The Study of Indian Music: Insiders and Outsiders, An Essay

In recent years, Indian musicians have been accessible to scholars, students, and younger Indian people because many of the singers speak English as first or second languages. This linguistic change does not correlate exactly with musical change or acculturation because many of the most traditional musicians and religious leaders have learned English in order to hold jobs or to interact in other ways with the dominant society, while also retaining their important cultural roles. Although many Indian people today do not speak their own tribal languages, they may be skilled in another type of language-the language of the insider. Teaching and transmitting information by example, parable, symbolism, and understatement is the norm in Indian discourse. A lifetime of sharing (and suffering) jokes about color, degree of Indian blood, blame for rain, and designations of "civilized" or "wild" has prepared Indian students and scholars for a type of field work that goes beyond participant-observation. Sometimes an Indian person who has a great deal of knowledge will give an easy answer (or a throw-away answer) to an outsider to test him or to get rid of him when the answer he might give an Indian person would be different. For example, an elderly Pawnee woman once told an enthusiastic graduate student that she" didn't know any stories in Pawnee" because the younger woman had asked her to tell them in the summer time while the two were working in a kitchen. Both the time and place were inappropriate, hence the "throwaway answer:' It would seem clear that members of the same Indian societies as the musicians would understand the music and the process of music-making better than outsiders. Of course, when a scholar is a native speaker of the Indian language he has