Amidst an alleged fatigue of empirically sound and ethnographically substantiated monographs, there is a largely unrequited longing for freshness in anthropological, musicological, and folklore researches. One aspires to read a narrative that can overcome the predictable modes of narration, and pleasantly unsettles the conventional ethnographic imagination. Richard Wolf’s The Voice in the Drum is an unconventional and soulful traversing across the issues of music, language, and emotions in the subcontinent, now popularly known as South Asia. The accounts appear on a confluence of "fictionland" and "ethnography-land," each feeding into the other in a manner that emotion and intellect, subjective and objective, fictional and factual, personal and public, join in uncanny harmony. The fictional protagonist Dr. Muharram Ali and the author, Wolf, appear in constant dialogue in a common quest of music. This could have, however, precluded the authorial high-handedness, as it were. But does it do so?—a question better left unanswered. For, the virtue of what it results in is immense. And it results in a discourse emerging from the practice of beating-drums. Moreover, another commendable implication of this work is that it aids in connecting the dots of South and west of Asia through the heuristic device of dhol, tasha, mrindang, to name a few vernacular equivalents of the drum.
The book, on the whole, chisels out the social embeddedness of musically significant practices. Doing so, it engenders a landscape of sound and sight, with musical notes, social groups, performative contexts, and illustrative visuals inter alia. In the performative context of Karbalah during the festival of Muharram, amidst the recitation of lament poetry, marsiyah in Urdu, the sonic dominance of tasha comes to the fore. And along with the sound appears the sight of the groups playing on dhol. This paves the way for the author to deliberate on vococentric hierarchy, a curious way of rethinking social stratification, which many sociologists have yet to learn. This helps in problematizing the superiority of vocalist over the instrumentalists in the instances of Karnatak music, Dhrupad, Khayal, as well as in qawwali. Additionally, the rich accounts also draw to attention to an intersection of the social and the musical. The musical actors thus become layered within their location in the social milieu. Many musical service providers are perceived in their social roles as barbers, midwives, and surgeons. The idea of “barber musician” lingers across pages even though the attention shifts to the idea of Dalit musician of various caste groups in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and various parts of north India. However, it is not only in the caste-context that musicians play a role. Examples of Bazigars, the nomadic entertainers and acrobats along with Bedas of Garhwal, Naqqal of Iran and northern India, Bhand and Taifah—all befit the scheme of analysis. Looking at the locational complexity, Wolf proposes that “musicians are embedded in multiple classification systems whose components represent different levels of generality” (35). This is adequately followed by anthropologically significant discussion on the correlation of the jajmani system (interdependence of service providers and clients in the hereditary caste occupation) and various categories of drummers. The ethnomusicological details about patterns of tone and stroke, ambiguities of melody and rhythm, lead to discussing the possibility of understanding the drumming and drummers beyond the matra, the numbers determining renditions.
Traversing a bewildering corpus of details, which naturally solicits more than one reading of this book, the author arrives at the most important conclusion. This is however a conclusion in intellectual kinship with many predecessors, including Murray Emeneau and Harold Powers. This is about “translocal musical commonalities,” suggesting that “disparate cultures in South Asia developed their musical styles in profound dialogue with one another as well—sharing systematic aspects of music such as nomenclature, theory, and procedures for expressing creativity, and not just discrete songs and melodies” (114). While these commonalities in musical practices are the manifestation of long-term face-to-face contacts in the region, Wolf mentions the recent processes associated with modernity, such as standardization in the twentieth century. It is, though, only a passing whimper of ambiguity about tradition-modernity. Elsewhere, writing on the possibility of theorizing the local, Wolf underlined the similar process in the wake of cultural globalization. There was a sense of South Asia in the midst of a novel packaging of the music and performances catering to the global audience qua consumers. One wonders, with reference to the book under review, what is the difference of the quality of translocal developments in musical practices in the two distinct epochs, pre-modern and post-modern? In the same breath, how to make sense of the premodern translocal in the wake of globalization that demands adequate erasure of the rough edges in the local variants of musical performances? And last but not least, how to grapple with the complexity of South Asia underpinned by the layers of historicity with reference to translocal hybridity in the past and the same in present?
Indeed, it requires Wolf to explain his notion of South Asia. In the Islamicate landscape, was there an entity called South Asia before the Cold War? Were there cartographic entities such as India and Pakistan when the stylistic fusions of drum beating could have happened? How do we justify the usage of the compound phrase South Asia in the context of Islamicate traditions? Could it be possible to develop a thesis on the idea of South Asia at the cusp of tradition and modernity in musical practices? Many such questions begin to surface along the margins of the book, leaving a reader hungrier than before.
While several chapters of the book dwell upon the auto-ethnography of the fictional character Dr. Ali, as his diary entries assume the role of being a key source, the author presents a perusal of literatures relevant for this work. The simultaneity of typical academic referencing and free-floating experiential narrations augurs well for not only this work but also the future of academic writing. This strength, notwithstanding, turns out to be too taxing for the reader at times. Negotiating with the two registers of speech and narration on the face of informative details about musicological significance is the author’s evolved strategy. Is it not too much to expect readers to have proximity with the same? One asks this with due scepticism while reading this otherwise fabulous work.
Regardless of ifs and buts, this is a book to marvel at. It demands slow chewing, to return to the food again and again to find out the possibility of another way of savoring. The relevance of the book lies in the contemporary, manifold, disciplinary requirements in anthropology, musicology, and performance studies. One of the manifold requirements is to revisit South Asia via the anchor points at people’s disposal.
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[Review length: 1116 words • Review posted on May 10, 2017]