Pramantha Tagore

Pramantha Tagore is Neubauer Family Foundation Distinguished Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. He holds simultaneous appointments as Associate Director and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International (CNCSI) at Durham University. After completing his MA and MPhil degrees at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, he held academic appointments at IIT Bombay and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, before joining the University of Chicago as a Nehru–Fulbright Visiting Fellow in 2021 and subsequently as a PhD Fellow in the Department of Music in 2023.

Pramantha’s research examines the relationships among music, race, and cultural politics in the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on modern South Asia and colonial Bengal. His work investigates how historical practices of music-making, performance, and pedagogy shaped emerging cultural publics, aesthetic ideologies, and social identities under colonial modernity. Bringing together ethnomusicology, music history, and critical race and empire studies, his scholarship attends to the material, institutional, and discursive conditions through which musical knowledge circulated between South Asia, Europe, and the broader imperial world. He is a founding member of the Global Western Art Music network and has played a central role in organising international scholarly and performance-based initiatives, including the Balzan Foundation–supported project Borderlands of Sonic Encounter, directed by Philip V. Bohlman, and the University of Chicago’s EthNoise workshop series on music, language, and culture.

On the musical side, he is a professional sarod player trained in the Maihar–Senia tradition of Hindustani music. For over two decades, he has received instruction in sarod, vocal music, and related instrumental practices through the guru–shishya parampara (master–disciple) system with leading musicians in India. As a performer and educator, he has collaborated with artists and ensembles across South Asia, Indonesia, the United States, the Middle East, and Australia. He is a founding member of Chicago Mehfil, a leading South Asian arts organisation in the Chicagoland area, co-founded with Tomal Hossain and Ihsan Ul-Ihthisam, and a founding member of the University of Chicago’s Modal Collective, formed in collaboration with Ronnie Malley. He is also empanelled with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) and affiliated with All India Radio, India’s national broadcasting service. Pramantha currently serves as Co-Director of the University of Chicago’s South Asian Music Ensemble.

• “S.M. Tagore on Indian Musical Instruments and Their Classification.” In Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen, Lester Hu, and Carmel Raz. University of Chicago Open Publication Service. Forthcoming.
• “Songs for the Empress: Queen Victoria in the Music History of Colonial Bengal.” Victorian Literature and Culture 52, Special Issue 1 (Spring 2024): 61–83. Published online 15 April 2024. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)
• “‘Pure or Tainted?’: Representing a Source of Colonial Bengali-English Music in RISM.” Fontes Artis Musicae 69, no. 3 (July–September 2022): 229–251 (with Christina Linklater and Emerson Morgan). (rism.info)
• “Listening Through the Walls: Music-making in the Historic Houses of Rabindranath Tagore.” In Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses, ed. Jeanice Brooks, Matthew Stephens, and Wiebke Thormählen (with Suddhaseel Sen)(Routledge, 2021).
• “From the Private to the Public: Hindustani Raga Music in Colonial Calcutta, 1800–1945.” In Kolkata in Space, Time and Imagination Vol. II, ed. Melitta Waligora and Anuradha Roy (Primus, 2020).
• “The Cultural Evolution of Performance: Representing Shakespeare Through Jazz.” International Journal of Cultural Studies and Social Sciences 3, no. 6: 144–160.