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Communities

Changing Status in India’s Marginal Music

Communities
Zoe Sherinian*
University of Oklahoma

Abstract
The renegotiation of the performance of an instrument or genre associated with
pollution or a degraded social status has been a significant theme in recent ethnomu-
sicological literature on marginalized Indian music communities. These communities
include Dalits (outcastes), lower castes, devadasis (hereditary temple dancers), women,
and rural poor. Through a review of this literature and film production, I describe
four positions taken by these communities and the impact on performance that
these changes have brought: (i) discontinuance and rejection, (ii) replacement, (iii)
maintenance of performance, yet rejection of caste or community duties, and (iv)
reclamation of the music and identity as creditable.

Since the late 1980s, ethnomusicologists who study music cultures of South
Asia have begun to more broadly examine non-classical musics and non-
elite musicians. They have also shifted from the dominant methodology of
musicological analysis of classical forms and instrumental techniques toward
a greater concern for cultural meaning and the dynamics of modernity that
have led to changes in music-making practices. A survey of this recent schol-
arship brings to focus a prevailing pattern of musicians from marginalized
communities in India engaging in the renegotiation of their traditional
performance roles and status since at least the early twentieth century. These
negotiations and shifts of identity are believed necessary because of the asso-
ciations musicians have had with particular instruments deemed polluting,
undervalued musical styles or genres, and the stigmatized social status that
often results from the above associations. As Ami Maciszewski asserts: ‘style
for a Hindustani [North Indian classical] musician emerges out of the com-
plex play of several histories: social (class and/or caste), regional, linguistic,
religious, gendered – and the power struggles connected with an individ-
ual’s position within these histories’ (2001, p. 3). So, too, Indian musicians
from non-classical hereditary music communities have negotiated, shifted,
and reconstructed social identities as Dalits (those formerly called untouch-
ables or outcastes), Sudras or lower castes, devadasis (hereditary temple
dancers), Adivasis (tribals), women, and rural poor. They have also negotiated
© 2009 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 India’s Marginal Music Communities 609

positively and negatively marked performance roles as singers, dancers, actors,

drummers and aerophone players.
Gregory Booth (1997) describes these processes as socio-musical mobility,
which may include more positive social or religious associations for the
instrument or music, caste identity changes, and economic changes for
the musicians. Below, I outline several patterns of change and give examples
of responses by various marginalized communities. I will review some of
the recent ethnomusicological literature on India (while this will not be
an exhaustive analysis) that has documented patterns of change in outcaste
music status. My intent is to spell out four positions taken by these com-
munities and the impact on performance that these changes have brought.
These positions in relation to instruments, genres, and social status will
include the following: (i) discontinuance and rejection, (ii) replacement,
(iii) maintenance of performance, yet rejection of caste or community duties,
and (iv) reclamation of the music and identity as positive.
Before I spell out the four stances I have discerned from the ethnomu-
sicological literature and give specific examples of community responses,
I will discuss this phenomenon in its broader context. Shifts in the status
of South Asian groups in general have been brought about most recently
as responses to frenzied socioeconomic changes and internal social move-
ments among the lower castes, Dalits, Adivasis, and women (these include
nacnis – public dancers/singers; tawaifs – courtesans of court and salon; and
devadasis – temple servant/performers, as well as women in traditional theater
contexts). Yet, some of these changes can be traced back to the colonial
period: colonial influences include the introduction of mission education
for lower castes and women; the introduction of liberal concepts of civil
rights; the filtering down of Victorian values to both Christians and the
middle class elite (particularly impacting devadasi dancers who came to be
considered prostitutes); the nationalist movement and more recently Hin-
duization have also brought considerable cultural nationalism manifest as
classicization in music and dance. Industrialization has increased urbaniza-
tion leading to the opportunities for occupational and economic movement
facilitating urban caste anonymity. Global and local media technology has
increased the popular hegemony of film song, considered by many who hold
the purse strings of musical status to be the abhorred opposite of both classical
music and traditional ritual forms such as wedding music.
Most of the communities and individuals within them engaged in a process
of status change and negotiation with which I am concerned are hereditary
musicians of a low Hindu caste or Muslim zat in which the performance
practice has been handed down from father to son in the case of most
instruments, or mother to daughter in the case of dance and some vocal
traditions. A common reason that the music of these hereditary musicians
is considered degraded is the Hindu construction of ritual pollution from
contact with drum hides or with bodily excretions such as saliva in the
use of aerophones, especially reed instruments like the shahnai or clarinet.
© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
610 Zoe Sherinian

Both the construction and performance of these instruments is usually

associated with lower or outcaste communities who have been assigned
ritual performance duties based on their caste status.
Many of these marginalized musicians traditionally practiced their music
in Hindu or Muslim religious or ritual contexts, often in fulfillment of a caste
duty. These rituals included life-cycle events like weddings and funerals as
well as daily temple worship performed for deities. Today, while they may
also perform in more ‘secular’ contexts or use ‘secular’ style music such as
film music in rituals, their negative status continues to result from Hindu
caste obligations to perform for religious rituals. Even when musicians have
converted to Christianity, low position in the social class hierarchy and the
need for economic support from these traditional occupations have prevented
many from rejecting caste-based obligations in Hindu religious contexts that
carry a negative stigma.
Many female dancers and singers as well as outcastes have also dealt with
seemingly contradictory roles and status as simultaneously auspicious (or
ritually necessary and powerful) and polluting. South Indian devadasi temple
dancers are auspicious in that they never marry a human male and thus can
never experience the inauspicious state of widowhood. Yet, their physical
proximity to the deity is limited by their lower caste and impure status. Carol
Babiracki describes the paradox of identity that nacnis or public dancers
experience as both inside and outside:
Each nacni is simultaneously a scorned ‘public dancer,’ a ‘kept’ woman (rakhni),
the goddess Radha herself, and an intensely private village wife. She lives with
a man of higher caste status who is her ‘husband,’ ‘keeper,’ manager, and per-
formance partner but who typically will not take water or food from her because
of her ‘lower,’ ‘impure’ social and religious status. (2008, pp. 5–6)

Similarly, the power to send the spirit of the dead to the next incarnation
that Paraiyar frame drummers of Tamil Nadu are believed to have is tem-
pered by their simultaneous status as outcaste or untouchable. While they
are required to perform powerful musical patterns at funerals, they simul-
taneously are forced to either touch the body of the deceased in order to
retrieve their payment of coins or rice placed on top of a sheet covering
the body, or a musician must remove the sheet and wrap it around his
head, therefore (re)polluting himself and re-inscribing his outcaste status
(Sherinian 1998).
The genre of music a musician plays can also lower his or her status as
is the case in late-twentieth-century wedding band music played in central
and north India where the increased presence of filmi git (or film song)
has further lowered the status of clarinet players. This has led to increased
polarization between the band (colonial or military style) and classical
music worlds, which makes it much more difficult for these musicians to
gain access to the classical concert stages and patronage to raise their status
(Booth 1997, p. 513). This case makes obvious the ongoing hierarchy of
© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 India’s Marginal Music Communities 611

value between classical music and light classical, film or folk music in the
modern context.
Other factors that have influenced the reconstruction of identity by
many musicians from marginalized communities include the loss of patron-
age from small kings and landed gentry over the course of the colonial
era. As the British took control of land revenues and taxation in the late
nineteenth century, the Muslim and Hindu kings who once patronized
scores of musicians, poets and dancers no longer had the financial means to
do so. By the early twentieth century, patronage of the classical arts shifted
from regional kingdoms to the urban middle class public concert stage. There
is, as a result, a more heterogeneous audience for classical music. However,
the music has become more commercial and oriented toward technical
virtuosity intended to entertain rather than fulfill religious purposes.
The phenomenon of lower and outcastes discontinuing the performance
of an instrument or dance type is also related to the broader process of
marginalized communities denouncing their traditional occupations ascribed
by Hindu dharma (caste duty) and considered polluting. These duties include
leatherwork, midwifery, removing night soil, clothes washing by dhobis,
toddy tapping, removing the dead carcasses of animals, funeral work, and
butchering. Playing membranophones and aerophones has a direct connec-
tion to polluting substances. In many cases communities who work with
leather or carry out the ritual obligations for funerals also hold ritual musical
occupations. The process of rejecting polluting occupations goes back in
modern India to at least the nineteenth century. By the 1820s the Shudra
Shanars of Tamil Nadu began to reject their role as toddy (country alcohol)
tappers to assert a caste status as khatriyars (changing their caste name to
Nadar). Many Shanars converted to Christianity gaining education through
mission schools, and by the early- to mid-twentieth century had become
merchants and administrators for Christian organizations. Similarly, in the
nineteenth century, Punjabi Camars (leather workers) were able to serve in
the British army facilitating their upward mobility.
In the 1950s, Bernard Cohn (1958) and M. N. Srinivas (1952, 1956) first
theorized such broader status shifts. However, they limited their analysis
to concepts of rejection or replacement, not positive recovery of identity.
That is, they observed low and outcaste people rejecting assigned duties
and life-ways that marked their inferior status. Or, these scholars observed
the lower castes replacing their patterns and behaviors with those that
emulate the upper castes as opposed to challenging the negative stigma
and reclaiming their occupations or lifestyle patterns as positive.
Cohn (1958) documents the process by which the untouchable Camar
community of Uttar Pradesh gave up the degrading occupation of leatherwork
considered responsible for their low status to become agricultural rural workers
or urban laborers. It seems clear, however, that most rural outcastes have always
been involved to some degree as indentured agricultural laborers, so it is not
evident that this was actually an improvement, at least not economically.
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612 Zoe Sherinian

Cohn sees economic and social change within these communities occur-
ring through urban employment, education, sanskritization, and modern
Dalit political activism. He argues that previous theories of change were
based on urbanization and westernization, while the case of the Camars
involved adopting ‘a more traditional Hindu ritual pattern’ (Cohn 1958,
p. 416) a process M. N. Srinivas (1956) termed sanskritization: that is, the
emulation of the values and lifestyle of upper castes including vegetarianism,
playing classical music, worshipping Brahminical deities and the use of
Sanskrit.
Yet, Cohn also describes the simultaneous and apparently contradictory
presence of Dalit political activism in the community. He notes that in the
cities, Camars were able to engage in activities traditionally barred to them
in the village. These include forming their own temples where they sang
both devotional songs and folk political songs, and emulated Brahminical
rituals (Cohn 1958, p. 419). The political organizing Cohn documents in
the early 1950s had a strong connection with Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s Dalit
movement which advocated using modern political methods to raise Camars
status, while some outcaste leaders advocated giving up traditionally degrading
occupations and leading a sanskritized life in order to improve one’s standing
(Cohn 1958, p. 420). Today’s Dalit movement organizations more often
embrace the rhetoric of proudly reclaiming degraded occupations, at least
the musical ones such as parai drumming in Tamil Nadu. However, it should
be noted that not all Dalit groups, particularly some in Maharashtra, feel that
the Dalit civil rights movement should identify with traditional musical
occupations that have carried a negative association (Eleanor Zelliot, per-
sonal communication).
The following examples categorized under four positions will further
illustrate the phenomenon of socio-musical status shift in India. The first
position involves performers discontinuing (sometimes outright rejecting)
the degraded dance, instrument, or musical genre, therefore distancing their
community from its sullied position with the hopes of raising their status.
This occurred among singers in the Madar community of Karnataka and
Andhra Pradesh that Catlin and Jairazbhoy profile in their recent film
Music for a Goddess. The women in this community chose to discontinue
their art with the hope that their daughters could have proper marriages.
Indeed the filmmakers note that ‘protest songs are sung within the tradi-
tion against the dedication of children’ from becoming performers who
are also prostitutes (Catlin and Jairazbhoy 2008). Such cases pull on the
preservationist tendencies of ethnomusicologists, especially as we wonder
if interest shown in the art form by outsiders (such as these filmmakers)
can help establish a more positive sense of cultural self-esteem to empower
the community to challenge the stigma.
Another example of rejecting an identity as musician is seen in Gordon
Thompson’s (1991) work on changing identity among the caste called
Carans in Gujarat. The shifts in identity for many Carans from being bards
© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 India’s Marginal Music Communities 613

or historian singers/poets for local rajas to rejecting their role as singers

altogether have primarily to do with their loss of kingly patronage in the
colonial and postcolonial eras. Furthermore, in the modern context influ-
enced by Gandhian politics of non-violence, the descendents of the former
monarch subjects of these songs are less comfortable with the lyrical content,
which valorizes them as ‘aggressive, bold, and violent’ (Thompson 1991,
p. 382). One of the points of contention among Carans today is whether,
historically, members of the caste sang praises to the Rajputs or simply spoke
them with poetic intonation. While this is an ongoing negotiation within
the caste, the point that it emphasizes for our interest is the contemporary
devaluation of some types of professional singers. Thompson notes that
‘musical behavior is symbolically associated with a low-ranking social status’
(1991, p. 388). At the suggestion that Carans were historically singers, many
become indignant:
In the eyes of Carans who dispute the role of singing in their caste’s identity,
regional professional musician castes (such as Larighas and Mirs [who are Mus-
lims]) occupy a much lower rank than [Hindu] Carans. The reasoning of these
Carans is based on the roles of musicians in the old royal courts, where singers
and instrumentalists were invited to entertain in the rajdarbar (royal audience
hall/royal audience), but seldom to stay and offer advice. Carans by contrast are
described historically as the confidants of their patrons, sometimes acting as oral
couriers delivering poetic salutations or maledictions to other rulers. (Thompson
1991, p. 384)
Those few Carans who continue to ‘sing’ today raise their status by per-
forming on a concert stage, by using vocal and instrumental choruses in
their performances or by limiting their performance to storytelling with
only brief interludes of song for ‘dramatic effect’ (Thompson 1991, p. 387).
Thus, many lower caste or status singers, dancers, and drummers have
distanced themselves from their former degraded status by separating them-
selves from or rejecting altogether the artistic practice. Some ethnomusi-
cologists may react by encouraging preservation, fearing the loss of traditional
performance practice, while others are interested in understanding these
processes as the result of modern dynamics of class mobility and the rejec-
tion of lower caste stigma.
The second position of socio-musical status shift in India is for the com-
munity of musicians to replace the low status instrument with a more valued,
usually classical instrument, or to become classical vocalists. We also see cases
of replacement of style from feminine to masculine and of context. Dan
Neuman describes the strategy of sarangi accompanists giving up their low
status instrument traditionally associated with courtesans to become vocalists
as a sort of ‘sanskritization’ (1977, p. 239). In the case of the famous sarangi
player Mamman Khan and his four sons who all became vocalists, this
however required that their children marry their first or second cousins in
order to separate themselves from other impure sarangi lineages, therefore
creating a new gharana (stylistic school).
© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x
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614 Zoe Sherinian

Replacement is also seen in the majority of Karnatak flutist T. Viswanathan’s

female relatives who in the twentieth century only became classical vocalists,
not Bharatanatyam dancers, as were the famed female ancestors in his family
who danced at the court at Tanjavur (Allen 1997, p. 68). Furthermore, the
two best-known singers in this family, T. Brinda and T. Muktha, trained
with Nayana Pillai, who taught them a ‘quintessentially male form of music
making – about as different from their family style as could be’ (Viswanathan
and Allen 2004, p. 98). The exception within this family is of course T.
Balasaraswati who was one of the most famous Bhratanatyam dancers in
the twentieth century, but the only woman from her family who pursued
this art, considered that of prostitutes and outlawed by the colonial powers
in 1920. Balasaraswati maintained her family’s particular style and repertoire,
while shifting the context of her practice from temple/court to the urban
music academy concert stage. Thus, replacement in this case is of context,
shifting from private elite court to public middle class concert stage.
Ami Maciszewski (2001, p. 4) writes about the female vocalist Gangubai
Hangal (1913–) who took on both a more masculine style of singing,
restricted herself to classical genre of khyal, and in the 1940s was one of
the first women from a courtesan lineage in the North to perform on the
concert stage. Another singer, Girija Devi, attempted to shift her status
through making ‘the articulation of spirituality a major objective in both
her musical performance and transmission’ (2001, p. 7) in order to distance
herself and her students from the association with the negative status of
tawaifs (courtesans). Girija Devi said she wants ‘to cleanse the genre thumri
of its negative associations with tawa’if-s performing it for the entertain-
ment of men and give it a spiritual aspect through the co-mingling of
language and music’ (2001, p. 7). One way she did this was through singing
Benares thumri, which uses consistent references to holy rivers like the
Ganges (2001, p. 7). Devi only sang for public concerts, in her own home
or on the disembodied modern medium of radio (Maciszewski 2001, p. 6).
Negotiation of status in these cases involves the performers changing their
means and content of performance such as instruments or genres tending
in most cases toward classicization, while in the modern period many found
that the public concert stage presented a socially acceptable context especially
for women who want to distance themselves from reputations as courtesans
or prostitutes in order to perform.
The third position of socio-musical status shift in India is to maintain
the performance, yet reject the hereditary caste or community duties, genres,
and style with which it is associated. This usually entails limiting performance
to auspicious or classical public concert contexts and valued repertoire. In
the case of Dalit (outcaste) drummers, some may reject their funereal and
upper caste Hindu festival duties, yet continue to play the patterns and for
the contexts associated with auspicious women’s life-cycle events within
their own communities or for their own funerals. An example of this is can
be seen among Chakliyar Christians of Western Tamil Nadu who play the
© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 India’s Marginal Music Communities 615

parai, the degraded Hindu ritual occupation of this lowest outcaste jathi,
which they were still required to fulfill even after converting to Christianity
several generations earlier. In 1998, the Christian Chakliyars of Arangapalayam
village near Dharapuram united against upper caste land-owning Counders
who insisted they come to play the parai drum to spread the news of a
Hindu temple festival. One hundred boys and girls of this village went to
the Counders as a unified group to declare, ‘We will no longer do this for
you. We won’t worship Hindu Gods’ (interview with villagers, Aranga-
palayam village, Tamil Nadu, June 28th, 2002). By refusing to fulfill the
Hindu ritual function of their caste, the Chakliyar’s discourse appears to
be religious. Yet, what fueled their resistance is not simply anti-Hinduism,
but the occupation of funereal performance associated with polluted bodies
expected of them by virtue of their caste. Thus, to perform the parai, even
for a Hindu festival, re-inscribes their ‘outcaste’ social identity. Through
Church-based advocacy, new Christian liturgical contexts in which the
parai and folk music are used have been introduced among Chakliyars.
Thus, they continue to play the parai, but limit themselves to contexts that
reinforce and empower their identity (Sherinian forthcoming).
Another example of maintenance of an instrument while rejecting lower
caste associations is in Yoshitaka Terada’s (2000) work on the nagaswaram
(double reed aerophone) player Rajarattinam Pillai who gained entrance into
the Brahmanized classical world of Karnatak music and on to the Tyagaraja
festival stage. However, he had to constantly negotiate aspects of his lifestyle
such as eating meat and drinking alcohol and defend his non-brahmin musi-
cal lineage of Isai Vellala temple performers in order to legitimize himself.
North Indian shahnai and clarinets players, many of who were of low-status
Muslim zats such as Rain and Dhamami, made a similar response. While
some were able to disassociate themselves from the wedding band context,
especially through patronization by All India Radio and through perform-
ing in Hindu temples, not all were successful for a complex set of reasons.
Booth argues that the clarinet ‘as a relic of the colonial past . . . as an instru-
ment associated with the low-caste status of many wedding band musicians,
and the similarly low status of their filmi git repertoire . . . was highly prob-
lematic as a solo classical instrument’ (1997, p. 515).
Thus, while some music communities have been able to maintain the
performance of their traditional instrument, some have been more suc-
cessful than others in changing the stigmatized identity of that instrument
through changing the context in which it is played. Others have had a
harder time distancing the instrument from its traditional repertoire or the
musicians from the stigmatization of their lifestyle/lower caste practices.
The fourth position of changing status among Indian music communities
is to shift the identity of the art, reclaiming it as positive in order to negotiate
the musician’s identity. This may involve changing or broadening the com-
munity who performs the art. Preliminary research I have conducted on
Hindu Dalit parai players suggests that this can be a complex negotiation.
© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
616 Zoe Sherinian

Fig. 1. Alanganalur, Tamil Nadu Parai drumming troup.

See: http://www.blackwell-compass.com/home_video#recofilm for full supplementary video file.

In the multireligious context of villages in the state of Tamil Nadu, most

ritual spaces are devoted to individual deities that are often marked by caste
associations. Yet the parai frame drum crosses many of these aural and social
boundaries to invoke multiple deities. The parai semiotically marks each
ritual context with either an inauspicious or auspicious rhythm or adi,
homologously marking the drum and its drummers with the corresponding
state. Upper caste villagers require the parai’s powerful aural presence to
take the spirit of their dead loved ones to the next reincarnation. Yet, it
is commonly maintained that the parai is inauspicious because of its asso-
ciation with funerals and death. Clarke, on the other hand, describes this
same drum as having a ‘protecting and exorcising function’ in the village
colonies or cerri where the outcaste drummers live (1998, pp. 81, 116). The
majority of the twelve different parai patterns are used auspiciously in the
colony for celebratory occasions like weddings and for women’s life-cycle
events such as first menses, and the return of a woman to her mother’s
house when she is 7 months pregnant (Figure 1).
Recently, the meaning of the drum has begun to shift as the parai drum-
mer has been reclaimed as a positive iconic symbol within contemporary
secular Dalit movements for liberation from caste discrimination, leading
some drummers to reject their inauspicious role in funerals while maintaining
life-cycle performance within the Dalit colony and playing for urban folk
festivals such as the Chennai Sangamam. Other social activists, including
feminists, nuns, and middle-class urbanites from various communities, have
taken up the instrument for the first time as a tool of social protest. Thus,
the parai has served as a religio-musical tool for both the marginalization
of these musicians and for them to more clearly define their religious
community and sense of self. Still to be investigated is how religious and
musical change circulates between the village and the urban secular social
movement contexts, and what musical shifts have occurred in this process.
© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 India’s Marginal Music Communities 617

Some of the 150,000 Tamil Dalit parai performers have begun to organize
themselves through the Tamil Nadu Antique Percussionists’ Union (Tapu),
first formed in 2001. Chennai-based union organizer Father E. S. Jose claims,
‘For us, revival for this art is linked to assertion of the performers’ rights.
We want just wages and due recognition for our form of music, which is
called Paraiyattam or Tappattam.’ He adds, ‘Our dream is to hold a proces-
sion of 1 lakh [100,000] drummers performing with gusto through the streets
of Chennai’ (Bhattacharya 2006). Another group organizing for a higher
status among Tawaifs (courtesans) is the organization called Guria. Amelia
Maciszewski’s written work (2001) and ethnographic film (2004) have docu-
mented Guria’s advocacy and organization of Tawaifs to fight against forced
prostitution and the trafficking of girls and women, yet maintain and make
their role as performers economically viable.
Other examples of maintaining an art, yet shifting its identity or the
identity of its performers, include Matthew Allen’s work on the re-casting
of Bharatanatyam and Paul Green’s work on the re-gendering of oppari
funeral lament. Nautch dance performed by hereditary female temple and
court ritual specialists shifted within a nationalist framework in the early
twentieth century from the perceived prostitute bodies of devadasi’s to the
clean pure vessels of Brahmin women from good families (Allen 1997, p. 67).
Allen also argues that this involved a gendered shift. The Tanjavur devadasi
style can be described as seductive and gracefully feminine in its use of the
erotically identified mood of sringhara rasa, repertoire focused on a rela-
tionship of Bhakti devotion with Krishna as the beloved of the devotee, and
sensuous flowing dance gestures. When the Brahmin nationalist Rukmani
Devi appropriated the dance and developed her kalekshetra style, she mascu-
linized it, shifting the repertoire to a more distant relationship with the
ferocious and rhythm-identified Nataraj. She discontinued the use of the
erotic sringhara mood, used texts focused on Nataraj, and created straighter
stronger lines especially in the arm gestures (Allen 1997; Vasantha Aravindan,
personal communication). As a result of these changes, Bharatanatyam con-
tinues to be the art form of choice for young middle-class girls from the
upper and middle castes in the urban centers of the South and in the
Indian diaspora.
Paul Green’s work on oppari is a case of male Paraiyar professional folk
singers distancing funeral lament from women’s spontaneous emotional
expressions and protests to construct male performance as crafted music that
creates catharsis for the family members during funerals through formulaic
structures, but lacks the personal and often protest discourse of females
directly related to the deceased and mocks the female style through exag-
geration (Green 1999). In this case, the oppari is reclaimed as music by men,
not women’s spontaneous emotional expression, but at the cost of appro-
priation from women. Indeed in all three cases above, appropriation by
another caste, class and/or gender is often an element in the reclaiming
of a performance practice as creditable.
© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
618 Zoe Sherinian

In conclusion, significant research, writing and ethnographic film has

been produced within South Asian ethnomusicology since the late 1970s
on the changing status of marginalized communities of performers in
colonial and postcolonial India. I have outlined four strategies of change
that individuals and groups within these marginalized often hereditary
communities have used to improve their status in the complex hierarchical
caste, class, and gender structures of India. A great deal of contemporary
ethnomusicological literature has focused on how marginalized musicians
have engaged one or more of the strategies of discontinuing and rejecting
performance, replacing the low status instrument or genre with a classical
one, rejecting hereditary caste duties and limiting performance to auspi-
cious contexts, and reclaiming the identity of the art and musicians as
positive in their struggle for economic and social improvement and in
most cases to continue their performance. I propose, however, that more
work needs to be done to theorize this phenomenon, particularly the
strategies that groups have used recently to maintain performance of their
traditional instruments and styles, yet change their internalized negative
self-perceptions and engage in politicized social movements to change
society’s perceptions of them. Further investigation of the refinement of
these strategies will contribute to understanding patterns of socio-musical
change and negotiation of identity in South Asia in general and by com-
munities of ritual performers in particular.

Short Biography
Zoe Sherinian is an Associate Professor of ethnomusicology at the Uni-
versity of Oklahoma. Her research focus has been Christian indigeniza-
tion and the production of liberation theology in India through Tamil
folk music with secondary emphases in gender studies and world per-
cussion. Her publications include articles in the journals Ethnomusicology
(Summer 2007), Worlds of Music (2005) and Women and Music (2005). She
also has articles in the anthologies Popular Christianity in India: Riting
Between the Lines, edited by Selva J. Raj and Corinne Dempsey and
Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in South India, edited by Indira
Viswanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji. Sherinian is currently finishing
a book entitled Songs of Dalit Transformation: Tamil Folk Music as Liberation
Theology, which argues that Dalits (former untouchables) have been able
to use Tamil folk music to create an indigenized Christian liberation
theology that can respond in liturgical performance to their needs for
transformative social change. She is a percussionist and is beginning a
new fieldwork and film project supported by a Fulbright Senior Research
Fellowship on the parai drum of the Dalits of Tamil Nadu, India. She
holds an MA and PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University
and a BA in sociology/anthropology and percussion performance from
Oberlin College.
© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 India’s Marginal Music Communities 619

Note
* Correspondence address: Zoe Sherinian, University of Oklahoma, 500 W. Boyd, Norman,
OK 73019, USA. E-mail: zsherinian@ou.edu.

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© 2009 The Author Religion Compass 3/4 (2009): 608–619, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00153.x

Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd