ABSTRACT
Gerry Farrell, in Indian Music and the West, has demonstrated that the roots of the nineteenth and early twentieth century revival broadly identified by the term ‘Hindu Music’ lay in the colonial imagination: When India was discovered as a cultural entity by orientalists in the late eighteenth century, the study of music, like language, had to suit their project of discovering and reconstructing a pristine Hindu past, free from Muslim influences. The debate between Charles Baron Clarke and the Bengal Music School led by Sourindro Mohun Tagore in the early 1870s epitomized the battle for control of a symbol that many Indians insisted should be reclaimed and repatriated through the indigenization of notational methods. Gurudev’s first cousin once-removed, Vinayakrao Patwardhan, was also an ardent follower of his guru Paluskar.
