ABSTRACT
In this chapter1 we explore South Asian music in contemporary Britain.2 A study of South Asian music in Britain is timely. In recent years, chiefly in the field of cultural studies, there has been an upsurge of interest in ideas of identity, ethnicity and place, often with music as a central constituent (Slobin 1992; Stokes 1994; Sharma et al. 1996; Woodward 1997; Leyshon et al. 1998; McCarthy et al. 1999). Such work draws largely on a post-modernist view of cultural formations in which concepts of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, diaspora and nationality are in a constant state of flux, never entirely defined, nor wholly defineable. In these types of analytical frameworks, places are no longer merely the physical or geographical locations of specific peoples or individuals, rather, they may have a central function as dimensions of what Appadurai has termed ‘imagined world’ and ‘ethnoscapes’ (Appadurai 1990). The ethnomusicologist John Baily has observed: ‘Issues of cultural identity seem likely to constitute some of the major problems confronting humanity in the twenty first century’, going on to note that it is the very disintegration of nation-states and empires that displays the ‘tenacity of this phenomenon we call “culture”’ (Baily 1994: 45). From this perspective, notions of identity and place linked to music are of particular relevance to studies of immigrants or displaced groups such as political and economic refugees. South Asian music in Britain can, therefore, be approached from cultural, musical and geographical perspectives – musical identities cross and mingle, are discarded and reconstituted, and musical styles are in a constant state of change and adaptation.
