John Baily’s 2015 monograph, War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan: The Ethnographer’s Tale, is a remarkable account of his four decades of engagement with Afghan music, both in Afghanistan and in Afghan refugee and migrant communities scattered across the globe. Baily describes the book as “a personalized account” (1) of his encounters with Afghan music. It thus traces the trajectory of Baily’s research from the 1970s up to ca. 2013, starting with his fieldwork in Afghanistan itself, but soon expanding to Afghan diasporic communities both near (Mashad, Iran, and Peshawar, Pakistan) and far (London, UK; Fremont, California; and Sydney and Melbourne, Australia). The book is something of a hybrid, ranging across genres—part history, part ethnography, part memoir, and part field diary. It thus interweaves political and musical history, profiles of individual musicians, accounts of Baily’s fieldwork trips, and reflections on the use of filmmaking and his own learning to perform Afghan music as research methods (2).
Baily first encountered Afghan music when passing through the country as a young man during overland trips to Australia in 1965 and 1970. He made his first professional research trip to the country in 1973 and returned many times over the following years for various research projects. Not long after Baily began his research in the mid-1970s, large scale out-migration from the country started in 1978 with the communist takeover and subsequent Soviet invasion. Baily’s work on Afghan music has thus coincided with some thirty-five years of armed conflict and the concomitant outflow of Afghan refugees from the country, including many musicians. Baily’s research thus led him to follow the trajectories of refugee Afghan musicians, subsequently encountering in their places of exile some of the same musicians he had first met in Kabul in the 1970s. This forty-year engagement with the topic has made Baily uniquely positioned to provide an account of the changing fortunes of Afghan music and musicians.
The bulk of the book consists of six chapters of thirty to forty pages each which together constitute a chronologically arranged narrative about Afghan music and Baily’s research on it from 1973 to 2013. These chapters are framed by a brief introduction and a “summing up” chapter with some observations regarding the role of music in the creation of a transnational Afghan identity and future prospects for Afghan music. Chapter 1 covers the longest historical range, summarizing historical sources regarding the development of music in the courts of the kingdom of Kabul from the mid-nineteenth century though the mid-twentieth century, discussing the significance of the establishment of radio broadcasting in Afghanistan in 1925, and giving a brief account of the fieldwork carried out by Baily and his wife Veronica Doubleday in the country during the mid-1970s before the communist takeover in 1978.
Chapters 2–5 cover a succession of recent historical periods defined in terms of political developments in the country including, respectively, the jihad (holy war) era from 1978 through the mid-1980s, the period during which the mujahadeen parties came to power (mid-1980s–mid-1990s), the emergence, rise, and fall of the Taliban (mid-1990s–2001), and Kabul after the Taliban (2001–ca. 2006). Baily thus contextualizes the different periods of his fieldwork, either in Afghanistan or in its diaspora, against the background of these politico-historical events, considering the ways in which they functioned as push factors for musicians to leave the country (with censorship of music playing a significant role), as well as attempts to re-establish musical institutions after the fall of the Taliban. These chapters all follow a similar format, beginning with a summary of political events and consideration of how the events affected musicians, followed by sections describing research trips Baily made and the evolution of his research interests over time, and offering profiles of various musicians Baily worked with. The musician profiles, in particular, add human faces to the story, personalizing the narrative and highlighting the musicians’ agency. The musicians presented, however, are all male, since Baily was not able to work much with female musicians (3). (The reader is referred to the published work of Veronica Doubleday on Afghan women musicians for an account of their musical worlds.)
Chapter 6 considers the global circulation of Afghanistan’s music and presents material from Baily’s research in Afghan exile communities in London, Melbourne, and Sydney. Here also Baily presents profiles of musicians as well as giving special attention to the role of the mass media (radio, audiocassettes and CDs, and retail outlets) in the circulation of Afghan music in exilic and diasporic communities outside of Afghanistan.
Packaged together with the book is a DVD including four of Baily’s films on Afghan music, each around 55 minutes long, shot variously in Peshawar, Kabul, and Fremont. Rather than being an optional supplement to the written text, the films are integral to the book’s presentation. Baily describes his approach to filmmaking (grounded in the observational cinema of Colin Young) in a section of chapter 2. The circumstances behind the making of each film are detailed at relevant points in the text’s narrative, and in numerous places in the book the performances and other events shown in the films are discussed and cued in the text with indications in minutes and seconds from the start of the film. This careful coordination between the text and the films gives the reader/viewer insight into not only the musicians and musical traditions documented, but also the research and filmmaking processes themselves.
This is a highly readable account of Afghan music and Baily’s research on it, in good times and bad. The book’s purpose is first and foremost to tell human stories, not to provide a technical account of Afghan music. There are no musical transcriptions or analyses of musical structure; quoted song texts are given mostly only in English translation, not in the original Dari or Pashto. For those details, the reader is referred to Baily’s other published works (the list of which runs to nearly two pages in the book’s bibliography). I have only a few minor quibbles. The otherwise useful glossary of musical instruments could have been expanded slightly to include the other occasional musical terms in Dari or Pashto found in the text, such as lehra and parandkâri, some of which are never defined. The terms “exile,” “refugee,” “diaspora,” and “migration” are largely used interchangeably; while a rigorous and sustained theorization of the differences between these terms would have been beyond the scope of the book, a bit of conceptual clarity would have been useful. But these are minor issues; the book succeeds brilliantly in doing what it sets out to do: telling Baily’s personal ethnographer’s tale about his musical encounters with Afghan people who demonstrate creativity and resilience wherever in the world their journeys take them.
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[Review length: 1119 words • Review posted on February 22, 2019]