Name: Celebrating the Music & Resilience of Manganiyar Musicians with Shalini R. Ayyagari
Start: 2023-09-05T19:00:00
Location: Alphabet City

University of Pittsburgh Department of Music

This program presents a combination reading and musical performance with author and ethnomusicologist, Shalini R. Ayyagari. In Shalani’s book, Musical Resilience: Performing Patronage in the Indian Thar Desert, she shows how professional low-caste musicians from the Thar Desert borderland of Rajasthan, India have skillfully reinvented their cultural and economic value in postcolonial India. Before India’s independence in 1947, the Manganiyar community of hereditary musicians were tied to traditional patrons over centuries and through hereditary ties. In postcolonial India, traditional patronage relations faded due to new political conditions, technological shifts, and cultural change. Ayyagari’s book is based on two decades of ethnographic research in India, which functions as a sociocultural history and musical ethnography of the Manganiyar resilience. It explores and documents how that resilience has allowed Manganiyar musicians to sustain and enliven their cultural significance even after the fading of the traditional patronage system that has shaped their livelihood for centuries.