Musicophilia and the lingua musica in Mumbai

Hindustani art music in the metropolis of Bombay/Mumbai played a significant role in the fashioning of both selves and public spaces from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. With the fall of Awadh in northern India in 1857 and the dispersal of the court that had inherited Hindustani music from the Mughal empire, the singers, instrumentalists and dancers began to migrate in search of new patrons. Many of them found a foothold in Bombay, which came to occupy a central position in assembling the new structures and spaces of performance, pedagogy, recording and consumption of Hindustani music. I suggest that the passion for Hindustani music was strongly linked to the linguistic diversity of Bombay, and that it was the lingua musica which aided the development of the public domain and its cultural vernacular in the twentieth century. Through their musicophilia, the city’s inhabitants engaged in fashioning a subjectivity that emerged through that which they shared.