| Summary: | This dissertation is an ethnography about the men and women who take up the practice and
performance of a Hindustani (North Indian) drum called tabla, as a way of life. Learning tabla
means that percussionists must find a guru, a learned master of the tradition who will guide
them in their life long study of this instrument. The relationships formed between gurus and
disciples are distinctively different in kind from teacher-student relations in Western knowledge
systems. The guru-disciple tradition is a very specific, culturally dependent mode of learning
originating from the Indian Brahmanical tradition of religious study. Discipleship is a form of
apprenticeship which offers no easy translation, philosophically, culturally or spiritually. My
ethnography and analysis of tabla as a way of life is presented from my own situated
perspective as a tabla disciple of two tabla masters, Ustad Alia Rakha Khan, his son Ustad
Zakir Hussain and as a visiting tabla enthusiast with another teacher of tabla, Ritesh Das. I
offer a multi-local ethnography which centres on tabla communities based in Bombay, India,
Toronto, Ontario, Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, Washington and the Bay Area of
California.
As tabla travels around the globe, outside of India, the learning and teaching of this tradition
changes somewhat in its new environments. However, learning to play tabla whether in Indian
or diaspora cultures necessitates adopting Indian ways of knowing, learning and being. For
those musicians of non-Indian ethnicity who become dedicated to this art form learning tabla
also means learning to embody Indian cultural ways of doing and knowing. I posit that learning
the cultural, as in learning tabla, begins in the body and the embodied mind. Knowing through
and with the body requires re-conceptualizing anthropological concepts of culture, memory and
tradition. Grounding an analytic concept of the body in the emerging critical Anthropology of
the Body and the Anthropology of the Senses allows for an examination of the social as
something more than cognitive and language based. === Arts, Faculty of === Sociology, Department of === Graduate
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