Music

Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious by Tejaswini Niranjana, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2020; pp xii + 225, ` 695.

As the concert stage is left empty, what can music and musicians do differently for the art form?

There has been little academic attention on the rise and spread of the Bhojpuri music industry in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. This article tries to size up the industry both in terms of its growing economy as well as significance as a platform for the development of a new form of cultural identity. Based on intensive field-based research covering over 80 artists and other participants of this industry all across the region and cities like Mumbai and Delhi, it argues that a new form of vernacular identity is being formed in the interstices of migration, remittances, secularisation and globalisation.