Date with The Archive | Musicophilia in Mumbai: Visual and Sonic Archives | A Conversation with Tejaswini Niranjana | August 06, 2025

How does one create a musical cartography of a city?

Join us for a Date with the Archive with cultural studies scholar Tejaswini Niranjana. Her talk will focus on the phenomenon of ‘musicophilia’ in the port city of Mumbai from the late 19th century to the present. Tejaswini will discuss how a lingua musica, drawing on the passion for Hindustani raga music, emerged in this city of migrants, making it possible to create a cultural vernacular that would eventually find expression in post-1930s film music. The people who were crazy about music – the ‘deewane’ – were also attached to the spaces in the city where they listened to the music. Tejaswini previously received a grant from IFA in 2014-15 for this project, and an exhibition in 2015 explored this connection between making music and making space. The talk will present the main exhibits and discuss them in light of how musicophilia became central to the experience of the city.

Musicophilia in Mumbai: Visual and Sonic Archives with Tejaswini Niranjana
August 06, 2025 | 06:30 PM IST

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Tejaswini Niranjana is Director, Centre for Asian Studies, GITAM University, India. Her books include Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (2006), and Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious (2020), both published by Duke University Press. She is the co-producer of three documentary films related to music, and the curator of Saath-Saath, the India-China music collaboration project. Her book, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (University of California Press, 1992), has impacted a wide range of fields from anthropology and history to post-colonial studies. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently awarded with the National Translation Prize for Fiction by the American Literary Translators’ Association.

Launched in 2018, The IFA Archive is a space that holds the diverse materials of the projects supported and implemented by IFA over the years, currently featuring materials from over 600 projects online at theifaarchive.org/ 

Date with The Archive is a series of talks by artists and researchers across different practices who have used archives extensively for their creative work, to bring to focus the potential of the archive as a significant resource for artistic and scholarly explorations. 

The IFA Archive is built with support from SP Lohia Foundation India.

Image Credits: Tejaswini Niranjana, Jugal Mody