Shantanu Majee

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will facilitate research to explore the historical formation of listening cultures in Maharashtra and Bengal through archival research. Rather than treating music as a collection of performances or compositions, the project interrogates how communities learned to listen, remember, document, and circulate musical knowledge across regional boundaries. Drawing upon the rich textual and visual holdings of the Dr Ashok Da Ranade Archives alongside the sound collections of the Archive of North Indian Classical Music (ANICM), the project seeks to reconstruct the interconnected histories of musical audiences that linked Pune and Kolkata from the late nineteenth century to the post-Independence period. This project is in collaboration with Dr Ashok Da Ranade Archives (ADRA) in Pune, Maharashtra. ADRA was established in 2014 under Maharashtra Cultural Centre in Pune as a centre for research and studies in Performing Arts. The archive was initiated by Dr Keshavchaitanya Kunte, a performer, composer, researcher and disciple of Dr Ranade. Its foundation was laid in line with the expansive vision of scholar-musician late Dr Ashok Damodar Ranade, one of the most respected scholar-musicians of India. The archive consists of his collection of wide-ranging and rare material from over the 50 years of his ethnomusicological journey. Along with Dr Ranade’s collection, several musicians and veterans have donated their personal collections to ADRA, such as Sardar Abasaheb Mujumdar, Malini Rajurkar, Sunita Khadilkar, Veenapani Shukla, WW Kale, Dr Balwant Dixit and others. Shantanu Majee is the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project.

Shantanu Majee is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of archives, sound studies, ethnomusicology, digital humanities, print culture, listening studies, oral history, and cultural memory. Trained in Nineteenth-Century Studies at Jadavpur University with a Doctoral degree from the same institution, his research combines archival ethnography, media history, and performance studies to explore the preservation and interpretation of India's sonic heritage. His work has been supported through collaborations with the British Library, Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Akar Prakar Art Gallery, DAG Museum, and more international scholarly initiatives in Digital Humanities and Victorian Studies. He is currently working as Associate Professor in the Department of English, Techno India University, West Bengal. Considering his expertise, research interest and scholarly engagement with archives and ethnomusicology Shantanu is best suited to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The historiography of Indian music has traditionally privileged composers, performers, gharanas, and musical texts compared to the historical formation of the listening communities. The material culture that sustained listening communities and the archival traces through which it is sustained comparatively has received lesser attention. This project – building upon the legacy of Dr Ashok Da Ranade who insisted scholars to understand music as a culturally embedded system rather than an autonomous aesthetic object – examines how listening emerges through institutions, media, pedagogy, technology, and everyday social practice. Primarily situating the project within the site of ADRA in Pune, the Project Coordinator will extensively use its collection of books, journals, concert brochures, photographs, institutional publications, research notes, correspondence, and other documentary materials to reconstruct the intellectual and cultural histories of music in twentieth-century India. These materials will be read along with selected holdings from the Archive of North Indian Classical Music (ANICM) – sound recordings, oral histories, programme notes, artists' papers, and documentation relating to performance traditions – to study the historical formation of listening cultures in Maharashtra and Bengal. The project however does not treat Maharashtra and Bengal as distinct musical regions. It conceptualises the two regions as interconnected listening worlds linked through the circulation of musicians, pedagogical institutions, print networks, gramophone recordings, broadcasting, and archival practices.

The project seeks to reposition listening, not merely as an act of hearing, but as a category of historical and ethnomusicological inquiry in South Asia. In doing so, the project will advance archival ethnomusicology by integrating textual, visual and sonic evidence, while generating new perspectives on musical memory, mobility, pedagogy and cultural exchange. In addition, one of the crucial aspects of this project is how it approaches archives as a method. The archive at ADRA is not treated merely as a repository or aftermath but as an epistemic framework through which histories of listening may be reconstructed. It seeks to treat the archival collections as an intellectual map that reveals the classificatory principles through which Indian musical knowledge has been organised and preserved. This premise and question furthers the scope and vision of the Archives and Museums programme of IFA. By looking at an archival site and its collection beyond an organised infrastructure of evidences, it treats the archive and its material as important active forces that shape historical knowledge. 

The research proposes to yield a variety of outcomes such as a substantial publication as a research article on listening cultures in Maharashtra and Bengal; an annotated digital bibliography and research guide on archival sources relating to Indian listening cultures; a digital exhibition presenting selected visual and textual archival materials with scholarly annotations; public lectures and educational resources introducing broader audiences to India's archival histories of listening. Collectively, these outcomes will demonstrate how archives function not merely as repositories of musical heritage but as active sites through which histories of listening continue to be interpreted, shared, and reimagined.

The Project Coordinator has divided his timeline into phases of fieldwork, archival research and analysis – including three research trips to Pune to consult ADRA along with research time at the ANICM. These phases will be punctuated with consolidation and verification of the archival data, translation, preparation of transcribed documents and metadata which will go into the research article and annotated bibliography, digital story map and the educational toolkit. Furthermore, public programming will be executed in two phases. The phase I will comprise Listening the Archive public listening session/lecture and Conversations Across Archives and phase II will comprise a two-day Archiving Listening Workshop. The location of these public programming will be decided during the course of the project in consultation with ADRA and IFA.

The outcomes of this project will be a research article on listening cultures in Maharashtra and Bengal; an annotated digital bibliography and research guide on archival sources relating to Indian listening cultures; a digital exhibition; public lectures and an educational toolkit introducing broader audiences to India's archival histories of listening. The Project Coordinator’s final deliverables to IFA will include a research article, an annotated digital bibliography and research guide, a curated digital exhibition, and an educational toolkit and documentation from the public programming.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is supported by Tata Trusts.