Amanda Weidman

Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real

Guru, face to face, shows the marga [way]. The sisya has to make the journey to excellence. How is that excellence purveyed? . . . There is a message that voice leaves in the listener’s soul, a memory like the ubiquitous murmur of surf, long after the particular sangatis of a rendering have been forgotten. . . . [Today] music is treated all wrong . . . as though it were a mere science, a matter of arithmetic, of fractions and time intervals. Raghava Menon, quoted in S. V. Krishnamurthy, “Divinity, the Core of Indian Music”

Neoliberal Logics of Voice: Playback Singing and Public Femaleness in South India

Abstract This essay explores the impact of neoliberal logics of voice on the music-making and performance practices of female playback singers in the South Indian Tamil film industry. As singers whose voices are first recorded in the studio and then ‘played back’ on the set to be lip-synched by actors, playback singers have been professional musicians and public celebrities since the 1950s. Their careers are governed by practices of voice cultivation and by modes of performance and public self-presentation, in the studio, on stage, and increasingly in mediatised contexts. Since the 1990s, neoliberal logics of flexibility, entrepreneurship and self-marketing have redefined the role of the playback singer and the way singers conceive of their work in both social and aesthetic terms. These changes have occurred within a broader context in which anxieties about globalisation and expanding commodity culture are reflected in debates about the place of women in public.

Voices of Meenakumari: Sound, meaning, and self-fashioning in performances of an item number

This article considers how ‘item numbers,’ song sequences that serve as vehicles for sexualized female performance in popular Indian cinema, are re-animated through embodied – danced and sung – performances outside the films themselves. I examine a single song sequence from a 2009 Tamil film and two kinds of re-animations of it: first, the song as conceived and sung by the original playback singer in performance outside the context of the film, and second, as performed by young women in TV shows and in live stage shows. These performances participate in complex projects of self-fashioning that exceed the conventions by which female voices are given meaning within the Tamil culture industry.

Can the subaltern sing? Music, language, and the politics of voice in early twentieth-century south India

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, ‘music’ and ‘literature’ began to emerge as two separate fields in south India, allowing a new kind of relationship between music and lan-guage to be imagined: one of analogy, rather than direct connection, contiguity, or co-mingling. This culminated in the twentieth-century canonisation of Tamil literature and Karnatic classical music as categories mutually opposed in their orientation to the ‘mother tongue’. Such shifts enabled the emergence, in the 1930s and 1940s, of new discourses on music and language in the context of the Tamil Icai [music] movement.