Resounding Caste: Practices of Distinction, Urban Segregation, and Musical Politics in Chennai, India

Caste inequalities persist in the relatively anonymized terrain of the modern, Indian city. The study of caste in urban India thus requires us to turn to the seemingly invisible symbolic processes by which caste makes itself known and continues to matter for social actors. Music is a symbolic arena in which these distinctions are battled, marked, or resisted. In this dissertation, I investigate how caste differentiation is socially reproduced by locating my study in the southern Indian city of Chennai and exploring the caste dimensions of two live musical scenes situated here: Carnatic and Gaana. I use data from participant observations and 103 in-depth interviews collected over eleven months of fieldwork in these two scenes with various members of the two music worlds: musicians, patrons, sponsors, brokers, producers, technicians, dancers, and fans, who animate contestations over contemporary meanings of caste in the city. In my analysis, I argue that caste is socially reproduced through four modes: socialization; spatialization; politicization; and the related processes of digitalization, migration, and globalization. Using this framework, I proceed from the individual, in examining the ways that a caste habitus is shaped through musical socialization; to the city, in analyzing the spatialization of caste, or how urban segregation is exacerbated as caste comes to be imprinted upon social groups through stereotypes and territorial identities. I then describe how these dichotomous social and spatial locations of caste mobilize distinct political ideologies and shape political action. Finally, I delineate the ways that caste has been made mobile through the circulation of recording and digital technologies, the movement and migration of caste diasporas, and the engagement of these two genres with global circuits of taste. I contend that caste comes to acquire varying levels of social, cultural, and political resonances in modern, urban India. This analysis of “musicking” reveals new insights into how caste boundaries are re-entrenched as Brahminism acquires a hegemonic register, and how these boundaries are resisted through an anti-caste aesthetic that recovers marginalized histories of arts associated with Dalit communities to reimagine radically different and equitable futures. This study contributes to sociological understandings of social difference, inequality, urban segregation, distinction-making, and social movements as they relate to the politics of caste, city, and culture