What does it mean to invent a classical national tradition? In this critical study of the development of North Indian classical music, Janaki Bakhle examines the role of colonialism in the making of a tradition that is often incorrectly assumed to possess an unbroken history from antiquity to the present.

At the end of the nineteenth century, two men with very different visions—V.N. Bhatkhande and V.D. Paluskar—worked to give Indian classical music, as we understand it today, its distinctive shape, form, and identity. Where previously no particular ideology, religious group, or ethnic identity had dominated, in the hands of Paluskar, a bhakti (or devotionalist) nationalist music was to be cleansed of its bawdy associations and put in the service of Hindu proselytizing. Bhatkhande, a secular musicologist, on the other hand, hoped that through systematic classification and categorization, music would become a new modern, national, academic art, avoiding religious entanglement. Bhatkande's politics were ahead of his time, but the victory has been Paluskar's—the victory of sacralization, not secularism. Viewed against the backdrop of colonial modernity, the different projects of these two men exemplify not only the success of a reformist modernization of music, but also the failures, contradictions, and compromises that accompanied North Indian classical music's transformation in relation to gender, caste, religion, and the public cultural sphere. A provocative examination of musicians negotiating the forces of the modern in order to ensure the survival of their musical traditions, this book also lays bare how art—and music in particular—can, at crucial moments, be itself successfully wielded as a modernizing tool.