April 10, 2025 | 5:00PM
Foster Hall 103
Professor Davesh Soneji
University of Pennsylvania
This talk considers the somatic and sensorial practices of music, dance, and theatre among Tamil-speakers as sources of global microhistory, and as the stories of real people who populate the broader canvas of global historical structures and processes.
These “eclectic geographies of Tamil music” hark back not only to memories of early modern Tamil migration, but more poignantly to the combined force of imperial labor, regimes of extraction, and mercantile investment that shaped migration from the colonial Madras Presidency and brought Tamil music to Ceylon, Rangoon, the Malay Peninsula, the southeastern African coastline, and the Mascarene islands. The expansive Tamil printed musical corpora that materialize in these contexts – from Muslim devotional songs produced in the British port cities of Rangoon and Penang, to Tamil “traveler songs” about the lives of Dalit plantation laborers from Malaya to the Mascarene, to the resettling of service-caste Sudra courtesan families from the South Indian Kaveri river delta to temples built by velalar and cettiyar capitalists in Ceylon – illustrate the centrality of Tamil language and its musical iterations across the modern Indian Ocean world. Taking these eclectic geographies of social and sonic affinity seriously as music history, this talk sutures fragmented materials related to themes of mobility, cultural encounter, and musical creolization that historians of South Indian music have disregarded.
Davesh Soneji is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asia Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of the award-winning book Unfinished Gestures: Devadasi, Memory, and Modernity in South India (Chicago, 2012). His current research is forthcoming in a new monograph titled Unbounded Tunes: Genealogies of Musical Pluralism in Modern South India.
Photo: “Pongole des Indiens.” A depiction of plantation laborers performing kuttu drama at a ponkal celebration on the Beaufonds sugar plantation in La Réunion. Photograph by Constant Azéma, 1872. © Archives départementales de La Réunion (2FI11/12)