Sid and I attended a lecture-demonstration yesterday by the Carnatic vocalist T.M. Krishna, titled “The Evolution of Ragas”. I loved it, both for TMK’s virtuosity as a performer and for his erudition and knowledge of the history of South Indian classical music. His talk explored the long history of the performance of classical music in South Asia, based upon information gathered from a variety of texts in Sanskrit and Tamil. TMK amply demonstrated that the theoretical categories employed by performers and audiences of Carnatic music to understand melody are acutely historical — they are created in particular social, geographical, and cultural contexts, and really don’t make a great deal of sense outside those contexts. (This is a big deal, by the way, in Carnatic circles! Carnatic music is usually seen almost entirely ahistorically by performers and audiences.)
What I find really interesting about this is that, in a certain sense, it doesn’t matter at all. It is entirely possible to take the categories we are presented with unquestioningly, and use them to structure our appreciation of Carnatic music — indeed, that is precisely what pretty much everybody in the audience had done until today. Of what use, then, is such historical investigation?
This question is of immense importance, not just for the relatively obscure field of South Indian classical melodic structures, but for the entirety of the South Asian (and hence South Asian American) effort to make sense of our heritage. For a variety of reasons (largely attributable, in my opinion, to the epistemic rupture caused by colonialism), we have been cut off from older ways of thinking and living, and are hence struggling to make sense of our past as we march towards the future. The question we need to ask ourselves, as TMK has done in this field, is very simple: does history matter? Do our past customs and traditions mean something to us? Are they worth preserving and investigating?
I should clarify that there are two things that can be meant by “disregarding” history.
- The first is to actually believe that all the categories we use to understand the world, all the texts we have, everything we call “culture” or “tradition”, are eternal and unchanging. This view is deeply problematic and leads to severe, crippling misunderstandings of our past and therefore our present. This is not what I’m talking about here.
- I’m more interested in the second possibility: that we acknowledge our past, accept that things were different and things have changed and things will change, but then consciously decide that there is no present relevance to studying the past. This is more like saying, “sure, R.D. Burman’s music came before A.R. Rahman’s and may have influenced it, but I’d much rather listen just to ARR, or for that matter, to that new DJ in that new up-and-coming club down the street.”
The second choice is a historically conscious choice to choose to disregard the effects of our past on our present and our future. And it will have moral, ethical, political, even aesthetic consequences. (Well, most things do, but you’d need history to tell you that!) What are those consequences, and are we okay with them?
I’m curious to know what y’all think about this matter. I’ve been thinking about other formulations of this question off and on for a while now, and those of you who know me probably know where I stand on the matter 
I’d love to hear from you all.
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