ABSTRACT
This book spans an era and a generation that has shaped it. Together, the master musicians who have authored this book have shown us not an episode or an ethnographic present but a series of both, comprising the changing musical world from before Independence to the new India of an open economy. In their own words — albeit in translation and edited into a text — these hereditary masters have created an entirely personal work of awesome reach and depth. It is their memoir of an era. It is also a musical-historical canvas of the second half of the 20th century. On this canvas, these sarangi players have brought to life a musical and social world that connects them in a dynamic of mutuality, of never-ending give and take, of collaboration and competition, of retention and innovation, and much more. It is an enormously rich offering of discourse and practice, rendering separate concerns with context superfluous because context is integral to all their words, regardless of speaker. Their enactment is marked by the lived moments of music making and conversation that I was so immensely fortunate to experience and learn from.
