ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author means the active construction or reinforcement of identity by means of musical content, performance or other association. In this sense, musicking requires that sounds be understood to have symbolic or semiotic potential. The author considers the roles played by music in the production of representations of Self and Other and to a limited degree, the production of the music in those roles. He also considers how the Oriental’s imagination manages to define its own Orient and how those Orient are (and are not) expressed musically. The author further considers external (that is, non-Indian) Other, as well as the conventional practice and content of the Hindi cinema that produced these images of the Others. He presents the historical sources of Hindi film music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with special regard for connections (albeit distant) to nineteenth-century Orientalism as constructed in Europe and America.
