Meghamala Ghosh

Tentatively titled The Trans-Urban Musical Ethnoscape: Operatic and Jazz Mutations of Calcutta and Bombay’s Hindustani Classical Oeuvre, this Foundation Project implemented by IFA will facilitate research to understand and recognise how various sonic traditions informed and reorganised the listening cultures of Maharashtra and Bengal in the early twentieth century. 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. Meghamala Ghosh is the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project.

Meghamala Ghosh is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. Her research focuses on ethnomusicological study of 19th century Bengal, with an interdisciplinary focus on archival work surrounding theatre stage art design. She is also a trained Hindustani Classical vocalist. She has a Bachelors and Masters degree in English literature from Presidency University, Kolkata. Meghamala has considerable research and teaching experience in the domain of South Asian theatre performance, stage design and leading archive-based curatorial projects. She founded The Memory Gazette, an online project on heritage archiving funded by Heritage Walk Calcutta and Global Leaders’ Platform. Given her research interest, practice and understanding of musical tradition, and work experience, Meghamala is best suited to be the Project Coordinator of this Foundation Project of IFA.

The modern Indian performance traditions are often compartmentalised into strict regional categories or genre-based segments. In doing so, the hyper-hybrid, trans-regional sonic exchanges that occurred between regions get frequently dismissed as merely derivative, commercial, or westernised pastiche. This project aims to address this gap by looking into factors like, the systematisation of Hindustani classical music during the long nineteenth century, its hybridisation with European influences, and the subsequent limitations it placed upon hereditary musicians/gharana music, folk music and theatre. Through extensive study of the printed materials, publications and audio recordings available at the archives this project will investigate three distinct sonic traditions. Firstly, the text-performance friction to understand how commercial theatrical and musical companies subverted textual, Puranic, and epic mythologies to fit the strict 3-to-4-minute constraints of early 78 rpm shellac discs. She will also delve into Maurice Bandman’s construction and management of the Roxy Theatre (Empire Opera House) in Calcutta and Royal Opera House in Mumbai. Secondly, exploration of the Hindustani Classical-Jazz-Theatrical Confluence to recognise how the introduction of jazz rhythms and big-band instrumentation was a deliberate rhythm system adapted by local music directors to capture the frantic pace of changing urban spaces, and how Hindustani classical music adapted to it. The third question investigates how the hybrid Calcutta-Bombay sonic highway directly informed the emergence of early "talkies," transforming localised regional theatre audiences into a mass, mediated public of modern listeners. Through these questions the project activates the archival collections at ADRA. In doing so, it also contributes to looking at an archive as a sensorial space of knowledge which furthers the vision and scope of the Archives and Museums programme at IFA.

Meghamala has divided the timeline of the project into four phases. The first phase is dedicated towards cataloguing and categorisation of the ADRA repository’s text and audio material. In the second phase she will conduct musicological and ethnographic research through structural analysis of musical and thematic patterns and instrumentation along with focussed field visits to institutional and private theatre archives in Mumbai, Pune and Kolkata to verify cross-city performance circuits, culminating in a draft of the academic essay. With the help of a graphic designer and web developer, the Project Coordinator, in the third phase will work towards creating a prototype of the live archive for the website. Simultaneously she will be preparing for the public programming. The last phase will go into organising and showcasing the public events and the final editing of the essay. 

This project will culminate into two primary outcomes: an open access website with textual documentation indexed against specific digitised music/theatrical tracks, featuring interactive geographical timelines of cross-cultural theatrical and musical troupes;  and an academic essay highlighting the findings from the archive. As part of the research and to further it in meaningful ways Meghamala will organise public programming in the form of Sonic Salons – an interactive listening experience open to the public, tracing the trans-urban channel of Western influences on Hindustani classical music across the cities of Calcutta and Bombay, along with moderated discussion with scholars on musical hybridities. Similarly, Performers’ Parlour –a public discussion will be arranged with performers interested to uncover the changing vocal and stylistic motifs from Hindustani Classical tracing further the Puranic motif involved across the time period in question. The Project Coordinator’s final deliverables to IFA will be the manuscript of the academic essay, an open-access website, and audio-visual documentation of 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.