Music and Social Movements in India - 1940s to the present

This event is sponsored by the Center for South Asia.

About the talk:
This lecture-performance will be based on research into music that has come out of social movements in India from the late colonial period until the present . Focusing on themes, styles and people whose lives animated the creation of repertoires of music in several Indian languages over the period, I will also attempt to demonstrate how music can be used as an entry point to uncover histories that have been unrecorded in formal sources, with a focus on aurality and aural imaginaries.

About the performer/speaker:
Sumangala Damodaran is an academic and a musician, currently spending six months in the US as Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence and Stice Lecturer in the Social Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. She brings three decades of teaching experience from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Delhi University. As a labor economist, her extensive work covers the informal economy, migration, gender, and global value chains. She is also a prolific author in the field of music, with notable publications such as The Radical Impulse: Music and Politics in the IPTA Tradition and the album Songs of Protest. She is a co-founder of the award winning Indian-South African Insurrections ensemble and a large multi-institutional project on music and migration which has resulted in a book Maps of Sorrow, co-authored with Ari Sitas.