Play it Again Saraswathi: Gramophone, Religion and Devotional Music in Colonial South India

Hughes, Stephen

Abstract

This paper considers brief period in the late 1920s and early 1930s when south Indian gramophone industry explicitly drew upon the power, magic and divinity of Hindu musical traditions. I will argue that music recording companies drew upon a Hindu theology of sound as a way of mediating their commercial enterprises and recording technology for new and rapidly expanding south Indian audiences. For at least a decade from the late 1920s into the 1930s the local gramophone trade, through their choice of music recordings, advertising, and record catalogues, enacted a conspicuous articulation of media technology as religious practice. At precisely the moment when the gramophone was becoming a mass phenomenon in the south its commercial success was predicated upon a religious address, which sought to imbed the recorded music and its public within a spiritual devotion to music. In particular the Hindu goddess of music, Saraswathi, became a key trope for representing both the recording technology and commercial institutions of the rapidly growing gramophone industry. South Indian gramophone companies tried to mark their musical recordings as part of a Hindu vernacular. In this sense the mechanical reproduction and commercial exploitation of religious songs was represented as continuous with other forms of popular religion. This was not just a matter of traditional religious practices being captured by modern media technologies. Nor was this a rupture of religious tradition and a negation of sacred art. This was a more complex encounter. The gramophone worked to save, protect and promote religious traditions, while displacing and changing them at the same time. The gramophone was embedded within a religious repertoire in such a way as to embrace, domesticate, and harness its technology as a kind of Hinduism. Yet the material inscription and commercial circulation of Hindu musical practices also helped reorganize access and availability of religious music performance in both private and public settings. The gramophone not only built upon and extended the vernacular experience of Hinduism, it also enabled a new set of constraints and possibilities for a addressing a new media public.

Citation

Hughes, S. (2013). Play it Again Saraswathi: Gramophone, Religion and Devotional Music in Colonial South India. In G. D. Booth, & B. Shope (Eds.), More Than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular Music (114-141). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof%3Aoso/9780199928835.003.0007

• Publication Date: Dec 24, 2013
• Deposit Date: Nov 13, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 2, 2025
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Pages: 114-141
• Book Title: More Than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular Music.
• ISBN: 9780199928859
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof%3Aoso/9780199928835.003.0007