantra teaches the individual to pursue his own release from phenomenal existence through direct, empirical means, through the manipulation of his own physical and psychical constitution, and these means are learned viva voce from a preceptor who also demonstrates the necessary techniques.

While engaged in research on the long-necked lute called Herati dutār in 1974, I was frequently told about a virtuoso dutāri (dutār player) who had died a few years earlier after a fight with a gang of ‘thugs’ in the city of Kandahar. His name was Amin-e Diwaneh. The Persian word diwāneh means ‘crazy’, and was applied to people who (in terms of Western psychiatry) might be classed as ‘insane’, though the cause of insanity was usually attributed to spirit possession. Diwāneh was also a description for individuals who were particularly erratic in their behaviour, and was often used affectionately. Amin the dutāri was such a person.

Though gramophones were imported in India before the beginning of the century, this was done privately by a few persons who were very rich and affluent. During their visits to Europe and other Western countries they would buy a gramophone machine for use at home because it was an attractive novelty and a handy medium of entertainment. In 1900 and for quite some time thereafter a gramophone was considered to be a show piece and a status symbol, as only the wealthy elite of the society could afford to possess it. Phonographs were commercially exploited in India only after the establishment of the office of the Mutoscope Biograph Company in Calcutta, on 7 July 1901, by one Mr J. Watson Harrod.

The dramatic development of popular music in India illustrates some of the complex and varied ways that South Asians have used art and entertainment as a means of adapting and relating to the social transitions accompanying modernisation. Indian popular music, nevertheless, has been all but ignored in scholarly literature, whether musicological or sociological; this article endeavours to provide a basis for future inquiries by providing a descriptive outline of the development of modern Indian commercial music in the twentieth century.

The ubiquitous songs in India's commercial feature films play a dual role in Indian society: they serve as both film songs and pop songs for India's 800 million people. India is the largest film-producing country in the world and one fifth of its current annual production of approximately 750 films is made in Hindi, each film having an average of five to six songs (Dharap 1985). As the major form of mass entertainment available on a national scale, rivalled only by the government-run television network, Hindi cinema plays a prominent and influential role in Indian society. Yet its songs, which represent India's most popular music in the twentieth century, are relatively little known to non-Indians, either to scholars or to the general public. Musicologists and anthropologists have for the most part focused their attention on Indian classical and folk traditions to the neglect of film song. To counteract this imbalance I propose here to examine one important aspect of Hindi film song – its peculiarly eclectic nature – which plays a major role in the nationwide appeal of this popular music. I look at some of the ways in which these film songs are eclectic and possible reasons why they are so. Such a study provides insights into the role of this popular music in Indian society and culture and can thereby contribute to an understanding of the role of popular music generally in non-Western and developing countries.

In this article I explore the manner in which elements from a non-Western music appear in pop music and jazz. The music under discussion is that of the Indian subcontinent and the classical music of North India in particular. The essay covers references to Indian music in pop, rock and jazz from the sixties to the present day but concentrates mainly on the sixties and seventies, and, in the world of pop, on the music of the Beatles. The influence of orientalism on Western music is not a recent phenomena, as Reck (1985) notes, but its appearance in pop during the sixties meant that it reached a larger audience than ever before.

The cultural identity of the Indian subcontinent has survived countless onslaughts and displacements often by simply absorbing and Indianising alien elements. The many hybrids in lifestyle, language, food and religion spawned of Britain and India's long, love-hate relationship are a testament to this. And now the process is repeating itself in the new generation of South Asians born and educated in Britain. It is a unique generation, its acceptance or rejection of and by white British society will probably set the pattern for generations to come, and the musical fusion which voices their cultural duality tends towards mutual acceptance.