Hindustani Music and the Emergence of a Lingua Musica in Mumbai

The centrality of Hindustani or North Indian classical music in the port city of Bombay/Mumbai from the late nineteenth century helped form a distinctive kind of aural community. The aspirations of this community impacted the way in which urban spaces were organized, as the love for music created a culture of collective listening that brought together people of diverse social and linguistic backgrounds. I suggest that this condition of collective listening enabled the formation of a new musical subject, the musicophiliac, for whom the exposure to Hindustani music opened up new possibilities for the performance of modernity. The notion of a lingua musica , I propose, is foundational to the emergence of the musical public in Mumbai from the late nineteenth century onwards.