Who Breathes Life into Mountain Music and Dance

Recording, Landscape and Brahmanism in the Western Himalayas

Abstract

While the sites of rituals in the Western Himalayas, such as weddings and festivals, still present what are considered more ‘folkic’ ways of musicking, there is also an erasure of the same, often found in the same places. One of the things shared by the categories of belief, ritual, and music is the concept of landscape, expressed in different orders and capacities. Owing to the large ambit of Western Himalayan folk performance, which exceeds its formalization, it would be reductive to develop a definitively exhaustive syntagmatic structure that ‘aptly’ grasps its workings. One could, however, identify a paradigmatic structure to understand alterities and oppositions through which music attains function and becomes an interface through which topographies become landscapes. The biggest paradigm that watches over the consensus of the locale, which generates and presents traditions as living traditions, is that of the state, particularly in Himachal Pradesh. The formation of Himachal as a particular entity of India has been peculiar. In that, it has been an event, not to reorder the pre-existing thrust of Brahmanism, but to buy into and regenerate it. The idea of secularism associated with modernity has brought the Brahmanical to the modern project that is Himachal Pradesh. The effects of Brahmanism, in connection with the state, can be seen in the putting-touse of, and regulations on the cultural labour of the folk musician and the landscapes generated by extension. This also urges one to think beyond a singular category of ‘Pahari music’, which almost becomes an empty signifier, incapable of containing the multitude of working traditions, ranging from different strands of recorded music, to both ritualistic and unexceptional instances ofmusic performance, brought to life by the same paradigm that distinguishes them. The themes of landscape, ritual, memory and tradition must then be seen as being presented by and to the workings of this paradigm in the pre-recorded, the recorded and the un-recordable.