ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to look at representation relating to the production of musical culture in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South India and to contextualize it within the larger frame of Orientalism and nationalism. Day’s observations captured certain tendencies inherent in the practice of music, its organizational structure and its social functions in South India. By the time Kalki was making the observations, the concert format—the kaccheri—was being assembled and put in place. The context was provided as mentioned earlier by the need to present an appropriately classical version of the tradition and prevent its dilution. The reinvented kaccheri and the aesthetics that underpinned it came to enjoy an almost universal currency in the following decades. The construction of the modern concert format as part of the new aesthetic conception was tied up largely with the changing public context of performance in South India.
