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Cassette Culture
POPULAR CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY IN NORTHERN INDIA
By Peter Manuel
University of Chicago Press
No one would guess from Peter Manuel's circumspect, jargon-ridden
first chapter how fascinating his study of northern India's burgeoning
music industry will turn out to be. So skim or skip to the fruits
of research so tolerant, thorough, and enthusiastic that it transcends
the standard-issue academese in which it is rendered. Mr. Manuel's
secret, as he demonstrated in his miraculously succinct Popular
Musics of the Non-Western World, is that he has no use for academia's
other cardinal sin: overspecialization. His subject may seem small
from the outside. But there's weight to spare in the galloping localism
and unstaunchable syncretism of a vast society that has yet to be
homogenized. Over the past decade, Mr. Manuel explains, the hegemony
of the movie music that has defined Indian pop since independence
has been undermined by audiocassette economics. Domestically manufactured
players and recorders are so cheap that even the Indian masses can
afford them, and once empowered as both consumers and producers,
they go on to prove the concept of "masses" a canard. The variety
and individualism Mr. Manuel describes seems limitless. Cassette
songs can be genteel, ribald, devotional, ceremonial; folkloric,
neofolkloric, hybrid, pop; sung in Hindi/Urdu lingua franca or regional
languages or dialects understood by "only" a million or so people--even
in English. They evince the vigorous autonomy and dangerous provinicialism
of northern India's cultures. Their stories should interest and
enlighten any American who doesn't wish the world would go away.
New York Times Book Review, ????
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